Kampala — The throwing of mud at an older author by a younger one is never pretty, and Paul Theroux was naughty to have done it. But with the passing of time, some of the judgments cast at VS Naipaul in Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow (1998) and elsewhere seem valid.
They are certainly borne out by this mainly laborious travel book, which seeks to examine the workings of African traditional belief. The occasion for this "travelling on a theme", as Naipaul likes to call it, is a series of recent trips in Uganda, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Ghana and South Africa, with occasional reference back to previous visits to some of those countries during the 1980s and the 60s.
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