Free The Masque of Africa by V.S. Naipaul

overgrown; the neat grass roofs of the huts would slip and collapse. When Speke and Stanley had come this way the forest and forest life would have seemed eternal; but now, like everything in Uganda, it felt frail.
    We returned by another route, going round an island where there was a fisherman’s settlement of about a thousand. So one of our boatmen said; but the settlement, with the dun-coloured shacks tight oneagainst the other, looked like a very full mainland slum, and I thought there might have been more people there. This was where the thick white smoke of the morning had come from. On the way out we had seen a few fishermen’s settlements, and some had looked romantic, picture-book places, with dark dugouts drawn up on pale beaches. But this big settlement that mimicked a mainland slum would have had no electricity and no water except what came from the lake.
    Soon in one part of the sky there appeared the thin brown tornadolike whirls of the lake flies that had troubled us in the morning. Before we could get back to Entebbe five or more of these light-coloured whirls defined themselves against the pale lower sky, thin, rising high, wavering, constantly changing shape: like emanations of lake water.
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    T HE B AGANDA people had great skills as builders of Roman-straight roads and majestic grass-roofed huts that didn’t leak even in the rainy season. They had a detailed social organisation; every clan was like a guild, with its special duties. Worshipping their Kabaka, they were ruled by the idea of loyalty and obedience. These qualities, taken together, made them a great fighting force, and gave the Baganda their empire, which lasted some centuries.
    Their history, however, has no dates and no records, because the Baganda people had no script and no writing, They have only a limited oral literature, which is a poor substitute for a written text that can be consulted down the centuries. Strangely, the absence of a script doesn’t seem to trouble academic or nationalist people; it isn’t a subject that is talked about.
    I found only one man who had thought about this deficiency of the Ugandan or central African kingdoms. He was a middle-aged melancholic and he was from a neighbouring kingdom (or kingdom area). He was passionate about the kingdoms, believing in the power of the imprisoned and irreplaceable royal drum of his area, with its particularheartbeat. He grieved for the recent past. The terrible Milton Obote had imprisoned the royal drum and sixty-two items of its regalia in 1967; and though the kingdoms had been technically restored, nothing had been the same again; and the drum had still not been recovered. The drum still had power, but it suffered in its imprisonment. Like a wounded patriot, the melancholy man exaggerated the pain to come: he lived with the vision of all this part of Africa being swept away by some new political force. He pointed to the demure woman, a relative, who was with him. He said, “In a few years you wouldn’t see her here.” He wasn’t saying that the woman would migrate; he meant only that in a short while people of the royal clan, to which his relative belonged, people known for their fine and distinctive features, would be squeezed out.
    I took him back to the question of the absence of a script and writing.
    He said, “Script? They didn’t know the wheel.”
    This was news to me. But then, reviewing everything I had read about old Uganda, I felt that what I had heard was right; though it was hard to imagine everything being manhandled or loaded on to donkeys on those straight Baganda roads.
    He thought that the geographical isolation of Uganda in central Africa, beside lakes the outside world didn’t know, would have gone some way to explaining why there was no script. And I felt he was right. The Baganda had their own language; it would have been reasonably easy, given the stimulus of literate neighbours, for a script to be devised to match the sounds of the language.