{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0381619937694704, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01557632398753894, 'mean_word_length': 5.002336448598131, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The “Big Man” in V. S. Naipaul's A BEND IN THE RIVER

Opinion on V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River still lingers under the shadow of Edward Said, who declared Naipaul “a third worlder denouncing his own people, not because they are victims of imperialism, but because they seem to have an innate flaw, which is that they are not whites” (79). Although the novel was initially understood as Naipaul’s imaginative re-creation of his experiences in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Uganda in the 1970s, the historical content of and context for A Bend in the River has been displaced by critical examination of Naipaul’s work as a product of ideology and autobiography. Selwyn Cudjoe, for example, warns that the “central concern” of A Bend in the River “is not the social development of the African” but “the relationship between an Indian (from who the East Indian has descended) and his past” (189). Dagmar Barnouw offers a sophisticated analysis of the novel’s narrator, Salim, as a proxy for Naipaul (41–49). Increasingly, Africa seems to have disappeared from the novel, and Naipaul’s prescient study of life under the “Big Man,” the unstable authoritarian governance that has plagued post-Independence Africa, has likewise largely vanished from the conversation. This merits correction not simply because the authoritarian leader as the “Big Man” or the “President” is mentioned 195 times in the novel (an average of once every 1.43 pages), but primarily because Naipaul’s fictional representation of neopatrimonialism, of life under the “Big Man,” remains strikingly insightful, detailed, and even relevant to understanding contemporary realities in post-Independence Africa. “Mobutu owns Zaire,” Naipaul wrote in his notebook during his 1975 stay in Zaire (qtd. in French 361), and reviewers of A Bend in the River when it was published in 1979 readily understood that the “Big Man” was modeled in large part after Mobutu Sese Seko, then President of Zaire and now widely acknowledged as the archetypal African kleptocrat (Meredith 293–308). This identification stands, but Naipaul—from his time in Uganda as well as Zaire—had a network of contacts in Africa, from journalists to academics to business people, and knew well the current state of affairs. In the novel, he forgoes a simple fictional realism for a creative examination of a larger historical phenomenon: the dynamics and effects of neopatrimonialism as practiced by Mobutu and other “Big Men” of postIndependence Africa in the 1970s, such as F elix Houphou€et-Boigny, President of