Counter-Currents
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V. S. Naipaul was a prolific Indian writer from the West Indies who remains of interest to dissidents today largely due to the respect he afforded Western Civilization, as well as his often insightful race realism. Both qualities appear starkly in his 1979 novel, A Bend in the River.
The story takes place in an unnamed town in an unnamed country in post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa, and focuses on the thoughtful yet unambitious Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim shopkeeper. The town is located at a bend in the river (also unnamed), which makes it an ideal place for trading.
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“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
This opening to A Bend in the River is, I think, one of the finest openings to any novel I’ve read, and I was transfixed by the book when I first read it in 1979. Naipaul wrote a probing study of Indian merchants brought to Africa, first by the Arab commerce, then by the British and other colonial powers, and now are at the mercy of the new government.
The hero, a merchant trying to survive under this world, is also seduced by the west, especially by Yvette, the wife of Raymond, a second-rate scholar who has the ear of The Big Man, the ruler of this country. But it’s simply not a polemic. Naipaul captures the struggle of modern man adrift, and uses many third world characters to demonstrate this angst in plain, harsh prose full of honesty. The novel made me a devoted Naipaul reader, and my review of Shiva Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere is very much in Naipaul’s vein
As I pointed out, Naipaul was admired by many on the right because he could say things about blacks and the third world whites couldn’t dare say.
Naipaul based much of his research on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and it is assumed Zaire is the model for this fictional land of the Big Man and a vivd cast of characters.
The London scenes are also very good, and shows the West’s decline and how it remains an irresistible magnet to races of people who will kill it, but can’t give it up.
Naipaul’s sentences are harsh and good, literary tonic. I envy the strength of his plain tone, and how it says so much. Yet, I always identified with Naipaul’s characters. They didn’t seem like aliens. They were extensions of my own angst and development at that time.
Thank you for this. Would you recommend any of Naipaul’s nonfiction?
Naipaul is a prolific journalist as well as fiction writer. some books I have read and recommended are:
The Middle Passage
The Loss of El Dorado (a study of slavery in the Caribbean)
India: A Wounded Civilization (Naipaul’s astute views of India’s self-delusions)
The Return of Eva Peron and the Killings in Trinidad (views on Latin America and black nationalism’s bogus claims)
Among the Believers (Naipaul’s visit to Iran after the 1979 revolution in Iran)
A Trun in the South (Naipaul’s visit to the American South, where he considered it similar to the Caribbean, and white/black relations very benign)
Thanks for this review. Naipaul’s tutelage of budding author Paul Theroux in the African bush (before this novel was written) is an interesting chapter. Theroux went on to become one of the most famous travel writers, and though I find his leftist tendencies obnoxious and naive he also honestly portrays what he encounters abroad and it appears Naipaul’s politically incorrect attitudes rubbed off on young Paul as well. In “Sir Vidia’s Shadow”, Theroux’s book detailing his friendship with Naipaul over the decades, he recounts how Naipaul observes how the African students at the local university don’t follow the paved paths on campus. They cut across the lawns and form their own footpaths through the grass. And isn’t that how it goes, they will create their own ways regardless of the quality of the alternatives offered. Theroux goes on to observe in his own Africa travel books that the NGOs and foreign meddlers only serve to worsen the situation for the locals. Only Africans can solve African problems. And though he doesn’t say so, the corollary to this is clearly that only whites can solve white problems.
Wow. Thank you for this. I had no idea about Theroux and Naipaul. But I can see the connection. You might like to know that there is an excellent review of Theroux’s Last Train to Zona Verde in Amren’s A Dissident’s Guide to Blacks and Africa. I reviewed Theroux’s Mosquito Coast for CC in 2018, and will get around to his Girls at Play one of these days.
The best novel I have read about Africa however remains Robert Ruark’s Uhuru.
Theroux’s Dark Star Safari was also surprisingly racially sound.
I look forward to reading your review (once open to the public), as, whether I’m to be believed or not, I had been considering A Bend in the River as a novel that I myself might want to review for CC. Probably an idle fancy, but, anyway, Naipaul is a good one. My favorite among his works remains A House for Mr. Biswas, but that for strictly personal reasons.
As you seem to like reviewing literature, especially with political or racial angles, might I suggest Greene, The Comedians? This novel, famously set in Haiti (at a time, I believe, when Haiti was barely on the map of Western literary interest), has possibly the best sympathetic but not fawning, brief portrayal of a true, sincere American liberal (not frothing progressive, though the former paved the road for the latter) that I’ve ever encountered. Plus, like most of Greene’s novels, it’s an enthralling read (even if less about Haiti per se than the struggles of a white man ‘marooned’ there).
How did I ever miss your review of Uhuru just this past September? Things move fast here. Thanks for recalling it, and the novel. I’d never heard of Ruark or Uhuru. That Arundel Leakey story is terrifying and emblematic:
Arundel Gray Leakey, cousin to the more famous Louis Leakey, and known as ‘Morungaru’ was a white settler farmer in Central Province. …
In October 1954, … Leakey’s home was attacked by 60+ Mau Mau freedom fighters who killed his wife and force marched him to the Mount Kenya forest. Almost all available accounts of his murder indicate that he was buried alive after being tortured and disemboweled. The murder was reportedly sanctioned as a human sacrifice to appease the spirits, but embarrassed the colonial government and forced it to look for a scapegoat.
Another African piece of journalism the readers might like is Shiva Naipaul’s North of South. Naipaul’s brother wrote a pretty scathing but honest view of modern Africa.
I also liked an earlier book, Congo Kitabu, written by Jean Claude Hallet (?), a Belgian who talks about his life in late fifties Congo. Again, his views on Africans were sympathetic, but he thought giving them their own country was a disaster. He also challenged the popular views of colonial brutality in the Congo, but also thought Africans did very well in the jungle and village life. He thought city life was too much for them, and a lot of ideas of ‘liberation’ were too much for them to absorb, and they were easily duped.
As for Greene’s The Comedians, George Orwell wrote a scathing review of Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, in that it was set in West Africa but was almost exclusively about British civil servants and their foibles. Also, Orwell thought Greene spent too much time dwelling on, as he called it, sanctified sinners. He believed that Catholic writers liked showing failed priests, but with that Catholics retained their superiority that they alone knew the meaning of good and evil. In The Heart of the Matter, Orwell noted how Greene assumed no one outside of the Catholic Church had the slightest knowledge of Christian
doctrine.
Like Lord Shang, I thought about writing a review for A Bend in the River, but had other things going, and now can say “Whew! Don’t have to do that one.”
I’m glad to see other people appreciate Naipaul’s work.
I have a little book by Naipaul. I think it has a peacock on the cover.
I meant to say this article was really interesting and informative. That was implicit in what I said.
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