V.S. Naipaul & the Heart of Dimness

“For my travel books I travel on a theme,” writes Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul. “And the theme of The Masque of Africa is African belief.” But Mr. Naipaul has a problem, and the problem’s name is God. Again and again in the pages of this otherwise insightful and entertaining short work, we find the author fussing and fuming about the impact of God-centered theist religions born outside of black Africa on the primitive animist roots of native belief. Perhaps this phobia is best expressed in a rather bilious early passage describing present-day Kampala, Uganda: “Foreign religion, to go by the competing ecclesiastical buildings on the hilltops, was like an applied and contagious illness, curing nothing, giving no final answers, keeping everyone in a state of nerves, fighting wrong battles, narrowing the mind.”