John Gunther's Africa

by RICHARD E. DANIELSON

ANYONE who reads John Gunther’s Inside Africa, or even reads in it, must be conscious that he is dealing with a journalistic tour de force of extraordinary dimensions. To explore the gigantic and diverse continent of Africa and to study the inside workings and problems of its vast populations is an appalling undertaking. I am told that in 19521953, during his and Mrs. Gunther s 40,000 miles of often difficult travel in a continent about four times the size of the United States, he interviewed formally over 1500 people. Moreover Mr. Gunthers task was aggravated by serious eye trouble which made the taking of notes and the reading and rereading of them an ordeal. That he and Mrs. Gunther should have completed that task and produced this fascinating book of 952 pages is a tribute to their enthusiasm and journalistic devotion.

The Gunthers girdled the continent and made many excursions into the interior. All the separate states of Africa were covered, some with more particularity than others. A few statistics from Mr. Gunther’s book will give some idea of the problems facing the enthusiastic inquirer and reporter. On Africa’s 11.3 million square miles live 198 million people divided into a fantastic number of nations and tribes. These are astoundingly variegated. The African people speak something like seven hundred main languages and innumerable tribal dialects. Of the 198 million people in Africa, probably only 5 million are white or of European origin. Yet the white man rules, although overwhelmingly outnumbered. Such statistics tell us, says Mr. Gunther, “why nationalism has such force. Only too patently 11,750 white men [as in Nigeria] cannot keep 30,000,000 black men from becoming free, once the 30,000,000 black men decide that they want to become free.” At times one feels perhaps that Mr. Gunther is stressing quantity rather than quality, but he has the brute fact of numbers behind him.

This not a travel book. As Mr. Gunther says, “it is a book of politics and information. But it is impossible to give a fair picture of some African countries without brief descriptions of some trips we took.” As he is an excellent observer as well as reporter, and writes with a knack for a pungent phrase, Mr. Gunther’s descriptions and narrations agreeably relieve the fairly heavy doses of outright political statistics. Too rarely Mr. Gunther lets down the bars and supplies us with groups of small but intriguing facts. Until I read this book I did not know, for example, that the horn of a rhinoceros is made of hair, not ivory; or that hippos “have reddish sweat”; or that the roar of a lion “can be audible at a distance of six or seven miles.”I am in debt to Mr. Gunther for the information that “when an elephant charges, he does not hold his trunk out and aloft, but carefully curls it up and tucks it against his chest; the trunk is delicate and too valuable to risk in combat.” These and similar bits of information are extraneous to the purpose of this volume. The important element in the book is the present political and social conditions in Africa and the outlook for the future which they imply.

One thing is certain: No one can generalize about Africa or Africans. The racial tensions which exist in one section are almost wholly different from those prevailing in another. The character and the quality of populations in one region will be absurdly different in another. Pygmies and giants may live almost side by side. Africans differ physically, mentally, and in their relative advances toward civilization. Each region or country has to be studied separately.

Defenseless Africa, already conquered and divided, but with only a fraction of its potentials realized or exploited, lies there today—perhaps the hope of the world, perhaps destined to chaos. Certainly, with few exceptions unrest is rampant everywhere. Here are the questions which Mr. Gunther asked himself during his travels: “Is the white man finished in Africa? Are Africans capable of self-government? If imperialism is dead, what is going to take its place? . . . Can the colonial powers save their position by reform? . . . the answers are not easy.”

French North Africa, including Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, is alive with nationalistic agitation and occasional violence. France has done many notable things in North Africa and has followed a policy of assimilation of the natives into French culture, and in the case of Algeria of political equality with citizens of Metropolitan France. The case of French North Africa is not yet desperate. Morocco at least is far from ready for independence, but whether or not the French can persuade the Arabs and the Berbers in this vast territory to seek their future under French guidance and coöperation remains to be seen. Egypt of course is a case of its own, being an independent country, as is Ethiopia. It is when one gets to British East Africa, including Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, that the racial tensions become acute. Kenya is the most disturbed of these countries because there the white settlers really came to stay and look over the best of the farming country. Their continued tenure there is extremely problematical.

It was, however, when the Gunthers reached the Union of South Africa that they faced the most violent and difficult interracial situation on the whole continent. The present government is “grounded in part at least on three of the most unpleasant, of human characteristics — fear, bigotry, and intolerance. It is based without qualification on the principle of unmitigated white supremacy (i.e., suppression of four-fifths of the people of the country) and it is in some respects the ugliest government I have ever encountered in the free world.”

