"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."
So the grim opening lines of Naipaul's densely pessimistic novel of Africa. A young man from a family of ethnically Indian immigrants on the eastern coast of Africa comes to a country in the continent's interior to set up a shop in a small town that sits eponymously on a bend in a great river. It is some time in the middle of the twentieth century, a revolution has just taken place, and the town's European colony has been ransacked, but a dictator has come to power and restored order, enough order for the remaining Europeans and Africans — and outsiders like Salim — to attempt to make a go of things.
Things go well at first, but chaos, an almost elemental force, part of the anima of the continent, encroaches, and Salim, the young man, must continually resist it, adapt to it, or risk being swallowed by it. The chaos is political chaos: warring tribes, warlords, increscent despotism, a cult of personality, economic exploitation, mushrooming corruption at every societal level, and these are all tied, in the mind of the narrator-protagonist (and of the author behind him), somehow with the idea of Africa itself.
Controversial in its own time, it would be impossible for a novel like this to be published today. What I like about it is precisely what makes it controversial: it's insistence that not all places are the same, that not all people are the same. There is a view of race and ethnicity in this novel that is almost classical, so antique that it feels anachronistic to call it racist: There are lands out there (the novel argues) where the land is this way, and the people are that way, and their ways are strange and they are incomprehensible to us. The stark alienation of Salim as a stranger in this strange land is well-sketched, even if our modern tendency is to find some point of reconciliation between the stranger and the strange land. Naipaul is not interested in such reconciliation, and that may be a moral failing, but he has given us an account that is very honest. The outsiders do not understand the Africans. The Africans know that they are on the edge of an eruption of violence. There is no hope here. Not now.