Ancestral voices: Naipaul’s ‘A Bend in the River’

Wandering between two worlds, one dead

The other powerless to be born.

Matthew Arnold,

“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”

I

In A Bend in the River (1979) V. S. Naipaul places his characters among the despotism, corruption and brutality of the post-colonial Congo.  In his review of the novel John Updike described Naipaul’s “Africa of withering colonial vestiges, terrifyingly murky politics, defeated pretensions, omnivorous rot, and implacable undermining of all that would sustain reason and safety.” Naipaul’s discussion of African history, his essays about the Congo and his use of literary allusions provide the essential background for understanding his greatest novel.

In 1877 the Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley was the first man to travel west from Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean to the centre of Africa in the Congo, an arduous journey that took three years.  In 1890 Joseph Conrad traveled east for one month on the river, from Matadi on the Atlantic coast of the Congo to the falls at Stanleyville, named for the explorer.  The cataracts begin only one mile outside the town, rise 16 feet high, extend for more than 60 miles and prevent ships from traveling beyond them.  Stanleyville, now called Kisangani, is the town at the bend of the river.

Naipaul’s novel refers the background of bloody twentieth-century African history, the era of corruption, brutality, and the exploitation of natural resources and human labor.  Before the Great War the Congo was privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium and rubber was a booming business.  But Roger Casement’s reports in 1903 and E. D. Morel’s Red Rubber in 1907 exposed the atrocities committed by the Belgians against the rubber workers in the Upper Congo.  In Congo Diary an African tells Naipaul that “his father remembered cutting-off the hands” of workers who failed to meet their rubber quotas, though amputation did not increase their efficiency.  In 1908 King Leopold was forced to surrender the Congo and give it to Belgium.  In 1931 the Bapende tribe revolted against Belgian rule and were brutally crushed.

The second half of the century saw the disintegration of the order imposed by European colonial rule.  From 1952 to 1960 in Kenya, the Mau Mau began a bloody rebellion that the British were unable to put down.  In 1959 in Rwanda to the east, the tall Tutsis used the smaller Hutus as their slaves.  In a savage yet lyrical passage, Naipaul recalls that the vast African jungle suppressed the slaughter: “The slave people were in revolt and were being butchered back into submission.  But Africa was big.  The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away.”  Paul Theroux remembered Naipaul’s cruel wit in Africa in 1966 as he sang: “Tut, Tut, Tutsi, good-bye.”

Naipaul also alludes to the “the semi-tribal war that had broken out after independence and shattered and emptied” Kisangani.  In Pierre Mulele’s Congo rebellion of 1963-65, everyone in the town who could read and write was taken out and shot.  In 1966 Milton Obote overthrew the Kabaka, or king of Uganda, and a character in Naipaul’s novel angrily remarks that “not one bloody paper has spoken up for the king”.  In 1964 in Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanganyika, “there was an uprising; and the Arabs—men almost as African as their servants—had been finally laid low.”  In 1972 Idi Amin drove Indian Asian immigrants, the backbone of trade, out of Uganda.  To keep the focus on Kisangani, Naipaul does not mention the successionist war in Katanga in the eastern Congo, the assassination of the Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in January 1961, and the accidental or deliberate plane crash in September 1961 of the United Nations mediator Dag Hammarsjköld.

II

Naipaul’s novel is based on his clear-eyed visit to the Congo in January-March 1975, commissioned by the New York Review of Books, with his secret sharer and never-mentioned lover, the Anglo-Argentine Margaret Gooding.  Naipaul’s Congo Diary about his visit (privately published in 1980) and his essay “A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa” (NYRB, June 26, 1975) described the conditions in Kisangani, the dictator Joseph Mobutu, and the decay and fearful ambiance of the country after independence.  These factual accounts of his journey were curtain-raisers for his novel.

