RAR created a particular military culture in which its troops developed powerful bonds of soldiery loyalty to their regiment. This loyalty was created through the Rhodesian Army mimicking the invented traditions of British colonial regiments, which were historically successful in creating in-group solidarity among troops. In contrast to much received opinion, recruitment to the RAR was not dependent upon either ethno-regional or familial identity, and soldiers from all over the country joined the army for myriad reasons. Masvingo catchment area became important, although not dominant, in supplying recruits. Likewise, soldiering became a metier prevalent within certain families. By the onset of the war for Zimbabwe, the RAR’s soldierly potency had been greatly enhanced by operational experience. structure and ethos of the RAR underwent significant changes at the tail end of the Federation and after the Rhodesian Front’s rise to power. In particular, a new emphasis upon the counter-insurgency doctrine learned during the Malayan Emergency indicated a shift towards being deployed on COIN tasks within Rhodesia.

Chapter 1 argues that V. S. Naipaul’s works are critically co-extensive with world literary formations and demonstrably foundational to the conception of the modern idea of world literature. Naipaul’s entry into world literature is via a writing that reads the literary world as an aesthetic totality. Kant’s critique of judgement is critical here even if Naipaul departs from Kant who read human cognition as discursive and not intuitive. Naipaul’s aesthetics is grounded in an intuitive mode of human cognition. His idea of “seeing” (and here he means “critical seeing”) via a “sensible intuition” is the basis of all his writings. Naipaul’s declaration of the primacy of the intuitive intellect – Proust is cited as exemplary – in the artistic process has no need for concepts or guiding principles, a prior idea or even a politics. However, Naipaul heeds Kant’s warning that if we were to rely purely on intuition – which would generate a non-contingent world with no distinction between objects that are real and those merely possible because all objects for the intuitive intellect are real – there would be no universal concepts generated by understanding and only individual representations grasped directly and immediately.

Using a short work by Jane Gallop on what the “theoretical” death of an author means when one is faced with an actual death of a writer one is writing on, the Epilogue argues that we have now entered an age in which an ethics of responsibility dictates that the death of the author is not just a theoretical problematic but one where both theory, personal loss, and mourning are brought together. The Epilogue thinks through the literary death of the writer. It is argued through close readings of three of his final works that Naipaul’s literary death coincides with the death of his first wife Patricia Naipaul in 1996. His final three major works are read as works symptomatic of a writer no longer in control of his great literary gifts. When the aesthetic impulse dies, the “author” dies too, but in the case of a great writer, which Naipaul is, before his “death” he had created worlds that no other writer had created. That achievement, singular and original, has to be acknowledged insofar as it now enables us to rethink and reconceptualize what it means to be a writer of “world literature.”

Black Rhodesian soldiers’ loyalties – as opposed to motivations for initial enlistment – were premised upon a shared sense of professionalism. Inherent to this ethos was their soldierly prowess, honed through continuous training and operational experience, which was also co-constitutive of a deep, emotive sense of mutual obligation between fellow soldiers. Furthermore, these soldiers were socialised into a distinctive military culture, which created a powerful, emotive regimental loyalty that incorporated traditions to create an accentuated sense of in-group belonging and homogeneity that bound them to their regiment, and thereafter the wider army. professionalism and regimental loyalties of these troops ensured that they remained steadfast during combat and in the face of the surge in popularity of the nationalist challenge to white settler-colonial rule.

This book has contributed to a new understanding of the loyalties of black Rhodesian soldiers during the era spanning the terminal years of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Zimbabwe’s war of liberation, and the tumultuous first two years of independence from 1980. That these black soldiers fought for white-minority rule in Rhodesia appears, superficially, both paradoxical and extraordinary, and it has led to their characterisation as supporters of the RF, mercenaries, or ‘sell-outs’ in neo-Rhodesian and nationalist literatures.

Chapter 3 begins with a reading of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), a work that marks an epistemic shift in Naipaul’s thinking. The novel does for the plantation diaspora what Balzac did for France. After a careful reading of this triumphal novel, the chapter shows Naipaul’s fascination with modernist compositional features in his much-neglected Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963). Then, suddenly uncompleted mourning creeps in. The product of that deepening melancholic imagination is his “placid” and poetic The Mimic Men (1967). It is a compulsion towards aesthetic design, to qualities by which a work of art is judged, that take him to a very personal engagement with Englishness where Naipaul takes on the challenging discourse of Romanticism (a poetic register co-existing with the high point of British imperialism). In Wordsworth there is the memorable account of the poet meeting a leech gatherer; in The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul encounters his own version of the leech gatherer even as he begins to understand that “Englishness” was always a learning process for both the colonial and the colonized.