Dark Continent

OUT OF AFRICA--Isak Dinesen--Ran-dom House ($2.75).

AFRICAN HUNTER--Bror von Blixen-Finecke--Knopf ($2.75).

BLACK AND BEAUTIFUL--Marius Fortie --Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

Kipling saw imperialism as the White Man's Burden. Contemporary writers are not so ready to shoulder the phrase. In France it has become almost proverbial that the way to turn a French writer into a violent anti-imperialist and radical is to let him see Africa. In general, a good case could be made out to show that African natives now impress whites more than the other way round. Among three of the latest books on Africa, two might well add something to the case.

Far the best of the three is Out of Africa, by the author of Seven Gothic Tales, an eerie, distinguished best-seller of 1934. It was later revealed that Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of the Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke, a slender, pale, large-eyed, middle-aged Danish woman whose divorced husband is a well-known big-game hunter, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, a distant cousin of King Christian of Denmark. Married in 1914, they went out to British East Africa, where her family bought them a 6,000-acre coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills near Nairobi, capital of Kenya Colony. Following her divorce in 1921, Baroness Blixen managed the plantation alone, until collapsed coffee prices forced her to sell.

In Out of Africa, a restrained, formalized book, which has little in common with her first book, Author Dinesen writes of the African landscape, its animals and people with the eye of a painter and a novelist: "The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent." The natives ("they were afraid of us more in the manner in which you are afraid of a sudden terrific noise, than as you are afraid of suffering and death") she sees as primitives, not as savages.

Isak Dinesen identified herself with the dying slave-owning aristocracy, which feels a closer relation with its slaves than the interloping middle class. With the same aristocratic naturalness she let two high-born English bachelors make her home their headquarters. They taught her the Greek poets, practiced the art of conversation, took her in a plane over East Africa, and their death, during her last weeks in Africa, was interwoven with the bitter loss of her farm.

By comparison with his former wife's volume, 50-year-old Baron von Blixen-Finecke's African Hunter is little more than a handbook for big-game hunters. A professional guide to millionaire sportsmen, he enumerates his choice kills, gives bag limits, cost ($2,000 per month per person), devotes his longest section to a hunting trip with the Prince of Wales--"perhaps the toughest sportsman of them all." Except for an occasional game beater. Baron Blixen-Finecke does not care much for natives. Now married to an adventurous, pretty, 29-year-old Englishwoman, he remembers his first wife (Isak Dinesen) for one incident, when she flew unarmed at two lions that had attacked an ox, lashed them into the jungle with a stock whip.

Black and Beautiful is the candid, sentimental, unusual, unvarnished autobiography of a 57-year-old Italian, now a U. S. citizen, who went to German East Africa (Tanganyika Territory) in 1901, became a successful trader. Like Isak Dinesen, he was deeply attracted by Africa and its people. But his sympathies were expressed very differently. To escape the conventional dissipations of other whites, says Author Fortie, he married several native women ("I picked virgins in the wilderness, returning them to their wilderness homes when I could keep them no longer"), all of whom he found lovable and admirable. He found his closest friend in a big Abyssinian cattle trader, saw little of whites except German officers, who eyed him suspiciously after the Maji-Maji Rebellion of 1905. In 1932, after an absence of twelve years, he returned to Africa to look up his old friends and wives. On this trip--which covers the last half of the book--52-year-old Author Fortie traveled 3,600 miles by old-fashioned safari, eventually located those of his wives who had not died. He was well pleased to see them doing well, beamed at resemblances to himself in many children and grandchildren. His conscience now at peace, he returned to spend the rest of his days urging on Africa's rulers his own unconventional, unreserved humanity toward Africa's natives.

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