Modern Age - Winter 2016 - 51
V. S. NAIPAUL'S A BEND IN THE RIVER
In his essay "Argentina and the Ghost of Eva Peron," the author
presents a vivid account of his detention by policemen in the
northern Argentinian region of Jujuy. It was only his possession of
a distinctively shaped tobacco pipe that saved him from further
detention and possible execution: the pipe's odd appearance,
more British than European and certainly not Argentinian, convinced local officials that Naipaul was in fact a foreigner and so
"por no interesar su detención."2 Naipaul was released, but having
come so near to torture if not death, he found it impossible to
complete the journalistic account of Argentina he had intended
to write. That same year he began work on A Bend in the River
and so, as he noted, "transferred . . . the emotion of Argentina,
and even the isolated police building in the bush of Jujuy, to my
Central African setting."3
Some idea of what Salim undergoes can be gleaned from historian Michela Wrong's vivid account of Mobutu's rule at the time,
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo. This was the period in which Mobuto attempted to
transform the Congo into a revolutionary society of citoyens and
citoyennes modeled on a number of dictatorial regimes, including
that of Mao Zedong. This was the tense phase in which, having
rejected the remaining vestiges of colonial rule, Mobutu led his
country in a socialist experiment in which much of the nation's
private property was confiscated and redistributed by the state
and, subsequently, the country descended into poverty and
authoritarianism. Though not intended as a historical account per
se, and certainly not limited to central Africa in its implications, A
Bend in the River offers a detailed depiction of a similarly unravelling state in which individual lives are at the mercy of corrupt civil
servants who terrorize the population with the president's assent.
51
Modern Age - Winter 2016
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2016
Contents
Modern Age - Winter 2016 - Cover1
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