Cory's Africa

AN AMERICAN VISITOR (247 pp.)--Joyce Gary--Harper ($3.95).

Most of today's countless novels about Africa offer a paraphrase of headlines, a splash of truculent social justice, and a dubbed-in romance. To see how shallow they can be, one must compare them with the late Joyce Gary's African books, which may not seem attuned to the latest news, but which even today make the news more intelligible. Gary fought in the Nigeria Regiment in World War I, later served as a magistrate dealing with the everyday crises of tribal life. Out of this experience came Mister Johnson (published in 1939), by all odds the best novel ever written about Africa, and An American Visitor (issued in 1933 but only now published in the U.S.), which is not up to Mister Johnson, but proves again that Africa reached Gary's pages through his pores.

Marie, an itinerant American journalist, might not make it in the Peace Corps today. She is of an older vintage of do-gooders, descended from Rousseau and Thoreau, firmly convinced that she sees "in a little community of naked savages the pattern of an earthly paradise." She quickly learns her mistake. The Nigerian tribes she has come to study want to be left alone, of course. Their good luck is to have an English district officer who wants the same thing. Bewsher is a typical Gary character--humane, eccentric, ready with the bottle, and just as ready to foxtrot in the midst of a mission compound. He handles his native charges with a nice mixture of cajolery, flattery and big-daddy scolding. His mistake is in thinking that because he is on their side, they are on his. The natives see only that Bewsher is white; to them it is inconceivable that he is not trying to doublecross them. When he loses his life, it is because he has persuaded Marie, by now his wife, that the best weapons are love and soft talk.

An American Visitor is something of a misnomer as a title. Marie is interesting only as an American abstraction, a believer in the view that what is savage is unspoiled. What is best in the book is its ring of truth. The natives and the British whites speak and act with absolute naturalness. Gary describes the Nigerian landscape, soldiers on the march, and a tribal attack with casual excellence. And he misses few of the ironies of a situation in which imperfect Christians try to perfect the savages.

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