An account of a journey through Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, North of South is a remarkably bad-tempered book. Africa annoyed Shiva Naipaul…. Shiva Naipaul is a West Indian novelist now living in London; he has no warrant in Africa. He is on a moral holiday there. Testy as it is, North of South is a first-rate book—spirited, funny, written with economy and care—but it is not a great book like India: A Wounded Civilization, because Shiva Naipaul is not implicated in what he indicts. He went to Africa seeking precisely what he found: he includes a letter to his publisher which sketches out his ideological itinerary. So there is little in Africa that can shock him; and, though much angers him, nothing there can hurt him.

Nothing, that is, except the way black Africans feel toward people like himself, toward "Asians." (p. 38)

It is a paradox...