An account of a journey through Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, North of South is a remarkably bad-tempered book. Africa annoyed Shiva Naipaul…. Shiva Naipaul is a West Indian novelist now living in London; he has no warrant in Africa. He is on a moral holiday there. Testy as it is, North of South is a first-rate book—spirited, funny, written with economy and care—but it is not a great book like India: A Wounded Civilization, because Shiva Naipaul is not implicated in what he indicts. He went to Africa seeking precisely what he found: he includes a letter to his publisher which sketches out his ideological itinerary. So there is little in Africa that can shock him; and, though much angers him, nothing there can hurt him.

Nothing, that is, except the way black Africans feel toward people like himself, toward "Asians." (p. 38)

It is a paradox, a mystery, this popularity of the whites, this hatred of the inoffensive Asians, and, underneath his urbane bafflement, it makes Shiva Naipaul furious with the Africans. "Transitional states," he writes, "are full of pain, riddled with illusion." There is much pain in what he describes, but he shows very little sympathy for it; his forte is exposing the illusion. Here is his farewell to Africa: "… Nothing but lies." "Nothing but"—it is the language of obsession, not that of observation. Africa is unproblematic to Naipaul. He needn't have gone there at all; he could have written his book straight from his prejudices. Those prejudices light up the plight of the marginal men, the Asian population in the new black nations, but they stand between the reader and Africa. This would not be a problem in a novel but in a work which claims to be transparent on reality it causes a loss of belief, it induces an indiscriminate skepticism, finally it makes the reader as churlish and ungenerous as Mr. Naipaul.

North of South presents a satirical view of a parody civilization, and this is ironic, because it reads like a parody of the travel books of Shiva Naipaul's more illustrious brother. So one must take Shiva's fulminations against the inauthenticity of the Africans with a dose of irony. Who is he, writing in a form borrowed from his brother, to talk about authenticity? I found myself asking. For here are the themes of V. S. Naipaul's books: authenticity, fantasy as an immobilizing force, the squalid racket of third-world politics…. Is it ungenerous of me to wonder aloud if some of the anger in Shiva Naipaul's narrative has its sources in his feelings not about Africa but about borrowing his brother's form, striking his brother's rhetorical stances, and using his brother's tropes and tones and even his brother's diction? Mrs. Naipaul may of course have produced two sons with very similar obsessions; in that very likely case there would be no question of parody, of unconscious imitation. And perhaps that is the least churlish way to leave the matter, as the problematic, conjectural thing that it is. (pp. 38-9)