Moved by wonder

Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Gabon and South Africa, while his chosen subject of exploration is, in his own (uncharacteristically poetic) phrase, &lsquoreligions of the earth.&rsquo By this, he means the older pagan and animistic beliefs and customs, especially those relating to indigenous healing and soothsaying. He finds them lying not far below the surface among many Africans who are officially and outwardly adherents of Islam or Christianity, which he calls &ldquothe foreign-revealed religions&rdquo.

But there is nothing drily anthropological about the book Naipaul writes as ever with a novelistic liveliness of observation and a sense of human comedy. His stated theme keeps bobbing into and out of view in an easy rhythm, as he goes exploring each country at an old-fashioned leisurely pace. He waits for days to meet the people he is keen to meet, he is driven around mostly uncomplainingly on bumpy roads, and once, deep in a forest in Gabon, when his &ldquonervy frail legs&rdquo give out, he is even put in a wheelbarrow. He is often &ldquomoved by wonder&rdquo when he gets to his destinations. &ldquoThe sacred grove took my breath away.&rdquo

Everywhere, he finds people to talk to. They are delineated quickly, not as portraits but as sketches. Some are important in their contexts, some even internationally so, such as Winnie Mandela, but most are ordinary people leading humdrum lives. They are not &ldquonative informants&rdquo they are more interlocutors and narrators. Naipaul doesn&rsquot interrupt them with many questions he lets them have their self-revelatory say. When someone becomes &ldquotoo random and glib&rdquo, he simply indicates it&rsquos time for him to leave.

What he reports is often startling. He tells of a custom in Uganda, prevalent until the nineteenth century, according to which the crowning ritual for a ruler required his mother to get rid of his brothers, including her own other sons this number was, in one case, thirty. This makes for a variation on our Mughal practice of the aspiring prince often doing away with his brothers. This may also put Idi Amin and Milton Obote in some kind of a historical perspective, though Naipaul himself does not make that connection. He reports such facts in a flat and level tone, leaving us to make our own inferences.

If anything, his comparisons work the other way. He seems ever ready to listen to myths &ldquocalling once more for a suspension of disbelief&rdquo but he is far from credulous. When he is taken to a soothsayer, he asks, &ldquoWill my daughter get married&rdquo And when the prediction is no, he says that&rsquos good, for he doesn&rsquot want her to get married. (He has no children.) This sounds like the bad old Naipaul all over.

Naipaul left his native Trinidad for England at eighteen, and his first major travel book was on India, An Area of Darkness (1964), a much reviled book because of its much misunderstood title &mdash for what he meant was not that India was a benighted country but that despite his Indian ancestry he knew little about it. He has since travelled more widely than, perhaps, any other Nobel-winning writer, and he has illuminated in his own acute manner what for most of us were areas of darkness if not, as here, the Dark Continent itself.