NAIPAUL WAS the first writer to focus on the experience of decolonization as an interconnected, global phenomenon. He believed that he was among the very few writers trying to capture how societies were being made and unmade in ways that were new and unfamiliar. In 1966, Naipaul spent a year as a fellow at Makerere University in Uganda’s capital city, Kampala. Toward the end of his stay, the Kabaka (or constitutional monarch) of Buganda’s official residence was attacked by the armed forces of the newly independent country, and the king narrowly escaped capture by scaling his compound wall.1 The attack on the Kabaka’s residence had ethnic overtones. It was ordered by the country’s president, Milton Obote, who was on his way to becoming an autocrat. The military assault was led by one Colonel Idi Amin, who would depose Obote five years later in a military coup. Amin went on to rule Uganda with extreme brutality from 1971 to 1979. Together with Obote, Amin undermined the social fabric of the ethnically diverse country and destroyed its national economy.
Notwithstanding the personal shortcomings of individual actors like Obote and Amin, for many postcolonial subjects the rise of such leaders was an indication that the euphoria of independence had given way to concerns about the integrity of political leaders and then to fears of civil unrest and social fragmentation. Some political actors argued that in societies marked by widespread poverty and illiteracy and the absence of strong institutions, democratic elections tended to exacerbate societal divisions without necessarily conferring greater legitimacy on the state. One proponent of this view, Nigeria’s General Babangida, justified the 1983 military coup he helped engineer in the following way:
We in the military waited for an opportunity [to overthrow the elected government of Shagari]. There was the media frenzy about how bad the election was, massively rigged, corruption, the economy gone completely bad, threat of secession by people who felt aggrieved. There was frustration within society and it was not unusual to hear statements like, the worst military dictatorship is better than this democratic government. Nigerians always welcome military intervention because we have not yet developed mentally the values and virtues of democracy.2
Naipaul composed his fictional writings of the 1970s against a worrying backdrop. In 1965, the Indonesian military massacred a million or more alleged communists (many of whom also happened to be ethnic Chinese). In 1967, civil war broke out in Nigeria, resulting in the death and displacement of millions. In 1971, following an election whose outcome confounded the projections of the ruling ethnic group, the Pakistani army invaded East Bengal and massacred hundreds of thousands of Bengalis. Most of these events were shaped by Cold War geopolitics; the actions of the Indonesian and the Pakistani armies were supported by the United States government.3
In a 1971 interview, an agitated Naipaul declared that the Pakistani army was using weapons supplied by the United States and China to commit war crimes.4 Naipaul was “extremely upset” about the East Pakistan invasion, which recalled the distress he felt at the civil war in Nigeria a few years earlier. When Naipaul visited the United States in 1968, he met with Cyprian Ekwensi, Chinua Achebe, and Gabriel Okara and expressed his support for the millions of Biafrans who were suffering from war and famine as a consequence of a blockade imposed by Nigeria’s federal government.5
The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European novels on which Naipaul had modeled his early work presupposed a stable society. He now found himself having to invent a style to describe the ways global forces contributed to social instability. In an interview given after the publication of In a Free State (1971), a collection of stories about individual displacement in a globalizing world, Naipaul provocatively declared that he was no longer in the business of imagining society in the provincial manner he had come to associate with English writers:
You might go on endlessly writing “creative” novels, if you believed that the framework of an ordered society exists, so that after a disturbance there is calm, and all crises fall back into that great underlying calm. But that no longer exists for most people, so that kind of imaginative work is of less and less use to them. They live in a disordered and fast-changing world, and they need help in grasping it, understanding it, controlling it.6
Naipaul’s fictional works during this period undermine the associations that are typically made between freedom, individual happiness, and collective arrival. Freedom, as Naipaul revalues the word, connotes the condition of having been cut loose or cast adrift from institutional protection as a consequence of social disruption. Refugees, unprotected minorities, and stateless people all subsist in a “free state.”
In Naipaul’s prologue to the three short works of fiction that make up In a Free State, Egypt’s political independence has resulted in the expulsion of Egyptian Greeks from a place they had long considered home. Being in a “free state” here means being the collateral damage of political emancipation—freedom resulting in unfreedom: “They were travelling to Egypt, but Egypt was no longer their home. They had been expelled; they were refugees. The invaders had left Egypt; after many humiliations, Egypt was free; and these Greeks, the poor ones, who by simple skills had made themselves only just less poor than Egyptians, were the casualties of that freedom.”7
At first glance, Naipaul’s tone appears to be coldly brisk. This is not because Naipaul no longer seeks to “identify with, explain or understand” his characters in this work, but rather that he focuses on communicating a pervasive sense of insecurity or disorientation among minority groups that find themselves, in one form or other, in a free state.8 Naipaul sought, through the portrayal of individual states of mind, to capture the feel of the changing times.
