Books: African Agonies

THE SAVAGE STATE by Georges Conchon. 222 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.50.

White is white and black is black in the new Africa, but the twain meet on one point of principle: even more than each hates the other, they hate anybody who tries to erase the color line that divides them. Such is the sardonic opinion of France’s Georges Conchon, a former Secretary-General of the Central African Republic, and he expresses his opinion with sadistic delight in this ferociously witty satire on the men and movements of contemporary Africa.

The savage state of the accusatory title is a young African republic where a Negro Cabinet minister falls in love with a white woman. Both black and white communities rise up against the couple and take a terrible vengeance. The minister’s black colleagues cynically arrange his assassination, and then literally eat his brains. His mistress is successively brutalized by a black mob and berated by the white colony. Her estranged husband, who tries to protect her, is beaten up by his white associates. And at book’s end, two howling hordes of savages, one black and one white, converge and expel husband and wife from the country.

Racism is the proximate cause of Conchon’s rage, but all man’s inhumanity is the ultimate butt of his abhorrence. In scenes both hilarious and scarifying, he slashes at the sickly fear, pride, cruelty and self-deceit that hide behind the name of love until they dare assume the shape of hate.

His representation of an Africa emerging is no doubt distorted. But it may remind people who like to pat underdogs that they usually have sharp teeth.