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In a Free State

V.S. Naipaul’s In A Free State, this post explores colonial legacies, cultural disconnection, and the politics of transition. A Booker Prize winner set in post-independence Africa, it's a haunting, uneasy journey through misunderstanding and the remnants of empire.

In a Free State

V S NAIPAUL
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER 1971

Like Troubles, In A Free State deals with the end of the colonial experience, except this time one in which the natives themselves are not so much completely absent, but who only appear in two dimensions.

In Ireland this would have been difficult if not impossible, in Something to Answer for the local Egyptian population in Suez is key to the story’s progression, but in writing on colonial Africa, and in a similar way Australia, this is not the case, with indigenous populations having at best walk-on parts, if being present at all.

In Naipaul's slim novel it is the former. Colonial rule has ended in a small fictional British colony (so we're talking southern or eastern Africa) and politically two factions, the king and the prime minister are in an uneasy truce. But change is in the air, who will gain supremacy, and to what end?

But these power plays are noises off to a road trip story, that of Bobby and Linda, a British Civil Servant, loyal to the King and kept on after the Colonial handover, and Linda the glass-half-empty British wife of another expat. Bobby has had to come to the capitial for work and needs to drive back to the administrative capital, Linda needs to get back there too, and tags along for a ride.

This was written in 1969 to specifically deal with this issue of change, but, political tensions aside (or not, depending on where in the cycle we are talking about), this could have been placed at any point in the last fifty years or more.

I spent roughly two years in Mozambique/Malawi over the millennium, and the whole book is achingly familiar of a story written thirty years prior; the bitter white business owners, inevitably nostalgic for an age that by the late nineties they couldn't have remembered themselves; the slow collapse of infrastructure and the helplessness of local populations so poor that living from hand to mouth, season to season, is a way of life (this always brings me back to Ryszard Kapuściński’s short essay My Alleyway, 1967, found in The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life); the beauty and the hopelessness. Mostly, though, the disjoint in understanding between the natives and the non-natives.

Anthropologists call this Systemic Misunderstanding, where cultural reference points are so completely different that there is no hope of being able to understand each other.

And so it is with In A Free State. Bobby and Linda understand each other, but barely like each other. But their interactions with the man at the filling station, soldiers, waiters, hitch-hikers are so dissonant that rage, contempt and/or bitterness is never far away. Linda is just bitter and wants to go home to England, but Bobby sees himself as a loyal civil servant, but doesn't understand that he stands outside of the growing pains of the new state and rages against to the humdrum frustrations, but in the end it is against himself.

Whilst the writing is of the quality you'd expect and builds a convincing world that is very recognisable to anyone whom has been to that part of the world, it's overall an unsatisfying story for me, though I wondered if that was the point: the protagonists are unsatisfied and will remain so, is that the colonial experience?

As an aside, not coming from a reading family, I always struggled to find the 'right books' to read, and reading In A Free State reminded me of the, for me personally, seminal Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie. This collection of essays from the late Eighties to early Nineties opened up a world a literature and criticism that I was barely aware of. Many of the authors discussed in that book were subsequently read and formed who I am. I mention this because in it was Naipaul's The House for Mr Biswas, the only other Naipaul, to date, that I have read.

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