Inside Africa

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Ghana gets an indulgent interview with the (black) Prime Minister, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, then a quick side trip to Togoland - British Togoland, which was joined to Gold Coast and is now part of Ghana, and French Togoland - now Togo. 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. As soon as you feel the weight of the book in your hands it certainly feels like it's an effort to cover a continent. Britain - British objective is to train the Africans for complete self-government, within the Commonwealth.

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. The important element in the book is the present political and social conditions in Africa and the outlook for the future which they imply.He is able to describe the unfamiliar by using familiar references and he beautifully describes details. 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. His analysis of the blighted Organization of African Unity provides an excellent rejoinder to the overblown rhetoric that shrouds that particular hodgepodge of nations. French North Africa, including Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, is alive with nationalistic agitation and occasional violence.

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. There is only so much justice nine-hundred pages can do, but it certainly beats Inside Asia, which while not a bad book certainly feels lightweight considering the subject. While publicly a bon vivant and modest celebrity, Gunther in his private life suffered disappointment and tragedy. 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. He loves interviewing major figures himself, and in fact my major criticism of the book is that too many pages were spent detailing the time Gunther spent with Dr.He doesn't like describing places that he hasn't visited and goes to the extent of apparently being the the first non-Portuguese to ever ask the government to visit the Fort of St. slight fading to spine, slight usage soiling to covers, small pencil mark half-title page, otherwise book clean and tight. Africans were free to become fully fledged Portuguese citizens, the catch of course being that very few met the qualifications. This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.