Although the novella “In a Free State” unfolds through the eyes of its two central characters, Bobby and Linda, two English expatriates on a car journey through an unnamed African country that has recently become independent, the tone of the third-person narrator never fails to impress on the reader the general sense of uncertainty in the country itself. This is how “In a Free State” begins:
In this country in Africa there was a president and there was also a king. They belonged to different tribes. The enmity of the tribes was old, and with independence their anxieties about one another became acute. The king and the president intrigued with the local representatives of white governments. The white men who were appealed to liked the king personally. But the president was stronger; the new army was wholly his, of his tribe; and the white men decided that the president was to be supported. So that at last, this weekend, the president was able to send his army against the king’s people.9
The novella opens with what appears to be a fact-based, unemotional account of political tensions in the country. The reader is lulled into a false sense of security by the simple diction and the soothingly repetitive rhythm of the sentences. This is why the words “at last” come as a violent shock. Easily missed because these words deliver devastating news in a deliberately understated way, they nevertheless convey to the reader the sense of doom that has been lurking beneath the surface all along. Naipaul uses these words to reveal a few chilling truths: how impatiently the new leader had been waiting for the former colonial power’s permission to unleash military violence on a disobedient ethnic community and how complicit the former colonial powers are with such action. Even though the narrator appears disinterested, then, his concern for the fate of history’s victims is subtly implied by the tellingly ironic “at last.”
Similarly, when the victims of the army’s actions appear near the end of the novella, the narrator’s empathy is communicated remotely, by means of the solicitude shown for the appearance of the prisoners, whose great accomplishments in the past are mentioned in a way that throws into relief their wretchedness in the present. They too have been placed in a “free state”:
Then they saw the prisoners. They were sitting on the ground; some were prostrate; most were naked. It was their nakedness that had camouflaged them in the sun-and-shade about the shrubs, small trees and lorries. Bright eyes were alive in black flesh; but there was little movement among the prisoners. They were the slender, small-boned, very black people of the king’s tribe, a clothed people, builders of roads. But such dignity as they had possessed in freedom had already gone; they were only forest people now, in the hands of their enemies. Some were roped up in the traditional forest way, neck to neck, in groups of three or four, as though for delivery to the slave-merchants. All showed the liver-coloured marks of blood and beatings. One or two looked dead.10
For ordinary Africans, being in a free state could also place stress on interpretative frameworks. Social codes were destabilized, and new visual signals were deployed to convey a state of civil disunity: “In the old photographs the president wore a headdress of the king’s tribe, a gift of the king at the time of independence, a symbol of the unity of the tribes. The new photographs showed the president without the headdress, in jacket, shirt and tie, with his hair done in the English style.”11
For those catapulted into power, freedom brought a sense of entitlement and license. The elite were in a free state in that they had shaken loose from traditional constraints: “They were the new men of the country and they saw themselves as men of power. They hadn’t paid for the suits they wore; in some cases they had had the drapers deported.”12 These new Africans were also freely aligned with the interests of a class of international elites. In Naipaul’s polemical depiction, they were “high civil servants, politicians or the relations of politicians, non-executive directors and managing directors of recently opened branches of big international corporations.”13 They were “new” in that they were the new colonialism’s front men. Having until very recently been discriminated against and excluded from power, this group sought to make up for lost time by advancing its selfish interests without regard for its civic obligations.
Just as plunder assumed a new guise in the postcolonial epoch, a free state did not do away with racism so much as foster new forms of exclusion. Thus there were no “Asiatics at the [popular New Shropshire] bar: the liberations it offered were only for black and white.” This is remarkable, the narrator explains with a display of resentment that recalls the joke about the drapers, because the capital was an “English-Indian creation in the African wilderness. It owed nothing to African skill; it required none.”14
Flush with the high prices that commodities and raw materials fetched on the international market, the postcolonial elite confidently assumed that good times would not come to an end. However, there are warning signs that such complacency is misplaced:
In the capital Africa showed only in the semi-tropical suburban gardens, in the tourist-shop displays of carvings and leather goods and souvenir drums and spears, and in the awkward liveried boys in the new tourist hotels, where the white or Israeli supervisors were never far away. Africa here was décor. Glamour for the white visitor and expatriate; glamour too for the African, the man flushed out from the bush, to whom, in the city, with independence, civilization appeared to have been granted complete. It was still a colonial city, with a colonial glamour. Everyone in it was far from home.15
The sardonic eye of the narrator of “In a Free State” constellates a set of shifting moods and encounters in which the attitudes of the new African elite, shadowy neocolonial forces, African peasants, the marginalized ethnic and racial minorities, and complacent British expatriates combine in ways that seem likely to give rise to new ways of being in a free state.