In his Diary Naipaul describes the 1,000-mile Congo River journey from the capital Kinshasa on the west coast to Kisangani at the bend of the river in the middle of the Congo, a trip that takes seven days up river and five days down.  The passengers with their goods and animals are packed on barges towed by the steamer.  The river is choked by hyacinths—not benign like Claude Monet’s water lilies—that foul the steamer’s propellers and slow its slow progress.

Naipaul took the unreliable flight from Kinshasa to Kisangani and on his return endured the steamer down river to Kinshasa.  He found everything in Kisangani a little pourri, rotten.  Mounds of rubbish are piled as high as small houses.  Toilet bowls are used to soak and soften manioc.  Smoked monkeys, with tails slit and tied round their necks to carry them, are a great delicacy.  The tiny elite import their eggs and orange juice from South Africa.  Many African workers get drunk on beer in the morning.

The Congo had been independent since 1960.  Mobutu, commander of the Congolese Army, had seized power in 1965 and became the Big Man, the Exploiter-in-Chief.  His father was a cook, his mother a servant, and he emphasised his humble origins.  His self-proclaimed, sexually potent title means “the cock that leaves no hen alone”. Only the chief can kill a leopard and wear a leopard-skin hat, and when he places his fetishistic stick on the ground no one else is allowed to speak.  His Marxist thoughts in Maximes imitate Mao’s Little Red Book, and in his speeches he’s replaced French with Lingala, the local African language.  The country is rich with copper and uranium, which supply Mobutu with a fleet of Mercedes and several lavish palaces.  His well-fed followers, in the starving and impoverished country, have big bellies and are bespangled with gold jewelry on the principle that “whosoever hath, to him shall be given”.

Mobutu has built a university in the presidential Domain outside town to train future administrators.  He has brought health and peace—the taxis are disinfected and there are no policemen in town—but revolution and violence always threaten to erupt. His giant photographs appear everywhere, but in the novel he never appears in person. Mobutu must always be unpredictable, loved and feared.  His motto, “Discipline Before All”, orders the people to submit to his oppressive rule.  (In 1997 he was overthrown by rebels, forced into exile and died of cancer in Morocco.)

After the Nationalisation decree of December 1974, businesses were taken away from the Indian, Greek and Portuguese merchants, who lost everything, and given to Africans; they were then taken away from the Africans and given to the State.  In the ruthless struggle to grab wealth, foreigners became the victims.  Naipaul recalls that when he was teaching in Uganda in 1966, a foreigner in Rwanda “was taken to prison by the police and spent a weekend there.  It cost him $4,000 to get out”.

The statue of the explorer Stanley, “who pioneered the Congo route and built the road from Matadi [on the coast] to Kinshasa, has been dethroned.”  He’s replaced by a gigantic statue of an African tribesman with shield and spear.  An African university lecturer, who remembers history and defends colonialism, tells Naipaul, “For most [Congolese] the past is a blank; and history begins with their own memories.”  But “the Belgians gave us a state.  Before the Belgians came we had no state.”  Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness has been degraded from idealism to savagery by contact with the primitive jungle; the Congo has been degraded by rejecting European civilization and given nothing to replace it.  Naipaul believes that all the African rebellions and tribal genocides were even worse than the cruel and extortionate colonial rule.  He concludes that the Africans “are short-sighted, self-wounding and nihilistic as they dismantle what remains of the Belgian-created state.”

The critic Timothy Weiss notes that at independence, “Only 16 Congolese  had graduated from a university and only 136 had completed secondary school.  Of 1,400 civil service posts, only 2 were held by Congolese.”  Though Belgium had the worst colonial rule in Africa, its regime was still better than Mobutu’s.  After independence the Congo, like “most developing countries, was actually regressing; and citizens of the world’s poorest countries were better off 10, 20 or even 30 years ago.  Nineteen of the 25 poorest nations are [post-colonial] African.”

