In North of South, a book about his journey through East Africa, the late Trinidadian writer Shiva Naipaul (brother of the more famous VS) makes startling observations. In one instance, he observes: “Africans are unpredictable. Without even a glance to right or left, they will with utmost calmness begin walking across the road.”

The book is replete with such outlandish episodes. But perhaps the most incredible is an account of travelling in a matatu in Western Kenya. The driver, Shiva narrates, negotiates corners at breakneck speed while the passengers cheer. Shiva is left to wonder: “Did death mean nothing to them?”

Unlike Shiva, I have had a lot of experience travelling in matatus. I have seen passengers withdraw into frightened silence at reckless driving or sometimes protest angrily. I have never heard of, much less seen, passengers wildly cheering driving that threatened their lives.

Shiva Naipaul, of course, is not the first foreign writer to reduce a complex continent into simple formulas that feed and excite the popular global imagination of Africa.

There are many others who, pretending to be recording objective observations, seek out stories and instances that “confirm” a deeply held notion of African moral and intellectual inferiority.

The narrator in North of South lacks the empathetic keenness that would allow him to narrate the contradictions and ironies inherent in every human society: The progress and retrogression, selflessness in the midst of greed, oppression and resistance of it, tribal tendencies but also inter-communal solidarity, etc.

So North of South lacks context, its assumptions are prejudiced, its inferences skewed and its conclusions stereotypical. It is not a work in the manner of, say, Michella Wrong’s Our Turn to Eat.

Instead, it is an exploration of Shiva Naipaul’s prejudices and fears, in the sense of the lazy racialism that attempts to prove intellectual or moral deficiency of the “other.”

And soon enough in the book, Shiva reveals the lazy clichéd hypothesis he is trying to prove:
“The tribal world was real, the new world lacking definition and solidity, fades into the dimmer reaches of the fantasy.”

And yet I wonder if the actions of our leaders do not often play into this Western stereotype of Africa.

Think of the bloodthirsty tyrannies that have plagued the continent, or the perennial ethnic bloodletting that in Rwanda led to genocide, or the impoverishment of generations through corruption scams such as Goldenberg or Anglo Leasing, or the continuation of cultural practices that impede our march towards freedom and progress.

Consider, too, recurring famines that we view fatalistically, or our response to natural or manmade disasters that never seems to improve.

This time last year, heavy rains wreaked havoc in Nairobi. County and government officials came out of the woodwork and vowed that the causes of the flooding would be addressed; buildings erected illegally in natural waterways would be demolished, and the drainage systems unblocked. They promised better disaster preparedness.

Now, rains are once again causing death and mayhem in Nairobi. The same officials have once again emerged from the woodwork and, without a hint of shame showing on their pudgy faces and sleepy eyes, are assuring us that measures will be taken to solve the problem once and for all.

At the site of a collapsed building that killed several people and injured dozens of others, the governor of the county threatened, just as he had at sites of collapsed buildings before, to sack negligent officers.

When the waters subside and the dead are buried, the governor, county and government officials will waddle their satisfied corpulence back to sleep until the next season of death.

During the last election, Nairobians, worried that an unrefined rabble rouser might take leadership of their city, voted for Evans Kidero. They figured that Nairobi needed an urbane administrator, not a councillor type.

But in the past three years, the Kidero administration, in spite of the millions it collects in revenue, has failed to improve infrastructure, security, garbage collection, lighting, and drainage. An expose by a local TV station recently revealed the extent of criminal rot in the county government.

It now looks like Evans Kidero will only be remembered for slapping a woman MP and the “Obama grass” that was planted, most comically, two or so weeks before the US president’s visit.

The governor, his entourage and national government officials would not be out of place in a Shiva Naipaul rant.