“Every Guy Has His Own Africa”

This chapter analyzes the writer Saul Bellow as an anthropological novelist, focusing on his African novel, Henderson the Rain King. Bellow incorporates ethnographic source material, including some from his erstwhile teacher Melville Herskovits, but Henderson is a bumbling caricature of the academic fieldworker. Nevertheless, the novel asks essential anthropological questions about how culture determines human behavior and thought and how cultural patterns change. I compare Bellow’s work with C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, which promoted the ideas of technical know-how and knowledge transfer from the West to the developing world that Bellow satirizes. The chapter ends with an analysis of the South African writer Bessie Head, whose story “The Woman from America” highlights the dangers of development projects that fail to pay attention to local conditions, just as Henderson does.