"The African soul is a blank slate on which anything can be written, onto which any fantasy can be transposed," writes Shiva Naipaul halfway through his narrative of travels in East Africa. The quotation is out of context…. But the dictum—of Africa as a repository for the foreigner's fantasies—goes a long way toward explaining the peculiar deficiencies of his own book.

"North of South," which recounts Mr. Naipaul's peregrinations through Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, is in the genre of travelogue cum essay. When the form succeeds, as it does, say, with a writer such as Paul Theroux, it is an effective device for larger statement. The voyager's day-to-day experiences are transformed into insights, theories, and finally, complete systems for generalization. When it fails or only partially succeeds, it degenerates into a string of observations, some interesting, some not so interesting, but on the whole leading nowhere...