Found Continent

WARRIORS AND STRANGERS by GERALD HANLEY 319 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.

British colonialism has produced a remarkable assortment of fruits and nuts, notably Lawrence of Arabia. But there have also been magnificent blossoms. Sir Richard Burton, the 19th century linguist and imperialist advance man, was an entire garden of delights. Gerald Hanley, the novelist and screenwriter (The Blue Max), is no Burton, although at one point in this memoir he claims to have succeeded where Burton failed--in discovering the secret of Wabaio, a potent arrow poison.

But mainly Hanley recalls a world on the wane with the grace and occasional wisdom of a man who has lived fully enough to have few regrets. At 56, he is a youngish old Africa hand. He left his native Ireland when he was 18 for life on a Kenya farm. As an officer in the British army during World War II, he helped round up Mussolini's homesick legions in northeast Africa. A more difficult job was keeping the Somali nomads from each other's throats.

As Burton had found a century earlier, the Somalis are among the bravest, vainest, crudest and also friendliest races in Africa. They possess enormous self-respect. Somalis love to fight, set great store in a killing well done, and do not mind dying. Hanley recalls coming upon a Somali who had just finished butchering a fellow tribesman. He expressed anxiety only when he realized that Hanley was not going to shoot him on the spot. "You're not going to start all that court business, are you?" asked the murderer as he was led away.

Serving in the Shag, as Hanley calls the vast oven of interior Somaliland, one found the usual physical torments: heat, flies, the lack of fresh food and cold beer. Drinking from bitter desert water holes led to "Wajir clap," an excruciating urinary-tract disorder caused by sharp crystals of undissolvable mica and gypsum. Prickly heat could make a man rub himself raw against a wall, al though some relief could be had by spraying from head to toe with gin.

The most merciless enemies, how ever, were loneliness and isolation. For months Hanley's reading matter was a book entitled Engineering Problems in Paraguay. The pressure of making decisions concerning the volatile Somalis drove many British officers into depression and even suicide. Yet solitude seems to have thrown Hanley backon his best resource: a fine, inquisitive mind whose essential romanticism was balanced by experience.

Although his admiration for the Somalis is genuine, he nevertheless sees primitivism as a vastly overrated way of life. On the other hand, the European's contribution in Africa has too often been merely a more efficient method of killing. Hanley's solitary reflections have taught him that there is really no satisfying man's greed, lust and appetite for novelty. In independent Kenya, where he returns to observe, only the Tusker beer seems to be the same. Many of his friends are gone, the game is scarcer and, as Hanley had noticed in much of East Africa, "the cement mixers are massing on the horizon."

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