A Naipaul Caught South of Fame

It is impossible to read “North of South,” Shiva Naipaul’s cynical yet deeply moving account of a late 1970s journey through East Africa, without being reminded of the travel writings of his legendary elder brother, V.S. Naipaul. Only 40 when he died of a heart attack in 1985, the unfortunate younger Naipaul cannot escape comparisons to his sibling, older by 13 years and a literary behemoth and Nobel Laureate often described as Britain’s greatest living writer. Shiva Naipaul’s work is more than worthy of notice on its own merits, but in so far as he has been remembered at all in recent years, it has been as V.S. Naipaul’s brother.

Like the elder Naipaul, Shiva began his career writing comic novels set in their family’s native Trinidad; works such as “Fireflies” and “The Chip-Chip Gatherers” won literary prizes and critical approval, and although he would write only one more novel in his lifetime, his skill as a storyteller translated readily to a distinctive brand of non-fiction analogous to his brother’s approach as a novelist. “North of South” (whose title refers to the countries Naipaul visits being north of South Africa), his first book of non-fiction, often reads like a novel, albeit one that is as keenly concerned with history, politics, and sociology as it is with its characters. Including such an array of weighty and entangling material, however, does not overburden the book with research or theory. Rather, Naipaul’s art of character and his attention to detail only serve to enrich the work.

At the outset, Naipaul sets himself to the task of investigating Africa and its politics through its people and their experiences. He laments the myopic Western focus on African politicians, not Africans themselves, “The book will arise, I hope, out of my own concerns—or, if you prefer, obsessions. What do terms like ‘liberation,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘socialism,’ actually mean to the people—i.e. the masses—who experience them.”

Naipaul explores the effects of policies such as Tanzanian dictator Julius Nyerere’s “ujamaa” on the ground. He writes with pitiless, unflinching accuracy and cynicism, never failing to completely evoke the abject poverty and horrors that he witnesses. This relentless honesty earned him accusations of racism in his lifetime and has ensured that the book remains relatively obscure, its truths too uncomfortable for the self-selecting blindness of a West devoted to political correctness first and foremost.

In truth, Naipaul is not a racist, nor any kind of bigot. He is certainly less sympathetic to his subjects than many other contemporary writers on Africa, but at the same time he condemns the simplicities of racial analysis and highlights the unfair plight of Indian immigrants throughout East Africa. His brother has fallen understandably under fire for ethnically and religiously insensitive remarks—in recent years, V.S. Naipaul has been overtly prejudiced in his assessment of Muslims and the Islamic World—but Shiva Naipaul, by contrast, merely shares his brother’s resonance and descriptive eye for the evocatively grotesque, notably in the instance of the diseased mendicants on the streets of Nairobi; “Most were maimed. Lepers with truncated arms and legs were a common sight; but even more numerous than the lepers were victims of severe bone malformation, the result of calcium deficiency. This affliction ravages the human frame, reducing it to tangled wreckage of atrophied limbs.”

The prose is not merely precise but elegant and memorable, full of acerbic wit and unusual metaphor. The writing illuminates not only the landscape and the people in general, but also a succession of unforgettable characters that illustrate the range of issues confronting modern Africa. One essentially tragicomic figure is the Sikh whom Naipaul meets on the plane to Nairobi; on the one hand, the author is repelled by the bumbling, garrulous man, overeager to befriend a stranger who is similarly of Indian origin. Yet Naipaul writes with uncharacteristic feeling for the Sikh’s profound predicament as a British Asian going to Tanzania to try and extricate his own mother. He writes of the outright racism that the Sikh experiences at Nairobi Airport, where British Asians are denied entry into Kenya without a visa despite every other British citizen being given free entry. Similarly vivid is Naipaul’s encounter with a Kenyan shoeshine boy who displays both an entrepreneurial bent and a streetwise cunning in trying to cheat the author.

The book’s political analysis is as incisive as the best political journalism, and Naipaul presents the causes of Africa’s problems with rare balance and simplicity; “At the height of the slave trade, African rulers seemed literally to have gone mad. To get hold of the guns and tobacco and brandy they craved, some chiefs betrayed and enslaved their own people. The desire to possess had spiraled out of control. Their successors behave no differently. Slavery, of course, is now illegal. But are there any moral distinctions to be drawn between a chief who, in order to satisfy his lust for brandy, sells his own people into slavery and the contemporary politician who, coveting a Mercedes-Benz, embezzles the funds of a charity set up to help orphan children?” But, as Naipaul reiterates, even the most glutinous despot is hopeless without a sympathetic, or at least ambivalent host of subjects: “Africans are content with the political kingdom.”

Thirty years after it first appeared in the United States, “North of South” is as thrilling, disturbing, and relevant as ever. Read it to receive a much-needed dose of honesty in the face of the increasingly desensitized literary and political discourse on Africa.

—Staff writer Keshava D. Guha kdguha@fas.harvard.edu.