Two Books from Africa:

...The story of the colored boy growing up, an underdog in a white-dominated industrial society, has been well and variously told by such writers as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin...

...When, in his tenth year, an enlightened white stenographer read him the story of Othello, he determined to learn to read and to become a writer...

...As the book progresses from the brutal facts of childhood to adolescence and then to adult life, other forces -- Trotskyism, Communism, the unions, the churches, the police--play in and out...

...Yet, from all indications, Peter Abrahams has further struggles ahead...

...In Tell Freedom, the author, now living in England, recalls his childhood and youth in a South African suburb...

...A great part of this book's charm, however, lies in the simple tales of pioneering adventure and courage...

...Reviewed by Keith Irvine British writer and critic ALTHOUGH the patchwork "epic" of the African frontier lacks the simplicity of the steady North American coast-to-coast sweep, the atmosphere of mingled violence and romance can only be compared, in literature, to that of Yoknapatawpha County in the earliest days...

...Whether they should have begun carving is, by now, an academic question...

...Lord Delamere "cut through the red tape" on that occasion, but today millions in Kenya are suffering because of similar attitudes of unchecked individualism on the part of a privileged few...

...Underneath all the current of violence, like a great rising river, runs the panorama of South African life...

...Neither a Communist nor an orthodox believer, Abrahams--whose blood is a fusion of Negro and European--bears all the marks of the confirmed individualist...

...Certainly Whitehall looked askance at some of those who so bravely hoisted the flag over vast and ultimately ungovernable areas...

...By becoming an individual rather than a marcher in the ranks of an "ism" army, he has exchanged the insecurity of one minority for that of another...

...Tales of the African Frontier--written by J. A. Hunter, a veteran game ranger, with the aid of an American journalist, Daniel P. Mannix--is probably the most adventurous factual book to come out of Africa since The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, whose story of the building of the Kenya railway is briefly told again in these pages...

...Another strange character was the soft-spoken young Scots explorer Joseph Thompson, who ventured unarmed into hostile territory, relying on parlor tricks, such as a galvanic battery, and his false teeth to distract attention and so save his skin...

...A sweeter counterpoint is provided by the boy's struggle to get an education...

...Perhaps Abrahams, like Koestler, can only do justice to the complexity of his experience over a period of time, by disposing of different aspects in different books...

...East Africa is the location of most of the tales, but it is the East Africa of the past...

...In Africa, the literary trail-blazer in this genre is Peter Abrahams, a talented South African writer whose Return to Goli has already attracted wide attention...

...from Capetown to England, and to the international literary fame he now enjoys...

...Boyes escaped the consequences of his acts...

...A strict Puritan, he was once commanded, under the implied threat of death, to render pregnant the coy young wife of a Masai elder...

...Tippu Tib, the Arab slaver, and Kabarega, the warrior king of Bunyoro, are the two exceptions...

...On another occasion, Fritz shot a lion and then, as the animal was dying, took its head in his lap and fondled it until it expired...

...Surrounded by men only too willing to club him to death, or to use him and his porters for spearing targets, he continued to chart maps, note geological strata, and observe plant and animal life...

...Violent days they were, and the frontiersmen were violent, adventurous men...

...Small wonder that the Kenya settlers of today, caught in the vortex of a world crisis, look back with nostalgia to those simple, apolitical days when a handful of white men had almost all the guns and proceeded to carve out an empire...

...South Africa during the Depression years, when jobs and tempers were short...

...The lion which eventually killed him was not so gentle...

...His first two volumes allow us to hope for a satisfying fulfilment...

...This inherent clash between the frontiersmen and the heart of empire was still further polarized at a later date, when Lord Delamere, leader of the Kenya settlers, led the Masai to begin burning down the Nairobi Land Office because the Government questioned the ownership of some land which he claimed...

...Portrait of the Artist as a Young Thug, leading a band of neighborhood boys to rob a market stall for food and drink...

...Tell Freedom is a powerful book, but it leaves one with the distinct impression that much, particularly on the personal plane, remains unsaid...

...His struggle is therefore ours...

...The British Commonwealth has not...

...a visit to a relation in a working party of prisoners: life with Aunt Mattie, who ran a firewood business during the week and at weekends became a "skokiaan queen," selling illicit liquor to the miners...

...One such adventurer was John Boyes, the "King of the Kikuyus," who appears to have attempted simultaneously to make his own fortune and to act as an empire-builder--only to find himself under British arrest on charges of waging war, signing treaties, impersonating government, and committing dacoity (banditry...

...When the smoke came curling up through the floorboards, the bureaucrats hastily issued him his deed...

...The trail led from an overcrowded schoolroom to a far-away college...

...Abrahams writes simply, creating powerful visual images--a horde of young children shivering with cold on the veld, as they fight over the cow dung which they have been sent to collect for fuel...

...The inability to control these frontiersmen and "gentlemen adventurers" aggravated the disease of gigantism from which the British Empire was already beginning to suffer...

...from the college to Capetown...

...Who could equal Fritz Schindelar, the Austrian aristocrat turned professional hunter, who attacked a lion with a beer bottle and played tag with a rhinoceros around the foot of a tree in which the daughter of H. Barclay of Barclay's Bank had taken sanctuary...

...Most of the "heroes" are white...

...He extracted himself from this predicament by giving the girl a glass of fruit salts, explaining that, according to the maker, the product could accomplish anything...