'The bend in the river' is a book I wanted to read for a long but never did. Finally I made it. It is the story of Salim, another colonial citizen with roots in India but uprooted to Africa. It is the story of immigration in which people don't belong to the place they are born or to any other place including those from where their ancestors came from. It depicts the gradual rise and sudden fall of Salim and other successful immigrants like him who lose everything during the civil war in an African country most probably Congo. I did experience a bit of it first hand during the Kuwait war. This is not a book review but some of the thoughts which went through my mind while reading it.
Congo is a county which suffered terribly in the hands of it's colonial master Belgium. It also suffered caught between the cold war between USSR and the US. A potential savior of Africa, Patrice Lumumba was sacrificed in that fight.
Patrice Lumumba was one of those heroes from the tragic socialist stories in which most often CIA is the villain. He hasn't reached the same folklore status as Che Guevara. In fact, Che might have gone to Congo to avenge Lumumba's killing. In the end he himself met with the same fate. It is not clear whether the old colonial power of Belgium or CIA was behind his killing. Lumumba still has sympathisers around the world.
When I started reading VS naipaul's novel, 'The bend in the river' set in seventies Congo, I was expecting sympathetic words towards Congolese people and it's leaders. None of it. In fact, it's protagonist blame everything on African culture and conveniently forgets cruelty of it's colonial Masters and fail to mention any of the Western conspiracies to exploit the regions abundant wealth. It sounded very unfair.
Strangely, Democratic republic of Congo still remain one of the poorest countries on Earth despite being blessed with abundant natural resources. It has water, weather, fertile soil, minerals, precious metals and one of the hot commodity nowadays, Cobalt! Cobalt together with lithium are two commodities the speculators in the financial markets busy betting due to the increasing popularity of electric automobiles. Cobalt and lithium are used to essential components in electrical batteries. But I doubt whether the people in Congo will benefit from it.
Natural resources alone cannot make a county or it's people rich. When various ethnic groups and tribes fight each other, when there is no peace there can be no progress. In that respect India has done well. Despite divisions based on caste and religion it has done well after it's Independence. One reason may be that there are no more natural resources to be exploited profitably. In the effort to exploit resources countries and corporation still play games to divide and conquer. It goes on even today in the middle East and Latin America. The latest being Venezuela. It is not difficult to create rift among the population in certain places it seems. There are no tribes fighting each other, there are no caste divisions but still how easy it is to form militias and hire mercenaries in Latin America.
Trust among it's people may be the greatest strength and asset of a country. Breaking that trust is the most lethal weapon.
https://youtu.be/FDxSWf4LCYY
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba
1 comment:
Natural resources including biodiversity are still the 'fat worms' which the rapacious colonial predators plunder and feed on .The ploy of globalization was put in place to engeder economic exploitation as political had already lost its feasibility and utility . Naipul held a very distopian view when he wrote that book about the decolonized countries of Asia and Africa .An Area of darkness flowed out of his same attitude regarding free Inda which drew much flak accross India.Some three East India Companies were formed among European countries to trade with India which was fabled to have been in possession of wealth including the one dubbed black gold (pepper) and Columbus was on such an India centric search mission . Seeing beads of gold that the native Bhahamas Indians wore Columbus grew fiendish
With greed and he rounded up the hapless aborgine people and led them upcountry at Gun point to show the Spanish the non existent mountains of gold. Axiomatic failure in the Gold rush ensured large scale maiming and outright killing of American Indians and this incident anyway triggered Spanish colonaisation of America and this Hispanic global empire much predated the British Empire over where too the Sun never set .When it came to Africa it was an orgy of mugging of various resources unleashed by all and sundry European countries.
A la Brhminical Kerala where the Brahmins trained their lust on the women of the Soldierly class who considered the Brahmin's impregnation a supreme benediction and it was besides lording over the land resources in exponential measure by wily brigade donnig holy threads (poonuls) across their torsos.
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