III

The title A Bend in the River comes from Conrad’s Lord Jim (chapter 35, line 1).  Naipaul mentions the mighty river Congo 13 times to describe its volatile, ever-changing qualities as it cuts through the jungle.  In Kisangani the Europeans come to the high banks to dine and drink in the (now ruined) Hôtel des Chutes and watch the cataracts in the moonlight.  Flowing to the center of the continent and close to the town, the river runs endlessly and generates eternal noise.  A regional trading post, natural meeting place and provincial capital, it has a rich future.  The European traders who replaced the Arab slavers felt more secure there until the town was half-destroyed by riots after independence.  Naipaul concludes with a concise description of the decaying town on the river.  His first words ironically contrast with the famous exaltation of England in Shakespeare’s Richard II: “This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle . . . This other Eden, demi-paradise”: “This piece of earth—how many changes had come to it!  Forest at a bend in the river, a meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilisation, the glittering Domain of a new Africa, and now this.”

The opening sentence of the novel states the dominant theme: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”  The first six words are taken verbatim from D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (chapter 18, p. 267, Signet ed.).  Lawrence means that Connie and Mellors must marry to avoid persecution by the moralistic world.  Naipaul gives the sentence a Darwinian meaning: the world destroys weak men who feebly struggle and fail to survive.  He also hints at the opening of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1.1): “the world is all that is the case. . . . The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” The facts in the Congo are grim.  Naipaul uses the word “world” forty times in the novel, again and again, like a musical phrase.  He stresses that there are no possibilities for powerless men in this narrow, melancholy, unsafe, poisoned world of turmoil and horror.

Naipaul also expresses his themes and alerts his readers with ironic Latin quotations.  One character quotes without attribution Seneca’s “On Anger”: “Time, the discoverer of truth,” though truth is hard to find, and even harder to endure, in the Congo.  The lycée’s motto from Pliny’s Natural History (8.1), Semper Aliquid Novi, “There’s always something new out of Africa,” would be more accurate if Mali (evil) replaced Novi.  Naipaul’s essay notes that Aperire Terram Gentibus adorns a monument at the railway station.  “To open the land to the people,” was the optimistic motto of the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps to encourage the building of the Suez and Panama Canals.  But the slogan has led to chaos rather than prosperity in the Congo, where the people left the land for the towns, found no work and were forced to live in squalor.  Miscerique probat populos et foedora jungi, from Virgil’s Aeneid (4.112), refers to Jupiter encouraging the Romans to colonise North Africa: “He approves of the mingling of the peoples and their bonds of union.”  This sign welcomes visitors at the dock of Kinshasa just before they are subject to extortion by corrupt officials.  Tribal hatreds and genocidal wars have replaced this idealistic vision.

In addition to the title of the novel from Conrad, the first sentence from Lawrence and Wittgenstein, the speech from Shakespeare and the Latin quotations, Naipaul also laces A Bend in the River with literary allusions to convey his meaning and provide a European cultural context for his African novel.  “The Vanity of all human endeavour”: Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes.”  “The greater discouragements, the keener I was to press on”: Sigmund Freud’s the greater the obstacles to sexual seduction, the greater the pleasure when they are overcome.  “I could be master of my fate”: William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus.”  Big Man and “If Africa had a future it lay with those refugees”: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother and “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles.”  “I want to win and win and win”: Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, “I want, I want, I want!”  “Even hypochondriacs have real illnesses”: Delmore Schwartz’s, “Even paranoids have real enemies.”  “I went over the [mental] pictures I had of Yvette that evening, ran the film over and over again”: Norman Mailer’s idea that the imagination runs riot and constructs its own sexual newsreels.

IV

A Bend in the River takes place, soon after independence, from 1963 to 1970, and traces the life of Salim, the 23-year-old first-person narrator.  He is a fearful and disillusioned Indian Muslim whose Arabic name ironically means “peaceful” and “safe.”  His family originally came from a Hindu region in northwest India, his grandfather was a labourer on the Nairobi to Mombasa railway (where lions ate the coolies), and his relations have been settled on the coast of Africa for generations.

