Naipaul is recognised as a "magnificent novelist", and "A Bend in the River" has been described as a "full-bodied masterpiece". Yet he has been accused of being a "neo-colonialist", and in this novel post-colonial Africa is depicted as spiralling into a kind of Hell. He has also been accused of being "infected by an ancestral communal resentment" against blacks. Whitaker indicates that Salim's plight as an outsider, a member of the Indian community in Africa, is credibly rendered, but takes Naipaul to task for ascribing to African people a "mysterious malevolence".