A Bend in the River

Salim, a Muslim of Indian descent, buys a shop in a town at a bend of the great river in the interior of a newly independent central African country, and watches the fragile post-colonial order rise and rot under the rule of the Big Man. Naipaul's unnamed town is drawn from Kisangani on the Congo: the river and its choking water hyacinths, the market and the shop, the Big Man's shiny new Domain on the edge of the bush, and the far-off capital from which power and terror flow.

Salim

The town at the bend

The shop

Salim drives inland to buy a shop in the half-ruined town at the bend of the river, where the trade of the interior slowly revives after the chaos of independence. The market, the shabby shops, the mix of peoples washed up here, this is the frontier world in which Naipaul watches a new Africa try, and fail, to hold itself together.

The opening chapters

inspired by Salim's shop and the market town at the river's bend are drawn from Kisangani, the real city on the upper Congo, left unnamed in the novel; sited there.

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