Back in East Africa, Salim’s friend Nazruddin had offered to sell  him his shop in Kisangani at a bargain price.  Feeling he must break away from his family and determine his own fate, Salim seizes the chance to escape.  He later explains that “Nazruddin used to tell us wonderful stories about the times he used to have here.  That was why I came.  I thought I would be able to live my own life . . . and would find what Nazruddin had found.”  Salim is vaguely engaged to Nazruddin’s daughter Kareisha, though it’s doubtful that Nazruddin would want his daughter to live far away from him in the dangerous Congo.  Like Naipaul, Salim is a detached, perceptive and pessimistic observer.  He’s threatened, frightened and vulnerable, helpless, trapped and self-destructive, and Kisangani does not meet the expectations of the stranger in a strange land.

Salim’s sophisticated and successful friend Indar is the subject of a long, poorly connected autobiographical digression based on Naipaul’s own search for employment and humiliating rejections after graduating from Oxford.  He’s now been invited by the government to lecture at the Domain, and introduces Salim to the Belgian Yvette.  She’s in her late twenties and married to Raymond, a distant self-absorbed scholar in his late fifties.  Raymond is doing historical research on the Congo, but rarely ventures out of his study to observe the people and the country.

Salim is immediately and madly bewitched by the attractive Yvette, who’s close to his age.  He’s riveted by her bare white feet and, when he dances with her, by her smooth skin beneath her silk blouse.  As the men leave her house Yvette, most unusually, embraces both Indar and Salim.  Using a sexual word, Salim thinks, “It was delicious to me, as the climax to that evening, to press that body close, soft at this late hour.”

When Indar says farewell at the dock and leaves the town he puts his hand on Yvette’s thigh, and Salim replaces him with Yvette as he’d replaced Nazruddin in the shop.  Salim’s sex life (like Naipaul’s before marriage) had been confined to pornographic magazines, masturbation: “subsidiary sexual satisfactions,” and whores in brothels who make him afraid of public exposure and venereal disease.  Yvette is “an ambitious woman who had married young and come out to the wrong country, cutting herself off.”  She’s bored and fed up with life in the remote Congo town and feels imprisoned in her house.  Salim’s desires are clear, but Naipaul does not explain why Yvette wants to sleep with him.  The Indian shopkeeper is not especially good-looking, not wealthy, not educated, not familiar with Europe and not sexually experienced with respectable Indian or white women.  It’s not clear if the lovers speak French or English.  But as Salim’s sexual fantasies come true, he feels ecstatic, energised and revitalised, with enhanced manliness and self-esteem, and his life takes on a new meaning.

The whores have taught Salim some useful techniques and Yvette has a climax for the first time in years.  Since his shop is in the center of town and his servant lives in his flat, secrecy is quite impossible.  His scandalous affair with Yvette (little Eve the temptress) is well known, and a word from Raymond, a close friend of the Big Man, could easily have Salim arrested, deported—or even killed.  They have awkward and humiliating threesome dinners with Raymond, who’s either as blind to their affair as he is to the reality of the Congo, or seems complaisant and eager to get on with his scholarly work.  But he also gets sexually excited and summons Yvette to bed right after she’s slept with Salim.  The trio of lovers are like the people Indar hears about in London.  They “didn’t keep it too secret, and the old man pretended not to notice.”

The most shocking and puzzling scene in the novel (ignored by most critics) takes place when Yvette leaves a dull dinner party, unexpectedly comes to Salim’s flat, has a satisfying sexual encounter and then tells him, ‘I’ll just give the god a kiss and go.”  As she’s about to leave, she makes a little joke and, referring to his brothels, says, “I thought you might have been in your old haunts. . . . You don’t have another woman hidden in that cupboard, do you?”

