Black & White

INSIDE AFRICA (952 pp.)--John Gunther--Harper ($6).

THE AFRICAN GIANT (400 pp.)--Stuart Cloete--Houghton Mifflin ($4).

These are reports on two important literary safaris into the grimly awakening Dark Continent. Novelist Stuart Cloete (rhymes with booty), a Boer South African with several excellent books to his name,* started out in Cape Town and crossed the Equator eight times in one year. U.S. Journalist John Gunther, who is running out of continents to get inside of (he has been Inside Europe, Asia, Latin America and the U.S.A.}, started in Morocco and toured Africa from "stem to stern, from top to bottom." All told, Gunther reckons, he traveled 40,000 miles in a year, visited 105 towns and "took notes on conversations with 1,503 people." Novelist Cloete confined his search to a single if vast theme: "To clarify our minds about the racial ferment of Africa." Reporter Gunther's more ambitious plan: to tell "all that the ordinary reader needs to know about Africa." Inside Africa is an outsider's story, flung together with globe-trotting glee; The African Giant is an inside job by a cautious professional who probably knows more about black Africa than any other white man alive.

Tourist Snapshots. One of Gunther's chief qualities is his tourist's knack for relating the far-off to the familiar. Thus, the muffled women of Tangier are like "wads of Kleenex," while some native chiefs remind him of Chicago ward heelers. Often he exaggerates and occasionally he is downright naive, but when it comes to picturesque details, Reporter Gunther has them all. "Giraffes," he reports from East Africa, "intertwine their necks when making love." And he is equally informative on human marriage customs.

Gunther quickly inspected Swaziland (contrary to legend, he reports, its native ruler does not have twelve toes), Portuguese Africa (forced labor is still the rule), the Belgian Congo (booming). He trekked to the jungle compound where Dr.

Albert Schweitzer runs his hospital. The sanitary arrangements were "picturesque," but the picture Gunther leaves of the grand old doctor seizing a spade to encourage his leper workmen ("Allez-vous OPP, allez-vous OPP-upp-OPP . . .") stands out like a flame in the forest.

The Hope. Inevitably, Gunther confronts the tragic question of South Africa.

He calls its white-supremacy government "the ugliest ... I have ever encountered in the free world." Just how ugly, he discovered in one Johannesburg "location" of 40,000 blacks, 65% of whose children die before the age of two.

Is there a solution to the South African dilemma? Gunther saw none, but he found hope elsewhere on the troubled continent--notably in British West Africa, where the hustling rival colonies of Gold Coast and Nigeria are driving hard toward independence. In Accra, the Gold Coast capital, he attended a debate in the Legislative Assembly and found it "far above the usual level of the House of Representatives." Gunther considers that the British rule Africa best. Though on the whole they provide jess economic opportunity than the Belgians, less racial equality than the French, they give the African "copious access" to education, justice, and, above all, self-government.

Magic & Machinery. Gunther takes it for granted that Africans are potentially capable of self-government. Stuart Cloete is less optimistic. African Giant shows that Africa's problem is too complex for the simple solution of being for black freedom and against white rule. Cloete stresses the most widely overlooked fact about modern Africa--its emergence from Stone Age savagery straight into Atomic Age civilization. His book--more evocatively written but less well organized than Gunther's--shows the incongruous patterns of overlapping magic and machinery, primitiveness and progress.

With his American wife Rehna ("Tiny"), Author Cloete set out from Cape Town and headed directly for the "biggest hole in the world"--Kimberly's fabulous diamond mine (one mile around and 1,335 feet deep). There, where the sons of savages mine the raw material of American engagement rings, they also ride bicycles, wear European clothes, dance to the throb of tom-toms and throw their unwanted children into the giant hole.

Looking at monuments of long dead African civilizations, Cloete reflects: "As these men passed, so could the white man pass. Moving like a ripple over the great lake of the African soul, disturbing the reeds on its fringe for a moment . . .

and then nothing." But Cloete feels that the white man must not pass from Africa; he is needed.

Following Gunther, Cloete flew to West Africa. But where Gunther highlights its progress, Cloete probes deeper and finds that everywhere the savage past impinges on the present. Between 1945 and 1948, Nigerian leopard-men clawed 196 people to death in a single district. White officials recently arrived at a chieftain's funeral to find the coffin unscrewed and the African guests engaged in eating the corpse (necrophagy is still common in Africa).

The Real Problem. Cloete's observations of the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya make writers like Robert Ruark (Something of Value) sound like Tarzan fans.

Cloete's overall conclusions come as a shock, for there has been nothing quite so blunt said about Africa in years: "The black man hates the white . . . The African, once he can read and write, will seldom pick up anything dirtier than a fountain pen or heavier than a pencil. He is evolved, an intellectual ..." These half-educated Africans fall easily for Communist propaganda. Africa therefore must be bound to the West to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Communist East. Any idea of holding the African down permanently, as South Africa is trying to do, is absurd, says Cloete. Yet "the answer is not immediate freedom, which could mean black tyranny and tribal wars. It is an improved agriculture . . .

the creation of an African middle class." Can the Africans achieve this alone? Cloete does not think so. "I had hoped," he says, "that when the African was on his own ... he would be capable of great things ... I had thought that the white man was the black man's problem. I was wrong. The African's problem is to get on without him."

* Notably Turning Wheels (TIME, Nov. 8, 1937), Against These Three (July 23, 1945).

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