A Bend in the River: Naipaul’s Critical vision of the Post-colonial world

A Bend in the River (1979) by V. S. Naipaul is one of the most acclaimed novels in modern times. It is considered the response to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that redraws the map of neo-colonialism and political turmoil in post-colonial Africa. In the Heart of Darkness, Conrad draws the mundane picture of European colonialism while Congo was a Belgian colony. On the other hand, Naipaul's description of Congo in A Bend in the River deals with the post-colonial reality and explores the historical and social dimensions. Naipaul relates to the novel and sets up his characters in terms of his world views and ideological orientations. So, it is evident that this novel is based on Naipaul’s view of third-world people. This is the reason Naipaul implies the social and political disorder and contemporary liberation movements as the unavoidable phenomenon in Africa as well as the other colonies of the west. Naipaul’s description of the post-colonial conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo includes racial and cultural inequality, political domination by the imperial powers, and exploitation of labor, slavery, and subjects to the black people. The beginning process of decolonization in DR Congo had gone under a neo-colonial process that reflected a change of power relationship between the colonial power and colonial nationalist movements which arose from the traditional imperial hegemony.

 In the 1960s, the nationalist movement in Congo grew up and Patrice Lumumba became the elected prime minister of DR Congo. The Belgian Congo achieved independence on 30 June 1960. Shortly after the independence from Belgium the elected Prime Minister Lumumba was murdered, and the state power was taken by Lieutenant colonel Joseph Mobutu with the backing of the U.S. and Belgium. After that Mobutu continued his dictatorship in DR Congo for the next 32 years. Mobutu established a single-party rule and his government periodically arranged elections where he was the only candidate. Mobutu’s government was responsible for severe violations of human rights, political repression, and corruption. He successfully neutralized his political opponents and rendered the rivals politically impotent. However, the thirty-two-long autocratic regime of Mobutu is the time frame of Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. But throughout the novel, Naipaul uses fictional characters to set up his plot and does not mention the state’s name and the president’s. But his metaphorical narration refers to the regime of Mobutu in DR Congo.

As the novel opens, the narrator, Salim, describes his weeklong journey into the interior of an unnamed revolution-ravaged central African state to take over the management of an abandoned shop in a settlement at the bend in the river partially destroyed in the violence that preceded independence. “Africa was my home,” Salim observes, “had been my family’s home for centuries.

A Bend in the River paints a bleak picture of Africa's future as the continent takes its first steps toward political independence. The novel's central idea "a new Africa" comes from the President, who struggled to unite his country in the early years of his political office. He does this by establishing development projects that will help bring his country into the modern world but destroy important aspects of its past. The President shows that he cannot express his vision of a new Africa. For example, it authorizes the creation of a base in the hope that it can serve as a model for a new Africa, but the infrastructure fails to achieve the President's ambitious ambitions. Buildings are in short supply, and some projects are not yet complete. In addition, Salim sees the Domain and the sages living there as a pursuit of "African words" that remain unrelated to "real" Africa. At the same time, the city is going through repeated cycles of tension, growing political tensions are showing signs of revolt, and the President is increasingly abusing his power. The “new Africa” appears dangerously unstable by the novel's end. 

Almost all of the characters within the novel suffer from emotions of dislocation. Some of those characters were geographically displaced from their homes, and a few feel alienated from the cultures they grew up in. Others have a combined ethnic or racial background that makes them perpetually out of the area. Salim, the novel’s protagonist, suffers from more than one kind of dislocation. As an Asian who grew up in Africa, he can't lay declare his Indian historical past nor does he feel an actual connection to Africa. Similar to this cultural shape of dislocation, Salim becomes geographically displaced when he acts from his community on the East African coast to the town in the continental interior. Due to those exceptional, overlapping varieties of dislocation, Salim reviews confusion about his identification and his social and political popularity. A perpetual outsider, he struggles with tension and melancholy, and as the novel progresses, he feels increasingly more worried about political violence.

The presidential photograph's recurring pattern depicts the politician's progression from a promising young leader to a dangerous autocrat. The President's first images portray him as a shrewd leader capable of leading Africa into the future. Although the shots need the use of a contemporary camera, the images represent the President dressed as a traditional African chief. In this way, the early images combine parts of tradition and modernity, which accurately reflects the President's political platform of a "new Africa" that embraces rather than rejects tradition. However, as the narrative progresses, the photos become increasingly propaganda-like. The photographs are becoming more widely distributed. The graphic composition quietly highlights the President's power by ensuring that his body takes up the majority of the image and relegates the rest of the image to the background.

The world Naipaul has presented in A Bend in the River is both fictional and actual, and it is not to blame for the breakdown of the African order. Individual Africans, according to Naipaul, are to blame for the tragedy in their life. Although the colonial system is the principal cause of marginalization in the former colonial countries, the novel rejects this blame from the start. The beginning, with its anti-evolutionary ethos, encapsulates the novel's whole existential worldview, as Naipaul states, “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

Despite Naipaul's insights and the presentism of most of his characters, A Bend in the River mainly depends on a unit to confront the reader's psyche with the layers of colonial and postcolonial history. The novel's nameless town is made up of colonial and postcolonial fragments. The postcolonial urban and surreal is destroying the playing ground of Eurocentric semantics and historicism not just in Africa, but also in London. The city's design reflects the fusion of London and postcolonial colonies. The spatial and social repeating of African history in London defies the urban dichotomy of the contemporary city versus the colonial outpost. When Salim returns to his hometown, Naipaul depicts the national urban ghostly. Naipaul anticipates a worldwide understanding of the overlap and interconnectivity of Africa's ultimately inseparable geographies, leaving the concepts of country and nationalization redundant. Salim, the figure he created, embodies his cosmopolitanism.

Finally, by showing an unsettling link between the two components of the term, Naipaul contributes to the greater discourse about the relationship between "post" and "colonial." As a post-colonial book, A Bend in the River never offers up new possibilities for the future. It is a form of complicit post-colonialism that justifies colonialism by focusing solely on the civilizing ideals of modernity, which Naipaul regards as imperialism's positive, reconstructive, and fundamentally human aspect. Because they reject the existence of other cultures, such artists will never be able to develop new ways of seeing and experiencing reality other than through the imperialist Western lens. It is a form of rewriting imperial power that does not aim towards an alternate future like oppositional postcolonial and resistance literature. Narrating European imperialism from a European point of view is not dissimilar to Naipaul's account of developing-country modernization. ‘A Bend’ appears to be mostly written for a White/Western reader who reads in English and only sees white, never black. Naipaul's anti-evolutionary solution, if there is such a thing, is the result of his pessimistic worldview. To put it another way, it represents his ideological orientation, which is incapable of dealing with the qualitative historical transformation that the entire colonial world has experienced.

Arunav Das, Independent Filmmaker, Writer and Translator