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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Bend in the River, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Freedom, and Identity
Racism and Diasporic Identity
Postcolonialism and Perpetual Unrest
The City vs. the Bush
Layers of the Past
Summary
Analysis
Zabeth brings her son, Ferdinand, to the shop one day. He is about 16, the son of a trader, a result of a brief and miraculous peace between the tribes during the colonial times. The father had claimed and raised Ferdinand until now, and had, for unknown reasons, sent him back to his mother. Zabeth intends to send Ferdinand to the lycée in town, recently cleaned up and reopened, but still rife with the detritus of fire and ruin, the placard above the door reading “Semper Aliquid Novi.”
The lycée is the second institution in town to be marked by a Latin motto. This ancient phrase is congruent with the state of the lycée, now reconstructed to educate the youth of the newly independent country, but still in a state of semi-ruin, and on the foundations of a formerly colonial school. Ferdinand is one of many boys to come from the bush to receive an urban or modern education, and their experiences and perspectives come to define the events of the book—the clash and combination of bush and city.
Themes
Salim first meets Ferdinand in the costume of the Lycée, and sees the importance of him wearing it, how it represents a life of something more than the Africa Zabeth has known. She wants a life for him “outside the timeless ways of village and river.” Since Ferdinand is to board at the school, Zabeth hopes Salim will look out for him, and prove a useful mentor or patron of sorts, especially with his ability to speak English. Ferdinand has a distinct and striking face, reminding Salim of the traditional African masks. His visage is both arresting and inscrutable, capable of hiding his emotions, and much about Ferdinand remains enigmatic to Salim.
Part of this new African identity is its visual performance. The uniform of the lycée physicalizes and in a sense legitimizes Ferdinand’s relationship to this new ideal. It is the physical manifestation of his transition away from the “timeless ways of village and river.” But it is juxtaposed with Ferdinand’s face, which Salim perceives as intensely African and thus as mask-like (a distinctly racist characterization). Salim also represents modernity or perspective to Zabeth due to his being a foreigner, which she wants him to impart onto Ferdinand. In many ways, Salim feels incapable of providing this guidance, and thus Ferdinand’s presence triggers Salim’s feeling of being an imposter in his perceived cosmopolitan identity.
Themes
Ferdinand visits Salim at the shop once a week. Their early relationship is awkward and stilted, as Salim feels he has to make a special effort with Ferdinand. He is also intimidated by Ferdinand’s unreadability, and inwardly jealous that he is getting to learn of things Salim knows nothing about, exposing the hollowness of his social position. Ferdinand and Metty become close friends. They often go out and get drunk at bars and frequently pick up African women, which concerns Salim. But Salim has no grounds to stand on himself, as he is guilty of the same pursuits. Still, Salim feels he cannot let Metty see him with African women as it would disgrace his family and Metty by extension. In order to maintain the pretense of his elevated status, it becomes Salim who must hide from his wards and not the other way around.
Salim’s jealousy of Ferdinand is rooted in Ferdinand’s African identity, which, under the President’s new government, is privileged with certain opportunities. But his identity is also “pure” in a way Salim’s is not. Despite perceptions of the bush as being "savage” or “backwards,” Ferdinand is inherently and inextricably linked to the cultural traditions and physical history of his people—things Salim lacks entirely. This magnifies the importance of Salim’s performed identity—in order to continue to appear to be of a higher stature or strata, he must hide the ways he is the same as, or below, the ways of Metty and Ferdinand. There is nothing genuine in Salim’s position of power, only the perception that he is important and his continued performance to induce that perception.
Themes
Salim’s house and shop are both functional but in perpetual disarray. Much like the shop, a concrete warehouse with his goods arranged on the floor, his flat is also spartan. The previous owner was a Belgian painter whose main subject was scenes of European life. In addition to her art she collected ephemera of that civilized world—magazines, novels, boxes, letters—similarly arrayed over a large central table. The barren bedroom is appointed with a luxurious large foam bed and huge cupboards full of nothing. All in all, the place reminds Salim of the promises of colonial life and the hollow sadness of aspirations unfulfilled, making him worry why his own fate in the town wouldn’t mirror that of Nazruddin or the Belgian painter.
Physical objects can also connote wealth, identity, and power—in a similar way to a flag or fetish, they actualize or legitimize someone’s identity through what they physically signify. Salim falls into a similar habit as the previous owner of keeping and even hoarding things that project a worldliness to others, like his English science magazines and European clothes. But left behind in the space he occupies, they imply what he inwardly knows and fears: that these things, and the identity they connote, are only a façade, inevitably left behind to project a “hollow sadness of aspirations unfulfilled.” Salim is just one in a lineage of many foreign hopefuls looking to make a future and a new identity for themselves in Africa, and his space is a constant reminder of this.
