Simple

When Salim refers to Africa or refers to ‘Africans’, he does so as if he is an outsider: “from an early age I developed the habit of looking, detaching myself from a familiar scene and trying to consider it as from a distance” (15). It is with this attitude that Salim records the transition from past to future in the unnamed, newly independent nation. Though Salim is not from this part of Africa, his conception of what makes one ‘African’ hinges on history, on ancestry. Even after having been set up for over 6 years in the interior village, he considers the town: “I saw it now as an agglomeration of shack settlements. I thought I had been resisting the place. But I had only been living blind—like the people I knew, from whom in my heart of hearts I had thought myself different” (116).

When the characters talk about Africa, the word that keeps coming back, over and over, is ‘simple’. Whether it is Mahesh telling Salim that the best they can do is ‘carry on’, or Father Huisman’s belief that, “there would always have been a settlement at that bend in the river” (64), Salim saying that, “there is a simple democracy to Africa: everyone is a villager” (48), or how the Big Man appears in his photograph, “a picture of all Africans” (134), in order to try and understand the complex history, the complex future of Africa the characters try to shrink Africa, simplify it, give it a type, in order to understand it.

Yet what this simplification seems to make things harder for Salim in some ways—makes him sadder, makes him see himself as lost. “You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life. You were in a place where the future had come and gone” (27). That identity seems to be so hard to grasp in a place turning over and over with settlements, civilizations and rulers, that Salim wants to identify with a sense of permanence. As permanent as the River is, as the hard geological Africa, the cultural identity seems murkier, seems to slip the grasp of all the simplification for Salim.