RIP V.S. Naipaul: he said what white men couldn't

So, farewell then, V.S. Naipaul -- racist, misanthropist and Nobel Prize winner. Another Trinidadian writer, C.L.R. James, said that his views on the world -- "The world is what it is" -- and its human inhabitants simply reflected "what the whites want to say but dare not." That explains why I, being Whiteman by name and white man in fact, have underlined so many passages in his books, of which I've read (and recommend) almost all.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born five days shy of 86 years ago in Trinidad, a descendant of impoverished Indians shipped to the West Indies as coolies -- bonded labourers. "I was born there, yes," he told an interviewer in 1983. "I thought it was a great mistake." In 1950, Mr Naipaul was awarded a scarce government scholarship to study in Britain, and left his family to study English literature at University College, Oxford. He never really returned.

Mr Naipaul saw himself as a lone, stateless observer, free of ideology, politics and illusion. From his base in England, he travelled for extensive periods to pen journalistic essays and travel books. He flew three times to India, the land of his ancestors, to write about its culture and politics, which he disliked intensely. He spent time in Buenos Aires to write about Eva Peron, the former First Lady of Argentina. And he went to Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia to research and write books about Islam, which he condemned.

That Sir Vidia Naipaul (knighted in 1990) was a great writer -- a master stylist and story-teller with a cold, clear eye for the ironies, tragedies and sufferings of mankind -- is beyond doubt. But he is one of those authors who one either loves or hates. To his detractors, he was essentially political, bearing witness against the post-colonial world with great writing but shielded from criticism by virtue of being "one of them". His many critics called him "troubling", even "bigoted". They saw him as a "hater", a purveyor of stereotypes, wallowing in loathing of the world from which he came.

His supporters, however, found in his fiction merciless comic clarity, and in his travel writing a terrifying honesty. He refused to glamorise or idealise the developing world, but delivered original, scorching critiques, devoid of political correctness. He was fearless and unbiased in his criticism, attacking the cruelty of Islam, the corruption of Africa and the self-inflicted misery he witnessed in the poorest parts of the globe. The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk said that Mr Naipaul represented third-world people "not with sugary magic realism but with their demons, their misdeeds and horrors -- which made them less victims and more human."

"There probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs", he once declared. He was scornful of the Caribbean, predicted that Africa would revert to bush (as indeed it has, IMHO) and often veered towards unapologetic misogyny. Indian women, he once wrote, wear a coloured dot on their foreheads to say "My head is empty."

V.S. Naipaul had little time for idealistic westerners who romanticised India and looked to it for a spiritual awakening. In the land of his ancestors, he saw only ugliness and a smug refusal to recognise the horror of the "narrow, broken lanes with green slime in the gutters, the chocked back-to-back houses, the jumble of filth and food and animals and people, the baby in the dust, swollen-bellied, black with flies, but wearing its good-luck amulet."

He was even more contemptuous of Islamic fundamentalism, which he decried long before 9/11 in The Believers (1981). One New York Times writer observed that it bore an antipathy to Islam so naked "that a book taking a comparable view of Christianity or Judaism would have been hard put to find a publisher" in America. An academic, Edward Said, said he found it hard to believe any rational person would attack entire cultures on such a scale.

Sir Vidia Naipaul will be remembered as a magical craftsman of English prose. He leaves behind a complex, challenging library of work which captures the complexities of the modern world in a unique blend of imagination, travel writing and autobiography. RIP.

What happens, now that the black "redeemer" has died?

Nelson Mandela died today, at the age of 95. RIP. Now that he's gone to his reward, you can expect an outpouring of breast beating and maudlin sentiment such as has not been seen since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Mandela would be a candidate for instant sainthood, if only he were Catholic. [In today's Church, do you really have to be Catholic? Ed.]

Mixed in with all the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth will be a large dose of anti-colonial, anti-white rhetoric. Comparisons will be made with the plight of the Jews in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. The Afrikaners will be cast in the role of the evil oppressors, while Mandela is portrayed as the Holy Moses who led his people out of bondage and into... well... into what? Into the promised land of black empowerment, equal rights for all (even queers), and all the blessings a "rainbow nation" can bestow.

Conveniently overlooked will be the fact that, for the vast majority of its people, South Africa is no better -- and in some respects worse -- than it was in the days of apartheid. The education system is in freefall, corruption is rife, and violent crime threatens virtually everyone. In other words, South Africa has become like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa under black rule.

Walt hopes that in the last couple of years of his life, Mr. Mandela's faculties were so dimmed by illness and old age that he was unaware of what a shambles his people have made of his beloved country.

Here's a quote from an early work by V.S. Naipaul, an ethnic Indian native of Trinidad, with some experience of Africa and the failings of countries, including his own, in the post-colonial era. This is from "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad", which appeared in a fine little collection entitled The Return of Eva Peron, with the Killings in Trinidad (André Deutsch, 1980).

Black Power -- away from its United States source -- is jargon...a sentimental hoax. In a place like Trinidad, racial redemption is as irrelevant for the Negro as for everybody else. It obscures the problems of a small independent country with a lopsided economy, the problems of a fully "consumer" society that is yet technologically untrained and without the intellectual means to comprehend the deficiency. ] [Emphasis mine. Walt]

It perpetuates the negative, colonial politics of protest. It is, in the end, a deep corruption: a wish to be granted a dispensation from the pains of development, an almost religious conviction that oppression can be turned into an asset, race into money.

While the dream of redemption lasts, Negroes will continue to exist only that someone might be their leader. Redemption requires a redeemer; and a redeemer, in these circumstances, cannot but end like the Emperor Jones: contemptuous of the people he leads, and no less a victim, seeking an illustory personal emancipation.

In Trinidad, as in every black West Indian island, the too easily awakened sense of oppression and the theory of the enemy point to the desert of Haiti.

Hmmm. Haiti. Yes. And Mr. Naipaul wrote that in the mid-70s [when you could still use the word "Negro". Ed.]. Look at Haiti today -- more of a "desert" than it was 40 years ago. Look too at Zimbabwe, whose "redeemer", Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe, is only 90, but determined to hang onto power until the desertification of his country is complete. Mr. Mandela, at least, was spared that.