Books: Jungle Jean

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED (200 pp.)—Mongo Beti—Macmillan ($3.50).

This is a lighthearted book about a serious theme—the confusion that a first whiff of education can bring to primitive people. Jean-Marie Medza is a French Cameroons Negro who goes to college 40 miles from his native village, flunks his finals and returns home only to find himself saddled with a task for which college did not prepare him. His cousin’s wife has run away to her father’s tribe in the backwoods and Jean-Marie has been picked as just the right man to go and fetch her back. Off he bicycles into the jungle, trying to feel like a modern conqueror but uneasy at the thought of the reception he may get from the savage backwoodsmen—an uneasiness that deepens when he arrives in the middle of a football match played with a wooden ball and 22 throwing-spears.

Actually. Jean-Marie’s wild and woolly cousins are proud to welcome an educated man; the fact that he flunked his exams is a technicality they fail to grasp. He soon finds himself writing letters for the adults and giving lessons to the children. Everyone takes for granted that his city ways of love-making must be the epitome of charm. As Jean-Marie is actually a virgin, much of Author Beti’s humor is spent on his hero’s efforts to keep out of one bed by falling between two. In the end it is the jungle that educates Jean-Marie and sends him back, a more sophisticated type, to civilization.

One tribesman sadly predicted that Jean-Marie would live some day like white men, drink water from a tap, not from the spring, and even use a tablecloth at dinner. Author Beti, himself a native of the Cameroons, describes the tribal way of life with such affection and good humor that even the hardened Western reader will long to swap his faucets and tablecloths for the refreshing springs and loincloths of the Cameroonian sticks.