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Summary: Chapter 7

Salim and Metty continued to live together. Metty seemed to lose his former “brightness and gaiety,” and Salim felt isolated and melancholy.

Just as Salim was coming to terms with the recent changes in his and Metty’s lives, his childhood friend Indar came to town. Indar also grew up on the East African coast but in a much wealthier family than Salim. Whereas Salim stopped attending school at sixteen, Indar went on to attend a prestigious university in England. Indar’s sudden appearance resurrected Salim’s old feelings of inferiority and resentment, and it made him want to prove that his drab existence concealed a longer-term plan for a prosperous future.

Salim and Indar discussed local politics and the recent rebellion, and Indar described a recent trip he made to the coast when he visited Salim’s family. This was the first time Indar had returned home since he’d left for university, and he explained that traveling by airplane diminished the pain he’d expected to feel. Because air travel allows you to arrive and leave quickly, you don’t have to spend too much time grieving for the past. Indar also explained that he had come to the town at the bend in the river as a guest of the government, which had invited him to work at the polytechnic for a semester. By the end of their first morning together, Salim had warmed up to Indar and felt relieved to have “at last made a friend of my own kind.”

Salim offered a quick tour of the few noteworthy places around town, and afterward, Indar took the lead and became Salim’s guide through the Domain. Salim knew little about the life that went on in the Domain. He and other townspeople felt that it was a world apart that merely reflected the President’s politics, which they didn’t want to get involved in.

The houses in the Domain looked like grand concrete boxes standing on leveled but otherwise empty land. Each house was air conditioned, carpeted, and well furnished. Each house also came with a houseboy dressed in a regulation white outfit. The foreigners who lived in the Domain seemed happy and energetic. They also accepted Indar as one of their community, which struck Salim as extraordinary and made him feel like an outsider. Even so, Salim found the energy of the Domain contagious.

Salim noticed that the intellectual and political preoccupations of those in the Domain focused on “the high idea of a new Africa” and emphasized the creation of a new type of African person. Whereas in the town the word “African” often carried a negative connotation, Salim explains that in the Domain, it had a bigger and more positive meaning of a person under construction who would inherit the newly independent continent.

Salim accompanied Indar to one of his seminars, where he and his students discussed the recent coup in Uganda and the differences among tribal religions that contributed to it. Ferdinand, who was one of the students, asked whether Indar thought Christianity had “depersonalized” Africans. Indar responded that Ferdinand’s question reflected an anxiety about the loss of traditional African religions. He continued, asking rhetorically whether men like Ferdinand, who were entering the modern world, had any use for African religion or whether sentiment caused them to hold on to it just because they were used to it.

Indar and Salim continued talking later that night. Salim worried that the way people in the Domain spoke about Africa departed too much from the real Africa. Salim asked Indar if he believed in “the Africa of words,” and Indar questioned whether anyone truly believes in anything and why it would matter anyway.

Salim felt increasingly confused. He suspected that the Domain was a hoax, and yet the place really existed and was populated with serious-minded individuals. Even so, he moved between the town and the Domain, always relieved to return to the former and yet always called back by the infectious energy of the latter.

Analysis: Chapter 7

Chapter 7 lays bare the ideological divide that separated the Domain from the nearby town. Salim saw the Domain as completely different from the town in terms of both the quality of its social life and its overall outlook on the world. The people who populated the Domain came from a diverse array of backgrounds, both African and European, and their common pursuit of questions related to the future of Africa created an energetic atmosphere of social connection and political engagement. In short, the Domain sustained a community that, despite its geographical isolation, felt a strong connection to the outside world. By contrast, the overall atmosphere of the town at the bend in the river was anxious and cynical. Although the people who lived in the town came from other parts of Africa and from Europe, they lived static and largely disconnected lives that prevented them from feeling a strong sense of community. Whereas the Domain represented the promise of a “new Africa,” the town remained stuck in an old, repeating cycle that had persisted throughout precolonial and colonial times.

As a high-powered intellectual and creative space, the Domain attracted individuals who were interested in envisioning an Africa that did not yet exist. Salim recognized that the President had commissioned the Domain as an experiment, hoping to produce a model for how Africa might insert itself into a modern world. In keeping with the aspirational foundations of the Domain, the intellectual work performed at the university there centered on forward-thinking philosophical questions about what “the new Africa” could look like and who “the new African” could be. Such questions are necessarily abstract and speculative in nature, and Salim felt concerned that they were divorced from the on-the-ground reality of Africa as he experienced it. Just as Salim saw the aborted agricultural project as a sign of the Domain’s hopelessly ambitious reach, he also suspected that the big questions about Africa’s future would prove too idealistic to be of any use. In other words, the new Africa imagined by Domain intellectuals not only didn’t yet exist—it might never exist.

Despite the many differences in background and personality that separated them, Salim and Indar shared a sense of being outsiders. On the surface, Indar’s upbringing diverges greatly from Salim’s. Whereas Indar came from a wealthy family and received a prestigious education, Salim grew up in a more middle-class family and left school at the age of sixteen. Indar’s wealth and education enabled him to become a globe-trotting intellectual, constantly on the move and in conversation with other “men of the world.” By contrast, Salim’s limited means prevented him from a life of endless possibility, and after moving to the African interior, he became increasingly stuck, his worldview increasingly parochial. In spite of these clear differences, however, both Indar and Salim share a common cultural background as a part of the Indian community of the East African coast. As Asians who grew up in Africa, the two men share a profound sense of dislocation—a sense made worse by the violent uprising that took place not long after Salim’s departure. Regardless of their different positions in the world, both Indar and Salim remain unsettled by their persistent outsider status.

During their reunion, Salim realized that, more than any other personality trait, Indar could be characterized by his rejection of sentimentality. When Indar described his first trip back to the coast since he’d left for university, he highlighted how air travel helped him manage his emotional response. Indar had expected the trip to make him sad since he knew the uprising on the coast had profoundly impacted the Indian community there. Yet the rapid travel the airplane enabled gave him less time to revel in the sadness he’d expected to feel. Indar felt liberated to realize that he could avoid suffering by simply avoiding nostalgia for the past. And though Salim won’t give his full account of Indar’s rejection of sentimentality until Chapter 9, the reader can already see how such a rejection has formed Indar’s broader outlook. For instance, when Ferdinand asks him about African religion, Indar insists that the question emerges from a sentimental desire to hold onto something from the past that no longer serves modern Africans. Indar’s rejection of sentimentality also appears clearly in the cynical questions he poses to Salim: “Does one believe in anything? Does it matter?”

 

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