It says a lot about the days we live in that Rishi Sunak is another very human consequence of the decolonization of Asia and Africa that began at the end of World War II.
Although there has been a Monty Python tussle in the corridors of Parliament, the Johnson-Truss trance seems to be an emergency in the past. The virtual new Prime Minister, born in the British Isles of Indian parents, is a superlative exemplary, one might say poster boy illustrator of the opportunities that the parliamentary monarchy offers its subjects. Rishi is only 42 years old and the market value of his personal fortune is much higher than that of King Charles III.
A remote predecessor of Sunak in office was none other than Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), a converted Jew who consolidated the so-called “Tory democracy” and also imperialism and the Raj: a regime of total British rule over India and Pakistan that it only ended in 1947.
That date leads me to think of the admirable, brave Salman Rushdie and other eminent English-language post-colonials, such as Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Jamaica Kinkaid and the black beast of progressivism, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, the by many abhorred VSNaipaul, Briton of Trinidadian origin and Indian ancestry. One of his most brilliant detractors, the American-Palestinian academic, essayist, and musician Edward Said, wrote of him as follows:
“It is [ Naipaul ] a Third World man sending dispatches home from the Third World to an implicit audience of disenchanted liberals in the West who can’t get enough of hearing bad enough about all the myths of the Third World—its national liberation movements, its revolutionary purposes, the evils left behind by colonialism—none of which, in Naipaul’s opinion, fully explains the sorry state of Asian and African countries sinking into poverty, the impotence of natives, and poorly learned and less assimilated Western ideas. , such as industrialization and modernization”.
I could never express better or with greater precision many of the reasons, although not all of them, for my love of Naipaul since I read The loss of El Dorado. His travel books and, especially, his political fictions, set in Africa or the West Indies, have provided me with accurate and very up-to-date keys to understanding my own country, keys that I never found in Marxism or in dependency theories.
When it comes to Venezuela, his anthropological acuity is simply prodigious to me and I can only attribute it to the fact that, while investigating the colonial past of Trinidad —which was an integral part of the Captaincy General of Venezuela until 1797—, Naipaul, who had learned the Spanish, traveled extensively in the east of my country: the Paria peninsula, the island of Margarita and our Guayana. Of these trips, carried out with great reserve, little is known. His most authoritative biographer of him, Patrick French, hardly gives an account of them.
For one of his best novels, The Mimic Men, published in 1967, ( the simulators, Seix Barral, 1984), Naipaul took the form of an autobiography: that of a post-colonial West Indian politician whom Ralph Singh christens. The Singh of this fiction talks about the politicians of the former British colonies, changed into center-left demagogues and “businessmen”, all at the same time, once they were granted independence.
Treat Singh’s personality, his unreasons, his venality and, also, his great, Aristotelian insights about the craft of politics is what, from time to time, I recommend to anyone who asks me why Venezuelan opposition politicians are, from near and far, so hopelessly insubstantial and doomed to failure.
That type of politician that Naipaul calls “colonial”, and in whom I find a mirror image of many current Venezuelan opponents, is, in Singh’s words, “an easy target for satire. I wish to avoid lampooning him, so I will leave aside the anecdotes about his illiteracy and his social innocence. It’s not that I want to show it bigger than it is or more failed. Happens that your situation satirizes itself, turning inside out to a point that already borders on the pathos and the tragedy.
Elsewhere: “The career of the politician [colonial] it is short and ends brutally. We are powerless and we do not understand that we are powerless. We confuse words and the acclaim of words with power. As soon as they unmask us, we are lost.”
And in another: “I just turned forty and I no longer have a political career.”
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