…you can explain the past only by what is most powerful in the present.

Ⅲ. The Caught Post-colonial Past and Present

…you can explain the past only by what is most powerful in the present.

—Friedrich Nietzsche—

Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.

V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River After returning from his Africa journey, Naipaul published a short story “A

New King for the Congo” in The New York Review of Books in 1975

, which delineates the sociopolitical turmoil of postcolonial Zaire. Naipaul later developed this article into the novel A Bend in the River, whose main themes consist of ethnic conflicts, secessional movements, historical upheaval, and social breakdown. A Bend in the River is part and parcel of Naipaul’s post-imperial landscape, in which the psychological damage inflicted by colonialism dooms former subjects to remain

“mimic man” and Third World societies to be forever “half-made.” Everything is rundown in the aftermath of independence and a period of overflowed violence. His attack on degenerate politics and derelict society in this novel is a part of the

disenchantment with the Third World that overtook many in the 1970s and 1980s.

Several postcolonial novelists, such as Ayi Kwei Armah (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, 1968) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Petals of Blood, 1977), to name only a few, with their devastating pictures emerging from African Third World countries, also expressed the frustration and disillusion as the new leaders have brought upon them time after time.

In a sense, Naipaul has remained true to one aspect of his

1

It was also reprinted in a slightly different title “A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the nihilism of Africa” in his The Return of Eva Perón with The Killings in Trinidad (New York: Vintage, 1981) 165-196.

2

In 1960 alone, 17 new countries (The Republic of Congo, generally known as Zaire, is among

experience: the careful nurture of his “outsider’s” status has often been translated into his fiction as characters who, for one reason or another, do not “belong.” Salim, the protagonist, who comes from an Indian-Muslim family, is a resident for generations on Africa east coast. He takes over a store in a town on a bend in the river, and from there we follow his life and the politics of the new state, gaining assorted perspectives on the hopelessness of it all through the activities and reflections of his various friends and acquaintances. He lives in a fractured postcolonial society in which everyone is becoming an exile, cut off from a community of others, at the mercy of arbitrary laws of a dictator or lawlessness of rivalries (On the Margins 105). Through his eyes, we learn about the transformation of Zaire from a colonial land into a chaotic country ruled by a jingoistic President and his propagandas.

In A Bend in the River, Naipaul takes up the more crucial question of whether the situation in the Third World has improved or declined after the colonies have been emancipated. Hana Wirth-Nester notes “He writes about the persistence of

colonialism in the era of political independence. He depicts what Frantz Fanon has termed ‘false decolonization,’ legal independence without breaking down the colonial social and political structure” (534). In diametrical opposition to Achebe’s

appropriation of traditional Igbo folk-culture in Things Fall Apart as reclamation of Africa’s past, Naipaul’s A Bend in the River proposes a wholly different but no less significant situational response to the predicament of modern African history and culture. Whereas Achebe advocates the reinvestment of semantic richness into the traditional cultures of Africa’s past, Naipaul paradoxically seeks the regeneration of African society by urging people to give up the meaningless attempts because in the memorabilia of post-colonialism, searching for past does not help Africans in the

them) with a population of 198 million received independence. Most of them are in a state of chaos

today. The continent has not known a single day of peace since the independence era began.

situation per se; on the contrary, it tends to produce radical exclusiveness, autocracy, and racial tumult. He opposes to nativism “[T]o encourage a young man merely to write nostalgically about tribal life is really slightly ridiculous” (Naipaul 29). In Naipaul’s opinion, this simply caters to Westerners’ need for exotic reading and this vending of “tribal mores” seems to be one of Africa’s fundamental functions—to keep on being a perpetual colony. Since the past of Africa has been intercepted and appropriated by European colonizers, it would be improbable to re-collect the missing threads again or declare a “genuine and authentic African culture.” “The true picture of the past flits by,” Walter Benjamin asserts, “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (255). In addition, the intervening experience has changed Africans’ nativity too much to return to the authentic past, and the cultural vision is full of distortion, hermeneutic tainting, and hybrid elements. “The notion of culture,” Smadar Lavie suggests, “based on the transmutation of race into cultural relativism, a notion that immediately ties a culture to a fixed terrain, has become increasingly

problematic…culture becomes a multicolored, free-floating mosaic, its pieces constantly in flux, its boundaries infinitely porous” (2-3 italics mine). Edward Said also asserts, “Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more ‘foreign’ elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude” (Culture and Imperialism15). As an issue of postcoloniality, the problem of the native is also a problem of modernity and modernity’s relation to “endangered authenticities” (Clifford 5). The movement of culture reclamation always

unconsciously sets a placebo other to gain a standing point, and unwittingly precludes

developing possibilities by limiting itself from the very beginning. It also invariably

led to a loss of commitment to our contemporary plural/secular identity. Fanon did

not see reclamation of the past as a plausible solution:

In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of colour. In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and my future. (Black Skin, White Masks 226)

Many studies have warns that today’s anxieties and agendas on the pure (even purged) images we may construct of a “privileged, genealogically useful past, a past in which we exclude unwanted elements, vestiges, narratives” (Culture and Imperialism15, italics mine). These characteristics often make minorities and national liberation movement expropriate ethnographic essentialism as a strategy to authenticate their own experience, and as a form of reactive resistance to the Eurocenter (Lavie 12).

This reclamation of past with its political purpose, however, often turns out to be

some kind of radical essentialism and worst of all, this hilarious passion has, as the

case in many Third World countries, been appropriated by new dictators to manipulate

against their opponents or control their subjects. The (mis)use of history and the

obsession of returning to origin and its subsequent chaos are the most important

themes in Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. In this chapter, the discussion will be

focused on post-colonial African countries’ quagmire of losing contact with their past

and the dangling dilemma between mimicry and essentialism when they are caught up

in a helpless web of modernization and indigenization. Furthermore, I would delve

into the subtle relationship between outside disorder and inner cultural elements of

people in these postcolonial countries. Through the vision of disorder, we can

closely examine the reason of the revolutions turning sour and the neglected sides of

post-colonial discourse.

