THE Nobel prize-winning author VS Naipaul was recently offered the chance by an African witch doctor to put a curse on his biographers, according to his wife, Nadira.

The novelist, 76, was given the opportunity to “get rid of” someone when he and Nadira visited the shaman in Uganda, she says. Nadira immediately thought of two biographers who had revealed the novelist in the most unflattering way.

Paul Theroux mauled Naipaul, a former mentor nine years his senior, in his 1999 book Sir Vidia’s Shadow, which explored the end of their 30-year friendship. One reviewer described the last fifth of the book as an “uninterrupted excoriation of Naipaul and his second wife”.

Patrick French’s biography of the author, published this year, contained frank and damaging revelations by Naipaul about himself. “It exposes him as an egotist, a domestic tyrant and a sadist,” Colin McPherson wrote in his review in this newspaper.

The visit to the witch doctor took place a few months ago.

Nadira, a former journalist for a Pakistan newspaper, writes about it in an article for the January issue of Tatler.

Born in Kenya, where she was a child during the Mau Mau troubles of the 1950s, she was familiar with witch doctors. She says her husband insisted she accompany him. “I need you to put the witch doctor at ease. Don’t scowl. It’s unpleasant, ugly,” he said.

They drove to his shrine, a compound in a semi-forest clearing on the outskirts of Kampala, the Ugandan capital, and entered a hut decorated with a leopard skin. A spear leant against an outside wall.

The witch doctor looked like “a dark version of Alistair Darling”, she writes. “The resemblance is uncanny.”

The couple sat before him, Naipaul on his shooting stick, his wife crosslegged on the floor. She writes: “[The witch doctor] looks at VSN [her husband]. Does he want to be reju-venated? Or is someone in the way? Is there someone we wish to get rid of? I can think of many who are in the way, starting with the wretched two-tim-ing biographers.”

She also describes going with her husband to the Ugandan university where he had been the writer-in-residence 40 years ago. “It was here that he met a man who was himself trying to be a writer. He [Naipaul] doesn’t now name him but I know he means an American who is obsessed with VSN and who hates me with the tenacity of a hornet with a squint.”

Massachusetts-born Theroux, father of the BBC television presenter Louis Theroux, was teaching at the university when they met there four decades ago. He has depicted Naipaul as “deeply unlikable, a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone and with race on the brain”.

Theroux has written that he believes Naipaul suspected him of seducing his first wife, Pat. The hostility deepened when Theroux suggested Naipaul had been with Nadira as Pat lay dying. The couple married nine weeks after Pat’s death.

Theroux then discovered that the Naipauls were selling one of his books, which he had inscribed to Naipaul and Pat, for $1,500. The feud has continued. Naipaul has called Theroux “someone who writes tourist books for the lower classes”.

He has not publicly attacked French, who - commissioned to write his authorised biography with full access to the novelist - produced a remarkable book based on Naipaul’s decision to be frank about the dark side of his character.

It exposed his cruelty to those who had been closest to him, notably Pat and his long-time mistress, Margaret Mur-ray. French also touched on Naipaul’s alleged racism when he wrote that “the only Blacks he associated with now were Con-rad and Barbara”.

This weekend French said he did not want to comment. Theroux hit back, however, saying: “Witch doctors are colourful only to tourists, belittlers and stereotypers like Mr and Mrs Naipaul. A real witch doctor might have found Mrs Naipaul a suitable case for treatment.”

Theroux’s conclusion might be apposite. For Nadira writes that the witch doctor said it was she who is in trouble. Their encounter ended when Nadira, who had agreed to pay for the session, realised she had left her purse in the hotel.

As the Naipauls rushed away to their car, the witch doctor called out that she was “a wicked woman and beyond juju of any kind”. It is, he shouted, “only your husband who can keep you in line”.

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