Themes
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Part of this self-consciousness comes from how Salim fears Ferdinand might perceive him. He tries to cover for this by showing off the things he owns to Ferdinand as a means of displaying his erudition and worldliness—his magazines, the paintings, anything. Ferdinand is unmoved, and Salim grows frustrated. He is jealous of what Ferdinand gets to learn at the lycée, understanding his education as structured and not incidental and indulgent like Salim’s perusal of the magazines. When Ferdinand asks Salim questions, like who “they” are when Salim explains “they are making a new kind of telephone,” Salim either cannot answer or refuses to, wanting to protect the boy from the truth (White men) and also loathe to give him certain satisfactions. Ferdinand goes home for the rainy season, and Salim begins to notice the great clumps of water hyacinth floating up the river from the South.
Ferdinand, however, in his current ignorance of the outside world, is naturally unmoved by these performances, which continues to tell Salim that which he does not want to admit: that this persona he is cultivating is inherently hollow as well. Salim simultaneously feels incapable and afraid of teaching Ferdinand about the outside world, both for the ways it would expose him, and for how it might hurt the boy. Ferdinand is the novel’s paragon of what the President sees as “the new African,” and thus his appearance in Salim’s life coincides with Salim noticing the water hyacinths, which themselves symbolize “the new African”—something that is both new but also entirely of the place it comes from. The plants clog waterways and spread quickly, much like the ideology of the President throughout these communities.
Themes
As Ferdinand grows up, he also becomes uncertain of himself, pulled between places, identities, and others’ perceptions as to what he should be. Ferdinand performs different personalities (as if trying on masks), copying his various teachers and even pretending to be Salim’s business associate. One day he asks Salim “what do you think of the future of Africa?” Salim wonders if Ferdinand’s idea of the place comes from his lived experience, or rather from the atlas presented to him at school.
Ferdinand quite literally performs various identities throughout his adolescence, as he tries to discover who he is and what will get him ahead. This underscores the idea that the “new African,” or performances of aspects of identity in general, are inherently self-exploitative. Masks and costumes themselves symbolize the exploitation of African identity for legitimacy. Even Ferdinand, who is (at least by the metrics introduced by the President) in many ways the “most African” character, still needs to perform aspects of that African-ness to assert himself. In this way, Ferdinand’s idea of what is African is manufactured by others—becoming less and less his lived experience and more and more what is told to him in the institutions he finds himself in.
Themes
All Ferdinand seems to know is about the world outside of Africa in relation to it, filtered through the lessons and inclinations of the lycée, but in his education he is also elevated, and Ferdinand seems to have a new idea of his importance as related to that institution. Salim feels threatened by this. Ferdinand gets it in his head that Salim should send him to America for his education. When Salim refuses, Ferdinand begins going around spreading the rumor that Salim is doing just that. Shoba and Mahesh warn Ferdinand that Metty is becoming malin like Ferdinand, a trait they see as universal to Africans.
Malin, meaning clever or sly, is certainly derogatory, but also carries with it a wariness and respect for the wiles that Shoba, Mahesh, and Salim perceive in African people. Namely, they see them as people “living with knowledge of men as prey,” making them, in their eyes, dangerous and unpredictable. This animalistic evocation once again presents the duality of city and bush present in the nature of “true Africa” as it manifests throughout the novel. While denigrating them comforts Salim, Shoba, and Mahesh, it really just expresses their fear of the intelligence and capability of the African people they find themselves surrounded by.
Themes
Salim finally feels able to articulate that strange force which seemed to separate him and Ferdinand. While Salim sees the world through the terms of his trade and ambitions and as simple and uncomplicated, it seems that the more Ferdinand learns, the larger the world becomes to him, and the more confused it leaves him. There is an influx of tall, regal warrior boys from the local villages to the lycée. Ferdinand begins trying on their imposing nature for himself, acting aloof toward Salim while simultaneously bragging of his generosity and patronage to the people of the town.
Salim also notes that when the Europeans controlled Africa they admired these warrior tribes, and some of that sentiment remains in postcolonial Africa, as such warriors are believed to be the highest kind of African. This is the first of many examples of how colonial values and mindsets continue to influence the ideas and politics of the President and the country as a whole, as the President also sees these boys as carrying some sort of “true” or “pure” African essence within their heritage and therefore awarding them with better opportunity.
Themes
Ferdinand falls in with some of the warrior boys and they concoct a scheme involving an old ledger from the school to extort money from Salim. Salim is wise to it and confronts Ferdinand. When Ferdinand first reacts with rage to being caught in his scheme, his face appearing intensely mask-like to Salim, Salim is gripped with a momentary fear that Ferdinand might lash out and attack him. Salim acknowledges there is nothing protecting him or Ferdinand from the cruelties of others in the somewhat lawless town.
Again, Salim’s phobic feelings towards Africans manifest in his descriptions of Ferdinand, a teenager, as fearsome and mask-like in visage. Specifically, the inscrutability he reports in Ferdinand’s face belies Salim’s inability to connect with the locals, which comes from and exacerbates Salim’s feeling of not-fully-belonging, driving him to phobia and bigotry. Salim also identifies an instinct in all people to be violent when structure is stripped away, an instinct that resurfaces throughout the novel.
Themes
