A Bend in the River

by V.S. Naipaul

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

The further away they got from the centre and their tribal area, the less likely they were to cut loose from the caravans and run back home, the more nervous they became of the strange Africans they saw about them, until at the end, on the coast, they were no trouble at all, and were positively anxious to step into the boats and be taken to safe homes across the sea.

And it helped to make Zabeth the good and direct businesswoman that, unusually for an African, she was.

When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do.

The slavery of the east coast was not like the slavery of the west coast. No one was shipped off to plantations. Most of the people who left our coast went to Arabian homes as domestic servants.

The authority of the Arabs—which was real enough when I was a boy—was only a matter of custom. It could be blown away at any time. The world is what it is.

But they were buried so deep in their lives that they were not able to stand back and consider the nature of their lives.

But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization.

The tone of his voice was different then, and I saw that this man, for whom (according to his talk) everything worked out beautifully, really lived with a vision of things turning out badly. I thought: This is how a man should behave; and I felt close to him after that, closer than I did to members of my own family.

Because when I accepted his offer I was in an important way breaking faith with him. I had accepted his offer because I wanted to break away. To break away from my family and community also meant breaking away from my unspoken commitment to Nazruddin and his daughter.

Here and there in the bush could still be seen the concrete shells of what had been restaurants (Saccone and Speed wines) and nightclubs.

What I had feared would happen on the coast came to pass. There was an uprising; and the Arabs—men almost as African as their servants—had been finally laid low.

People who had grown feeble had been physically destroyed. That, in Africa, was not new; it was the oldest law of the land.

He seemed to be wanting to thrill himself again and again; and this disturbed me.

It was some time before I understood that it wasn’t a real name, that it was just the French word métis, someone of mixed race.

As a trader, he had travelled about the country during the miraculous peace of the colonial time, when men could, if they wished, pay little attention to tribal boundaries.

all the troubles that had come after independence, especially the long secessionist war.

Semper Aliquid Novi.

I had already been disturbed by his face. Now I thought: There’s going to be trouble here.

It was hard to go on after we had finished with the greetings. He offered me nothing in the way of news; he left it to me to ask questions.

From Ferdinand’s point of view Metty was a better guide to the town than I was. And for these two unattached young men the pleasures of the town were what you would expect—beer, bars, women.

Shortly after I arrived, my friend Mahesh told me that women slept with men whenever they were asked; a man could knock on any woman’s door and sleep with her.

The smaller basins, for instance, were in demand because they were good for keeping grubs alive in, packed in damp fibre and marsh earth. The larger basins—a big purchase: a villager expected to buy no more than two or three in a lifetime—were used for soaking cassava in, to get rid of the poison.

Metty had taken over the kitchen and it was in a terrible state. I don’t believe he ever cleaned the kerosene stove; with his servant-house background, he would have considered that woman’s work.

It was as if the lady had lost faith in her own junk, and when the independence crisis came, had been glad to go.

began to feel that any life I might have anywhere—however rich and successful and better furnished—would only be a version of the life I lived now.

I knew there was something that separated me from Ferdinand and the life of the bush about me. And it was because I had no means in my day-to-day life of asserting this difference, of exhibiting my true self, that I fell into the stupidity of exhibiting my things.

“Look at these magazines. Nobody pays me to read them. I read them because I am the kind of person I am, because I take an interest in things, because I want to know about the world.

I often thought, while I read, that the particular science or field I was reading about was the thing to which I should have given my days and nights, adding knowledge to knowledge, making discoveries, making something of myself, using all my faculties.

I really did mean the scientists; I meant people far away from us in every sense.

The people still called it “the new thing” or “the new thing in the river,” and to them it was another enemy.

“Salim, what do you think of the future of Africa?”

Out of this staggering idea of his own importance, he had reduced Africa to himself; and the future of Africa was nothing more than the job he might do later on.

But Metty, as a servant in our family house, had seen playmates grow into masters;

The game parks had gone back to nature, in a way never meant.

He had found me as I was leaving to play squash at the Hellenic Club.

He couldn’t slump around at the lycée and pretend he was used to being waited on by slaves. But he thought he could practise on me.

But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away.

For Ferdinand there was no such possibility. He could never be simple. The more he tried, the more confused he became. His mind wasn’t empty, as I had begun to think. It was a jumble, full of all kinds of junk.

Young men, not all of them from the lycée, took to turning up at the shop, sometimes with books in their hands, sometimes with an obviously borrowed Semper Aliquid Novi blazer. They wanted money. They said they were poor and wanted money to continue their studies.

To talk of trouble was to pretend there were laws and regulations that everyone could acknowledge.

Rome was Rome. What was this place?

But this one’s only 1940. I was born in that year. Or: This is 1963. That was when I came here.

“What do you do? You live here, and you ask that? You do what we all do. You carry on.”

It had been started by a refugee from the Portuguese territory to the south (a man avoiding conscription),

A little bit of the world was lost with him.

It was a one-sentence letter written in very big letters on a lined sheet roughly torn out from an exercise book, and sent without an envelope, the sheet just folded small and tight. “Salim! You took me in that time and treated me as a member of your own family. F.”

We had the occasional comfort of reward, but in good times or bad we lived with the knowledge that we were expendable, that our labour might at any moment go to waste, that we ourselves might be smashed up; and that others would replace us.

Electric batteries, for instance—I bought and sold quantities long before they arrived; I didn’t have to handle them physically or even see them. It was like dealing in words alone, ideas on paper; it was like a form of play—until one day you were notified that the batteries had arrived, and you went to the customs warehouse and saw that they existed, that workmen somewhere had actually made the things.

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.