AFRICAN HORIZONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 790, 10 September 1954, Page 14

AFRICAN HORIZONS

THE NEW WEST AFRICA, by F. Le Gros Clark and others, edited by Basil Davidson and Adenenkan Ademala, with an introduction by Ritchie Calder; Allen and Unwin, Enfglish price 15/-. [t used to be said that the British Empire was mainly brown. More recently the Commonwealth itself has become also mainly brown. But soon it will probably have an important section of black-for shortly there will be two more self-governing countries in the Commonwealth -the West African countries of the Gold Coast and Nigeria, which together have a. population greater than the total of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. We need this book and many more like it-that is, if the white electorates in the Commonwealth are to retain the sympathy of the brown and black electorates. We are fortunate that the brown and the black have a capacity to forget and forgive and this itself is a challenge to the older self-governing parts of the Commonwealth. With revolution in Asia and comparatively peaceful constitutional change in Africa, our world has so altered that ‘very great readjustments are needed in our emotional and mental horizons’ (if indeed they can be separated) in order to cope with a world where material power and high standards of living for those of Western European descent. are combined with the political power and drive of peoples who yesterday were colonials. The book itself is readable and thought-provoking. Even if we do not

meet the challenge of the emerging countries of West Africa, it will serve to remind us that in 1066 West Africa had schools and universities, commerce, art and organised government, and that when Leo Africanus in 1526 revisited West Africa he wrote that in Timbuktu there was a "great store of doctors, judges, priests and other learned men. . . And hither are brought divers manuscripts or written books out of Barbary, which are sold for more money than any other merchandise."

W.B.

S.