Books: Ajricana

OUT OF AFRICA-F. G. Carnochan and H. C. Adamson-Dodge ($2.75).

GOLD FEVER-L. M. Nesbitt-Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

SKYWAYS TO A JUNGLE LABORATORY-Grace Crile-Norton ($2.75).

STONE AGE AFRICA-L. S. B. Leakey-Oxford ($2.75).

RESTLESS JUNGLE-Mary L. Jobe Ake-ley-McBride ($3).

THE GENTLE SAVAGE-Richard Wynd-ham-Morrow ($3.50).

GARI-GARI -Hugo Adolf Bernatzik -Holt ($3.50).

THREE-WHEELING THROUGH AFRICA-James C. Wilson-Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50). As the strange and obscure folkways of African natives become better known, white travel-writers through the dark continent are driven to increasingly eccentric exploits in their desire to stay off beaten paths and make interesting copy. Net result is that a collection of recent African books is likely to give armchair travelers a vague feeling that both blacks and whites in Africa habitually suffer from a touch of tropic sun, natives indulging in some pretty weird ceremonies, their white observers indulging in carrying-ons no less grotesque. A patient reader who goes through eight current African books will probably emerge with this feeling a certainty and with a strange hatful of ethnological information, native legends, travelers’ jokes and cloudy political analyses to serve as trophies of his daring trek.

Out of Africa is the biography of Kalola, head of the once-powerful Snake Guild of the Nyamwesi tribe in British Tanganyika. Based on Kalola’s story as he told it to Ethnologist Carnochan, it is written in a fictional narrative that robs it of authority, covers the period from Kalola’s birth in 1856 to his death in 1933. Illustrated with photographs of charms and initiations, it is most interesting in its account of intertribal politics and in its account of Kalola’s fighting in the war with German conquerors in 1905.

Gold Fever is the work of Lewis Mariano Nesbitt (The Hell Hole of Creation) who was killed last year in an airplane crash in Switzerland. A series of sketches of gold mining on the Rand, South Africa, it is based on Nesbitt’s experiences as an engineer there in 1912 and is written with considerable literary distinction. It is noteworthy for its account of the great miners’ strike of 1913, for its sketches of Nesbitt’s fellow-miners, for some poetic but subdued descriptions of life 7,000 ft. underground.

Skyways to a Jungle Laboratory is the travel diary kept by Mrs. Crile of the expedition of her husband, Dr. George Crile, famed U. S. surgeon [TIME, Oct. 19], to Maji Moto Camp in the Great Rift Valley of Tanganyika. Writing little of the scientific achievements of the camp, Mrs. Crile gives good descriptions of Africa from the air, long accounts of the hunting exploits of the members of the party, illustrates her book with 51 good but conventional photographs.

Stone Age Africa is a scientific volume, of interest to laymen for its exact geographical and geological information, for a number of good photographs and for a suggestive chapter on Stone Age African art, with several specimens of brilliant prehistoric drawings. Restless Jungle is by the widow of Explorer Carl Akeley, includes a description of a conventional trip from Cape Town north, with chapters on an interview with the Queen of Swaziland, on elephants at play, on African pioneers, on native witchcraft, which Mrs. Akeley is disposed to take seriously.

The author of The Gentle Savage is more candid, more skeptical, more modern. Artist Richard Wyndham, depressed by an English January, traveled to the Sudan by air, to the province of Bahr el Ghazal, commonly called “the Bog.” His book is memorable for its 48 excellent photographs and for his direct writing about the ways of African whites and native women, about the two handsome models he bought, one for six cows, or approximately £4. (He tried to hire them, but their parents could see no “difference between a model and a wife.”) He writes well about native dances and about the tall, strapping Dinkas, who are great fishermen, great dancers and whose custom it is to straighten their hair with cows’ urine and paint their faces white.

Still stranger documentation on this tribe is found in Gari-Gari, the work of a celebrated Austrian anthropologist. Visiting eleven peoples in the Anglo-Sudan, he brought back 1,400 photographs and 30,000 ft. of cinema film. Sixteen of the 116 remarkable pictures listed in the index of Gari-Gari have been omitted from the U. S. edition of the book, for reasons that observers of the others can readily comprehend. Anthropologist Bernatzik observed natives who cut terrible ornamental scars on their bodies, who wrestled in costumes that gave their matches the appearance of cockfights, native beauties who made up by plastering clay on their heads and dyeing their hair red.

Three-Wheeling Through Africa is the record of a motorcycle trip by two University of Nebraska graduates from Lagos, Nigeria, 3,800 mi. to the Red Sea. Written in an exclamatory prose and complete with descriptions of hardships and breakdowns through equatorial Africa it is the one book of all recent volumes on Africa most likely to set a reader puzzling as to whether the outlandish habits of natives in the eyes of whites are half as inexplicable as the habits of whites in the eyes of natives.