I think the chapters dealing with the Union of South Africa are the sharpest, most acute, and possibly the saddest in this book. The Union contains the largest white population of any state in Africa; it is enormously wealthy, and far more advanced in material ways than any other region; but white and black meet there head on, and what the ultimate result will be, no one can say.

Mr. Gunther has interesting chapters on Portuguese Africa, on Rhodesia and Nyasaland, on the Belgian Congo, on British A Vest Africa with principal reference to Nigeria and the Gold Coast. In Nigeria the passion for independence is probably farther advanced and more intelligently advocated than in any other British African colony. The British policy is to educate and train the native Africans for self-government, but they hesitate to have a definite date assigned for that purpose. Mr. Gunther feels that the French are doing perhaps better work in black Africa than along the Mediterranean basin. In French Equatorial and in French West Africa relations between the natives and the French are more flexible and easy than elsewhere.

I think that Mr. Gunther in his short chapter devoted to French West Africa has treated the subject somewhat inadequately. If his experiences there came at the end of his long journey, it may well be that he was tired and could not attack this subject with his usual élan. I may add that French West Africa and to a lesser degree Liberia are the only parts of Africa with which I am really acquainted. I can endorse every word written by Mr. Gunther in his chapters, “Mr. Tubman of Liberia” and “Monrovian Doctrine.” This fantastic country is unique in that a small aristocracy of fifteen to twenty thousand, the descendants of the freed slaves who were sent from the United States in the 1820s, rules with an iron hand an unknown number of bush Negroes, perhaps a million and a half to two million in the hinterland. These two chapters are to me utterly fascinating and I recommend their reading. As it is impossible to check the accuracy of Mr. Gunther’s reporting without following in his footsteps — which God forbid — it is satisfactory to me to testify to his thoroughly comprehensive treatment of Liberia and his proper, if uninspired, account of French West Africa.

In his recapitulation, Mr. Gunther sums up his findings on the while man in Africa: “Kenya is the worst trouble spot, in Africa from the criterion of public order, in consequence of the prolonged, bloody Mau Mau rebellion. ... In the Union we have inspected one of the most unpleasant and exacerbated political situations in the world. Apartheid cannot work as its inventors hoped it would work, but the governing authorities will make no concession that might conceivably lead to a harmonious relationship between white and black. . . . Portuguese Africa has not yet entered the modern world; the Belgian Gongo has. Belgian rule is bourgeois, practical, and stern; it has done a good deal for the Africans and . . . will be obliged to do more. Sixty thousand Belgian whites cannot permanently deny political expression and civil rights to more than 12,000,000 blacks. On the British West Coast we have encountered the highest advance of colonial peoples toward effective selfgovernment. Nigeria has profound problems still to solve particularly in the realm of national unity. . . . Taken all in all, British rule is the best. If I were an African I would rather live in a British territory than any other. The British do not give as much economic opportunity in some realms as the Belgians and perhaps not as much political and racial equality as the French in Black Africa, but the average African in British territory has more copious access to the two things Africans need most — education and justice.”

What a vast change in thought and morals has taken place since World War I! Imperialism and colonialism, if not highly respectable, were at least accepted as normal conditions at the turn of the century and for some time afterwards. Indeed the generation which knew and admired Rudyard Kipling succeeded in convincing itself that white imperialism in backward countries was a helping hand to the natives, drawing them out of darkness into light. Mr. Kipling succeeded in convincing me at least of the heroic work being done by British administrators and soldiers. It was not until Mr. Dooley explained their function to Mr. Hennessy in approximately these words, “Take up the White Man’s burden and hand it to the coons,”that I began to wonder. This was a body blow to the colonialism and imperialism of the day, and our Mr. Wilson followed through with his “self-determination” doctrine. Since then the British Empire has moved out of India and Burma and Ceylon — probably the greatest gesture of renunciation in history. Everywhere, colonies and protectorates are seething with nationalistic agitation which may or may not be justified.

Mr. Gunther is consistently political in his attitude. He counts noses and he is constantly reiterating that a handful of whites cannot for long govern and decide the destinies of millions of blacks. To repeat, his emphasis is on quantity rather than quality. Of course he does differentiate carefully between the degrees of advancement of indigenous populations, and I think that on the whole his comments and conclusions are eminently fair. All in all, this is a profoundly impressive book.