Books: Three on Africa

OVER AFRICAN JUNGLES-Martin John-son-Harcourt, Brace ($3.75). SPEAK TO THE EARTH-Vivienne de Watteville-Smith & Haas ($3). AFRICA DANCES -Gorer-Knopf ($3.50).

The Africa that became familiar to readers of the reminiscences of Trader Horn was an eerie land where white goddesses lived in clean captivity and where fortunes could be picked up in almost any stretch of impenetrable jungle. Last week three substantial volumes of African travel suggested that future romancers will be compelled to place their tales on still more remote continents to make them acceptable, for all three books present a flesh & blood Africa only a little more remote than Europe and in some respects almost as civilized. While Martin Johnson’s Over African Jungles, an account of a 60.000-mi. flight in two Sikorsky Amphibians, repeats some of the stock references to the mystery and glamour of the hot lands, the prevailing note in the three books is intelligent curiosity and skepticism. No tom-toms throb maddeningly for these travelers.

Martin Johnson, his wife and six others flew from Capetown to Nairobi in Kenya Colony, then west over the Belgian Congo, north to Cairo and Tunis. Equally divided into accounts of the hazards of flying over wild country and remarks on the hordes of elephant, lion, wildebeest, zebra, giraffe seen from the air, Over African Jungles is distinguished for its 100 remarkable photographs. It succeeds in communicating a sense of the expanse and variety of Africa despite Traveler Johnson’s purplish prose.

Speak to the Earth, written with considerable literary grace, deals with a small area of East Africa near the Tanganyika border, where Vivienne de Watteville wandered with a few porters, searching for elephants. A self-possessed lady, friend of Edith Wharton, daughter of a trained collector of fauna for the Berne Museum, Vivienne de Watteville possessed one charming idiosyncrasy. She wanted to make friends with wild animals. She wanted to pet them if possible, considered Androcles the most fortunate of humans. While she never succeeded in petting a wild elephant, she was often almost close enough to do so. Once while trailing them she started to walk around a huge grey boulder, was startled when the boulder (a sleeping rhinoceros) suddenly reared up and ran away. Although she was chased by most of the animals of the jungle, was interested in lions without being very afraid of them, elephants were her passion. She watched them by the hour, crept within ten yards in order to study them, set up a dummy to test the legend that they crushed humans by kneeling on them, witnessed their gay and clumsy frolics with fascination, almost envy.

Both Over African Jungles and Speak to the Earth are frivolous works compared with Africa Dances. Geoffrey Gorer, 30-year-old English writer, traveled from Dakar through French West Africa to Dahomey and the Gold Coast, with Feral Benga, famed Parisian Negro dancer, who wanted to stage a Negro ballet. The travelers saw some extraordinary native dancing, including the performance of adagio dancers who danced with children and knives, throwing knives that seemed to pass through the children in midair. But most of Africa Dances is devoted to realistic appraisals of native culture, political and economic conditions, colonial administration, the heat and discomfort of the country. Among the whites Geoffrey Gorer encountered lack of ambition, futility, occasional brutality; among the blacks, resignation, degeneration. He found French colonial methods less successful than the English, primarily because the English teach the natives to read, and make colonial administration a career while the French look upon it only as a temporary ordeal. In studying the natives, with the insight Benga provided, Geoffrey Gorer came to the conclusion that white men cannot understand the mental processes of true savages, who have no time-sense. Before his journey was over, Geoffrey Gorer was prepared to accuse such writers on Africa as Paul Morand and William Seabrook of “naïve diabolism,” of having written misleading reports. He believes that African Negroes, like the Amerindians, are doomed to extinction unless new methods of governing them are developed.