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Summary: Chapter 1

A Bend in the River opens with the first-person narrator, Salim, explaining how he purchased a shop from a family friend named Nazruddin. The shop was located in a former colonial town in an unnamed central African nation that had recently gained political independence. A local rebellion had caused Nazruddin to give up on his business in the town and move his family to the relatively more stable nation of Uganda. He sold the shop to Salim at a low rate, and Salim drove from the East African coast to the continental interior. When he arrived at the town situated at the bend of a great river, he found a derelict place partially reclaimed by nature.

Salim recalls that his first customer was a marchande—or “merchant”—named Zabeth, who made the difficult and dangerous journey to town once a month from her village in the bush to purchase supplies for her community. Salim considered her a canny businesswoman. She also had a strong, distinctive odor that came from ointments she used to protect herself from ominous forces. Zabeth was a renowned sorceress.

Summary: Chapter 2

Salim explains that his family has lived on the East African coast for centuries among a community of Muslims who came originally came from India. Because the majority of people who lived on the coast had immigrated from other places bordering the Indian Ocean, Salim considered it “not truly African.”

Salim describes how the stories about his family’s past are few in number and scanty in details, despite them having lived in Africa for centuries and witnessing the arrival of the Europeans, the expulsion of the Arabs, the expansion of the British imperial presence, and the granting of independence. He insists that the only history he knows about his own people comes from books written by Europeans.

In spite of the many changes that transformed the coast, the Indians continued to exist as they had always done. Salim’s family lived with the men and women they previously enslaved in a large compound, and over generations of cohabitation, racial mixing had taken place.

Salim has long felt like an outsider in his community, and he nurtured a habit of observing the world with a “detached” eye. Such a detached way of seeing convinced him that his civilization had fallen behind that of Europe and that their way of life was destined to fall apart when the Europeans left Africa. Yet even as he harbored a fatalistic attitude toward his community’s future, he still cared very much for it.

At a time when Salim felt especially trapped by these opposing feelings, Nazruddin returned to the coast and offered to sell Salim his store in central Africa. Salim looked up to Nazruddin as a man of the world and felt entranced by Nazruddin’s luck in business and infectious enthusiasm. Seeing the store as a way to avoid his community’s fate, Salim accepted the offer. Before parting ways, Nazruddin instructed Salim that “business never dies in Africa; it is only interrupted.” Yet he also told Salim that he must always know when to get out.

Salim arrived in the town knowing its heyday had ended. He found the place almost completely abandoned, studded with ruined relics of its colonial past and populated by a handful of Belgian, Greek, and Indian hangers-on. Soon after Salim moved to the interior, an uprising on the coast unsettled the Asian and Arab communities there. Salim’s family scattered, and they sent a young half-African servant to live with Salim. Formerly known as Ali, town locals called the servant Metty, after the French word métis, meaning “mixed.” Metty quickly adapted to life in the town and became an asset to Salim.

Analysis: Chapters 1–2

In the opening chapters of A Bend in the River, Salim depicts himself as a man who feels doubly dislocated. Growing up in a minority community on the coast of East Africa has left him feeling neither fully Indian nor fully African. Though his cultural heritage marks him as an Indian, the geographical and historical distance that separates Salim and his community from their homeland also cuts them off from the everyday concerns of their place of origin. This sense of existing uncomfortably between Asia and Africa forms the first type of dislocation Salim feels. The second type of dislocation stems from the social and political complications resulting from the end of European colonialism and the beginning of African independence. When Africans finally threw off the yoke of colonialism that had suppressed them for so long, they felt a strong distrust of all foreigners. Fearing this distrust would lead to the destruction of his community, Salim moved deeper into the African interior and thereby cut himself off yet further from any sense of home.

Salim’s sense of himself as a perpetual outsider has made him into a detached observer. Not fully belonging anywhere, Salim looks at the world around him with a cold, analytical eye. This has important implications for Salim’s narration as well as for his personality. In the novel’s first two chapters, the reader can already see that Salim’s narrative style is dense with description, explanation, and analysis and frequently low on action or dialogue. He spends much of his time alone, looking and thinking rather than actively engaging. Though Salim certainly does interact with others, he constantly judges them and, by implication, sets himself at once apart and above them. Yet Salim also turns his analytical eye on himself, searching for answers about who he is. As he declares: “I could be master of my fate only if I stood alone.” Ironically, though Salim sees others with apparent objectivity, he typically fails to understand himself or his situation with any clarity, instead getting confused by the flow of competing thoughts. Salim’s perpetual confusion about his own position in the world only serves to make him feel more detached.

Salim’s status as an Asian in Africa has made him sympathetic to European influence. In Chapter 2, he indicates his disappointment at the failure of the Indian community to recall its own history on the East African coast. Although his father and grandfather told a few stories, for a fuller picture of his community’s history in the region, Salim needed to rely on books from Europe written by Europeans. As Salim puts it: “Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away, like the scuff marks of fishermen on the beach outside our town.” Aside from the work of historians, Salim also praises the colonial government. He recounts how the British administration created a set a beautiful postage stamps that depicted scenes and objects of local importance, such as the elegant sea vessels called dhows. The images on these stamps helped Salim see elements of his heritage more clearly and appreciate them. In this way, Salim depended heavily on Europeans to develop a sense of his own identity, which has in turn made him sympathetic to the influence of European imperialism.

Nazruddin’s advice to Salim about how to run a business introduces an important theme about the cyclical nature of political and economic life in postcolonial Africa. As a serial entrepreneur who mastered the art of thriving on small profits rather than holding out for massive windfalls, Nazruddin recognized the importance of knowing when to “get out.” Although Nazruddin didn’t spell out what an aspiring businessperson must look for when deciding whether to stick with a venture or sell off one’s shares, he offered a clue when he says, “business never dies in Africa; it is only interrupted.” Judging by his recent experience in central Africa, where a political uprising led to rapid economic collapse, Nazruddin’s advice implicitly underscores the need to keep abreast of larger social forces. Such forces will repeatedly conspire to “interrupt” commerce in Africa. Success in business therefore depends on knowing how to “get out” before the interruption and hence knowing when to get back in before the next boom, just as he himself did by moving his family to Uganda. Put concisely, Nazruddin’s advice to Salim emphasizes the need to attend to the repeating political cycles of boom and bust that will interrupt but never stop commerce.

 

Next section Part One, Chapter 3

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