No single national or unified point of view emerges from these disparate subject positions. Naipaul does not provide a normative viewpoint from which an alternative to the tense and unsatisfactory state of affairs can be envisioned. Even though “In a Free State” conforms to the formal realism of nineteenth-century European fiction, it does not presuppose the consensus or shared framework that underlies that form of writing. Freedom in this context evokes disparate, even incommensurate, visions of social life that have not yet been combined to enable shared ways of seeing and saying.
Many of these disparate perspectives are filtered through Bobby’s consciousness. Although Bobby is a British civil servant, he is a supporter of the underdog. He regards Africans as his equal and is outraged by his compatriots’ casually racist attitudes. Accompanying Bobby on his long drive back from the capital city to the Southern Collectorate, where he lives and works, is Linda—a “compound wife” married to a British radio journalist who has become disillusioned by all the pro-government programs the new regime requires him to produce. Linda and her husband plan to leave for the apartheid state of South Africa, where white expatriates who no longer feel welcome in erstwhile British colonies are relocating.
In contrast to Bobby, who is given to ostentatious displays of colonial guilt, Linda has an unassailable sense of her superiority. Much of the comedy of the novella follows irresistibly from the antagonism the two characters display toward each other. Linda thinks that Africans are primitive and congratulates herself for having the guts to say so. Bobby responds with sanctimonious outrage to virtually everything she says, as their long car journey turns into a sequence of revealing exchanges about the different ways that racial prejudice manifests itself in the white expatriate community in the era of decolonization. In a discomfiting twist, Naipaul nudges the reader into a feeling of complicity with the racist Linda. The reader is not asked to identify with or approve of Linda, but is also not allowed to view her racist attitudes from a distance or with comfortable detachment. Linda transforms the reader who laughs at her jokes into an often unwilling accomplice of her racist views.16
Naipaul’s strategy of implicating the reader in objectionable attitudes may have been part of a broader effort to diagnose the psychic attitudes of the former colonial master. In a classic essay, “Regulated Hatred,” D. W. Harding argues that Jane Austen’s books are, “as she meant to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked.”17 Naipaul’s novella, which was admired by many English readers, was written in the late 1960s, a time when ethnic nationalist opposition to the immigration of Commonwealth subjects to Britain was on the rise.18 By presenting Linda as well as Bobby in an ironic light, Naipaul draws on his personal familiarity with this apparently unrelated context to anatomize the self-serving positions adopted by his ideologically diverse English hosts toward colonialism and its consequences.
Bobby has a working-class background. A scholarship boy, his sexuality further contributed to his isolation during his time at the University of Oxford, where he suffered a nervous breakdown. Bobby thinks himself fortunate to have escaped the aridity of England’s class system, its bleak tenements, and its repressed sexual atmosphere. Looking out the car window at the natural beauty all around, he tells Linda that he was “saved” by Africa. Bobby also finds himself in a free state in other ways; the same-sex encounters he seeks with African peasants and poor boys take place between equals, Bobby believes, because (unlike his compatriots) he sees black people as equals. Now that the country has become independent, he is happy to be able to serve it in a new capacity, putting his skills at the service of the local people rather than the colonial ruling elite.
Naipaul subtly illustrates how Bobby’s anti-elitism and his solidarity with Africans may be more complicated than they seem. This becomes apparent when Bobby expresses his disapproval of the fugitive African king, whom he criticizes for being too much of an Anglophile and insufficiently “African.” It is suggested that the origins of Bobby’s hostility may lie in the fact that he and the king were contemporaries at Oxford. Whereas Bobby had been ignored by his peers, the king was a much-sought-after figure in the social circles of the same university. After he graduated, he also found many admirers and supporters in the upper echelons of English society.
