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What is missing from Siva Naipaul's account of Africa is Africans. His writing is sharp and incisive, but most of it is based on interactions with the people he manages to interact without much effort: hoteliers, bureaucrats, fellow travellers, immigration officials. As such, the picture he portrays of Africa in the seventies is how Whites, Asians, and a few mid level African bureaucrats. His dismissal of socialism in Tanzania is entirely based on whether the hotel bus works or not, what one particular local individual has to say about the state of affairs, and a few other characters. What is missing is an understanding of the state of the majority. At least in Tanzania, he tries but fails to visit a concept village, but in Kenya and Zambia, he doesn't even bother to try to find out for real how common people have fared under ideological states like Tanzania, semi-idealist state of Zambia and the completely free-for-all-takers Kenya.
What saves this book somehow is a reasonably well articulated investigation of African hatred of Asians and a few generalizations (e.g. both blacks and whites deserve each other, both are not worth a tear, both have been corrupted by contact with each other), which though sweeping in nature, are thought provoking enough to call for a better book to dwell more thoroughly on the same questions. Shivaji Das
What saves this book somehow is a reasonably well articulated investigation of African hatred of Asians and a few generalizations (e.g. both blacks and whites deserve each other, both are not worth a tear, both have been corrupted by contact with each other), which though sweeping in nature, are thought provoking enough to call for a better book to dwell more thoroughly on the same questions. Shivaji Das
