African Paradox

With Forks and Hope, An African Notebook, by Elspeth Huxley. Morrow, $5.95 A recent symposium on Africa deplored the passing of “tranquility, happiness, and spontaneity” from the black continent. This is a reinvention of the “noble savage” dreamland in which the African traveler simply did not recognize what he saw. Such utopian constructions do service to nobody: between the idyllic images of pre-colonial black men and the calls for revolution by leftist agitators all the way from New York to Peking, the reader is first baffled, then loses interest. Africa is either unknowable, he concludes, or is not worth knowing.

Mrs. Huxley’s book brings us back to reality through her intimate knowledge of the continent. It is a veritable encyclopaedia of its Eastern parts: vegetation, wildlife, landscape; the parade of colonial officials, new leaders, old tribes, new social classes. Her descriptions do more honor to emerging Africa than reams of nonsense on négritude or African socialism, because she takes her subject with neither condescension nor exaltation. Although we follow her through three countries only—Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika—the whole continent is reflected in what she writes.

TM

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Thomas Molnar

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With Forks and Hope, An African Notebook, by Elspeth Huxley. Morrow, $5.95 A recent symposium on Africa deplored the passing of “tranquility, happiness, and spontaneity” from the black continent. This is a reinvention of the “noble savage” dreamland in which the African traveler simply did not recognize what he saw. Such utopian constructions do service to nobody: between the idyllic images of pre-colonial black men and the calls for revolution by leftist agitators all the way from New York to Peking, the reader is first baffled, then loses interest. Africa is either unknowable, he concludes, or is not worth knowing.

Mrs. Huxley’s book brings us back to reality through her intimate knowledge of the continent. It is a veritable encyclopaedia of its Eastern parts: vegetation, wildlife, landscape; the parade of colonial officials, new leaders, old tribes, new social classes. Her descriptions do more honor to emerging Africa than reams of nonsense on négritude or African socialism, because she takes her subject with neither condescension nor exaltation. Although we follow her through three countries only—Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika—the whole continent is reflected in what she writes.