A. Appropriation and Disruption of African History

In the colonial era, colonial hegemony possessed the power of discourse and narrative, and as a result, the histories of those colonized people cannot but all “rely upon the sheer egoistic powers of the European consciousness at their center”

(Orientalism 158). While Europeans usurped the position of articulation and writing of history, the colonized people were left without much choice: either concocted history by Western hegemony or no history at all. Being an offspring of immigrants coming from northwestern India hundreds of years ago, Salim, the protagonist, is unable to retrace his origin after generations of inhabitance and hybridization in Africa. Salim confesses: “Africa was my home…we can no longer say we were Arabians or Indians or Persians…we felt like people of Africa” (BR 15). “We felt in our bones that we were a very old people,” he says. But while Salim is reflecting upon his knowledge of the past, he realizes that he has lost contact with Indian ancestral traditions and all of it comes from European sources, i.e., the colonizing countries: “All that I know of our history and the history of the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by European” (BR 16-17). Colonial history is a history that

“the colonizer is dynamic donor and the colonized is docile recipient, … the west initiates and the native imitates” (Parry 89). Salim confesses, “Neither my father nor my grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past” (BR 16). Veiled by a mist of migratory and colonial experience, Salim’s sense of history has been a parasite upon Europeans’

discourse. “Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away”

(BR 17). “For all of them,” Said asserts, “the history of the Third World had to overcome the assumptions, attitudes, and values implicit in colonial narratives”

(Culture and Imperialism 279).

1. The Expropriation of African History

Fanon notes: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding people in its grip

and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it” (The

Wretched of the Earth 210). As a result, even in the post-colonial era, Dipesh Chakrabatry suggests: “‘Europe’ remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones that we call ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Kenya’ and so

on…Only ‘Europe,’ the argument would appear to be, is theoretically knowable” (223, 225 italic original). Salim knows perfectly well that Europeans were hypocrites that

had been telling lies and also recognizes the rhetoric beyond so-called “civilization mission”:

[T]he Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different…The European wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. (BR 24)

Fake and arrogant as it would be, it is the only “version” of history he can

possibly receive. Historical accounts of the Indian people had been largely shaped

by the European vision of Indian identity. Salim knows that his identity has been

fixed and defined in “books by Europeans that [he] is yet to read” (BR 26). He

realizes that Western historical representations of India and Africa have to do with

issue of power and ideology: “It was Europe that gave us the descriptive postage

stamps that gave us our ideas of what are picturesque about ourselves” (BR 237). As

Edward Said affirms in Orientalism, Western representation of the Orient—and all

non-European countries in general—“depends for its strategy on this flexible

positional superiority which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible

relationships with the Orient without losing him the relative upper hand” (7).

Europe then becomes the center of meaning that defines and fixes the “Other.”

Father Huismans, a priest from Europe Salim encounters in the town, stands for the stereotype of imperialistic white supremacist. He regards Africa as a dark continent inviting European’s enlightenment and civilization. He collects indigenous African carvings and masks, investing them with meaning, and storing them in a lycée

museum. As Salim takes them as “exaggerated and crude” pieces, Father Huismans thinks they were “imaginative and full of meaning” (BR 90). His action is typical ofimperialistic exoticization of a tamed Other, which is a most frequently used strategy. Salim also notices that in the room “there were no windows…and the only light was from a bare bulb hanging on a long cord” (BR 95). The setting seems a miniature of Eurocentric conceitedness of being the source of “enlightening” in the

“dark” Africa. The closeness of the room also implies the desire to “appropriate Africa by freezing it into some timeless zone of the primitive, unchanging past” (Hall 117) and manipulates that Africa image according to Eurocentric interests. Father Huismans also plays God by marking every collected mask a date, arbitrarily “cutting off the masks from its temporal and spatial references” (Fu 3). Salim is confused by the spatial “displacement” of these masks: “This is Zabeth’s

world” (BR 95). He is aware the absurdity that African’s culture should be collected and reinterpreted by a European on African soil. This anachronism renders Salim a perturbed historical view on Africa: “So old, so new” (BR 96). Salim also observes that “I never felt that he [Father Huismans] was concerned about Africans in any other way; he seemed indifferent to the state of the country” (BR 90) because Father Huismans is absorbed in the history he fabricates and further alienates himself from the real outside world,

the postcolonial Africa. His collection is regarded as “an affront” to African religion,

3

Zabeth is an African sorceress and a retail merchant, who buys goods from Salim’s shop. She

has a son Ferdinand, whom she sends to Salim, later to the Lycée to get education. Ferdinand, in the

end of the novel, helps Salim out and sends him away.

and as a result, he was beheaded by Africans in the bush and paid his life for his arrogance.

2. The Rift of Historical Consciousness

The nature of historical documents and sources is related in significant ways to historical representation. For Naipaul, Eurocentric history not only dominates the history of Africa, it also corrupts Africans’ historical consciousness as well. Naipaul also makes Salim cast doubt upon the validity and legitimacy of historical documents and sources. The narrator Salim muses over how an ordinary British postage stamp enabled him to detach himself from his local surroundings and consider them “as from distance”:

Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area. The British administration gave us beautiful stamps. These stamps depicted local scenes and local things;

there are one called “Arab Dhow.” It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said, “This is what is most striking about the place.”

Without that stamp of the dhow I might have taken the dhows for granted.