Her mild jest provokes Salim’s jealous rage, and he irrationally thinks she’s betrayed him as she’s betrayed Raymond.  As Brabantio warns Othello: “Look to her Moor if thou hast eyes that see, / She hath deceived her [husband] and will thee.”  Though Salim has not honoured his engagement to Kareisha, he demands Yvette’s fidelity to him.  She had been Indar’s lover before her liaison with Salim, but has rejected the sexual advances of several visiting Europeans who’d tried to seduce her.  There’s no evidence that she’s betrayed Salim.

Salim’s violence, repressed until now, matches the political violence in the Congo.  He suddenly beats and kicks Yvette, and ends their affair before she can reject him.  Shifting from passive to active voice, speaking with cruel objectivity and reducing her to infantile behavior, he says:

She was hit so hard and so often about the face, even through raised, protecting arms, that she staggered back and allowed herself to fall on the floor.  I used my foot on her then, doing that for the sake of the beauty of her shoes, her ankles, the skirt I had watched her raise, the hump of her hip.  She turned her face to the floor and remained still for a while; then with a deep breath such as a child draws before it screams, she began to cry, and that wail after a time broke into real, shocking sobs.

Salim first realizes his sexual dreams with Yvette, then destroys them with guilt-ridden “brothel fantasies of conquest and degradation, with the woman as the willing victim, the accomplice in her own degradation.”  Patrick French’s biography reveals that Naipaul beat up his lover Margaret Gooding in exactly the same way.  Then, as in the novel, Naipaul complained with appalling self-pity, that his hand hurt.  Salim says, “The palm of my hand was stiff, swollen.  The back of my hand, from little finger to wrist, was aching; bone had struck bone. . . . The skin was blue-black.”  The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche provided a cruel justification for Salim’s violence by declaring in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Will you go with a woman?  Then take a whip.”

After Salim beats her, Yvette is abjectly submissive, gets into bed as if nothing unusual had happened and summons him for more sex.  But Salim feels impelled to inflict even more punishment.  He joins her in bed and reveals, “I held her legs apart.  She raised them slightly—smooth concavities of flesh on either side of the inner ridge—and then I spat on her between the legs until I had no more spit.  All her softness vanished in outrage.  She shouted, ‘You can’t do that!’  Bone struck against bone again; my hand ached at every blow” as he beats her again and pollutes the wet center of his sexual ecstasy.  Salim gets as much sadistic pleasure from beating Yvette as he does from having sex with her, and wants to be pitied because he cannot help being a monster.

Yvette looks dreadful, her face is in an awful state, and she’ll have to hide for several days.  Raymond will certainly ask her to explain how she acquired the disfiguring bruises.  But she seems to have masochistically enjoyed the beating, which relieved her guilt and perversely united her with Salim.  She telephones to console him as soon as she gets home and even offers to return for more pleasurable chastisement.

In the shop Salim’s main customer is Zabeth, a sorceress and marchande, who buys quantities of his goods, poles them downriver through unlit waterways, and sells them to remote and hidden villages.  He befriends and teaches her son Ferdinand, encourages the boy to study, helps him enter the local lycée and the polytechnic in Kinshasa.  Ferdinand becomes an administrative cadet and eventually returns, first-class

on the steamer, as the local ruler of Kisangani.  When Salim returns from a trip to London to sell his shop, he finds that it has been nationalized and given to the incompetent Théotime (honoring God).  Reversing the roles of master and servant, Théotime makes Salim his manager and forces him to become his chauffeur.

Salim’s family had sent Metty, their half-Indian, half-African former slave, to serve and help him in the Congo.  Naipaul too obviously foreshadows future danger when Metty helps Salim bury his passport, money and valuables in a crate in the backyard.  Salim thinks, “This is too stupid. . . . I’ve made a mistake.  Metty knows that everything of value that I possess is in that box.  I’ve put myself in his hands.”  He later buries gold that has been stolen and ivory that has been poached, and Metty predictably betrays him. He tells the police where the contraband is buried, they arrest the trapped and vulnerable Salim and, like the foreigner Naipaul heard about in Rwanda, put him in prison and extort a handsome bribe.

