Cautious Optimism and Adulation:
RICHARDS, JOHN W.
Cautious Optimism and Adulation Independence for Africa. By Gwendolen M. Carter. Praeger. 177 pp. $4.50. Profiles of African Leaders. By Thomas Patrick Melady. Macmillan. 180 pp....
...Twelve of the 14 chapters focus on various African countries and territories...
...Miss Carter discusses Kenya primarily in terms of the relationship between Africans and Europeans without considering the serious rifts among the Africans themselves...
...Independence in Africa was clearly written before last June 30 when the Congo became independent, and despite a few late revisions it is more than eight months behind the swift pace of events...
...But the sections on the two former French territories, the Congo Republic (Brazzaville) and the Ivory Coast, and on Portuguese Angola are very informative...
...Only in the section on Kenya did I find any important flaw...
...There has been little in American newspapers or magazines about these non-Englishspeaking areas...
...Pan-Africanism is much easier to talk about than to achieve...
...4.95...
...The profiles remind one of the campaign biographies that abound in America at election time...
...In sum, Independence for Africa may not be detailed enough for the serious student, but for someone newly interested in Africa it is valuable and readable...
...However, there is considerable factual information about the leaders and the countries they represent that can be distilled from the author's adulatory prose...
...Of the present pair, curiously, it is the more out-of-date book that is much the more valuable...
...Miss Carter relates how such tribal differences caused a sudden eruption of violence in Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast in October 1958...
...As has happened in the past, and will happen even more often in the future, a moderate African leader had to change direction to survive the nationalist wave...
...But his book is disappointing...
...Tribes living next to one another can be as different in traditions, customs and temperament as, say, the Danes and the Italians...
...In other chapters—on the role of the opposition in Ghana and on multi-racial government in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland —Miss Carter's cautious optimism, based on her trip to Africa a year or so ago, now seems merely wistful...
...These workers were also men with black skins, invited to the underpopulated Ivory Coast to fill jobs for which no local Africans were qualified...
...Melady's credentials looked good: PhD in international relations, service with the International Cooperation Administration in Ethiopia and founder of the Institute of African Affairs at Duquesne University...
...The nine African leaders discussed appear not as men but as plaster saints and, as such, are not very interesting...
...For two days, local Africans terrorized thousands of Dahomeyans, Togolese and Yorubas (from Western Nigeria) who worked in the shipping companies and banks of the port...
...Yet when Miss Carter, Professor of Government at Smith College and one of the most respected American scholars on Africa, deals with the background to these events, her book is extremely useful...
...Miss Carter's report on Angola, which broke into the news with nationalist riots following the Santa Maria episode, provides the best short account I have yet seen of a troubled land that may soon push the Congo off the front pages...
...Reviewed by John W.Richards Free-lance journalist, recently returned from Africa Two things can generally be said about books on Africa: They are coming out faster than they can be read, and they are out-of-date the day they are published...
...Moreover, the discussion of the Congo Republic (Brazzaville) and the Ivory Coast makes clear something Americans find difficult to understand—that Africa is not one land with one people...
...I picked up Profiles of African Leaders with uncommon anticipation, for it is difficult to find collected biographical information on almost any African leader...
...The same chapter also explains why Premier Félix HouphouetBoigny of the Ivory Coast, a former French Cabinet minister who once preferred association with France to links with neighboring African states, now is a hard-bargaining nationalist...
...These have largely been obscured by the national movement for independence, but now that Africans are to play a responsible part in the Kenya Government, a significant and potentially dangerous struggle for power has begun, with the Kikuyu attempting to reassert their traditional dominance...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 12
