NO SWEETNESS HERE

Miss Aidoo's simple stories do more than many more strenuous efforts to make contemporary African experience accessible to outsiders. Her sphere is the personal, where independence and Westernization are felt more often than understood in terms of small hopes and inexplicable disappointments. A former soldier becomes a colonial's steward because there is no other work; but self-government can't dissolve the habit of calling white employers ""master,"" and nationalist abstractions can't make up for the water-closet and electric bulb he doesn't get. A village grandmother is terrified by news of her daughter-in-law's Caesarian section, and a radical woman professor remembers, too late, how she argued that silky wigs were irrelevant to the revolution. At opposite extremes, these are both examples of the intercultural mystification that Miss Aidoo understands only too well, in all its subtlety. Her touch is light but sure, and her audience, though small, will be well rewarded.