A Bend In The River

Salim flies over vast forest to the capital city, never having been there before. He thinks he would have been impressed if he’d travelled to the capital from the town on the river, but coming from London, it seems “flimsy in spite of its size, an echo of Europe” (247). Salim has to spend the night in the city before his flight to the town the next morning. Driving in from the airport, he observes “along the road big board about ten feet high, uniformly painted, each with a separate saying […] of the President” (248). All the way to his hotel, Salim sees statues, African madonnas, and presidential portraits. He feels they reflect “the wish of a man of the bush to make himself big,” and he feels an “odd sympathy” for the president (248). The more he sees that reminds him of his own town, however, the more this sympathy dissipates. The hotel lobby is full of secret police, and “the tensions of Africa were returning to” him (248). In the presidential gardens, Salim sees rapids 1,000 miles upriver from the rapids in his town, choked with water hyacinth, “here almost at the end of their journey” (249).