Too Bleak for Comfort

...Party officials and aid workers Class struggle, since it does not exist, has to be invented Marxism, like Christianity before it, has been reduced to caricature in Africa " To Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian stock, the prevalent attitudes toward the Asian minority in East Africa epitomize the injustices and self-delusion practiced by whites and blacks alike Indians, he maintains, are resented mainly for their staunchly insular and "communalist" instincts The Indian "brought India with him and kept it inviolate " Naipaul meets whites who self-righteously condemn Asian exploitation of blacks while romanticizing the mutual benevolence of the white-black colonial relationship For blacks in power, the predominantly mercantile Asian communities make convenient scapegoats, as did the Jews in Europe It should be noted that this is a very funny book But the vignettes of the pathetically doomed Asians, of savagely cynical whites, of one long, hapless black-African comedy of errors, too often have the quality of gallows humor Eventually, we begin to weary of Naipaul's implacable pessimism In his review of VS Naipaul's latest novel, Bend m the River—a grim picture of a contemporary African state —Irving Howe writes "A novelist has to be faithful to what he sees yet one may wonder whether, in the final reckoning, a serious writer can simply allow the wretchedness ot his depicted scene to become the limit of his vision " Howe's point is all the more relevant to a work of nonfiction, even if it is as admittedly subjective as "a montage of people, of places, of encounters " In his months of travel, one wonders, did Shiva Naipaul not meet a single black or white whose inclusion in his book might have permitted a glimmer of hope for East Africa' And shouldn't it matter whether, despite the corruption and failure in their midst, the inhabitants of the region are on the whole happier than they were before independence...

...We end up feeling that Naipaul's unfailing indignation is triggered more by esthetic offenses than by concern for social welfare This adds to the suspicion that, its eloquence notwithstanding, Naipaul's North of South is only one side of the East African story...

...Indeed, it is a measure of Nai-paul's talent that he successfully combines his informal method and weighty themes His flair for pointing up revealing details, for conveying the wider significance of characters while preserving their individuality, and for frank observations, succeeds in forging a montage" that is a coherent, vivid portrait of East Africa today But it is also so relentlessly bleak that eventually it begins to alienate the reader Black and white, Naipaul finds, are "rotten to the core,' each "destroyed by contact with the other " The extreme foreign-ness of traditional Africa and the contexts of Euro-African contact have prevented acculturation from following the relatively predictable patterns exhibited, for example, in the Americanization of immigrants to the United States Instead, Europeans in Africa often become tragicomic mutants, people whose ties to both cultures have gone grossly askew "Transitional states are full of pain, riddled with illusion We can lose one self without gaining another " In Nai robi, Naipaul encounters a shoeshint boy who belligerently demands the equivalent of $12 for a shine "His greed diu not recognize any limits Anything, everything, was possible he had lost touch with reality ' The whites living in independent Kenya are no less skeptical than Naipaul about the "new" Africa He meets "old-fashioned colonials who justify life on the plantation with postures ot noblesse oblige toward their African laborers Even more disturbing is the new breed ot settlers who opportuninistically ride the crest ot change An Englishman opening British-statted private schools catching to the status-conscious black middle class tells Naipaul If you learn how to think black there is a killing to be made in this country It doesn't mean behaving like a black man and saying how wonderful everything black is Sometimes when they make me angry I take them by the scruff of the neck and call them niggers They don't mind They laugh They feel you are being frank and aboveboard with them " With its Socialist orientation, Tanzania offers a different version of the African-European bastard offspring Most prominent are the politicians and intellectuals who persist in grafting imported Socialist doctrines onto a streamlined traditionalism—despite abject poverty, failed development schemes and all the other local factors that militate against their dogmas "There are no classes, in the sophisticated Marxist sense, in Tanzania?only peasants...

...Too Bleak for Comfort North of South-An African Journey By Shiva Naipaul Simon & Schuster 349 pp $10 95 Reviewed by Eric D Goldstein Editor, "Let's Go Europe" The idea behind this book is appealing A novelist travels for several months in a foreign region, armed with a few addresses and a little background knowledge, intending to write "not a straightforward travel book or a current affairs book or (God forbid') a sociological treatise but (almost) a kind of novel, a montage of people, of places, of encounters " Thus unlike, say, Saul Bellow's travel-commentary, To Jerusalem and Back, which is dominated by long conversations with Israeli dignitaries and intellectuals, North of South emphasizes everyday encounters in East Africa?with gabbers who buttonhole the writer in bars, with officials who detain him at borders, with interesting "acquaintances of acquaintances" he happens to visit Yet for all his casualness, the guiding interests of Shiv a Naipaul, brother of V S Naipaul, are quite serious "What do terms like 'liberation, revolution,' 'socialism' actuall) mean to the people...

...e , the masses—who experience them'" How do the white and Asian minorities fit into the changing order...