White Magic
Black Star Rising. By Russell Warren Howe. (Herbert Jenkins, 21s.)
Ma. MORRIS has travelled through an increasingly isolated, anachronistic, telephone-tapping society and submits a record of Breughel-like figures in the Free State, surly poor-whites, the Treason Trials, liberal fighters, cabinet ministers and the 'oily indecision of the United. Party which indeed makes one ask whether Hitler were not preferable to von Papen. He sees how the Boer Wars stimulated arrogance and uncertainty at the same time. Hospitable Afrikaner Jehovahs now brood over old wrongs, drifting here and there into sheer dottiness. One such believed that the 46th Psalm proved the Baconian theory: another refused to shake hands with blacks on obscure Mendelian grounds: a third held racial colours to reflect degrees of original sin. In Kimberley, where Rhodes once signed a cheque for '0,338,650 only,' a notice reads, 'Before Starting the Winch, Operators must ensure that neither Men nor Natives are in the Vicinity.' Inevitably, the Negro dominates the book, retreat- ing into jazz, foolery, defiance and thuggism. Deschiptions of the horrible''Tot' system recall the enfeebled atmosphere of The Time Machine; the disgusting shanty-slums are the world of Jew Sass.
At one cnd of the scale are the simplest of tribesmen . . . still in thrall to magic, witchcraft, tribal ascendencies : at the other is my young couple at Sophiatown, playing Mozart over their
spaghetti and dreaming of New York. . Some of the white men . . . are undoubtedly vicious and unseeing; but others seem to be playing parts in an inevitable drama, moved neither to pity nor cruelty, like insects that appear to feel no pain, or soldiers deadened by some terrible experience.
Dedicated to apartheid, it is the Whites who are now in thrall to magic. From their 'fears and obsessions a 'terrible beauty' and worse must surely be born: After a certain point appeals either to conscience or to self-interest simply cease to work and poet and psychologist alike are ignored by the bigoted almighty politician. Mr. Morris has to await a miracle : his middle-of-the way values will doubtless irritate an age in which the extreme Right sent half Europe back to the deserts of the Thirty Years War, and the extreme Left exists on a morality that strangles men after a safe-conduct.
The second book, on West Africa, is more encouraging. The Zimbabwe ruins, the Dahomey Renaissance, genetic and forensic research—they have all shattered the myth of inherent Negro incapacity, so useful for Christian slavers. An important Negro civilisation flourished at the time of Diocletian and old Ghana influenced the entire Mediterranean world. Mr. Howe maintains that, historically, Negro cruelty was merely less refined than European, and everyday West African mor- ality rather higher. He has travelled in Dahomey, Togo and Ghana (about which he is reassuring) and observed not the exotic but the significant political change. Informative and shrewd, he sharply analyses French policy, reduces fetish- ism to proper perspective and confirms that 'Colonial attitudes, even more than exploitation, have created the Bandung world.' Like Dr. Nkrumah he foresees a United States of Africa in which, to adapt one of Dr. Vervoerd's more acceptable sayings, Europeans will not be toler- ated below certain levels of conduct.
PETER VANSITTART
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