Today's West Africa

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30366, 15 February 1964, Page 3

Today's West Africa

The Tomorrow Tamer. By Margaret Laurence. Macmillan. 244 pp.

The publishers of this book claim it to be one of the best collections of short stories to have been published for many years. This is a bold but not idle claim, for this collection of 10 stories paints an accurate and highly-mov-ing picture of today’s- West Africa. Here we see the contrasts between old and new, flashy neon lighting and modern cars side by side with markets still -selling magic potions, the conflict of the new Africa “spiv” and the old fetish priest, and the readjustment of both African and European to a rapidly changing environment. These stories are not so much concerned with political and social change as with individuals, but it is through the lives of these very ordinary people that something of the changing West African pattern can be seen.

In “The Drummer of all the World” we see the close friendship of a European and an African boy growing up together in the old West Africa, followed by their estrangement in later years through the European’s nostalgic love for the old Africa that has gone and the African’s adoption of many of the less worthy traits of western civilisation The European community of the old West Africa contained many to whom life elsewhere was unthinkable and whose necessary adjustment to the new order is difficult and painful. “The Perfume Sea" tells the moving story of Mr Archipelago, whose flourishing but antiquated beauty parlour is rapidly running downhill with the withdrawal of the European population, but is saved by the slow realisation of the hitherto unthinkable idea that African women are really no different from their white counterparts in at least this one field of feminine endeavour. In “The Merchant of Heaven,” Brother Lemon, an American evangelist, finds that the purveying of salvation is not the simple matter he once imagined. Kofie, in the title story of the book, succeeds in taming to-morrow for his village; but learns of himself as a separate person too abruptly and too late. In “The Rain Child” we share the anguish of a young African girl who has grown up in England and who cannot accept Africa as her

home. “Godman’s Master” is a horror story of a dwarf who enslaved and imprisoned in a box as an oracle to a fetish priest, discovers on his escape that there is more to freedom than not living in a box. “A Fetish for Love” clearly underlines the vast difference between European and African marital relationships. “The Pure Diamond Man” is the arousing story of Tettah, a product of his time —an African “wide boy.” As tragedy in the classical tradition we are given “The Voices of Adamo,” in which Adamo, growing up in an isolated village, is severed from his tribe, and seeks, with tragic consequences, a substitute tribe in the Army. Finally in “A Gourdful of Glory,” Mammii Ama, a buxom and warm-hearted market woman, sees unexpectedly another meaning of Free-Dom when the anticipated happy time of free busrides fails to materialise. This collection of remarkable stories, which are full of life and colour, have the common theme of growth, not so much of community but of individuals, Independence is meaningless without that inner freedom which is emancipation from fear, and recognition by the individual of his own worth and the reality and worth of others. It is clearly this inner revolution which is a major driving force in West Africa today and which accounts for so much of what is happening there which the Western World in its ivory tower of self-styled higher civilisation finds both laughable and tragic. Margaret Laurence’s deep understanding of this situation cannot be too highly recommended, especially if, in reading, we learn not to scoff and deride through ignorance the forces that are setting the pace of the most rapid evolution that the world has ever known.