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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).