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Intro
Driving inland toward the town at the bend in the river in a unnamed African country, Salim reflects on what moved him to leave his family and life behind. Salim comes from a family of Muslim East-Indian merchants and former enslavers who have lived on the eastern coast of Africa for generations. Noticing the sweeping force of political independence throughout the continent and having become disillusioned with his family’s lack of cultural grounding and passive way of life, Salim longed for the opportunity to leave his home behind. Nazruddin, a family friend and charismatic businessman, offered to sell Salim a shop that he owned at an old colonial town on the great river in this interior country. Salim accepted and began making the long journey through the bush.
Salim finds the town a ruin, covered by relics of its colonial past and still unstable after its many uprisings. He is one of a handful of foreigners and hopefuls to repopulate the town and befriends another Indian couple named Shoba and Mahesh. Their lifestyle is spartan and uncertain, but life slowly begins again in the town. Meanwhile Salim learns that, as he had feared, an uprising occurred on the coast, killing many and scattering his family. He receives word from his family that they have sent one of their servants to live with him, and soon after Metty arrives.
Salim and Metty share a small flat previously owned by a Belgian painter and operate the shop, selling basic trade goods and materials. Their first regular customer is an African woman named Zabeth, who travels up the river by dugout to purchase goods for her village in the bush. Zabeth is known as a magician and “prophetess.” She sends her son, Ferdinand, to school at the town’s lycée and asks Salim to watch over him. Ferdinand is a mercurial adolescent. He becomes fast friends with Metty but his relationship with Salim is confused and often contentious. Ferdinand is influenced by the people around him, trying on various personalities, and even trying at one point to extort money out of Salim.
Salim meets Father Huismans, a Belgian priest and the headmaster of the lycée, who is obsessed with the culture and history of the bush and keeps a large collection of masks. Life begins to pick up in town, only for rebel activity to flare up in the bush once again, threatening the peace. The new President, known colloquially as “The Big Man,” sends a heavy military presence to occupy the town, including a force of White mercenaries. Executions and carpet bombings of the bush quickly snuff out the rebellion, but Father Huismans turns up dead after one of his excursions into the bush. Public opinion sours on him, and an American collector makes off with his collection of masks.
After the rebellion, the town experiences a significant economic boom, which Salim and the other businessmen enjoy. Mahesh attempts various business ventures to get rich quick, even enlisting Salim’s help to smuggle contraband, and eventually opens a branch of the Bigburger franchise in town. The President begins aggressively investing in public works and builds the State’s Domain on the land of an old European suburb by the town. The Domain becomes an academic hub, attracting foreign scholars to its modern neighborhoods and polytechnic institute. One such academic is Salim’s childhood friend Indar, whose original move to study abroad had been part of Salim’s motivation to leave his old life behind.
Indar, a guest of the government, has been put up in the Domain and shows Salim around its modern architecture and half-finished public buildings, full of foreigners and scholars discussing the President’s vision of “new Africa” and “new Africans.” The two attend a dinner party held by Raymond and Yvette, a White couple living in the Domain. Raymond is rumored to be the President’s right hand man—“the Big Man’s white man”—sent to watch over the development of the Domain. But Salim learns that he has fallen out of favor with the government and has turned his attention away from writing a history of the country toward a collection of the President’s speeches, still loyal to the man and his ideals. Indar develops a deep infatuation with Yvette.
In his time staying in the Domain, Indar recounts to Salim his experiences at university in London, describing how his identity made him “placeless,” not belonging anywhere he went, and how by embracing this condition and “trampling upon the past,” he became modern and free. Meanwhile, Ferdinand succeeds at the polytechnic institute and lands an administrative cadetship in the Capital. Salim and Yvette see Indar and Ferdinand off at the steamer, and soon after the two begin an affair.
Salim and Yvette’s relationship is intense and revelatory to Salim, who had previously only slept with prostitutes. He also comes to understand how Yvette must have been beguiled by Raymond’s intelligence and potential but is now trapped with him. A prominent businessman sells his stake in the town, signaling an economic collapse. The President establishes a Youth Guard to help maintain order in town. Raymond’s book of speeches is published but cut down into a propaganda leaflet which the Youth Guard distribute. The President proceeds to disband them, and the disenfranchised members form the Liberation Army, rejecting the President’s vision for a new Africa.
Salim begins to feel more vulnerable and unsafe than ever. His relationship with Yvette grows stale and Salim becomes physically abusive with her, after which their relationship fizzles. Sensing the growing instability and mounting violence between the government and the rebels, Salim visits London where Nazruddin now lives with his family, in part to fulfill his engagement to Nazruddin’s daughter Kareisha. Nazruddin now lives on Gloucester Road alongside a large Arab population, and in explaining his various failed business ventures he instills in Salim his own doubt that there is any “place in the world for people like him.” Salim realizes the illusion of power and belonging and decides he can only live in the present. He resolves to return to the town.
Salim returns to find the President has ordered a nationalization of all foreign-owned businesses and has ceded his shop to Citizen Théotime, a local mechanic and drunk. Salim is forced to become a manager and Théotime’s chauffeur and can only stand by as Metty is horribly mistreated. Realizing that time has run out, Salim begins smuggling contraband and funneling his money out of the country through goodwill currency exchanges, losing him almost three quarters of everything he had. Metty tips off the local police to where Salim is hiding his gold and ivory, and they take Salim to prison.
Salim spends days in prison and is eventually brought before the town commissioner, who turns out to be Ferdinand. Ferdinand laments the situation the country has fallen into, expressing how everything he has been taught has been a lie and how there is no longer safety anywhere. But, remembering Salim’s goodwill towards him, Ferdinand frees Salim and tells him to escape on the next ferry. Salim takes the steamer the next evening, hours before the President is set to come to town. The steamer weathers an attack by revolutionaries and sails off into the night.
