22 APRIL 1955, Page 27

Africa Stirring

MR. DAVIDSON has written an intelligent, well-documented book about the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola—the first of its kind for a long time. (Never mind, for a moment, about the 'awakening.') It will not please all Belgians or all Portuguese, not at any rate those whose job it is to produce expensive glossy representations of their respective colonial gardens, designed to lure the imaginations of foreign game - hunters, investors and journalists. But I would guess that perceptive Belgians who know their Congo would agree that the account is 90 per cent. true. After all, a large part of Mr. Davidson's material is drawn from their own admirable reports, surveys and social criticism. The section on Angola is much briefer, and turns essentially on one questitsn- how much forced, semi-servile African labour is still empR5'yed there, and under what conditions? I don't know Angola, and it is clear that Mr. Davidson had to dig hard for such information as he got; butsI should be surprised &the gloomy picture he paints of that fossilised colonial economy were not substantially accurate.

The chief merit of The African Awakening is its skilful weaving together of various threads in the history of the modern Congo the sixteenth-century kingdom, ruled over by His Catholic African Majesty, Alfonso I, of whom the Portuguese ambassador wrote to King Manuel : 'I must tell you, Sire, he studies cease- lessly and sometimes falls asleep over his books'; the new European impact in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the period of plunder and depopulation associated with the Congo Free State; the development, during the last generation, of a modern administrative system, linked with a mind-and-character- forming Church, and scientifically managed Big Business; the strange Dionysian life emerging in the great town. It is valuable to have the connections between present and past presented in this way—even if the presentation seems too fluent at times. It is a healthy antidote. to the present tendency to deify Leopold II, beatify Stanley, and forget the havoc which Europe once created in the Congo Basin. To imagine that modern conveniences have erased the memory of the injustices which Edward Morel, Frobenius and Andre Gide'attacked will not help us to understand the contemporary African attitudes.

As regards the, `awakening'—Mr. Davidson's central thesis can perhaps be crudely stated in the form of an equation: efficient industrial development=the rise of new African social classes, property-owners and proletariat (including skilled and semi- skilled workers)=nationalism and the demand for political rights. The Belgians, in Mr. Davidson's view, have grasped (much more clearly than the British in the neighbouring Rhodesian Federation) the first half of this equation, but ignore or reject the second. (The Portuguese, on the other hand, haven't yet go round to think- ing about equations at all.) The thesis seems to me probable— though one would be glad to have more evidence about nascent Congolese nationalism. It is, of course, a thesis that can be argued about. But at least it gives an intelligible framework to the book.

The African Awakening can safely be recommended to mis- sionaries, businessmen, politicians, and anyone else with an interest in the Belgian Congo who is too grown-up to be satisfied with official fairy stories as much the best available introduction in English. It is instructive, but never tedious. Its weakness is a tendency to lapse into rhetoric and an occasional blurring of the detail to fit in with the total pattern. For example, it is doubtless true in a general way that Indirect Rule—insofar as it ever existed —is dying in the Congo. But it is a misconception to say of Shamba Bolongongo that 'his dynasty has long since failed and disappeared, for Chiefs in the Congo have suffered the same destruction of authority and dignity that European domination has wrought elsewhere.' For Bolongongo's people, the Bakuba,

are one of the few peoples in the Congo where the king, and his elected Councils (supported by a highly intelligent local admini- stration) still enjoy some measure of authority. The present Lukengo is alive, regal, and magnificently polygamous.

Mr. Stoneham also has a thesis—a beautifully simple one: the origin of the troubles in Kenya is the decline of the fagging system. Other Evil Forces, of course, have been at work : the usual ones— Fabian civil servants, Protestant missionaries, female anthropolo- gists, etc. But the taproot of racial tension has been the growing tendency to make fun of the Public Schools. This has undermined the position of the Prefects, in Kenya as elsewhere. The only way out, Mr. Stoneham suggests, is apartheid—one Kenya for the Prefects, and another for the Fags.

THOMAS HODGKIN