Safari of a People Watcher

TOURIST IN AFRICA (201 pp.)--Evelyn Waugh--Little, Brown ($3.75).

"As happier men watch birds, I watch men." confesses Evelyn Waugh, and in this account of two months of African travel early last year, he is as good as his word. His collector's eye for the gaudier human specimens and his ear for the strange sounds they utter are as sharp as ever. As for the prose: in the present sellers' market, no man writes English better.

Fictioneer Outdone. Evelyn Waugh is no newcomer to the chattering kraal of African commentary. It is 30 years now since the young, not yet famous writer packed his traps for the Dark Continent. It seemed a pointless excursion at the time, but he was convinced that Europe was entering on a phase of barbarism, at the very moment the African races believed that they were emerging from it. The perception of that parallel lay at the heart of Waugh's satiric genius. His Bright Young People--the Mayfair savages of his English novels--were tribal kin to his jungle primitives.

What Waugh offers in his current jottings of his African jaunt, mainly in Kenya, Tanganyika and the Rhodesias, is really a novelist's notebook, full of swiftly sketched scenes and characters who. not surprisingly, speak like people in Waugh fiction. There are astute little studies of key figures in African history, including Cecil Rhodes, an empire builder for whose financial chicanery and ''Anglo-Saxon'' racialism Waugh expresses intense distaste, and the tragic Lobengula, last king of the Matabele. for whom he has intense admiration. And there is a truly Waugh-like figure. "Bishop" Homer A. Tomlinson of New York, self-styled "King of the World," whose self-coronation in Dar-es-Salaam. Tanganyika, with the aid of a plastic terrestrial globe, was witnessed by an awed Waugh--the fictioneer outdone by the actually absurd.

Zanier than Azania. As usual, Waugh is his own best character, full of a fascinating collection of human quirks, crotchets and quaverings. The most notable and characteristic scene in the book is the one where Tourist Waugh is induced to address a secretarial class at a Tanganyika commercial school on the subject of how to write English. Reports Waugh: "Like a P. G. Wodehouse hero I gazed desperately at the rows of dark, curious faces. 'Well.' I said. 'well. I have spent fifty-four years trying to learn English and I find I still have recourse to the dictionary almost every day. English.' I said, warming a little to my subject, 'is incomparably the richest language in the world. There are two or three quite distinct words to express every concept, and each has a subtle difference of nuance.' This clearly was not quite what was required. Consternation was plainly written on all the faces . . . 'What Mr. Waugh means,' said the teacher, 'is that English is very simple really. You will not learn all the words.

You can make your meaning clear if you know a few of them.' " Here is the full Waugh personality--a formidable yet anomalous, even ridiculous figure who wishes the reader to understand that he is always misunderstood. What lends special weight and irony to the book is the recollection of some of Waugh's earlier travel memoirs--They Were Still Dancing (Haile Selassie's coronation in 1930) and Waugh in Abyssinia, followed by two luxuriantly comic novels, Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938). These books can be read today as textbook diagrams of the means by which Waugh, using the common tactics of a journalist, can lend some life to the dead stuff of experience--and then, turning artist, work the magic trick by which the same material becomes something rich and strange, with a life of its own. Though on this trip Waugh was in Africa at the wrong place and time to observe the goings-on in Leopoldville. he must have been aware, as he wrote his book, that some of the more bizarre shenanigans in Black Mischief's fictional Azanian Empire were being acted out a generation later in real life.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.