As it was, I learned to look at them. (BR 22)

For Salim, then, the British colonization of East Africa indirectly (but also irrevocably) alters the very coordinates or basic structure of his psychic perception. First,

physical objects like the Arab Dhows are weirdly estranged from their immediate surroundings, and utterly inconsistent with previous or traditional systems of reference and understanding. Those exotic images go through the process of ostranenie

or in Edward Said’s trope, orientalization: “…for such representations as

4

The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky called one of his most attractive concepts “ostranenie”:

making strange. In most cases it is translated as “defamiliarization.” In “Art as Technique” (1917),

representations, not as ‘natural’ depictions” (21 italics original) and are thus established as icons of Africa. Through the synecdochical reduction, Africa is molded and pressed into an image on stamps that circulated widely and indirectly propagandized as the colonial image to other places of the world.

Another experience stimulates Salim’s alienation that cuts him from the temporal and spatial references are the mottoes that he sees on a ruined monument near the dock gate of the bend in the river. Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi,

“He approves of the mingling of the peoples and their bonds of union” (BR 91). Salim learned that “[T]hey were very old words, from the days of ancient Rome” (BR 91). But he intelligently discerns that it was distorted to suit those Belgium colonizers cause: “In the motto, though, three words were altered to reverse the meaning” (BR 92).

His response then is “I was staggered. Twisting

two-thousand-year-old words to celebrate sixty years of the steamer service from the capital” (BR 92). Colonial hegemony did not only appropriate and dominate African history but also distorted and misapplied Western canon to serve its own cause. It borrows the splendor of ancient empire and words to amplify and solidify the legitimacy of its colonial exploit in Africa. Another instance of Eurocentric

historiography is the lycée motto: Semper Aliquid Novi, whose meaning Salim also learns from Father Huismans: “Always something new.” From Eurocentric

he makes this clear: “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.” In postcolonial context that Africa as a silenced object, it may be revised as this:

“Colonial history writing is a way of narrating and representing process of an object; the object is not important.”

5

Virgil Maro, Aeneid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1970) 85. Mandelbaum translated as: “…if he likes the mingling of peoples and the writing of such treaties” (Book IV, Line 148-149).

6

This motto refers to Virgil’s Aeneid, the Aeneas-Dido episode in which gods are contemplating

the possibility that hero might linger on and forget his quest for the foundation of Rome. Juno

suggests that Aeneid stay in Africa and marry Dido. Venus disagrees and challenges her with a

negative statement that the Trojans (men of Aeneid) and the men in Tyre (men of Dido) should not be

mingled: “I am ruled by fates and am unsure if Jupiter would have the Trojans and the men in Tyre

become one city, if he likes the mingling of peoples and the writing of such treaties.”

perspective, Africa is exotically new, inhabited with “noble savages” who await European Christian salvation and enlightenment.

As Ralph Singh asserts in Mimic Man: “there is no such thing as history nowadays; there are only manifestos and antiquarian research; and on the subject of empire there is only the pamphleteering of churls” (MM 32). In the New Domain, Salim meets Raymond, a churl of neo-colonial historiography. In the character of Raymond, Naipaul embodies the workings and method of historical representation.

Raymond is a Belgian historian and scholar who has been engaged by the Big Man to write propagandistic works on his administration. Raymond’s method and work raises the question of the validity of historical documents and sources and unveils the link between power, ideology, and historical representation. “The article about the race riot” Salim observes, “turned out to be a compilation of government decrees and quotations from newspapers” (BR 268). At first Salim cannot understand that

“Raymond seemed to have taken them very seriously…He stuck with the

newspapers” (BR 268-269), because according to his experience, “newspapers in

small colonial places told a special kind of truth. They didn’t lie, but they were

formal” (BR 268 italic mine). Later on he realizes that “His [Raymond’s] subject

was an event in Africa, but he might have been writing about Europe or a place he had

never been” (269); he chooses to believe what he wants to believe. Raymond

interprets and analyzes events from his identity of European centrality and he records

them in a fashion that pleases the Big Man. Even if Raymond has “made Africa his

subject”, “he had less true knowledge of Africa, less feel for it” (BR 270). His

oblivion to human experience and indifference to local or private narratives are major

features of colonial historical discourse. And as a “royal scribe,” Raymond works in

accomplice with the mimic President and colonizes the Zairians again through a new

weapon: newspaper. In addition to Salim’s anxiety of living in a historical void, in

the history written by Raymond, Salim realizes even in post-colonial period, history is still deteriorated by corruption and neo-colonial ideologies.

B. The Dilemma Between Essentialism and Mimicry

For history is not only absence for us. It is vertigo.

The time that never ours we must now possess. We do not see it stretch into our past and calmly take us into tomorrow, but it explodes in us as a compact mass, pushing through a dimension of emptiness where we must with difficulty and pain put it back together.

Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse

One of the most intractable issues that postcolonial subjects have to deal with is the re-collection of their history. The historical blank and disruption resulted from colonialism is now for them to fill and connect. Developing on the base of a fragmentary past, Africa’s future, as Wole Soyinka admitted, over and above the destruction of alien influences, remains a “hazy and undefined ideology” (112). As a result, this recovery process usually turns out to be a specific impulse towards

recuperating a very different history marked by discontinuities and erasure. This recovery is sometimes so misled that it risks re-shaping even re-covering their history.

After the independence wave the African societies and people have taken their past as

a prime concern of politics. “For reasons both of personal emancipation and social

responsibility, African writers also take upon themselves the task of undermining

European representations of Africa and establishing new ones” (Darby 140). For a

century or more Africans hardly had their say in the history about themselves and the

continent; therefore, African post-colonial historiography seems to serve as the

correction and self–affirmation. In many cases, it is likely to take the form of

presenting the past through a totalizing collective reminiscence. However, “Their fictional, or at least romantically colored, fantastic quality,” Edward Said argues, simply “give[s] the nationalist struggle something to revive and admire” (Culture and Imperialism 16). The “returning to the past” becomes some kind of fetish worship and it has missed the point from the very start.

