Literary places in the river town

A Bend in the River

V. S. Naipaul

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.

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