The arguments that repeatedly break out between Linda and Bobby over the course of their long drive signal some of the rifts within English society in the era of decolonization. Occasionally, however, the two find themselves in complete agreement. Both Bobby and Linda “can’t stand” the cunning Indian shopkeepers. These shopkeepers, Bobby complains, “don’t sell the Africans a pack of cigarettes. They sell them just one or two cigarettes at a time. They make a fortune out of the Africans.”19 Linda feels just as strongly about the Indian exploitation of Africans. Both the righteously anticolonial Bobby and the staunchly pro-imperialist Linda are committed to protecting African tradition against the rapacious Indian shopkeeper. Such moments of concord are rare, however. When Bobby gratuitously remarks that blacks were not permitted during colonial times to live in a fancy white suburb he happens to glance at through the car window, Linda ignores the barb. She mischievously retorts that surely the servants of white people must have been allowed to live there. Bobby responds,
with the calm grim satisfaction of a man prophesying the racial holocaust, “I suppose that is why someone like John Mubende-Mbarara has refused to move out of the native quarter.”
“How well you pronounce those names,” [Linda said].20
Bobby’s moral earnestness puts him at an obvious disadvantage. He replies, somewhat desperately, that Linda will now have to visit the native quarter if she wishes to view the work of this artist. John Mubende-Mbarara will not come to people like her; people like her must go to him.
Linda said, “When Johnny M. began, he was a good primitive painter and we all loved his paintings of his family’s lovely ribby cattle. But he churned out so many of those he got to be a little better than primitive. Now he’s only bad. So I don’t suppose it matters if he does continue to paint his cattle in the native quarter.”
“That’s been said before.”
“About him living in the native quarter?”
“About his painting.” Bobby hated himself for answering.21
The cheerfully cynical Linda baits the sanctimonious Bobby for her entertainment, and his many stumbles make for painfully funny exchanges that expose the flaws of both characters.22
At one point in this road trip, the barbed exchanges develop into open hostility. Reproof and contempt drip from everything Bobby says in response to Linda’s imperturbably racist views. When Linda dismisses the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya as filth-eating savages,23 Bobby snaps, “They were oppressed for centuries.”24 He also rails against the British habit of “lecturing the Africans about corruption” when so many of the departing British expatriates (who are Linda’s friends) are demanding to be reimbursed by the African state for thousands of pounds of made-up expenses.25 Bobby adds in a satisfied tone that he has reported this dishonest behavior to his new boss, Mr. Butere.
As the tension mounts, it becomes evident that “In a Free State” explores the deranging legacy of colonial rule. Naipaul reveals the continuities between the corruptions of the colonial and postcolonial periods when Bobby expresses regret that the killing of the king had not taken the form of a “police action” rather than a military assassination.26 Assassinations make for bad publicity; Bobby’s civil service training will enable him to make this point tactfully to his new boss, who is the minister of the interior. Bobby only disagrees with the means employed by his bosses, not their end. He believes that the president’s attack on the king is a legitimate and necessary effort to consolidate the authority of the central government, regardless of the suffering it causes the king’s people. Although Bobby makes these points to the reactionary Linda to underscore that he works solely for the advancement of African interests, it turns out that his aims serve British and American interests as well.
Although “In A Free State” cannot be described as a piece of anticolonial writing, Naipaul’s use of irony suggests that one way for the colonized to overcome their anger is by regarding their colonizers less as cruel gods than as people who have also been affected by the deranging effects of colonialism. Cultivating a coolly assessing attitude toward the absurdities of the colonial past, as well as the postcolonial order that has succeeded it, appears to be, for Naipaul, the first step toward a clear-eyed grasp of the challenges facing the society.
The most memorable scenes in the novella are devoted to exposing the self-deception of the colonizer who declares his solidarity with the colonized. Bobby’s humiliation by the “Zulu activist” in the ironically named New Shropshire bar—“the capital’s interracial pick-up spot”27—is one example. Accustomed to paying poor African boys just a few shillings for sexual favors, Bobby fails to notice that the Zulu’s simple appearance is an affectation—dressing down is how the black man from South Africa separates himself from the unsophisticated, newly rich eastern Africans among whom he now finds himself. The narrator tells the reader that the Zulu’s use of items of clothing as props to test or flirt with white men suggests that he is a more complicated character than Bobby realizes: “The cloth cap was like part of his elusiveness. The cap made the Zulu appear now as a dandy, now as an exploited labourer from the South African mines, now as an American minstrel, and sometimes even as the revolutionary he had told Bobby he was.”28
Significantly, it is Bobby who comports himself like an unsophisticated man from the country, failing to take the hint when the Zulu tells him that nothing can be bought in the capital city for less than several hundred dollars. Bobby implies that such a price is too high, but continues to believe that he still has a chance with the man. A poorly paid civil servant, Bobby fails to see that his racial prestige and authority do not get him very far in a place like the New Shropshire bar, which caters to a wealthy clientele with which he lacks the means to compete. The Zulu has bigger fish to fry and is looking for a way to rid himself of Bobby.
