Books: Jungle Jean

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED (200 pp.)—Mongo Beti—Macmillan ($3.50).

This is a lighthearted book about a serious theme—the confusion that a first whiff of education can bring to primitive people. Jean-Marie Medza is a French Cameroons Negro who goes to college 40 miles from his native village, flunks his finals and returns home only to find himself saddled with a task for which college did not prepare him. His cousin's wife has run away to her father's tribe in the backwoods and Jean-Marie has been picked as just the right man to go and fetch her back. Off he bicycles into the jungle, trying to...