Masque Of Africa

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In The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, Naipaul returns to Africa after a forty-two year absence to remap Africa’s sacred geographies. In this book he travels to six countries – Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa – to discover the “nature of African belief”. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Vivian Gornick, said, “Naipaul brings an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought.” I think there are many excerpts from the book that can lead me to both agree and disagree with this book review. The Masque of Africa starts in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, where Naipaul immediately encounters, an ongoing theme of the book, change. Naipaul is comparing the drive from Kampala to Entebbe, Naipaul says, “the drive was through country; … It was different now. You could see how Entebbe itself had grown, with more than a scattering of villages or settlements far and wide on the damp green ground below the heavy grey clouds of the rainy season.” (page. 4) By using the short, straight to the point sentence “it was different”, Naipaul leads you to believe this change he observed is not going to be something he is happy with, everything he sees now will be compared to what he saw in the past, and to him the present is incomparable. He only sees the bad and focuses on it. He is good at pointing out the over populated cities, garbage in the streets, cruelty towards animals, different cultures and religions, and overspending of money, but never shows you the good things of Africa making me believe that Africa has nothing to offer for me, I want no part of it. The best writing in this book, to me, deals with native healers and fortune-tellers. In Uganda he enters a small office and spots a framed certificate on the wall: the witch doctor has an official license. In Nigeria he teases a fortune-teller by asking whether
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