1. Tragic or Strategic Essentialism?

In “ A New King for the Congo,” Naipaul criticizes the Africans who lost contact with their past and tried to avert their responsibility by romanticizing it: “The past has vanished. Facts in a book cannot by themselves give people a sense of history…another past is accessible, better answering African bewilderment and

African religious belief: the past as le bon vieux temps de nos anc tres (the good old times of our ancestors)” (23). Africans take refuge in the worlds of ancestors, or be solaced by the belief that in eternity all temporal problems will be unraveled (Boxill 78). Through the struggle based on Manichean dichotomy, resistance or

counter-narrative paradoxically becomes a grand narrative itself, and nationalism movements, which intends to establish their own cohesive grand narratives as

countercanons to that of the Eurocenter, usually develops into an exclusive totalitarian mechanism. Critics such as Gayatri Spivak have repeatedly cautioned against the idea that pre-colonial cultures are something that we can easily recover, warning that a nostalgia for lost origins can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism. Spivak is suggesting here that the pre-colonial is

7

This term comes from Spivak, who maintains that essentialism is bad, not in its essence—which would be a tautology —but only in its application. The misuse of the concept of “strategic

essentialism” is that less “scrupulous” practitioners ignore the element of strategy, and treat it as simply

“a union ticket for essentialism. As to what is meant by strategy, no one wondered about that.”

Therefore, “She claims to have given up on the phrase, though not the concept.” However, I think this strategic weapon is too dangerous and precarious on the part of its practitioners to be actually deployed.

Even if it is strategically beneficial, I decline to regard it as a plausible solution.

always reworked by the history of colonialism, and is not available to us in any pristine form that can be neatly separated from the history of colonialism (Loomba 17-18). In a specifically postcolonial context, we find “essentialism” in the reduction of the indigenous people to an “essential” idea of what it means to be African/Indian/Arabic. Wole Soyinka strikes a similar note in his analysis of the potential pitfall of an essentialist movement such as n gritude,

which “stayed within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectual analysis of both man and his society, and tried to re-define the African and his society in those externalized terms” (Soyinka 129, 136). The rhetoric of n gritude and the politics of Black Power is, used as the expression of a disabling fantasy, are attempts to re-invent the lost antagonist, and with it the old dialectic of master and slave on which colonized identity had been founded. Said also suggests that “In post-colonial national states, the liabilities of such essences as the Celtics spirit, n gritude, or Islam are clear: they have much to do not only with the native manipulators, who also use them to cover “contemporary faults, corruptions, tyrannies” (Culture and Imperialism 16 italics mine). Its nature of binary opposition always makes it a handy tool for politicians to attack their

opponents. Naipaul has depicted this post-colonial angst in “A New King for the Congo”: the Zairians are “anxiously only to make it known that they were loyal, and outdone by no one in their ‘authenticity,’ their authentic Africanness” (29). The crisis of essentialism, therefore, is twofold. On one hand, while “demand[ing] that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly

homogeneous and unbroken tradition (Imaginary Homelands 67), the essentialist attempt of totalizing and obliterating cultural difference such as Pan-Africanism or Pan-Arabism have created on anthropological and logical fallacy. These “unity”

8

The word Négritude was first used in Césaire’s “Notebook of a return to the native land”, the author intentionally choosing a word with a denigratory connotation—in French, négre is closer to

“nigger” than “Negro”—to signify his belonging to an international race of downtrodden people.

cracked and crumbled as countries discovered their own national interests and opportunities. On the other hand, when applied in internal affairs the manipulation of “essence” may lead to exclusive tribal skirmishes, racial genocide, such as the Rwanda Tutsi-Hutu conflict in 1994. When this essentialist idea comes to its

extreme, it will become a rage that destroys everything regardless of the consequences such as the horrible message the rebel Liberation Army carries in A Bend in the River:

They are going to kill everybody who can read and write, everybody who put on a jacket de boy. They are going to kill all the masters and all the servants. When they’re finished nobody will know there was a place like this here. They’re going to kill and kill. They say it is the only way, to go back to the beginning before it’s too late” (412 italic mine).

Naipaul had prophesized that the “‘black power’ could create anarchy, that it carried a kind of pre-colonial feebleness, so that the whole imperial cycle might quite easily start all over again” (Roach 37). He contemptuously notes it as “hysteria…a great mirage”, and he fears it will end badly.

2. Colonial Mimicry

Dismissing the colonial past, Naipaul concentrates his ruthless criticism more upon the postcolonial chaos and corruption. Chun Fu also suggests that “Naipaul’s concern, therefore, lies less on an indictment of the past than on the urgency of the present here and now” (2). He steers his readers through the mist of pretence and

9

The term “mimicry” here is different from Homi Bhabha’s defintion: the desire for a reformed,

recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite…is constructed

around an ambivalence” (86). Rather, as Rob Nixon defines: “Mimicry, in Naipaul’s usage, wavers

between an explanation and an accusation…The bewilderment and lack of resources in such societies

prompt them to plunder the Western nations for cultural and material values, political languages, and

social institutions, all of which are appropriated in incongruous, denatured, and therefore damaging

forms” (131-132).

ostensible rhetoric and investigates the real situations of postcolonial Third World countries. The wretchedness is by no means an issue of abstract academic argument, but rather, an exigent symptom to be diagnosed and cured. The way civilizations delude themselves, the way they make cocoons out of their cultural myths, and die inside them are Naipaul’s main concerns. Unlike other writers, who are buttressed by an easy patriotism, Naipaul feels no compulsion to be charitable. “Manners.

Particular clothes. The tweeds, the accents,” Naipaul mocks about essentialism, “As though these things then become achievement. You hold onto the symbols of your country and your culture, and it’s not enough” (Naipaul 61). In his point of view, the biggest obstacle of Africa’s progress is that most of the newly independent countries in Africa are trapped in essentialized nationalistic rhetoric and superficial mimicry on the Western world. While claiming to desert Western influences and resume the ancestral way of life, African people are also attempting to achieve European power and success by means of imitations of the surface features of European culture.

