Volume 36, Number 5 · March 30, 1989
Inside the Whale
By Neal Ascherson
The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places
by Nadine Gordimer, edited and with an introduction by Stephen Clingman
Knopf, 356 pp., $19.95
The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside
by Stephen R. Clingman
Allen and Unwin, 276 pp., $29.95
'Whatever happens, the hour of man has struck in Africa.' This is Nadine Gordimer traveling through the former Belgian Congo in 1960, before it became Zaire and just before tribal war and secession plunged its territories in blood. She started at the Atlantic, and made her way to the cataracts, to Leopoldville (Kinshasa), and on by river steamer for another thousand miles to Stanleyville (Kisangani). There she left the Congo River, and headed east through the Ituri forest to Kivu and the Mountains of the Moon. If she had stayed with the boats and gone up the Lualaba, she might have found another white intellectual confronting Africa, as Conor Cruise O'Brien prepared to lead UN troops against the rebellious Katangese gendarmerie.
Review, 2838 words
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