A Bend in the River—V. S. Naipaul
"You must always know when to get out"
Like many Americans, I have ignored the world outside our borders for much of my life. So even if the Decade Project hasn’t done anything else for me it has at least shown me a much bigger world than I had known. In this case, A Bend in the River opened my eyes to major events taking place in Africa during my lifetime—events to which I should have paid much more attention at the time. V. S. Naipaul published this novel in 1979, but many details came straight from his 1975 essay, “A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa.”
The story takes place in an unnamed country deep in the interior of Africa during a period of political turmoil. Naipaul somewhat annoyingly avoids names of real places and people, referring instead to the Big Man or the President, the Domain, the great river, the falls, and so forth. But it takes only little effort to uncover the proper names: Mobutu, Kisangani, the Congo River, Boyoma Falls. When the story begins, the world would have known the country as the Republic of the Congo, but the name changed to Zaire during the time span of the novel. Nowadays it calls itself the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Narrated in first-person by the protagonist, Salim, the novel begins around 1963 when Salim sees that things will soon get very dangerous where he lives on the east coast of Africa for people like him of foreign descent, so he snatches an opportunity to buy a store in a devastated city on the Congo River. Salim’s family came from India and had lived in Africa for centuries, yet he always thought of himself and his family as outsiders, not true Africans. In 1960, the country had gained its freedom from Belgium, but freedom had brought with it anarchy, bloodshed, and rage. The opening section of the novel, “The Second Rebellion,” describes the geopolitical situation and the complex intertwining of races, religions, languages, and cultures. After a six-day drive and multiple bribes, he arrives at the city to find it nearly a ghost town and his store a looted shell. Nevertheless, he takes up the challenge, certain that trade will eventually return. The location of the town, at the bend in the great river, virtually guarantees an eventual demand for the sort of essentials that he sells. As the man who sold him the store said, “Business never dies in Africa; it is only interrupted ... What you must always know is when to get out.”
While the town and its trade recover, the government changes hands. In the next section, “The New Domain,” the Big Man, whom we know as Mobutu, builds a modern city, called simply the Domain, unannounced and almost overnight, next to the existing town. No one at first knows what this means.
We watched and wondered as the buildings were run up. And then we began to understand that what the President was attempting was so stupendous in his own eyes that even he would not have wanted to proclaim it. He was creating modern Africa. He was creating a miracle that would astound the rest of the world. He was by-passing real Africa, the difficult Africa of bush and villages, and creating something that would match anything that existed in other countries.
The Big Man shows off the Domain to the world with news stories and much fanfare. But the hastily constructed buildings sit empty and almost immediately begin to fall apart. He at last finds a use for the buildings, turning the Domain into a university city and research center. Soon it starts to populate.
The third section, “The Big Man,” describes Mobutu’s kingship and personality cult. As his grip on Zaire tightens, he builds, not a functioning government, but a tribal, one-man rule with the sole purpose of enriching himself. One only needs two qualities to gain a position in the government: Obedience and loyalty. He secures obedience with a ruthless army and he secures loyalty in part by filling every empty space on walls, billboards, and newspapers, with pictures of himself.
In the last and shortest section, “Battle,” Salim returns from a short stint in Europe and sees the writing on the wall. Mobutu has nationalized all businesses, including Salim’s little store, replacing the owners with government appointees. When it becomes clear that an even worse disaster approaches, Salim decides to get out while he still has his skin. Metty, his faithful servant and companion insists he leave.
It’s going to be bad here, Salim. You don’t know what they’re talking about outside. It’s going to be very bad when the President comes. At first they were only going to kill government people. Now the Liberation Army say that isn’t enough ... They’re going to kill everybody who can read and write, everybody who ever put on a jacket and tie ... They say it’s the only way, to go back to the beginning before it’s too late. The killing will last for days. They say it is better to kill for days than to die forever. It’s going to be terrible when the President comes.
Mobutu ruled from 1971 to 1997, so in A Bend in the River Naipaul boldly describes a country in the midst of a frightening transition, and he describes it without the benefit of historical hindsight. Prospects for Zaire did not look good by the end of the novel, and, indeed, the first peaceful transition of power did not occur until 2018. Naipaul could not have known how the story of the country would end, so the novel, which started in medias res, ends there as well.
A Bend in the River does not offer much entertainment or humor. It compelled the world to look at the plight of post-colonial Zaire in the 1970s, in much the same way that Italian neorealist films like Umberto D. and The Bicycle Thieves compelled the world to look at post-war Italy in the 1950s. In fact, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 for his impressive body of work “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” I agree that this novel does just that. Unfortunately, in my view, this has turned the novel into an educational tool. The characters serve valuable educational purposes, but they come across as flat and lifeless. We need to understand so much to fully grasp the situation in Zaire that Naipaul spends a lot of effort telling instead of showing. He chose to write the novel in first person form, so every other character’s story gets told either by Salim as background information or in the form of a monologue. One of those monologues lasts for fifteen pages.
I must admit the book hit me pretty hard, unexpectedly, at the end. Not because I identified with Salim, but because I saw the story of his flight from the approaching days of killing as one story among many millions: the Armenian genocide, the Trail of Tears, the partition of India, the fall of Saigon, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Rwandan genocide, the Rohingya genocide, and the list goes on. Can we not live together?
Next up, Catch-22, by Joseph Heller.
Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.
A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul
I found “A New King for the Congo,” in the collection of Naipaul’s essays, The Writer and the World.
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
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