It’s hard enough to accept the emptiness and finality of death in a society like ours, where it is rare and predictable and usually comes after a long life. In places where death is so random, so frequent, and scythes through children more frequently than the old, the idea that the dead live on all around us—that they can hear us and still need us—meets an obvious and aching need. These beliefs are often the best story people can tell to make the world seem bearable again. It’s a way of regaining a sense of control amid chaos. There’s an intensity to it that Naipaul sees everywhere: People fall into shaking, howling trances communing with their dead. I remember seeing rows of women in a soothsayer’s hut in Ethiopia, spasming as they interacted with the “spirits” of their lost children. It’s the purest expression I know of Christopher Hitchens’ explanation for all religion: “We’re afraid of the dark.”
Yet along with this obvious comfort there is what Naipaul—and so many Africans—call “the dark side.” Once you cede power to an invisible force for which there is no evidence—whether it’s Jesus or Allah or a dead child—you cede power to other human beings who can then claim to use those invisible forces against you. It licenses charlatanry. Soothsayers demand money for their “powers,” like the one who tells Naipaul that there are curses preventing his daughter from getting married and if he wants them lifted he’ll have to pay. It licenses bigotry. A community can announce that a malaria outbreak is due to the old women of the village waging witchcraft, and slaughter them. It licenses some deranged delusions. During the war in Congo, a soothsayer announced that you could be cured of HIV if you ate a pygmy. I visited a pygmy village where several men had “disappeared” as a result.