Set in an unnamed African country after independence, the book is narrated by Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim and a shopkeeper in a small, growing city in the country's remote interior. Though born and raised in another country in a more cosmopolitan city on the coast (likely Mombasa) during the colonial period, as neither European nor fully African, Salim observes the rapid changes in his homeland with an outsider's distance. Although Salim never identifies the country where he lives, the events closely parallel the Belgian Congo's transformation into Zaire under Mobutu Sésé Seko (the novel's "Big Man") - with the unnamed city in which the novel is set having some similarity with the Zairean river port of Kisangani. Others see a resonance with Idi Amin's Uganda - however, as Uganda is referred to multiple times in the book as being a place people go to, or hear news from, this seems unlikely.
The first sentence of the book is considered emblematic of Naipaul's world view: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."
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Indians in Africa
Though Indians pervade every facet of East African commercial life, their presence in this region remains far less known than that of the East Africa's European settlers who imported the Indians as coolie laborers in the late 1800s to build the Uganda Railway.
Of the original 32,000 contracted laborers, about 6,700 stayed on to work as "dukawallas" (shopkeepers), artisans, traders, clerks, and, finally, lower-level administrators. Excluded from the middle and senior ranks of the colonial government and from farming, they became a commercial middleman and professional community. Some even became doctors and lawyers.
It was the dukawalla, not European settlers, who first moved into new colonial areas. Even before the dukawallas, Indian traders had followed the Arab trading routes inland on the coast of modern-day Kenya and Tanzania. Indians had a virtual lock on Zanzibar's lucrative trade in the 19th century, working as the Sultan's exclusive agents.
Between the building of the railways and the end of World War II, the number of Indians in East Africa swelled to 320,000. By the 1940s, some colonial areas had already passed laws restricting the flow of immigrants, as did white-ruled Rhodesia in 1924. But by then, the Indians had firmly established control of commercial trade — some 80 to 90 percent in Kenya andUganda — plus sections of industrial development. In 1948, all but 12 of Uganda's 195 cotton ginneries were Indian run.
Many Parsis settled on Zanzibar to work as merchants and civil servants for the colonial government, forming one of the largest Parsi colonies outside of India that lasted until the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964. Indians in Zanzibar founded the one locally-owned bank in all of East Africa, Jetha Lila, which closed after the Revolution as its customer base left.
The lives of the Mhindi (Swahili for Indian) were first fictionalized for a Western mass audience in V. S. Naipaul's "A Bend in the River." The West Indies author's 1979 book remains the best-known literary work in English addressing the Indian experience in East and Central Africa. Though recently "A Bend" enjoyed a resurgence of critical acclaim for its dead-on portrayal of post-colonial African life in the former Zaire (renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo), the novel also lifted the curtain on an ethnic group who had become central to East Africa's life in the later half of the 20th century.
In 1972, Idi Amin, gave the nearly 75,000 Ugandans of Asian descent 90 days to pack their bags and leave the country. These descendants of the dukawallas and Indian coolies then comprised about 2 percent of the population. Their businesses were "Africanized" and given to Amin's cohorts, who plundered and ruined them. The country lost a valuable class of professionals, sliding into a chaos that would eventually claim up to 750,000 Ugandan lives.
Some 27,000 Ugandan Indians moved to Britain, another 6,100 to Canada, 1,100 to the United States, while the rest scattered to other Asian and European countries.
Today, however, many of these same ethnic Indians have returned. In 1992, under pressure from aid donors and Western governments, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni simplified a then 10-year-old law letting Asians reacquire lost property.
While many black Ugandans have learned the art of business during the Indians' absence, Indians today still run many shops, hotels, and factories in Kampala, the capital, as they do in Kenya and Tanzania. Sikh and Hindu temples figure prominently in the urban East African urban landscape, as do Mosques, particularly those built by the large Ismaili Muslim community, which immigrated from Gujarat. Some extended families — the backbone of the Indian ethnic group — are prospering under Uganda's new openness. Two families, the Mehtas andMadhvanis, have built multimillion dollar empires in Uganda since the 1980s.
Still, the Indian communities remain concerned about their position in East Africa. Continued fighting in western Uganda between hundreds of rebels and troops in June, 2000, and politically motivated ethnic violence in Mombasa that claimed more than 40 lives in August, gave credence to these concerns.
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