The opportunity presents itself when Bobby attempts to seduce him. Bobby reflexively addresses the Zulu in the pidgin English that has always worked with peasant boys picked up on the roadside in the rural south of the country. Almost instantly, Bobby realizes the Zulu may view this speech as condescending, and he code-switches. But it is too late. The Zulu calmly spits in Bobby’s face, in full view of the other white patrons, precipitating the latter’s headlong flight from the bar.
The scene in the gas station late in the novella exposes the pretensions of the benevolent white man in a different way. When Bobby and Linda break their journey in a rural place called Esher, Bobby pays for gas and behaves as though nothing is amiss when the young African attendant has difficulty calculating the change. True to form, Linda pounces on the perceived incompetence of the gas station attendant. Bobby can barely contain his anger at her remark when Linda suddenly points out the damage done by another attendant to Bobby’s windshield:
Linda said, “Look what this one’s been doing.”
Bobby looked at Linda’s side of the windscreen. Then he looked at the small African. The African was using a double-edged cleaner, one edge made of rubber, one edge made of sponge; but both sponge and rubber had perished, and he was rubbing the central bar of metal on the windscreen. He had left a complicated trail of deep scratches on the windows all around the car. Scratching away now, not looking at Bobby, he frowned, to show his intentness.29
The scene is excruciatingly painful to read. The obviously racist disregard of Linda’s “this one” makes the reader turn reluctantly in the direction of her gaze. However, the reader’s reflexive desire, which is also Bobby’s, not to validate Linda’s self-satisfaction is upended by the grim comedy of the damaged windshield.
Through the misguided actions of the African man who damages the windshield, Naipaul succinctly communicates the immense hurdles that face peasant societies unprepared for the historical transition to modern society into which they have been inducted. It is also a story of rural peoples recently forced to work in disorienting semi-urban conditions. Naipaul’s staging ensures that the historical predicament faced by this individual is presented as sharply as possible, rather than vacuously transmuted into empathy underpinned by the false presupposition that observer and observed inhabit the same lifeworld.
Some of these points can be gleaned from the passage just quoted. But the dramatic brilliance of the scene pivots around exposing Bobby’s pretensions. The events in this episode are filtered through Bobby and communicated through his agitated feelings. His fury at the damage to his car is compounded by the fact that Linda, whom Bobby has come to loathe for her racism, regards the damaged windshield as confirmation of her views about African backwardness. It is an “I-told-you-so” moment. Bobby longs to hit Linda. In a superbly orchestrated move that intensifies the grotesquely comic nature of the scene, he instead directs his pent-up fury at the African attendant:
Bobby saw the fineness of the African’s features, the special, dead blackness of the skin, and recognized him as a man of the king’s tribe. Bobby was at once deeply angry. The African, aware of Bobby’s scrutiny, frowned harder.
“What on earth are you doing?”
Bobby pushed the door open so violently that the African was hit and thrown off balance.30
Under pressure, Bobby turns into the very thing his rational self claims to have disavowed. His irrationality manifests itself in the arbitrary judgments of the colonial master who operates on the supposition that he knows his natives: “Oh yes, you are very clever,” Bobby sneers. “Like all your people.”31 It is as if Bobby has, against his will, issued an unconscious directive, as did his would-be humanitarian precursor Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1899), who was driven mad by Africa a century earlier. By revealing how Bobby discovers his own heart of darkness despite his best efforts, Naipaul shows the colonial master to be suborned by a deeper corruption that no amount of rationalization will overcome.
When the Indian district superintendent who apparently oversees the running of the state-owned gas station does not appear to answer for the gas attendant’s actions, Bobby seizes on a familiar object of loathing. It is “the old Asian trick of remote control,”32 he cries, as if the Indian is to blame for conspiring with the African—now troublingly identified by his features as belonging to the criminalized tribe of the fugitive king—to damage Bobby’s windshield.
