Pride & Prejudice

I HAVE TWO COUNTRIES (208 pp.)--Mbonu Ojike--John Day ($3).

Mbonu Ojike spent seven years in the U.S. and returned to his native Nigeria in 1946 with a master's degree from the University of Chicago and a liberal education in race relations. As a writer, Mbonu has not taken as well to English. Yet as a study in African pride v. U.S. prejudice, this book has its amusing moments, mostly from Author Ojike's ingenuous tilting at some sacred U.S. windmills.

In the author's native Ibo language, Mbonu means "deeds, not words." Readers will undoubtedly find many of Ojike's deeds convincing. When he tried to register at a hotel in Iowa, he was told that Negroes were not welcome. "I beg your pardon," he replied haughtily, "I am a Black man from Nigeria." Ojike got the room. He was also initiated into American pomp and protocol, and discovered that by wearing Nigerian robes one could get admitted to many lily-white functions. But when he tried to enroll an African friend in the University of Chicago Medical School, Ojike ran into a form of democratic double-talk which plagues Negroes in supposedly tolerant Northern communities. The dean told him that although Negroes were accepted in the school, they were not permitted use of the hospital for their clinical work, hence if they wanted a degree they had to do clinical work on their own in a Negro hospital. Asks Author Ojike: "Why should a . . . college train a white doctor to come to cure Nigerians and at the same time refuse to train a Nigerian to go home and cure his people?"

Ojike studied on scholarships, earned his expenses by waiting on tables, scaling fish at summer resorts, and sweeping out the local Y.M.C.A. Most of his time in the U.S., as Mbonu tells it, was spent as a sort of black Cinderella in a white man's coach. He often had to play hide-&-seek with Jim Crow, yet he went home feeling pretty optimistic about the U.S. race problem. His conclusion: "Against the declining forces of reaction and hate are overwhelming forces of progress and kindness."

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