Echoing Christ’s last words on the Cross, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), Salim thinks, “What have you done to me?”  Metty then outrageously asks to leave town with Salim, which Salim refuses, and even demands money.  Salim, who’d been irrationally brutal to Yvette, is now irrationally kind to Metty.  He is not at all angry, and may still feel responsible for his servant.  He gives Metty his valuable flat and car, and promises to send him money from abroad.

The Big Man is scheduled to arrive in Kisangani the next day.  As cunning, cruel and despotic as ever, he’s arranged for a public execution to take place.  Everyone will witness the execution and one man will be executed, but nobody knows who the victim will be.  Ferdinand tells Salim, “We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones.”  He urges Salim to leave on the last steamer and saves Salim’s life before the inevitable massacre breaks out.  Salim escapes, but since his family has been driven out of East Africa, he has no safe place to go.  The  novel ends with two references to Conradian darkness as the passenger barge breaks loose from the steamer and drifts away down the river.

In this context of overwhelming violence, Naipaul dramatises the effects of colonialism and independence, and shows how it feels to be stuck in a decaying and dangerous country.   Salim says that without Europeans who recorded African history “all our past would have been washed away,” and recalls the vanished peace of colonial times.  By contrast, people today are screaming about injustice, oppression, brutality and the threat of imminent death.  The idealistic Father Huismans, named after the French-Catholic novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, is the victim of African violence. The priest taught Catholic doctrine while preserving African statues, was accused of bringing false gods to the land and murdered: “His body had been mutilated, his head cut off and spiked,” like the heads that decorated Kurtz’s fence in Heart of Darkness.

Yvette’s scholarly husband Raymond condemns colonialism and defends the Big Man.  He’d befriended the dictator when he was a boy, as Salim had befriended Ferdinand, and urged him to join the army.  His protégé eventually became commander of the army, seized control of the Congo and acquired more power than King Leopold.  Raymond then became the Big Man’s White Man and intellectual guide, and runs the Domain.  Raymond even swallows the Big Man’s bogus cult of his mother and asks Salim, “Can you imagine the humiliations of an African hotel maid in colonial times?”

In fact, a maid’s job for an unskilled woman was not humiliating.  Unlike a prostitute, she worked in a clean place, had a modest salary and got decent food.  Raymond says the Big Man disciplined the army and brought peace to the land, and absurdly claims that he gave the country freedom without coercion.  But Raymond is soon discarded and becomes a defeated man.  His once-flourishing house in the Domain, like Salim’s shop, is taken over by an African.  Raymond and Yvette disappear and head, again like Salim, for an unknown destination.

Salim’s handsome close friends, Mahesh and Shoba, are also in great danger in both East Africa and the Congo.  This Indian couple, who’d defied caste prohibitions and married for love, fear the retaliation of her brothers who’ve threatened to punish her transgression by burning her face with acid.  When Shoba returns home for her father’s funeral, her brothers carry out their vendetta and pay a hairdresser to scorch her face with peroxide.  It seems impossible for Mahesh to manage his shop and run his Bigburger franchise (an allusion to Big Man as well as to McDonald’s) if, as Naipaul says, he speaks neither French nor Lingala.  In any case, his business will surely be nationalised.

Mahesh persuasively tells Salim, “It isn’t that there’s no right or wrong here.  There’s no right.”  And Indar concludes, “Everything had conspired to push black Africa into every kind of tyranny.”  As ancestral voices prophesied war, Naipaul opposed the prevailing intellectual tide and condemned the disastrous condition of the independent Congo.

Jeffrey Meyers was once Naipaul’s anointed biographer, spent a few days with him in Wiltshire and London, and wrote a chapter about him in Privileged Moments (2000).

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