BRUTALLY RUDE NAIPAUL AND KEMI
Kemi Badenoch’s hurting words deserve long gazes, reckons OKELLO-OCULI
V.S. Naipaul was at Makerere Campus of the University of East Africa as a ‘’Writer-In-Residence’’ when he met in his residence the Editorial Board of ‘’THE MAKEREREAN’’: a newspaper published by undergraduates.
. He was the one who asked for the meeting.
Not a word of welcome, but suddenly his English wife emerged with chairs in both hands. She too worked with a busy silence.
Naipaul hit me hard as the ‘’News Editor’’, accusing me of assuming that my readers were my mother: patient in reading long-winded drivel. ‘’If you are reporting that a political leader had choked on a piece of meat, why must I hear chirpings by birds from lush leaves of trees, while a clear blue sky looked on with keen indifference, before I reach the choking ?’’, he barked at me.
It was rhetorical because he quickly invited all of us to turn to the ‘’Editorial’’. He reduced the page-long piece to the only six-word sentence in the text. We agreed that since the paper was funded with funds meant for the welfare of students, Medical Students would have fruitfully used the rest of the page.
. He was furious that racist British lecturers praised banalities we had written. ‘’Writing in not a display of ignorance and illiteracy. Writing is a VERY SERIOUS affair, You must read widely’’, he glared at us.
Naipaul’s works are accused of racism and contempt for Caribbean, African and Indian peoples. Franz Fanon’s classic work ‘’THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH’’, is similar to Naipaul’s rage. A man of India’s Diaspora in Trinidad met Fanon who was from Africans shipped to Martinique. They looked at their ancestral lands with Caribbean rage.
Naipaul studied at Oxford University in England. Franz Fanon studied for a Psychiatry degree in Paris. Both admired the genius, creativity and inventiveness of Europe; inventing ships that enabled them to enslave victim races.
Both at Oxford and Paris, they met the brightest of the children of this colonial ‘’bourgeoisie’’ and heard them being told to conquer the world and exploit ‘’under-developed’’ countries. Their own countries had leaders who yearned to consume; not drenched with sweat from undertaking industrial inventions.
Fanon defected from the French army and joined those fighting and dying for the liberation of Algeria. Naipaul stayed in England. He wrote to LIBERATE Africa and India and, perhaps the Caribbean too. They knew that power lay in inventing machines for industrialization of economies: wishing the same for their own leaders.
Naipaul travelled to India. Graduates from Oxford holding top administrative posts in India offered him their own best insights about challenges facing India. He was disgusted by those who wished to live like British elites while hanging on to primitive cultural and religious beliefs. They lacked the secular admiration for, and pursuit of the potential power in industrial productivity. Their impotence infuriated him.
Naipaul used his rare power in descriptive writing to paint the filth of Indians defecating: just like the cows that Hindu mythology venerated. The first president of India drank Cow Urine; preferring it to water. In Pakistan he met the same non-progressive devotion to religion.
In his book ‘’A TURN IN THE SOUTH’’, Naipaul saw poverty in Southern States of USA. The mournful tone in HILLBILLY Music was a cry against poverty. It made racism barbaric across the region. The book was ignored by America’s book reviewers.
They expected his praise; instead the rude Indian exposed their ‘’Underdevelopment’’. By the time Donald Trump won the 2024 elections, there was a hint that he read the book. Vladimir Putin, as a Soviet Spy in America, must have also studied it.
Kemi Badenoch MP, and newly elected leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, has been bashed for labeling Nigeria as ‘’living hell’’; where she traveled ‘’over one mile to get drinking water’’, etc. India’s elites had been equally furious with Naipaul.
It was not clear if it was his rudeness or Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s castration of millions of India’s men that forced her scientists to wake up and give India nuclear weapons; and gain leadership in manufacturing medical drugs for the global market.
Kemi has talked at a time when a leading politician that roused the imagination of youth condemned Nigerians for being consumers of what other economies produce.
An African proverb says that a boil that is preventing a child from sleeping is not cured with kisses and sweet songs but a hard squeeze. The child screams but soon goes into a deep sleep.
Fanon had to join the Algerian war. Naipaul had to travel on a bicycle, by bus and trains, for a total of 90 days, to meet India’s complex vastness for his second book. Kemi’s rudeness deserves long gazes and sharpness.
Prof Oculi writes from Abuja
