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'War is at my Black Skin' Posted: Sunday, October 28, 2001 JAMAICA OBSERVER - IT is wholly appropriate that Sir Vidia Naipaul should have been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Sir Vidia, a most eloquent and gifted writer, has been a fountain of joy for those who believe that the 'end of history' has sanctified capitalism and the Mid-Atlantic way of life. Naipaul has been at pains for four decades, to explain away the 'White Man's Burden'. He has made it his mission to explain to the Anglo-Saxon world the painful deficiencies of the lesser breeds, so granting absolution to those who may have felt guilt about mistreating the masses of humanity without the law. My only meeting with Naipaul was 42 years ago, around the time of Jamaica's independence, when he was writing The Middle Passage. I helped shepherd him round Kingston and, unwisely, as it turned out, was responsible for inviting him to a party at a house in Trafalgar Park. There, a furious argument broke out between two of my friends, Parboosingh, the painter and Basil Keane the dentist. This row was later immortalised in The Middle Passage as one example of the 'Congolese behaviour' Naipaul found so acutely distressing. The use of the term 'Congolese behaviour' was a giveaway. It was not only a deliberate insult to Jamaicans but to the Congolese, whose prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, had recently been murdered by the Belgians on behalf of the Americans. It was the kind of express malice which is Naipaul's signature in his dealings with his ex-compatriots in the post-colonial world. Naipaul is, as far as I am concerned, a lifeless robot with a second-hand soul. MORE |
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