In A Bend in the River, which Robert Boyer names as one of the century’s great political novels, Naipaul presents a land gripped by tribal violence and political

turmoil so vividly that it casts an apocalyptic vision for the readers. The Big Man tries to retrieve “traumatically eclipsed” history, but the mythologizing of beginnings can be susceptible in that it can unwittingly serve the reactionary forces of revivalism.

Naipaul notices a statement in Elima, the official daily: “In Zaire we have inherited

from our ancestors a profound respect for the liberties of others.” “So Montesquieu

and the ancestors are made to meet,” (19) Naipaul ridicules the mimic analogy of

democracy. Because there is nothing by that name in the country, “when the chief

sets his carved stick on the ground [before he lifts it again, nobody is allowed to

speak], the modern dialogue stops; and Africa of the ancestor takes over…the chief’s

words cannot be questioned” (19). On one hand, Western democracy is emphasized

as an ancestral value, but on the other hand, tribal kingship and dictatorship is forced upon the apparently liberal nation, and thus composes some kind of bizarre mimicry.

Then there is makeshift juxtaposition and coexistence such as kingship in a republic, paternity to a collection of hostile tribes, and borrowed or usurped technology in primitive bush. Like the magnificent buildings in “Domain of the State” which the Big Man lavishes large sums of money upon, the idea of progress is only mimicry, sometimes with profound political intentions. It is never a reality. While urging his people to retrieve “glorious past”, he breaks the tradition by mimicking Christianity:

He announces he himself and his mother as gods. To justify his legitimacy and to imply he is the saver of the country, Big Man even mimics and usurps the “Madonna Worship” in Christianity. To honor “African Madonna Mary,” his “hotel maid”

mother, “Shrines had been set up—and were being set up—in various places connected with the President’s mother, and pilgrimages to these places had been decreed for certain days” (BR 291). In A Bend in the River, the Big Man, who is supposed to be the military strong man, Joseph Désiré Mobutu,

had written his own history since. He has fitted his people with the blinders of “African

authenticity”—which, in this new nation with neither precedent nor passion as a nation, can mean anything Mobutu claims. The town of A Bend in the River is a perfect illustration: on one hand, the “New Domain” where a modern Africa of concrete, glass and imitation velvet chairs is conjured out of urban dereliction; on the other a hinterland of bush filled with the vengeful jacqueries of the dispossessed (Neil 37). Among the African jungles, it “was by-passing real Africa, the difficult Africa of bush and villages,”(BR 15) and functions as more of a propaganda and decorative

10

In 1971, under an “Africanization” policy, Joseph Désiré Mobutu (then President via military

coups) tried to preserve the “tribe custom,” changed his name into verbose Mobutu Sese Seko Ngbendu

and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.” Under his

decree, Zairians were obliged to Africanize their names and adopt African dress.

template than quintessential technology or modernization; it is what Naipaul calls

“colonial mimicry.” The jerrybuilt “‘progressivism’ ostensibly devoted to the good life and European high rises, wither into tropical disuse” (Belitt 39). It echoes Frantz Fanon’s criticism in The Wretched of the Earth: “…incapable of great ideas and inventiveness…It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and

imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature” (175).

But paradoxically while “In the town ‘African’ could be a word of abuse or disregard;

in the Domain it was a bigger word. An ‘African’ there was a new man whom everybody was busy making, a man about to inherit” (BR 177). In the tug of war between superficial mimicry of Western world and essentialized return to Africanness, Africans are perplexed and lost. Naipaul sarcastically calls him omnipotent

“everything” through Raymond’s words:

He is the great Africa chief, and he is also the man of the people. He is

the modernizer and he is also the African who has rediscovered his African

soul. He’s conservative, revolutionary, everything. He’s going back to

the old ways, and he’s also the man who’s going ahead, the man who’s

going to make the country a world power by the year 2000. (BR 205)

It is an “obscene idol.” It seems before the Savior every obstacle and contradiction

is trivial and can be solved simply by using big words. After so long a history of

colonial flail and persecution, Africans are yearning for emancipation and national

redemption. While the dream of redemption lasts, like the Israelis followed Moses

out of Egypt, persecuted Africans will manage to survive only if someone might be

their leader. Political “demiurge,” therefore, becomes a prevailing phenomenon in

Africa. Redemption requires a redeemer; and a redeemer, in these circumstances,

cannot but end like the Emperor Jones: contemptuous of the people he leads, and not

less a victim, seeking an illusory personal emancipation. “Men who know nothing

about politics have grown hot with ideology” (Armah 89), Africans who are eager to find a way out are susceptible to the rhetoric of their leaders and are dazzled by their exultant national narrative. “They had only the habit of authority, without the energy or the education to back up that authority” (BR 21). The Big Man, like Mao Ze-Dong in the “Culture Revolution,” turns out to be a fake messiah who leads his country and people into the hell of darkness.

The post-independent new ruling class mimics their former colonizers’ slogans and big words to discipline or fascinate their subjects. It has given rise to a “new kind of fascism.” It is “such a good advertising and public relations stunt” that blinds us to tribalism, materialism and social class. Armah expresses his anxiety in postcolonial political mimicry: “There are something so terrible in watching a black man trying at all points to be the dark ghost of a European…they had spent their lives struggling to imitate, talking of constitutions and offering us unseen ghost words and paper held holy by Europeans” (81). Like Big Man., those leaders do not educate their people from the very foundation; on the contrary, they simply “borrowed words they themselves had not finished understanding” (Armah 82). Naipaul also ridicules the ignorant and empty formalistic officialese and their extravagant use. In Zaire nder the reign of the Big Man, “Monsieur and madame and boy had been officially outlawed; the President had decreed them all to be citoyens and citoyennes.

