Confounded Expectations
WHITAKER, JENNIFER SEYMOUR
Confounded Expectations Fantastic Invasion: Notes on Contemporary Africa By Patrick Marnham Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 231 pp. $10.95. Reviewed by Jennifer Seymour Whitaker Associate Editor,...
...Thus, despite the fact that Marnham is a witty observer and a gifted storyteller, his account ultimately does not escape the stock of cliches that shape our common perceptions of Africa...
...Reviewed by Jennifer Seymour Whitaker Associate Editor, "Foreign Affairs...
...But he soon falls into the same trap that snared so many of his colonial and neo-colonial predecessors: Overcome by the alienness of the African environment, he develops an irrational dread of a world totally out of control...
...This apparently unconscious ambivalence in Marnham's response is reflected in the structure of the book...
...The last and longest section sums up contemporary Africa as a place where the modern, Western institutions that displaced the tribal ones have not worked, leaving a vacuum filled by the unscrupulous venality of new native elites...
...The ironies grow heavier and the scene more bleak and chaotic as the book progresses...
...On the cultural level, for instance, the passion for Western literature fostered by the burgeoning educational system of many African countries has led to a poetic (lowering in the adopted languages...
...The problems Marnham underlines in contemporary Africa??tribalism, corruption, a fragile infrastructure, a declining agricultural base??are real enough...
...On the level of politics, Nigeria's return to democratic government last year was brought about through a painstakingly and shrewdly organized election...
...The well-documented cultural insensitivity of Western aid-giving shades into a widespread systemic breakdown presided over by the new African leadership...
...and the reconciliation of the warring factions in Zimbabwe was achieved, in part, by the adroit international maneuvering of the Frontline states...
...In the first place, the leaders and people of the continent, now moving as swiftly as they can into the modern world, will not willingly about face and march backward...
...Following a spate of recent literary travelers (including the two Naipauls and John Updike), British journalist Patrick Marnham sets out to record the depredations wrought by foreigners on Africa and the continent's supposed triumph over them...
...The martial exercises of game wardens against poachers, a retired warden's fatal passion for lions, the corruption of an American anthropologist who offers guided tours of the village where he is conducting his field work after his last grant runs out??all entertainingly exemplify the ironic interaction between Africa and the West...
...The need for Western institutions is undeniable??even if the synthesis Africans are creating will often seem an unlovely hybrid to Westerners, and will work imperfectly for some time to come...
...In his discussion of the Kenyan and Tanzanian game reserves, Marnham's rather hackneyed theses??his romantic view of the balance between man and nature, the artificiality of fencing animal species inside a finite tract of land, etc.??are redeemed by vivid description and anecdote...
...Yet even now there are grounds for optimism about modern African life that Marnham ignores...
...Each of these cases represents a contructive use of Western institutions that belies the romantic despair of certain expatriate travelers...
...Marnham's one-dimensional account shows how easy it is to overlook what confounds our expectations...
...But it is silly to imply, as he does, that the only solution is to let Africa revert to bush...
...The first part considers the absurdity of Western-sponsored game conservation programs that obstruct the patterns of human survival...
...Then, more seriously, the book examines the sometimes irrelevant and often destructive operation of Western aid programs...
...The final chapter on Amin's Uganda adds nothing new to that senseless saga of cruelty and waste, and reads like a drawn-out groan...
...author, "Conflict in Southern Africa" Starting with a dead elephant and ending with Idi Amin, this tour of contemporary Africa presents yet another fascinated??and horrified??peek into "the heart of darkness...
...The wily East African who stealthily regains his land from the game reserves goes on to become a confirmed thief, robbing fat tourists beside a polluted lake, then a doctor trysting with his girlfriend in a hospital bed while a patient dies in the emergency room...
Vol. 63 • June 1980 • No. 11
