‘A New King for the Congo’ and A Bend in the River

Naipaul, who had spent a large part of 1965–66 in East Africa and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), returned to East Africa in 1971 and Zaire in 1975. His report on ‘A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa’ (1975) was republished in the collection of essays The Return of Eva Perón (1980) along with ‘Conrad’s Darkness’, the latter a slightly revised version of an essay written in July 1974. The novel A Bend in the River (1979) was followed by a limited edition of A Congo Diary (1980). At a conference Naipaul said, ‘You’ll find in the Congo all the nice ideas of Fanon ridiculously caricatured by the present ruler … Mobutu says … that he doesn’t have a borrowed soul any longer; his particular black thing is “authenticity”. Authenticity … is rejection of the strange, the difficult, the taxing; it is despair.’43