The emotional violence of the story reaches a climax at this point; it stands in for the actual violence that takes place offstage, which we discern only through its effects—the dead king in his burnt car, the beaten people of the king’s tribe. The violent momentum is kept up with the appearance of the old colonel at the hotel. Like the country’s new chief of security, a man aptly named Hobbes, the colonel believes that history allows for only two kinds of subjects: predators and their prey. He appears as an angry-chorus-like figure promising worse things to come for the country. In another echo of Heart of Darkness, it is as if Conrad’s Kurtz had recovered from his mental breakdown in the Inner Station and opened a hotel in the same place (another submerged parallel with Bobby, with whom the colonel ostensibly has nothing in common):
These people don’t know how lucky they are…if the Europeans had come here fifty years earlier, [these Africans] would have been hunted down like game and exterminated. Twenty, thirty years later—well, the Arabs would have got here first, and they would all have been roped up and driven down to the coast and sold. That’s Africa. They’ll kill the king all right. They’ll decimate his tribe before this is over. Have you been listening to the news?33
Similarly, it is through the starkly racist exchange with one of his workers that the colonel brings into the open the deep-seated forms of hatred that structure this colonial society and contribute to the violent passions that run beneath the surface. It culminates in a terrifying scene that distills the psychic damage wrought by settler colonialism on ruler and ruled. It is a weirdly comical conversation that takes place in the free state, between a fearful yet defiant former white master and his recently emancipated African “boy”:
[THE COLONEL:] “Who do you hate more? The Indian or me?”
[PETER:] “I hate the Indian.”
“You are ungrateful. Who do you hate more? The Indian or me?”
“I will always hate you, sir.”
“Don’t you forget it. Your hate will keep me alive. One night, Peter, you will knock on my door—”
Unlike other postcolonial writers, Naipaul is not interested in attacking the former colonial rulers for believing themselves superior. He suggests that such sadism is the inevitable result of the extreme asymmetries of power created by the colonial system in Africa. The solution lies in the colonized strengthening themselves by taking stock of their predicament.
This is also Naipaul’s way of suggesting that the postcolonial nation cannot rely on others, however well-intentioned they may appear, to build the kinds of institutions and social practices it needs in order to thrive. All humanitarian or philanthropic acts subtly reproduce older asymmetries of power. True freedom comes only when one has joined the ranks of the strong. This is a kind of melancholy insight, which is underscored at the end of the novella. Bobby falls asleep thinking that his servant belongs to the king’s tribe, toward which he now feels an even greater dislike. He tells himself that he must sack the boy when he wakes up in the morning.
Bobby receives a kind of poetic justice, however. When he runs into the army that is hunting down people of the king’s tribe, Bobby expects to be treated with respect. He gives the low-ranking soldiers his credentials and explains his association with the high-ranking government official, Mr. Butere. Bobby’s fine words are met with uncomprehending looks that recall the scene in the gas station. This time, however, Bobby’s presumption gets him into trouble. The soldiers beat him up and relieve him of his valuables. The army is out of control elsewhere in the country, so Bobby gets off lightly, relatively speaking:
Bobby drove in and out of the white barriers and then slowly past the vehicles halted on the other side of the road, vehicles going out of the Collectorate: the Peugeot taxi-buses, the broken-down vans and African cars. The passengers were on the verge. Some were holding duplicated foolscap sheets, their passes; but others were already sitting down on lying on the grass, half naked, their clothes torn; the fully clothed soldiers moving among them. Some of the African women were in Edwardian costumes. So the first missionaries had appeared among the king’s people; and so, ever since, but in African-style cottons, the women of the king’s people had dressed on formal occasions or whenever they made a long journey.35
As they come into view for the first time in the novella, the narrator pays his respects to the technical and organizational skills of the king’s people, which predate the arrival of the Europeans: “They were a people who lived, vulnerably now, in villages along their ancient straight roads: roads that had spread their power as forest conquerors, until the first explorers came.”36 The people gathered by the roadside are descendants of a group that had accomplished a great deal before the advent of European missionaries and colonial officials. It was ironically these institutions, bearers of a novel idea of progress, that disturbed the ideas of society and order that had underpinned the old arrangements. The missionaries and officials, and others who came in their wake, laid the conditions for a form of historical transition unfamiliar to the local population. This European makeover of old institutions reconfigured an “Africa” along lines that provided Naipaul, as it had Joseph Conrad before him, with a “vision of the world’s half-made societies as places which continuously made and unmade themselves.”37 Only in the closing passages of “In a Free State” does Naipaul offer glimpses of a normative vision. It lies in the possibilities represented by African communities such as these—their values and internal organization, their organizational and technical skills, all of which had been tragically passed over for political reasons in the era of decolonization. Naipaul reveals that he is guided by pragmatic, rather than political, considerations: the better educated or technologically advanced local community ought to have been allowed to lead the way to a better postcolonial future for the nation.