North of South: an African Journey

This is a chronicle spanning several months travelling in Kenya, Tanzania and Kenya in 1978 as far as I can gather. Shiva Naipaul explains his book thus in his inroduction: "..not...a straightforward travel book or a current affairs book or ...a sociological treatise but (almost) a kind of novel, a montage of people, of places, of encounters seen and interpreted in light of the questions I have outlined..."
Those questions he posed are ones about the gap between liberation rhetoric and its day-to-day manifestations, the extent of cynicism, apathy, incomprehension and even fantasy present in these post-independence nations.
At fifty years remove much has changed in East Africa and the impression that one remembers about the ideals of show more Harambee in Kenya and ujamaa in Nyrere's Tanzania was that they were rallying cries to the new nations but that they were fizzers as far as nation-building principles went.
Naipaul sets aside time for discussing the situation in which "Asians" found themselves after independence. They were not liked at all by Africans and endured hostility to their presence. Important it is to remember that Indians maintained a functioning merchant class while new governments grappled with grand socialist schemes that were inimical to the societies for which they were intended.
Shiva Naipaul is a concise writer; his prose and reportage is spare and clear. The book is easy to read and the narrative does not become ponderous or bogged. In reading this account, it's important to remember that his negative criticisms of much he encounters, stem from the shock of the new status these countries experienced in their post-independent decades.
Poor Shiva Naipaul was not to live long, dying at age forty from a sudden heart attack. show less

Naipaul's younger sibling writes about his travels through Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia in the mid 70s. His style of writing would best be defined as serious though not as acerbic as his better known sibling's with even some idiomatic prose sprinkled in between to lighten up the scenery.

To sum it up, what the author has tried to highlight is perhaps the tenuous relations between white, black and brown with the contest being mainly between the former two and the latter being viewed as total outsiders and exploiters. I think the Asians are partly to blame for this given the way they tried to impose their own caste system on the blacks and having to reap the whirlwind of backlashes in post-independence africa.

Naipaul's younger sibling writes about his travels through Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia in the mid 70s. His style of writing would best be defined as serious though not as acerbic as his better known sibling's with even some idiomatic prose sprinkled in between to lighten up the scenery.

To sum it up, what the author has tried to highlight is perhaps the tenuous relations between white, black and brown with the contest being mainly between the former two and the latter being viewed as total outsiders and exploiters. I think the Asians are partly to blame for this given the way they tried to impose their own caste system on the blacks and having to reap the whirlwind of backlashes in post-independence africa.

Zambia