Apes and Men
THESE two volumes provide an interesting contrast. Mr. Meik went to Nyasaland to assist in the reorganization of the
railway—in which task he was so successful that he was bom- barded by complaints from business men accustomed to the good old ways, that "Goods had developed the habit of
coming up regularly and to time " : but his real interests lay outside his work. " Chief of all the things that fascinated me was native life," he writes. Mr. Johnson, on the other band, went out to film gorillas, and apart from a short interlude with pygmies in the Ituri Forest this was the chief pre-occupation, for which an exceptionally elaborate safari had been prepared. His interest in the native- leomes second—and a very bad second at that : to Mr. Meik it provides the chief emotional release from his official duties. The two points of view are naturally reflected in the books which they have given us.
Congorilla is an interesting record of an expedition which, even if the suggestion that it traversed unknown• tribes is not strictly founded on fact, at least wandered sufficiently off the beaten track to give it an adventitious attraction. The book is a far better one than the monologue of the film led us to expect, and despite its exaggerations and occasional bombast it is eminently readable, especially when the author leaves the pygmies and gets down to his gorillas. About the latter he has some real knowledge to impart, and he does it well : of the former he knows little and, as he admittedly used " a makeshift language " (the examples of his Swahili both in the film and in the book bear this out) he could not by the nature of things have got very far with them even if he had wanted to do so. His superficial observations indeed had better not have been made, as they might –mduce readers to discredit what is really valuable in the book. We refer to such remarks as the absence•of a sense of religion and ceremonial among the pygmies, or " I do not believe that pygmies are dominated by emotions as are larger people "—as if physical size were a criterion of emotional content.
Africa makes a different kind of appeal to Mr. Meik. This is not so good a book as The People of the Leaves, in which he portrayed the intimate life of a small Indian community. There is the same appreciation of beauty and the same delicate use of words, but it is possibly just this sense of beauty which has " let him down." We feel a certain straining after effect, a deliberate- attempt to capture something elusive, which results in sentimentality or bathos. There are too many silent apostrophies conveyed by dots, too many phrases like " death dancing on the ends of his big tusks " or " the laughter that is balanced on the finger-tips of Pathos." A little more restraint would have been far more convincing. There is, too, an exaggeration of incident, of hardship, of danger, which asks too much of us, and which in the'usually bathetic denouement, as, for instance, when he slipped his " spare automatic into Eve's unaccustomed hand," telling her to keep the last for herself, prompts us to levity rather than to the appropriate mood of sympathy. Almost he falls into melodrama, and overworks his snakes and crocodiles, and mosquitoes, and the numerous perils that stalk by night.
Nevertheless this is a good book, worth reading and worth keeping. It is a book which the Portuguese will dislike, if they ever read it—and incidentally it gives a first-class picture of an official's life, with its discomforts and spells of really strenuous work, its occasional " wangles " and esca- pades, its balancing of rival interests, and particularly the contrast between British and Portuguese methods, all told lightly as a foil to the author's real enthusiasms, which lay in the country and its peoples. His descriptions of native life are good and he has a sincere regard for them, even when he fails to understand what they are driving at. His account of their rituals may be out of perspective through this misunder- standing, as when be writes that " they are Simply animal crudities in which the incest barrier is raised," but they are vivid and hold the reader by their sense of actuality. More- over, he sees the issues and the problems which confront us with a passionate clarity, just because he has to some extent got under the black skin and finds it not so black after all.
" I am no upholder of backwardness," (ho writes) " and, for my part, love the fleshpots of Egypt and the conveniences that western civilization has placed at my disposal, but I do hate unfair interference. . . . If only we were able to teach him what he were able to assimilate . . . and not to try to force him to learn in a single generation what he has been unable to grasp since the dawn of time—the tropics would be a happier place. . . . The people at home, in the smug smallness of their well-ordered conventional lives, will wake up ono day to the danger of the issue at stake in the tropics, but by then it will be too late. The others are waking up now. If only we were just in practice as well as in theory, and judged the races according to their own standards and not according to ours, it would make everything different, for we should have won the greatest psize of all—the lever with which to raise the world—Und J. H. DRIBERG.
Previous page
