AFRICAN VIEWS OF THE WEST

From the first ""Coming of the Pink Cheeks"" to the years of humiliation under colonial bureaucrats like ""Miss Pringle"" to the political philosophies of Nyere, Nkrumah, Toure and Kaunda -- a spectrum of African opinions on Westerners and on the future of relations between newly independent African nations and their former colonizers. As the editor's introduction suggests, the selections reflect less cultural and geographic diversity than their counterparts in Impact: Asian Views of the West (1971), but they do vary according to their authors own backgrounds -- a traditional wife bitterly rebukes her western-educated husband in the powerful ""Song of Lawino"" while others, like Jones in a short story by Abioseh Nicol, admire the sense of order epitomized by London's system of traffic signals. However, the attractions of a European education are most frequently accompanied by a deep-seated dread of becoming a ""black white man."" The more numerous and generally shorter entries here add additional background to the dramatic, fictional and autobiographical accounts found in Ojigbo's Young and Black in Africa (1971) and the experience of seeing ourselves through the eyes of another culture proves both an uncomfortably amusing and highly educative experience.