Indian-origin Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul has landed himself in another controversy by penning one of the darkest travelogues about Africa in decades.
Critics believe his new work, The Masque of Africa, portrays a continent still caught with one foot in its primitive past and obsessed with eating domestic pets.
According to a report published in the Sunday Times, the Trinidad-born author, who has previously been in hot water for alleged racism, misogyny and disregard of Islam, now writes about witch doctors, buildings allowed to fall into ruin and streets strewn with rubbish.
Seventy-eight-year-old Naipaul is particularly harsh about the Ivory Coast, where kitten is on the menu.
“I found out what was the best way of killing a cat or kitten. You put them in a sack of some sort and then you dropped the sack in a pot of boiling water. The thought of this everyday kitchen cruelty made everything else in Ivory Coast seem unimportant,” he writes.
According to the report, killing cats and dogs and preparing them for the dinner table almost becomes a leitmotif for the book.
Novelist Robert Harris, who reviews the book in the newspaper’s culture section, said he found it “repulsive”. —PTI