The Ordeal of Negro Africa

In the past decade, Liberal sociologists have invaded the Dark Continent in force and seeded it with cliches, myths and falsifications. Margery Perham, who will be remembered for her distinguished biography of Lord Lugard, has dispelled some of these myths, but remains on fundamental issues a prisoner of sentimentality and collective masochism. Two younger and more perceptive writers, L. H. Gann and P. Duignan, have done an admirable job of realistic diagnosis and prognosis. They challenge the view that Africa consists of newly emerging nations or that the independence movement is, strictly speaking, nationalist.

Negro Africa is preponderantly tribal. The so-called nations are not communities of language, kith, culture and historic tradition, but administrative units established for pragmatic reasons by the European colonizing powers. The independence movement is largely one of racial resentment against real and imaginary wrongs, arising in a social environment that is, as Miss Perham writes, still “dark with poverty, ignorance, hunger, disease, isolation, cruelty, human sacrifice, even cannibalism.” The African grievance that the best land was pre-empted by white settlers is shown to be without historic justification. Its reductio ad absurdum is the “African Congress speakers who complain that when the whites first came into Rhodesia in 1890 they stole all the finest farms by the side of the railway lines!”

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Nathaniel Weyl

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In the past decade, Liberal sociologists have invaded the Dark Continent in force and seeded it with cliches, myths and falsifications. Margery Perham, who will be remembered for her distinguished biography of Lord Lugard, has dispelled some of these myths, but remains on fundamental issues a prisoner of sentimentality and collective masochism. Two younger and more perceptive writers, L. H. Gann and P. Duignan, have done an admirable job of realistic diagnosis and prognosis. They challenge the view that Africa consists of newly emerging nations or that the independence movement is, strictly speaking, nationalist.

Negro Africa is preponderantly tribal. The so-called nations are not communities of language, kith, culture and historic tradition, but administrative units established for pragmatic reasons by the European colonizing powers. The independence movement is largely one of racial resentment against real and imaginary wrongs, arising in a social environment that is, as Miss Perham writes, still “dark with poverty, ignorance, hunger, disease, isolation, cruelty, human sacrifice, even cannibalism.” The African grievance that the best land was pre-empted by white settlers is shown to be without historic justification. Its reductio ad absurdum is the “African Congress speakers who complain that when the whites first came into Rhodesia in 1890 they stole all the finest farms by the side of the railway lines!”