In 1976 Shiva Naipaul spent 20 weeks in Kenya and Tanzania, concluding with a brief dash down the Great North Road to Zambia in the company of a party of trekking hippies. He does not seem to have been well prepared for his journey nor to have met anyone of much consequence while he was there. The story [told in North of South] is mostly one of chance conversations in aeroplanes, buses, taxis, customs posts and, above all, hotel bars. All this is told with a great deal of novelist's sparkle, a power of vivid description and of characterisation through reported dialogue, which will not endear Mr Naipaul to his many acquaintances when his book comes into their hands….

On the whole, Mr Naipaul's book is more informative about touts and tourists, pimps and prostitutes, than about the national and international politics of the East African countries. He makes it quite clear that he has no admiration for Uhuru, whether capitalist-style in Kenya or socialist-style in Tanzania, but the evidence for both is disappointingly thin. So far as Tanzania is concerned, one must be a little sympathetic about the real difficulties placed in the way of would-be observers and the extreme reluctance of ordinary people to hold any converse with strangers….

Kenya, however, is another matter. There is freedom of travel. There is, as Mr. Naipaul's stories show, considerable freedom of speech. He could, and should, have looked beneath the surface and examined the basis of the capitalist economy, the inter-tribal situation and the prospects for the future. Instead of this, all we get is a blisteringly callow analysis of the black-white alliance against the brown….

It would be only natural to expect that Mr Naipaul, himself a Trinidadian of Indian descent, should have a sharp and compassionate eye for the predicament of the Asian communities in East Africa. In fact it proves not particularly compassionate…. [North of South is] a witty but not very wise book.