A dark vision of 'a third world's third world': V. S. Naipaul's Africa

This study analyzes the historical, biographical, educational, and religious factors which likely shape V.S. Naipaul's criticism of Africa in his texts and formulate his place in the Western tradition of surveying Africa in a negative manner. As I note, Naipaul's upbringing in a predominantly black Trinidadian environment may have provided the foundation for his antagonism towards blacks, since Indo-Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians have at times engaged in political and racial animosity. His hostility perhaps progressed to an anti-African stance in his texts and may be sustained by his Brahmin background, which encouraged him to reject those he deemed inferior. Naipaul's education in the colonial system may have also made him receptive to condemning Africa as a futureless region by adopting the principles set by the British colonizing culture and following the imperial gaze of James Anthony Froude and Anthony Trollope, British travel writers of the 19th century, and Joseph Conrad, one of Britain's most canonical early 20th-century writers.Naipaul's exploration of Africa's "reputation" for violence, primitiveness, and decay which started in In a Free State (1971), "A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa," and A Bend in the River (1979) changes slightly in A Congo Diary (1980), "Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro," "Home Again," Half a Life (2001), and Magic Seeds (2004). Through the discussion of these texts, I point to the significance of Naipaul's subtle move away from emphasizing the "inferiority" of Africa to employing some compassion towards African societies and their progression. Yet even with this sympathetic stance, Naipaul still retains some remnants of his bleak colonial vision of Africa. The fact that he only gives a cursory examination of how colonialism plundered African societies and blames these many diverse societies for their condition ultimately reiterates his devalorization of Africa. I conclude that Naipaul's views of Africa, therefore, stay embedded with his initial negative assessments and with the West's ideological positioning.