Word: yamoussourko
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...sort to a heritage of backwardness. The tribesmen have been taken out of the country to sit in glass and concrete skyscrapers in Abidjan, the nation's modern capital. But human sacrifice still exists in the villages on the other side of the verdant 18 hole golf course at Yamoussourko...
...book's second essay, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussourko," that may reveal the most about Naipaul--more, in fact, than he may have intended. The Naipaul we meet in the first essay is, by his own admission, an innocent. The essay begins with his first moment of artistic creation--a sentence about a family black sheep named Bogart. He wrote the sentence, the first line of his first story, in a BBC staff room in London 30 years...
Over the years, however, Naipaul seems to have changed. His earlier works, set mostly in Trinidad, were happier, suffused with an appreciation of the sometimes joyous results of his own cultural mixture. But one could hardly describe Naipaul's recent work as joyous, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussourko," for example, offers a compelling but hopeless view of one of Black Africa's most successful nations. Naipaul echoes in non-fiction a point he made earlier in his novel A Bond in the River. While African development has been successful in building great monuments to itself, it has used what the west...
Then there are the crocodiles. The country's ruler built Yamoussourko his tribal village, into a resort city with broad boulevards and posh hotels. He built a huge palace so he could live amid the town's splendor. Then he put a pool full of crocodiles into a pond in the palace's front yard--crocodiles being the clan's totem. Amid the marble facades and the fountains, they are a reminder of tribal power and tribal superstition...
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