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Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932–2018), publicly known as V. S. Naipaul, was a British-Trinidadian writer of Indian descent, best known for writing bleak novels and travel accounts of the developing world. Naipaul was born and raised on the island of Trinidad, located in the Caribbean Sea off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. His grandparents arrived in Trinidad in the nineteenth century as indentured servants, having secured free passage from India in exchange for a set period of labor on one of the island’s plantations. In 1950, Naipaul received a scholarship to study in England, and he chose to attend Oxford University. Following the completion of his studies there, he settled in London. He immediately began a long and productive writing career that spanned five decades and saw the publication of fourteen novels and sixteen works of nonfiction. Naipaul received numerous high honors for his work, including the prestigious Booker Prize for his 1971 novel In a Free State and a knighthood in 1989. In 2001, the Swedish Academy awarded Naipaul the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising the “vigilant style” of his prose and his commitment to unveiling the hidden “history of the vanquished.”

For all of Naipaul’s success in the literary world, the views expressed in his writings have also long made him a subject of controversy. Many prominent critics have lauded what they see as Naipaul’s unflinching account of the dislocation, disillusionment, and degradation he had witnessed throughout what was then called the Third World. However, many other writers and intellectuals have found Naipaul’s approach to the developing world offensive and, at times, racist. The pessimism that Naipaul expresses in much of his nonfiction, as well as in his fiction of postcolonial Africa, has given prominent scholars cause to charge Naipaul with an abiding Eurocentrism that, in the words of Edward Said, turned him into “a witness for the Western prosecution.” In other words, Naipaul’s grim depictions of the developing world may be understood as implicitly giving justification for European imperialism. Given Naipaul’s own personal history as an imperial subject who grew up in the British colonial Caribbean, his perceived Eurocentrism carries an uncomfortable irony.

Yet the irony Naipaul may have exhibited in his own life relates directly to the main ideas of his writing, many of which emphasized difficult themes related to crises of identity, existential alienation, and cultural dislocation. Many of Naipaul’s novels explore the challenges and contradictions that arose as colonies were granted independence and navigated the rocky path to nationhood. His first major success, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), follows a Trinidadian man of Indian descent as he strives and continually fails to become the master of his own destiny. Subsequent novels, including The Mimic Men (1967), In a Free State (1971), and Guerrillas (1975), each in their own way explore personal and collective senses of alienation and dislocation that arise as newly born nations struggle to adapt to rapid modernization at the expense of traditional heritage. In A Bend in the River (1979), Naipaul’s exploration of alienation and dislocation takes on special complexity as the ethnically Indian protagonist must navigate two separate but connected forms of colonization: that of the British Empire, which dominated East Africa throughout his childhood, and that of an emerging African regime, which sees everything of foreign origin as a threat to African independence.

A Bend in the River expresses a fundamentally pessimistic view of the newly independent Africa, a view that Naipaul very likely based on developments he saw taking place in the continent’s central region. Naipaul set his novel in a central African nation. Though unnamed in the novel, the country bears a strong resemblance to Zaïre—now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1967, Zaïre came under the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, a ruler who enjoyed a significant cult of personality despite his totalitarian political ideology. Particularly in the early years of his reign, Mobutu initiated an official policy of authenticité, French for “authenticity.” Mobutu designed this policy to purge Zaïre of all foreign cultural influences, especially those lingering from the traumatic period of Belgian colonialism. Like Mobutu, the unnamed President in Naipaul’s novel encourages Africans to “radicalize” and orders the nationalization of all foreign-owned businesses. As a foreigner, the protagonist of the novel suddenly finds himself powerless and disenfranchised, and he must hurry to flee the country as it descends into barbarism and violence. Such is the disturbing vision Naipaul offered of independent Africa’s future in his 1979 novel.

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