A Bend in the River 821becomes for him the symbol and the space for his
hope of a secure and prosperous future:
I began to get some sense of the social excite-
ments of life on the Domain, of people asso-
ciating in a new way, being more open, less
concerned with enemies and danger, more
ready to be interested and entertained, look-
ing for the human worth of the other man . . .
they were in touch with the world. To be with
them was to have a sense of adventure.Salim realizes almost too late that the hope gener-
ated by life in the Domain is false, that “human
worth” is actually more degraded there than it was
under colonial rule. However, it takes him a long
while to overcome the essentially romanticized
vision of Africa that lures people into the material-
ism of the Domain: “In the magical atmosphere of
the Domain, among the avenues and new houses,
another Africa had been created.” Salim acknowl-
edges that this romantic vision, while briefly exhila-
rating, clashes in the long term “with our cynicism,
created by years of insecurity.”
In contrast to this old-world cynicism and inse-
curity, Salim’s servant Metty represents the hope of
freedom and “a new sense of worth” even outside
the limits of the dreams perpetuated within the
Domain. This hope is also reflected in Zabeth and
Ferdinand’s desire for “a better life,” which keeps
them both hard at work to earn money for Ferdi-
nand’s education. Salim can agree with them that
the best hope for their future and for the economic
revival of the country seems to lie in acquiring an
education that might lead to connection with “an
outside world.” Comparing his real-life experiences
among the town’s ordinary folk with the high culture
of the Domain, Salim sees Ferdinand as being situ-
ated at the meeting point of the old and new Africas,
as well as with the outside world:
Zabeth lived a purely African life; for her
only Africa was real. But for Ferdinand she
wished something else. . . . This better life lay
outside the timeless ways of village and river.
It lay in education and the acquiring of new
skills; and for Zabeth, as for many Africansof her generation, education was something
only foreigners could give.No wonder, then, looking “as an African” rather
than an Indian expatriate, Salim sees Ferdinand’s
face “then and later as one of great power.” For him,
Zabeth’s son represents the hope of future genera-
tions of African nationalists, a power greater than
the copycat technology and superficial Westerniza-
tion he sees in the Domain.
After Metty betrays him to Prosper during the
revolution, Salim faces the downfall of all his per-
sonal and communal hopes while in jail. He also
confronts some hard-won and discomforting truths
about the change that he and others like him had
once hoped for so much and that has destroyed his
old world while leaving him unfit for the new one:Those faces of Africa! Those masks of child-
like calm that had brought down the blows
of the world, and of Africans as well, as now
in the jail. . . . They had prepared themselves
for death not because they were martyrs; but
because what they were and what they knew
they were was all they had.The much-vaunted hope for a better future for
Africa built by Africans, Salim realizes at last, was
merely an idea that has met its destructions at the
hands of Africans. In place of the promised new
Africa governed by free people, he sees only the
“people crazed with the idea of who they were. I
never felt closer to them, nor more far away.” The
demise of hope and the confirmation of cynicism
seems inevitable.
Eventually, Salim is released from jail through
the timely intervention of Ferdinand “progressing
through the world.” Salim is intensely conscious
of the gap that now yawns between them, but,
strangely, “Ferdinand seemed shrunken and char-
acterless in the regulation uniform . . . He was,
after all, like other high officials. I wondered why
I thought he would be different.” He now sees
in his unexpected rescuer both the apex and the
nadir of all hope. Ferdinand’s last conversation
with Salim confirms Naipaul’s ultimate assertion
of the failures of neo-nationalist aspirations that