Africa without Fear or Favor

Africa: A Political Travelogue, by Thomas Molnar. Fleet, $6.95 By courtesy of the Relm Foundation—“whose great merit,” he says, “is aiding scholars not conforming to orthodox Liberal ideology”— Thomas Molnar made the Grand Tour of Africa, from Tunis to Cape Town and, north again, to Cairo. In some ways, or so it seems to the jaded taste of a European, he rather resembles the wide-eyed Enquiring Traveller of the Victorian era, showing the same intellectual earnestness (“It is with this objective in mind that the traveller should observe everything around him”), the same disapproval of slovenly natives, the same indefatigable interest in all he sees and hears.

This touch of naivete gives his book, as it gave Victorian travel books, great freshness. Mr. Molnar received, and conveys, very vivid impressions. Anyone visiting Africa for the first time must be struck by the indolence, incompetence and petty dishonesty which surround him, but it is unfashionable to report such things. Mr. Molnar accepts no such hypocritical restraint. He tells us that you can almost calculate the weeks since the departure of a colonial government “by the degree of neglect and dilapidation of buildings, streets, parks, and essential services.”

AL

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Anthony Lejeune

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Africa: A Political Travelogue, by Thomas Molnar. Fleet, $6.95 By courtesy of the Relm Foundation—“whose great merit,” he says, “is aiding scholars not conforming to orthodox Liberal ideology”— Thomas Molnar made the Grand Tour of Africa, from Tunis to Cape Town and, north again, to Cairo. In some ways, or so it seems to the jaded taste of a European, he rather resembles the wide-eyed Enquiring Traveller of the Victorian era, showing the same intellectual earnestness (“It is with this objective in mind that the traveller should observe everything around him”), the same disapproval of slovenly natives, the same indefatigable interest in all he sees and hears.

This touch of naivete gives his book, as it gave Victorian travel books, great freshness. Mr. Molnar received, and conveys, very vivid impressions. Anyone visiting Africa for the first time must be struck by the indolence, incompetence and petty dishonesty which surround him, but it is unfashionable to report such things. Mr. Molnar accepts no such hypocritical restraint. He tells us that you can almost calculate the weeks since the departure of a colonial government “by the degree of neglect and dilapidation of buildings, streets, parks, and essential services.”