Gringo and his Brothers
Illampu. By Halms Radau. (Abelard-Schuman, 12s. 6(1.) Master of the Elephants. By Rene Guillot. (O.U.P., 10s. 6d.) The Young Traveller in China Today. By James Bertram. (Phcenix, I Is. 6d.) The Navajo. By Sonia Bleeker. (Dobson, 8s. 6d.) The Fifth Wheel. By Moshe Shamir. (Bodley Head, 9s. 6d.)
THE modern Western European conscience at its most noble can best be observed in a children's bookshop. There the liberal parent stands, turn- ing over the pages of a charming book about the devoted friendship of a white boy for a black one: if only, he agonises, my parents had given me books like this! I might have been spared a lifelong self-consciousness at the sight of a negro, have accepted him as my brother without that permanent slight hesitation! His children, he swears, shall accept without hesita- tion of any kind at all, and as he takes the charming book to be wrapped he moves with thz. confidence of a man who knows he is helping to build a better world.
Of the large number of books (ostensibly for children) aimed at such a parent, Illampa is a splendid example. It is about a Bolivian Indian and his white llama. The boy's life is saved by a gringo doctor, he goes to Copacabana for the festival, he shoots a jaguar: but the climax of the book is when he is led by an old gringo to a sort of Andean Eden, where animals of all kinds graze. All that was best in colonialism is here transformed into a single-handed Peace Corps: fulfilling his side of the relationship, the Indian boy offers a return to innocence. Mawr' is per- fectly suitable for imaginative children as well as adults, being a scrupulously unpatronising ac- count of Bolivian Indian life, with most attrac- tive drawings by Heiner Rothfuchs.
Master of the Elephants is set in the Upper Ivory Coast,'where the Lobi tribe lives. Fofana, a mysterious and powerful Lobi boy, makes friends with Jean-Luc, a French boy whose father runs a plantation. Fofana's innocence is primal, he can communicate with the jungle animals, and it becomes his duty, as the new master of the elephants, to persuade these eco- nomically and religiously significant animals to
cross the Volta and pass through the Lobi lands: otherwise they will go through the lands of the trans-Voltan tribes. In the performance of this literal and symbolical duty. Fofana takes Jean-Luc with him: the initiation of the French boy into the language of the elephants is superbly told by M. Rene Guillot, and another example of the gringo being granted innocence as a result of helping his primitive brother: Jean-Luc has saved Fofana from the iron- masters at the beginning of the hook. Strongly recommended
The Young Traveller m China Today has such an ill-managed plot that at times one is distracted from the interesting things it has to say about Mao's China. Alan Kennedy, who has just left school, is searching for his sister, who dis- appeared as a baby during the advance of the Communists. With an uncle's help he finds her, and at once goes to spend four months with the Chengtu Volunteers, building a dam for a back- ward village. Mr. Bertram makes his hero easily bored with ideological argument and there are a great many questions begged here which an ordinarily intelligent schoolboy will find irritat- ing. However, the glimpse of modern Chinese youth is rewarding, and the quick scamper through the great cities makes one want to go East, young man.
It there is uneasiness in Mr. Bertram's account of the Chinese situation, there is a frank ad- mission of colonial guilt in Miss Bleeker's story of The Navajo. Slim Runner has tuberculosis and is cured by the white doctors (the theme is obsessional in this type of book) so that he can be a sand-painter. But after the simple account of Navajo life conies an appendix with the brief history of what the United States did to the tribe, and if 1 was Slim Runner I think I'd get off the reservation : no one can really be trusted. Only Americans write so freely and openly about their colonial shame, it should be noted. And, of course, there was a lot of American pressure behind the formation of the great liberal anti- colony : Israel. The Fifth Wheel is about the odd-job boy on a kibbutz who has to fetch a tractor from Haifa and the misfortunes which befall him on the way. Since this is a Jewish book, the jokes are sometimes very funny, and there is a truck-driving Bible-quiz contestant whO cries out to be played on the screen by an Israeli Fernandel. The kibbutzniks sound slightly like public-schoolboys at times, but mirth generally abounds.
JULIAN MITCHELL
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