The Masque of Africa by V.S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online Page A

mediums who can invoke the ancestors. The powers of God, the guiding being who knows all and hasbeen in existence forever, can reside only in a royal person, a Kabaka. The Kabaka is linked to the spirit world; the mediums are linked to the ancestors. This is where the cosmogony touches earth and the Baganda.
    This theology—difficult when it separates from
Paradise Lost
—was outlined in the Bambara lounge of the Serena hotel by Madame Sehenna, a former cultural minister, who now gives cultural and religious talks on the radio and generally guides culturally troubled young Bagandans. Susan brought her to us one afternoon: an educated middle-aged woman with a close-to-English accent sometimes. We sat below a beautifully carved wood panel—the Serena is full of fine African carving—and heard about the stigmata or signs of the Kabaka.
    He has a mark on his right hand and is born with two umbilical cords. Only people of the monkey clan, one of the fifty-two clans of the Baganda, can install the Kabaka. When he is holding court he hears a voice from above that speaks to him alone. A separate house has to be created for him where he sits in seclusion and no woman can enter. It is here that the angels come and guide him. Now that things have begun again to go badly for the Baganda—the government is even claiming some of the nine thousand square miles of the sacred land of Buganda—there are people who say that the installation of the Kabaka was not well done. Perhaps certain rituals were left out; now as a result the people are suffering and lost.
    Madame Sehenna said, “But you mustn’t think it will end. We are doing work. Many of the angels who were protecting the Kabakaship have now come back. We have a prince of the royal blood who has the connection. He gets revelations and he tells us. The prince can be consulted. He lives in his shrine. You buy an exercise book and write the name of your first ancestor, your name, and your problem.”
    The first ancestor, known to God, was not born but created, and this ancestor doesn’t die; he disappears.
    “The exercise book with your name and your problem is taken to the shrine, and the answer is given. You have to buy back the answer.The royal drum is tuned by someone from the lion clan, and the lion is the symbol of Buganda. You also have the fallen angels who live and are underground. If you offer them great sacrifices, like your mother or your child, something very near and dear to you, they give you great riches. Wealth beyond your dreams. In this case you go to a medium and you go to the lake and, if you are a woman, you meet a handsome man, a spirit, who takes you beneath the lake. If you are a man it is a beautiful woman who will take you and give you the wealth you want. But once you invoke the spirit world you have to obey their rules. You cannot marry a human then, as the spirit of the man or woman will live with you. You see many such people driving these big cars and living in big houses like palaces here. You cannot escape their rules. If you do, the riches vanish and you are punished.”
    F OR A FEW days Luke was my guide. He didn’t have much to show me because he didn’t know a great deal, and because he lived in a far-off part of Kampala where the roads were unpaved. When it rained the roads around his house became impassable, and then he would telephone to cancel whatever arrangements we had made. Later, when we tried to work out what I owed him, he would claim these blank days as working days because he had set them aside for me.
    He worked in a university, one of the many new universities of Uganda. He got 170,000 shillings a month, a little under 600 pounds or 1200 dollars a month, which I thought sufficient for his needs. But he and the other teachers and many of the students as well were on strike. This meant that he had great needs. And when he came late one morning and said he wanted to take me to a diviner or witchdoctor I became anxious. I was