Three out of Africa

If most U.S. readers still think of Africa as the Dark Continent, it is not for lack of light thrown by books. Three new volumes prove again that Africa holds the raw materials of great literature--for any first-rate writer who will undertake to mold them.

Camara Laye is a young Negro from French Guinea, now studying in Paris, who has written a brief, effective autobiography, THE DARK CHILD (188 pp.; Noonday Press; $2.75). It has an aura of primitive charm that is fully matched by its simple dignity. Laye came from Kouroussa, a town in the interior, where his father was a famous goldsmith. The town was near the railroad and had a hospital and schools, but its inhabitants believed in spirits and magic spells, although they were Moslems. Laye is firmly convinced that his mother had magic powers, tells how even the witch doctors feared her and the crocodiles refused to attack her. When he left home to go to school, she gave him a magic brain potion to sip before he began to study. It consisted of honey mixed with the water used to wash Koran texts from prayer boards. The stuff must have worked because Laye wound up first in his class. His childhood memoir is eloquent proof that even gifted young Africans have not yet cut the umbilical cord binding them to traditions that were old when Stanley presumed he had met Livingstone.

J. A. Hunter is a white man whose love of Africa is different from Camara Laye's, but probably no less intense. He came there as one of the earliest professional white hunters and his TALES OF THE AFRICAN FRONTIER [written with Daniel Mannix; 308 pp.; Harper; $4) is highly satisfying armchair-adventure stuff. Hunter's heroes are African pioneers. A good example of the breed is Colonel Ewart Grogan, now 80 and living in Kenya, who started in 1898 to walk from the Cape of Good Hope to the Sudan to map out a railroad route dreamed of by Cecil Rhodes. He made it in a year after hardships that make climbing Everest seem like a lark. Driving off a party of cannibals, Grogan captured two of the women and a couple of children, all emaciated. Complained one of the ladies: "Things are very hard with us ... in the last week, our men have only been able to catch two people."

No professional Africa hand, but a good observing traveler, is Esther Warner. Her SEVEN DAYS To LOMALAND (269 pp.; Houghton Mifflin; $3.50) is the story of a seven-day hike she made across Liberia to witness the native trial-by-ordeal of a houseboy accused of thievery. Her account is charming and clear-eyed.

At one point, she suspected that the local native trader was running a backroom brothel in his shop: behind a curtain, "there was laughter and low moaning and exclamations of surprise and delight." As it turned out. the trader was simply charging admission for a look at U.S. magazines. The Atlantic Monthly "is not worth even one peanut with a worm inside." The New Yorker and Esquire were in some demand. "Sometimes a copy of TIME was acceptable and sometimes it was not. The one sure way to open the cornucopia of the back room was to produce an issue of LIFE.'' Explained the trader: "It costs one copper for anyone to stand there while the sand runs through the small hole in the bottom of my timekeeper gourd ... I am the only man in this village who can read words, but anyone can read pictures."

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