Chapter 5 - In the Shadow of the Master

Summary

Chapter 5 marks Naipaul’s serious turn to Africa. In his first significant book on Africa, In a Free State (1971), Naipaul does not write the formulaic postcolonial novel; what he does is explore colonial repression, the silent, menacing, underside of the spirit of Victorian expansionism. And he does this in the shadow of the master, Conrad. To Naipaul, Conrad’s Africa is such a powerful foundational discourse that it shapes his reading of Africa, and especially of the Congo. But it also provides the right intertext for his own great work on Africa, A Bend in the River. The chapter argues that in the hands of Naipaul postcolonial reconstruction, decolonization, and the restructuring of class relations have a narrative function where an aesthetic impulse is always present. In that transformation human relations, and their representation, become important. For Naipaul, any new history – postcolonial or revisionist – remains equally “opaque” if in the absence of an open-ended critique it transforms social history into the dangerous, imperialist, great man narrative of history, precisely the kind of great man history celebrated under imperialism.