4 ideas
Naipaul argues that history is built around achievement and creation, and that because the West Indian colonies were organized purely as sites of extraction worked by imported slaves and indentured labourers, nothing was created there. What such a place has is a record of events done to it, which leaves its people without a usable past to anchor their identity.
In a colony whose culture, values and prestige all originate in a distant metropole, people measure themselves against imported standards they can never fully own. The result is a derivative society that performs Englishness or Frenchness rather than generating its own forms. That creates chronic insecurity, contempt for anything local, and status contests built on proximity to the metropole and to whiteness.
Their local world therefore seemed unreal or unworthy of being written about. Look at what a curriculum treats as the proper subject of art and knowledge, and you can see which places a society has been taught to regard as real.
Travelling through British Guiana before independence, Naipaul finds that politics nominally about socialism and anti-colonialism has hardened into rivalry between Indians, the descendants of indentured labourers, and Africans, the descendants of slaves. The two groups rally respectively behind Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham. The case shows how groups imported separately to serve a plantation economy carried that separation into self-government, so that mass democracy turned into a racial census.