Struggle for Africa. By Vernon Bartlett. (Frederick Muller. 15s.) Struggle
for Africa. By Vernon Bartlett. (Frederick Muller. 15s.)
MR. BARTLETT mentions that Africa is the natural hinterland of Europe. This is true, but his subject is of greater importance because Africa is a mental and political hinterland too, a comfortable cultural annexe to the European mind, an enclave, peculiar to Europeans, from the world of power politics. In peopling this continent Mr. Bartlett quite kills negligent optimism towards African racial problems by giving them an intractable ordinariness. Problem after problem is presented calmly but with never an offer of escape. This tour of human Africa is of value to the general reader, but he cannot achieve it without some strain, because the author arrives at his judgments by subtracting from a perfection he might hope to find, rather than by the more en- couraging path of adding up the merits he does find. This and his maintenance of impartiality between African, Indian and European opinions by means of equal blame give the book a sense of negativeness. He does not attempt to decide the significance of the fears he arouses—on the one hand that Africans have an innate inaptitude for the initiative necessary for the development of an artisan class, and, on the other hand, that educated Africans sometimes do not show sufficient proof of a sense of responsibility. Both these fears surely are of first importance in a consideration of the problems of racial partnership ; and such partnership the author concludes is the only course open to Euro-
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