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.