Best Book on Africa
IRVINE, KEITH
WRITERS and WRITING Best Book on Africa The Heart of Africa. By Alexander Campbell. Knopf. 487 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Keith Irvine British writer and critic Heavily tragic, weightily moral or...
...Campbell measures the multitudinous attitudes he encountered in his travels...
...This book is so valuable that it is impossible to convey its diverse qualities in so short a space...
...Campbell confided to Sanders his doubts and fears far troubled times ahead, but Sanders firmly insisted that he was exaggerating the dangers...
...While admiring the qualities of what might be called the Congo Compromise (i.e., usually benevolent paternalism), he recognizes plainly that this is merely a temporary expedient, and not a possible pattern for African society...
...Campbell's moral judgments are implicit in situations rather than explicit in sermons...
...Sanders was less perturbed about any immediate danger than about the implications of these events...
...Bartlett's quick Cook's tour of the continent, Mr...
...and, second, that he hints that within 25 years the population of Africa will probably double, so that Africa's big problem will be not race but food...
...It is strange how many of the fleeting moods of Old England become petrified in far-flung corners of the world long after the mother country has rejected them...
...And why, for example, should a Congolese technician suddenly disappear after questioning his American overseer on so subversive a subject as the workings of the AFL...
...Miles away, there had been trouble between black and white, and "his people," hearing the news, had risen and attacked his headquarters, shouting anti-white slogans...
...Troops had been sent in to restore order...
...Up to date, informative and readable—as a book by a Time correspondent should be?The Heart of Africa is also written from personal conviction, unaltered by rewrite men, and undistorted by editorial policies...
...Those who travel to Africa should make it their vade mecum...
...He is, moreover, patently disturbed by certain phenomena in that territory...
...One of the most significant anecdotes is quoted toward the end of the book...
...He has recorded the reactions of a South African millionaire and his entourage at the moment when ruin struck them down...
...Campbell has obviously been impressed with developments in British West Africa, but widely modulates his enthusiasm in view of the rapid pace of African political development and the unpredictability of its future nature...
...The next time they met, Sanders was singing a dolefully different tune...
...He introduces us to Reverend Michael Scott living among the shacks of a shanty-town, and to Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, the diamond emperor, sipping whiskey among his first editions...
...A district commissioner, resembling Sanders of the River even down to carrying the "absurdly appropriate" name of Sanders, ruled 100,000 tribesmen scattered over 2,000 square miles of territory with the help of four African policemen wearing pith helmets and equipped with bicycles...
...He is immersed in his subject and is able to set his interpretations against a long perspective of personal experience, as well as against the by now de rigeur background reading of Professor Toynbee...
...Allowing the eye-witness account to replace the generalization, Mr...
...Up to now, Vernon Bartlett's competent but hastily assembled piece of journalism, The Struggle for Africa, provided as good a popular survey of the continent south of the Sahara as one could obtain...
...Bartlett by a long country mile...
...Reviewed by Keith Irvine British writer and critic Heavily tragic, weightily moral or rancorously bitter, the contemporary literature on Africa is not usually distinguished by wit...
...Apart from this, those who interest themselves in the continent will find much stimulation in this book...
...Yet, wit is not the only virtue that illumines Alexander Campbell's The Heart of Africa...
...In Kenya, the pseudo-sophistication of Noel Coward's 1920s is perpetuated in debased form...
...Campbell's book—although he tactfully refrains from drawing it—is that, whatever benefits the "free world" may have conferred upon the African, freedom is conspicuous by its absence...
...They have never sent troops here before," he said...
...Campbell has been at hand with his notebook...
...The whole atmosphere of white Kenya's neurosis is conveyed in the incident—at which Mr...
...For example, if theoretically there is no color bar, why in practice do the Congolese so scrupulously eschew white haunts...
...He has witnessed a battle between Nyasaland villagers and police, and another between rival gangs of tribesmen in the Negro sections of Johannesburg...
...As against Mr...
...I can't rule them at all...
...The result is the best and most comprehensive popular book on Africa now extant...
...Campbell has charted the present course of the rising African storm, for which the color bar, more than any other single factor, is responsible...
...Campbell was present ?when a Kenya settler, on learning that the man before him was a British newsman (Colin Legum of the Observer), stuck a gun in his ribs with the cry: "Another bloody Bolshie...
...Out of their own mouths (not the writer's), the illiberal white elements of Kenya, the Rhodesias and South Africa are condemned...
...One of the inescapable conclusions of Mr...
...Briefly, one may say, first, that Mr...
...Elsewhere in Africa, Mr...
...Campbell outdistances Mr...
...He first heard the words "Mau Mau" from the lips of an obscure and worried district officer in Nyeri, whose reports were "chucked into the waste-paper basket...
...Virtually at every crucial juncture in African history since World War II, Mr...
...And if I can't rule these people with four policemen on bicycles, I can't rule them with 40,000 soldiers...
...Against the touchstone of realities in contemporary Africa, Mr...
...He also pieced together the censored story?a grisly one—of how the South Africans put down the East London riot of 1952...
...to Doctor Malan up on Table Mountain, to Jomo Kenyatta jauntily swinging his elephant-headed stick, and to Chief Hosea Kutako sitting in council under a tree...
...Campbell, an expatriate Scot, has been on newspaper assignments in Africa for the best part of two decades...
...Campbell's picture of Kenya is unforgettable...
...Sun-tanned selfishness, pink gins, cowboy shirts and revolvers blend to form a new imperialistic mutation highly distasteful to the Heart of Empire itself...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 25
