Volume 8, Number 4 · March 9, 1967
Absolute Beginners
By Roland Oliver
Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision
by Georges Balandier
Pantheon, 276 pp., $5.95
False Start in Africa
by René Dumont
Praeger, 320 pp., $7.00
Africa's Search for Identity
by Victor C. Ferkiss
Braziller, 346 pp., $6.50
Here at last are English translations from the French of two of the most famous books on Africa published in recent years. Balandier is a sociologist, and his book is a very attractive, largely autobiographical by-product of his professional field notes. His investigations were pursued in Senegal and Guinea, Gabon and Congo Brazzaville, and among communities as various as the fishermen of the Atlantic beaches south of Dakar, the gold-washers and miners of the Upper Niger and its tributaries, the negrillo hunter-gatherers of the forests north of Stanley Pool, and the whitecollared intelligentsia of the Brazzaville suburbs. There are striking portraits of individuals, ranging from a pagan familyhead in the remotest depths of Guinea to the French doctor in Lambarene who ended his African career shooting at empty Perrier bottles balanced on the heads of his household servants.
Review, 2036 words
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