Africa Is a Country

Naipaul loves the cats

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Naipaul loves the cats

By
Sean Jacobs

In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, novelist Norman Rush reviews V.S. Naipaul’s new book on African belief systems, “The Masques of Africa.” Naipaul, it seems, got very upset at how Africans threat some animals:

Trying to figure out Naipaul’s foundational worldview is too hard for me. It’s a secret he works to keep. He strews around all manner of conflicting clues. Is he an Empire Loyalist? Not really. Not if you read his columns of acidic comment on modern England published in the Illustrated Weekly of India in the 1960s. And not if you read his The Loss of El Dorado (1969), a powerful indictment of the settling and ravaging of Trinidad. Is he a champion of the insulted and injured? Sometimes, with reservations—and often he forgets that their poverty is making somebody up the pyramid happy and rich. He has written in praise of the fundamentalist ideology of Hindu nationalism …[But] I don’t know. He is passionately against cruelty to animals. One can be certain of that.

Further Reading

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.