"The African soul is a blank slate on which anything can be written, onto which any fantasy can be transposed," writes Shiva Naipaul halfway through his narrative of travels in East Africa. The quotation is out of context…. But the dictum—of Africa as a repository for the foreigner's fantasies—goes a long way toward explaining the peculiar deficiencies of his own book.

"North of South," which recounts Mr. Naipaul's peregrinations through Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, is in the genre of travelogue cum essay. When the form succeeds, as it does, say, with a writer such as Paul Theroux, it is an effective device for larger statement. The voyager's day-to-day experiences are transformed into insights, theories, and finally, complete systems for generalization. When it fails or only partially succeeds, it degenerates into a string of observations, some interesting, some not so interesting, but on the whole leading nowhere.

The book is a collection of hapless encounters—with rapacious immigration officials, reckless taxi drivers, street hustlers, ideological robots and racist expatriates—strung together by the author's sardonic, often bilious observations. It is built on vignettes and cameo portraits….

These people undoubtedly do exist—we have to take Mr. Naipaul's word on that—but as representative types they are hardly the defining personalities in Africa today. One wonders how he failed to meet, or at least record, a single non-racist white or a single articulate, intelligent black. At times, he seems to go overboard, the novelist overpowering the journalist. (p. 14)

Elsewhere Mr. Naipaul's theories collapse from sheer intellectual weightiness…. He finds that the "obsessive concern with wildlife" in East Africa leads to the degradation of the more backward tribes, who become "mere adjuncts to the animals"—a point supported by the fact that bookstores carry glossy albums of the two side by side.

Nevertheless, "North of South" is superbly written, even in the evocation of the scenery that Mr. Naipaul finds uninspiring. Many of the points are well taken, if not altogether new—that independence has primarily benefited a black elite, that the continent craves the material goods of the West, that its ideologies and sometimes even its wars are rhetorical. But it is marred by a snideness of tone. One moment the author records with obvious scorn the pejorative asides of a colonial housewife, the next he incorporates and elaborates on them in his own private observations. The shift between defender and detractor is disconcerting: It blurs the author's own standing. Who is it, in the final analysis, that is relating all these tales of "native ineptitude" and why? It's a bit like pornography masquerading as a sex manual. (pp. 14, 24)

Mr. Naipaul's central thesis is that black-white relations in independent Africa today are rotten to the core….

There is, of course, some truth to the construct. From the point of view of social integration, Kenya's multiracial society is a myth. Whites do enjoy inordinate privilege, many blacks aspire to European possessions if not life styles, and the Indians remain a group apart…. But to see in these remnants of the past the whole future, and in these individual truths the single overriding truth, is to ignore some contradictory evidence….

The grotesque caricatures Mr. Naipaul reveals do exist—it would be remarkable if they did not—but there are many more subtle and perhaps more important trends at work. To see nothing in black Africa today but a continuation of the master-slave relationship betrays a myopic vision. Africa's ambiguities are good for fiction, not for journalism. The continent seems contradictory: Its scenery can be uplifting or oppressive, its land nurturing or unyielding, its people kind or brutal. What one sees depends to a certain extent on who one is. This is the "blank slate" that Mr. Naipaul found and that he filled with his own projections. (p. 24)