He used the two words together in his speeches, again and again, like musical phrases”

(BR 238). Regardless of the social and economic differences between each other, these regimes transplant the values and institutions vainly from Western countries.

Without fully comprehending the usage of these words, whose prerequisite is a democratic and liberal republic polity, the Big Man neglects all that and tries to achieve the reputation simply by giving their people the name. Naipaul mocks this

11

Citoyens and citoyennes are masculine and feminine form of “citizens” in French.

easy Genesis “signifying process”: “Let there be citizens, and there were citizens.”

Under the grandiose titles, Africans actually remain unchanged and are politically retarded.

While denouncing those leaders in the Third World, Naipaul does not spare the people in these countries either, because “Everyone had surrendered his manhood, or a part of it, to those leaders. Everyone willingly made himself smaller the better to exalt those leaders. These thoughts surprised and pained me” (BR 220). Everyone succumbs and acquiesces to Big Man’s orders with deterministic resignation and indirectly fosters this farce. The Big Man publishes “a very small, thin book of thoughts, Maxime, and forces everybody, including children, to buy one at their own expanse. Naipaul delineates “its Saturday-afternoon children’s marches with the President’s booklet,”

These marches were hurried, ragged affairs…some of the smaller children frantic, close to tears, regularly breaking into a run to keep up with their district group, everybody anxious to get to the end and then to get back home…Mud stained the children’s canvas shoes red and look like wounds on their black legs…They just held the little book and scampered in the gloom, spattering one another with mud, shouting [the long African name

the President had given himself] only when the Youth Guard shouted at them.

(BR 293-294)

It seems a tragic recurrence of colonial slavery—after more than two centuries of colonization, Africans once again permit a tyrant to put fetters on their children.

Naipaul complains, “When, as in Haiti, the slave-owners leave, and there are only

slaves”? (OB 275). After breaking down colonial oppression the country is

automatically building up yet another system of exploitation. The only difference is

the white tyrant Belgian King Leopold II is replaced by black dictator native President

Mobutu under the disguise of pseudo-democracy. Naipaul criticizes that the Zairians take Big Man’s lies so quietly and submissively that they might as well be regarded as accomplices of him and his farcical kleptocracy. Therefore, Naipaul gives a

despairing remark: “Africa has no future” (Naipaul 49). And sadly, examined from the hindsight more than twenty years later, the situation seems not a bit any better, and perpetual coups, endless civil war, and invasions backed by grudging neighboring countries still plague this continent.

3. “Program of Disorder”

and Escape

After the east coast is liberated, Salim feels the Africans’ malice towards the Arabian community he belongs to.

He misses the safety: “To be a colonial is to know some kind of security…I used to think of this feeling of insecurity as a weakness, a failing of my own temperament, and I would have been ashamed if

anyone had found out about it” (BR 23). Therefore, in the wave after Zaire “became independent, quite suddenly,” Salim resolvedly purchases Nazruddin’s ramshackled store in the bend in the river to pursue a new life. He arrives at the war-ridden town with its ruins and its deprivations; he “felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and

12

Mobutu had reigned over Zaire for 30 years, from 1965 to 1997. In 1997, Laurent Kabila, a veteran guerrilla fighter supported by several neighboring countries, overthrew his government and as a rule, named himself President. But shortly in January 2001, Kabila was shot dead at point-blank range by a bodyguard. His son, Joseph Kabila quickly “succeeded” to his presidency (as a hereditary crown). But the rebel army, Congolese Rally for Democracy (again, it is a colonial mimicry of big words) backed by Rwanda and Uganda rejected the new leadership. The war-ravaged country is again plunged into civil war and tribal conflicts.

13

The term “program of complete disorder” is from Frantz Fanon’s “Concerning Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963.

“Decolonization, which sets to change the order of the world, is, obviously a program of complete disorder” (36). While Fanon regards this “disorder” as an inevitable phase and a crisis before liberation, Naipaul thinks it is a negative power, once out of control, will destroy everything on its route.

14

Arabs in African east coast had been notorious of being merchants and transporters in the slave

trade in colonial era. Therefore, once these countries were liberated and Europeans were ousted,

Arabs became the next target that Africans tried to expulse.

you were looking at the relics of that life. You were in a place where the future had come and gone” (BR 39). When he mourns at the sight of the relics of a

withdrawing civilization, a rebellion of a tribe against Mobutu explodes. “I knew other things about the forest kingdom, though,” he perceives the cruelty beneath hopeful and peaceful pretense. “I knew that the slave people were in revolt and were butchered back into submission. But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy river and lakes washed the blood away” (BR 78).

Knowing his own impotence to change anything and his feeling of “insecurity” amid foreign land, he decides to overlook the chaos and manages to be a cold-eyed and observant outsider.

The phenomenon of total corruption of the government from top to bottom astounded Naipaul when he came to Africa for the first time. Through Salim, he expresses his uneasiness with the “new army” of Zaire, who are dangerously armed and greedy in general, but without any knowledge about whom and what its blind loyalty (if there is any) is serving. “They made such a play with the national flag and the portrait of the President…like their fetishes, the sources of their authority”

(BR 136). They have not a slight feeling of responsibility either: “They didn’t see, these young men, that there was anything to build in their country. As far as they were concerned, it was all there already. They had only to take” (BR 136). Feeling justified by the widespread accusation of Western colonization, “They believe that, by being what they were, they had earned their right to take” (BR 137). While their boss, the Big Man himself is an example of crookedness,

they are shameless, without bothering to cover their pursuit of illegal money. They are bold because

15

The corruption in Zaire is legendary. Mobutu’s ill-gotten wealth is estimated at around $5 billion. In the early 1960s he had steadily augmented his wealth by blurring the distinction between public and private funds. The “leakage” of money as World Bank and IMF estimated it, amounted to

$400 million—one fourth of Zaire’s export revenues—in a single year of 1988.

they are secured by the magic of a “leader” (The Big Man) whose “inner purpose [is]

to become the general president of that company of profiteers”(The Wretched of the Earth 166).

