First Africa
The Prehistory of Southern Africa. By J. Desmond Clark. (Pelican Books, 6s.)
'ONE good thing about stone implements is that they don't want the vote.' Attributed (no doubt falsely) to Field-Marshal Smuts, this saying is occasionally quoted to explain why in Southern Africa archaeology flourishes more than the study of present-day tribal life. The real reason, prob- ably, is the remarkable profusion and diversity of the country's prehistoric relics: fossil man-apes and extinct types of man, three succeskive Stone Ages followed directly by an Iron Age, rock paint- ings and engravings of many styles, Zimbabwe and other stone ruins, and even traces of early gold-mining activities. The sub-continent haS indeed 'much to contribute to the knowledge of the history of the human race,' and very many workers have taken part in discovering and describing those contributions.
Dr. Desmond Clark, Director of the Rhodes- Livingstone Museum in Northern Rhodesia, has now attempted the difficult task of summarising their findings for the general reader. The only other book of the same kind was published by Miles Burkitt more than thirty years ago, since which time so many important discoveries have been made that a new synthesis was badly needed. On the whole it is very well done. The detailed descriptions of stone implement industries, though,, of course essential, are (perhaps inevitably) not easy for the non-specialist to follow. The chap- ters on fossil remains, daily life in the Stone Ages, and pictorial art are happily less technical; the discussion, of rock paintings and engravings (by no means always of Bushman origin) is in fact the best popular introduction yet written about this fascinating aspect of South African prehistory.
Dr. Clark is less successful in showing how the present-day native peoples—Bushmen, Hottentots, Bergdama, and Bantu—fit into the stdry. But that is not his fault. It is still controversial, for example, whether the Bushmen came from East Africa or originated in the South; and physical anthropolo- gists claim to have identified so many different strains in each of the four main groups of peoples as to make it obvious only that apartheid and the concept of 'racial purity' are decidedly very recent phenomena in the 40,000 years or more of human existence in South Africa.
The book is well illustrated with maps, photo- graphs and text figures, and contains an admirable list of references for further reading.
I. SGHAPERA
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