The Masque of Africa (34 page)

Life became very hard for Creina. A widow in Africa is nothing, and Creina lost all the authority she had enjoyed as Neil’s wife. Young starveling boys she had taken in and nurtured now turned against her, began to steal from her. They stole her cassette, her typewriter. They stole the money, two thousand dollars, she had put aside to pay farm women for their beadwork; this was an important part of the farm’s income. Now that there wasn’t the money to pay the women she had to pay them in instalments out of her seventy-five dollars a month wages. It was easy to steal from Creina; there were no locks on her doors. And it got worse. One man falsely accused her of killing eight of his goats. He wanted money for his goats; otherwise he was going to kill her. People she knew pleaded with her to leave the farm, but she didn’t.

She told Rian Malan, “If you’re really going to live in Africa, you
have to be able to look at it and say, ‘This is the way of love, down this road: look at it hard. This is where it is going to lead you.’ ”

This is the resolution of this marvellous book. It is not easy to accept. Creina is so much finer than the louts who exploit her. Perhaps the problem is that “love” is not defined. Without that definition it is hard to follow Creina when she tells Rian Malan, “I think you will know what I mean if I tell you love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat.” It may even be that in this parable the writer is finding a way of saying something quite difficult: that after apartheid a resolution is not really possible until the people who wish to impose themselves on Africa violate some essential part of their being.

March 2008–September 2009

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty-six books of fiction and nonfiction, including
A House for Mr. Biswas; In a Free State
, which won the Booker Prize in 1971;
A Bend in the River; An Area of Darkness; Among the Believers;
and
Magic Seeds
. V. S. Naipaul was knighted in 1989. He was awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize by the Arts Council of England in 1993 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He holds honorary doctorates from Cambridge University and Columbia University in New York, and honorary degrees from the universities of Cambridge, London and Oxford. He lives in Wiltshire, England.