The government makes laws to prevent others from doing what they do: “With the guns and jeeps, these men are poachers of ivory and thieves of gold…Officials and governments right across the continent were engaged in this ivory trade which they themselves had declared illegal” (BR 137). Nevertheless, Salim keeps vigilant not to get involved because “A government that breaks its own law can also easily break you” (BR 137). Salim also witnesses the mercenary-like army in the town: “The army had a real war to fight; and no one could say whether those men, given modern weapons again and orders to kill, wouldn’t fall into the ways of their slave-hunting ancestors and break up into marauding bands, as they had done at independence, with the collapse of all authority” (BR 101). He fears that those soldiers, who have no idea of democracy and equality but seize upon destructive power, will turn wild and ravaging once they break loose of their reins. And once again, the precise prophecy realizes itself afterwards.

After coming back from Britain, where he renews his marital commitment with Nazruddin’s daughter, Kareisha, Salim finds his shop in the bend of the river has been

“radicalized,”

which means “confiscated.” His shop has ceased to be his, by

16

Herman Cohen, an ex-assistant secretary of state for Africa affairs of the U. S., agreed that Zaire’s central government is “basically a clan family of cousins acting like the Mafia in Sicily, making these illegal deals, siphoning the money off cobalt and copper revenues.” Cohen adds, “Mobutu requires a huge cash flow. He has to keep the family afloat. In effect he has about three thousand to four thousand dependents, including women and children. This nation is essentially his tribe.

Naipaul also presents their desperate situation: “These men, who depended on the President’s favour for everything, were a bundles of nerves. The great power they exercise went with a constant fear of being destroyed. And they were unstable, half dead” (BR 407).

17

In September of 1991 exploded the “pillage”, an astonishing week-long spree of looting and destruction by underpaid troops of the national army laid waste the major cities across the country.

More than 200 people were killed. Much of the modern productive sector of the economy was destroyed. The sidewalk next to major military bases became thriving markets for looted goods.

Most press accounts described these horrendous riots as the work of “mutinous” troops. But whether the pillage was aimed at toppling Mobutu remains a mystery; no soldiers was ever prosecuted or disciplined.

18

In 1973, under a “Zairianization” policy, the government seizes 2,000 foreign-owned businesses.

decree, and is being given out by President to new owners—“state trustees” as they are called. As Salim’s friend Mahesh describes the absurd “legal robbing,” “So many people just going into places, not saying anything to the people inside, just making marks on doors or dropping pieces of cloth on the floor, as though they were claiming a piece of meat in the market” (BR 386). Citizen Théotime, a former mechanic who “had trouble signing his name,” now takes over Salim’s shop and becomes his boss simply because “politically he had certain tribal connections” with the President. Citizen Théotime feels some qualms, though, when he sees Salim in the shop for the first time, and tries to defend himself against bad politics:

…you know what the situation was like. The revolution had become un pé pourrie. A little rotten. Our young people were becoming impatient…We had absolutely to radicalize. We were expecting too much of the President. No one was willing to take responsibilities.

Now responsibility has been forced on the people. (BR 384)

But as Salim observes, Citizen Théotime is one of those who are not willing to take responsibilities and simply acts like a man enraged by his own helplessness. Salim finds him “liked being in the dark storeroom with nothing in particular to do, just looking at his magazines when the mood took him, and drinking his beer” (BR 392).

Under Naipul’s description, Citizen Théotime’s mentality has become an ironical epitome of the “dependent complex” and “persecution complex” of the Third World people. “It was strange.” Salim notices the embarrassing situation they are both in,

Most of the nationalized companies are distributed amid Mobutu and his associates. Many fail because of the new owner’s inexperience. Similarly, in 2000, in the week of Zimbabwe’s 20

anniversary of independence, the crisis over the illegal occupation of around 1,000 white-owned farms

emerges. Gangs of attackers torch the homes of hundred of farm workers. President Robert Mugabe, who has refused to order his supporters off the farms, pours fuel on the situation by calling white

farmers “enemies of the state.” “How people need the enemy,” Naipaul says. (Naipaul 117) Thus they

can easily lay the blame on the enemy, rather than on themselves. “They imagine that if you kill the

right people everything will work” (Naipaul 47). After so many years of independence, many African

countries seem still unable to come up with a way to solve their economic problems except by blaming

others and further justifying themselves as “national gangs.”

“He wants me to acknowledge him as the boss. At the same time he wanted me to make allowances for him as an uneducated man and an African. He wanted both my respect and my tolerance, even my compassion” (BR 394). This identity dementia has harassed Africa, even the whole Third World countries for decades. While posing as independent and dignitary, the Third World countries heavily rely on foreign

favor of loans and unconditional aids. While demanding equal treatment and respect, they ask for exceptions because of their persecuted history and poor situations. After becoming the boss, Citizen Théotime starts to assume a haughty air and regards Salim and Metty his servants. When Salim protests against Théotime’s sending Metty out on pointless errands, “Citizen Metty is the manager’s assistant. He is not a general servant,” (BR 396) Citizen Théotime arrogantly replies: “I am the state trustee, appointed by the president. Citizen Metty is an employee of a state establishment.

