The colonized had their way over the colonials in the opening game, with Senegal showing France to be a weary and disjointed defending champion.
This almost psychoanalytic approach underplays complex power dynamics between the colonizers and the colonized.
His enterprise, he insists, "would be entirely superfluous if there existed photographic traces of the gaze of the colonized upon the colonizer".
As for the "who," his interest is vested in the colonizers more than the colonized.
He knows the best evidence he has for the life of the colonized may be the letters and dispatches of the colonizers, men with uninformed eyes.
In his writing, Naipaul is simultaneously the colonized and the colonist, in part because he never seriously imagines that the colonized would ever want to be anything but the colonist, even as he uses each category to judge the other.
His safety concerns lead him to remind the colonized out loud: 'Here I am the master.' The colonist keeps the colonized in a state of rage, which he prevents from boiling over".
Colonialism is wrong, but the human claims of the colonists are just as real as those of the colonized.
The ironies are rich, as the colonized victim gets in the last, oddly reassuring word.
