WITH FORKS AND HOPE: An African Notebook

To travel inside East Africa with Elspeth Huxley is to be attuned to both the changing ways of the land and people and the changeless joys of nature. In an absorbing record of her encounters and findings that has, thankfully, none of the sketchy or superficial about it that so many would-be observers offer, she reveals much of Africa's beauty and yields much information about its life. She traversed Tanganyika, Kenya and Uganda between February and May of 1963; her observations are of this period and these places. In each country she visited the game preserves, noted the problems raised when the needs of human beings conflicted with those of wild animals, or when the habitat was threatened by incursion, change, drought, overpopulation. She visited the Leakeys at Olduvai, the Adamsons at Isiolo. She spoke with Nyerere. Her comments on the political organization and functioning of the countries are careful and revealing, as she discusses the leading parties and men. There emerges from her writing a sense of an Africa which has gained ""Freedom From"" without yet deciding what its freedom is for, (she fears that Pan Africanism may direct itself to its detriment to the militant, anti-Portugal, anti-South Africa rather than developing economically and socially); and a sense of the loss and waste which has occurred in the turnover from the colonists (particularly in farming and forestry here) to the Africans. Candor, understanding and concern speak well here.