It is for me to decide how the half-caste is to be used for” (BR 396). Once becoming an oppressor, he thinks he owns the whole store, including the staff this gangster

policy has endowed him with. He is entitled to take everything, except for responsibility, in this store and use them as he wishes. He is a living example of Frantz Fanon’s note: “The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor” (The Wretched of the Earth 41). To make more money and get out of the country, Salim begins to live dangerously: he begins to deal in gold and ivory illegally. Unable to solve the problem of his assistant Metty, whose status has been reduced from a slave to a slave’s slave, Salim feels that “ I had been growing smaller and smaller in Metty’s eyes, and now I failed him altogether” (BR 396). At last, Salim is turned in to the police by Metty as a strong protest. Salim finds he has been trapped in a network of inefficient authority and worst of all, extortionate officials. “Things …had become very bad with the radicalization. Everyone had

become more greedy and desperate,” Salim acutely perceives the insurrection around.

Having refused to pay the horrendous “ransom” the official Propsper

blackmails, he is taken into “preventive detention” in the police headquarter. There a maxim is painted on the wall of the yard: Discipline avant tour—Discipline Above All—which he finds ironical because discipline is the thing that is completely lacking here and now. He knows the government is on the edge of anarchy and even if he bribed Prosper it would be useless. Prosper only behaves in the way that would “propsper”

himself, not the community, not the country, let alone any ideals. The government is dysfunctional and reduced into multiple greedy individuals: “Every official was willing, for a consideration, to give assurances about his own conduct. But no official was high enough or secure enough to guarantee the conduct of any other official” (BR 315). “What a complicated lie the words had become?” he wonders,

“How long would it take to work back from that, through all the accumulated lies, to what is simple and true?” (BR 402 italics mine).

Ralph Singh, the exiled Caribbean minister in Naipaul’s The Mimic Man, warns,

“Hate oppressions; fear oppressed,” cautioning against the simmer and destructive rage which would consume everything regardless of the consequences. This wish is tactically covered by appealing to “return to the past” and is clearly expressed in the printed leaflet of rebel Liberation Army:

The ancestors shriek. Many false gods have come to this land…By

ENEMY we mean the powers of imperialism, the multi-nationals and the puppet powers that be, the false gods, the capitalists, the priests and teachers who give false interpretations. (BR 318)

The ongoing ressentiment, which usually leads to blind belligerence and malice, worries Naipaul most and he is afraid it would drag everyone, black or white, into

19

Naipaul seems purposely to employ the irony here. He regrets that it would be very pathetic if

the country can only achieve prosperity through this way. He implies that only after this kind of

person and mentality are eradicated one day can Africa find her way to “prosperity.”

bottomless abyss. “The anger came out,” Ghana writer Armah also shows similar apprehension: “but it was all victim anger that had to find even weaker victims, and it was never satisfied, always adding shame to itself” (69).

At last, Salim is rescued by Ferdinand, Zabeth’s son who used to stay under his guardianship while attending the lycée in town. Ferdinand, now a commissioner after the training in the Domain, urges Salim to “ Forget everything and go.”

Ferdinand admits he himself is also in a precarious situation:

“It’s bad for everybody… Nobody’s going anywhere. Everybody’s in it.

Everybody you see. We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning. That is why everyone is so frantic. Everyone wants to make his money and run away.

But where? (BR 408)

Ferdinand himself is victim of “colonial mimicry.” He now realizes that

“Everything that was given to me was given to me to destroy me” (BR 408).

Because with neither a higher goal to serve except the President nor the capacity and resolve to enforce his ideals into practice, Ferdinand is stunned by the violence around and rooted in his chaotic homeland. As an indigenous Zairian, he decides to stick to the country’s fate and “go in one car”

with it to the end, for better or for worse.

Salim, who has earlier drifted into the interior, now feels compelled to emigrate to another place in a forlorn and completely dejected situation. In his failure to find a solid home and the futility of his quest for order and security, he finds that “triumph of nationalism in the Third World not only suppresses the very real tensions

unresolved in the postcolonial states, but also eliminates the last hope of resistance against it” (Ramadevi 118).

20

It is about a bad dream Ferdinand had: He and one friend of his want to witness an execution together, while the friend does not know he himself is the man who is going to be executed.

Nevertheless, Ferdinand still decides to go to the execution with him “in one car.”

The night cruise scene on the river at the end of the novel is such a famous scene of Naipaul’s dark vision of the Third World that Derek Walcott calls him “Mr.

Nightfall.” Desperate villagers in dugouts try desperately to tie up to the steamer to flee the approaching slaughter, but they are mercilessly gunned down into the river together with some armed militia who attempt to take over the boat. “We went on.

Darkness fell.” Naipaul calmly, even relentlessly, delineates the holocaust. While presenting a bleak landscape of Africa in 1970s, Naipaul conveys a very important message: That some things not mentioned does not mean they do not exist. Some ideas devised to counter enemies turn out to be the enemy itself, and some mishaps dismissed as trivial by-effects of grand exploit are in most cases the main problems in those countries. There is no denying Naipaul was pessimistic about Africa’s future in 1980s because it had been foreshadowed by guerrilla way of kidnapping of the past and the present. “The setting may change, but no one will make a fresh start or do anything new” (Guerrilla 144 italics original), Naipaul sighs. Most states are

undermined by the manipulated tribalism through which, Fanon declares, political leaders show themselves as “the true traitors in Africa, for they sell their country to the most terrifying of all its enemies: stupidity” (The Wretched of the Earth 183).

The “heart of darkness” is no longer a construct of imperialistic prejudice; it is the

tragedy of real Africa after so many years of independence and liberation. It would

be useless, in Naipaul’s point of view, to blame past colonialism for leaving traumatic

effects or attribute their failure of establishing themselves to Western economical and

cultural invasion. This kind of accusation does not help a bit on the situation of

Africans. Many people may think Naipaul is cold-blooded and apathetic to those

who are suffering. But as shown in the interview with Alastair Niven: “You would

not believe this now. No one is more anxious to embrace the oppressed of the

world” (165). Naipaul is eager to help those suffered Africans. But before

embracing, they have to take their own responsibilities and help stand firm on their

own feet. Only by doing so, Naipaul insists, the problem can be solved permanently.