A Bend in the River

Salim, a young man from a community of Indian Muslim traders on the East African coast, buys a small shop in a town at a bend in a great river, deep in the interior of a newly independent African country. The town is rebuilding from the ruin of colonial departure, and Salim watches it cycle through fragile prosperity, rebellion, and the rise of a strongman called the Big Man, whose cult of personality reshapes everything. Naipaul charts the disillusion of a man who belongs nowhere, neither to the Africa around him nor to the past he left, as the country slides toward a violence he cannot escape.

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Barack Obama

44th President of the United States

JAN 2017

His 'A Bend in the River,' which starts with the line, 'The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.' And I always think about that line... particularly in foreign policy.

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