Dear Editor,
I refer to Abu Bakr’s letter captioned “Naipaul reinvented himself as an upper class Englishman” (07/11/02). Permit me to offer a few elucidations.
(i) Eric Williams did not owe the idea of his book Capitalism and Slavery to CLR James. In the late 1930s when Williams was doing his PhD at Oxford, the current fashion was the economic interpretation of history largely inspired by Marxism. Williams, as a young student, was merely responding to the current fashion of historical writing and research.
(ii) Abu Bakr claims that Naipaul re invented himself as an Englishman. Abu Bakr has done much the same for himself. He is a Black Guyanese who lives in France. He has adopted an Asian religion, changed his name to an Asian one, and in some of his letters flouted his Asianness.
Yours faithfully,
Kassa Barnet