Picked-Up Pieces (54 page)

—C
YPRIAN
E
KWENSI
,
novelist, short story writer

W
HICH
T
RIBE
D
O
Y
OU
B
ELONG
T
O
?, by Alberto Moravia, translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson. 218 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.

B
Y THE
E
VIDENCE
, by L. S. B. Leakey. 276 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

A
LPHABETICAL
A
FRICA
, by Walter Abish. 152 pp. New Directions, 1974.

“Africa, that repetitive, bewildering continent in which everything is reiterated until one’s ordinary sense of reality reels and one is thrown into stupefied, visionary states of mind”—thus Alberto Moravia describes the geographical enigma that, over nine years’ time, beguiled him into making five sub-Saharan journeys, which produced thirty-eight journalistic essays now collected under the too perky title of
Which Tribe Do You Belong To?
The first trip, taking him across Central Africa from Accra to Nairobi in the spring and summer of 1963, produced the most exhilarating impressions and most sweeping theories; the second, during which he was attached to a crew making a film on Tanzania for Italian television, encountered more misadventures (thefts, delays, quarrels with the natives, perilous plane landings) and evoked essays more
disgruntled and problematical; the third, fourth, and fifth, touring the hinterlands of black Africa in the early seventies, show considerable traveller’s fatigue and exasperation with the monotony, the impoverished sameness, the “oppressive and melancholy” lakes, the “tangled, evil bush country,” the “red, obscene cones of anthills,” the fleas, the bribes, “the wide prairies enlivened by the despairing gestures of dropsical baobabs.” By the book’s last incident (Moravia photographs some “truly peculiar women” in Chad and is scolded by “three young men, probably students, reproaching us with nationalist severity”), the impressionable fancy of this highly alert traveller seems defeated by the inexhaustible drabness of what he sees. Moravia, who has composed a fresh, even impudent book about his tour of Red China, is one of the best travel writers in the world; in English only V. S. Pritchett can match his sharpness of phrase and flair for generalization. Before the muddled, stubborn refusal by everything save the animals to be picturesque gets to him, he says a number of beautiful things about the Dark Continent and its inhabitants:

Anthropologically unprejudiced as only a European confident in his superiority could be, Moravia finds what is specifically African in the thinly populated immensity, in the landscapes that repeat “a single theme or motif [such as the acacia tree] to the point of terror,” in the transnational tribalism centering on the market towns, in the “frenzy for trading” that makes Africans “one of the most contriving races in the world,” in the African’s unique success at “becoming a modern man while still preserving intact his original dancing capacity,” and in the fact—apparent, as of 1963, in the shining and incongruous commercial buildings of the African cities—“that, whereas the red star of Communism shines over Asia, it is … the white star of neo-capitalism that gleams over Africa.”

The crisp first impressions lose some starch in the later travels. Moravia’s initial sense that Africa, “a great natural space, swarming with tribes but devoid of nationality,” is destined to become one of “the great continental countries such as India, China, the United States, or the Soviet Union” runs up against the obstinate fact that the Africans cling to the institutions and arbitrary national boundaries created in Europe. The Nigerian civil war of 1967–70 represents for Moravia “a symbolic contest … between two different conceptions of nationality, the one previous to colonialism, the other subsequent to it. The defeat of Biafra was the defeat of the tribal conception.” And he admits to difficulty, as he moves through the open market of Fort Lamy, in imagining the traders “no longer unoccupied and on the alert but efficient and rational, sitting at European desks in bureaucratic offices.” Some of Moravia’s perceptions, like the things perceived, repeat to the point of monotony; the image of a red-dirt road as a bloody wound recurs close to a dozen times. But his eye remains basically attentive, his attention basically loving; some of the best pieces (few more than six pages long) are among the last, as he wanders from Timbuktu to the Mountains of the Moon. He combines the passive, even dazed traveller’s receptivity to random detail with the thinker’s determination to
see through
—to observe, as it were, aggressively. His essays not only describe to us wonders we will never visit, they tell some of us who were there what it is we saw.

Sitting in a posh hotel in Mombasa, Moravia observes across the dining room a tableful of specimens of “homo Victorianus”—a species extinct in Europe but surviving in Kenya:

To a passing traveller, the late Louis S. B. Leakey might have seemed such—one of those white men whose whiteness, in the Kenyan highlands, had become self-cherishing, muscular, clever, and brutal. His memoir
By the Evidence
savors of the satisfied adventurer, of spacious opportunities ingeniously and unapologetically seized. It was Leakey, of course, who perceived the depth of human prehistory that lay beneath the sunstruck gorges and dried lake beds of East Africa, and who seized the opportunity to verify Darwin’s intuition that Africa had been the cradle of humankind. With his discovery, in 1959, of the Zinjanthropus skull, a hominid fragment nearly two million years old, Leakey became the most famous paleoanthropologist of his time.
By the Evidence
is subtitled
Memoirs, 1932–51
, and was meant to be the middle volume of an autobiographical trilogy. The initial installment was
White African—
published in England in 1937, in the United States in 1966. The third volume, because of Leakey’s death, of a heart attack the very day after he had completed
By the Evidence
, is now never to be written. The book in hand tells, then, of neither his epochal, career-vindicating discovery nor of his extraordinary African upbringing.
By the Evidence
chronicles his settled middle years, between the ages of thirty and fifty. Too much of it is concerned with the organizational trivia surrounding such promotional triumphs as the 1947 Pan-African Congress of Prehistory; Leakey kept a journal, and our passage through his days sometimes plods. On the other hand, he is intriguingly terse on personal matters; his marriage to Frida Avern, he tells us, literally in parenthesis, “had, regrettably, broken up” while he was roughing it in the bush with Mary Nicol, who becomes Mary Leakey a few pages later. There is more revealed of the man in
White African
—regarded by the author, too lightly, as a “pot-boiler.”

Leakey was born, his first memoir tells us, in 1903 of missionary parents
in a mud-and-thatch hut in Kabete, eight miles from Nairobi, then itself “little more than a scattered collection of corrugated-iron bungalows, and offices, gathered for convenience round the railway station.” Born prematurely, he was swathed in cotton wool, and had to be kept dry not only from rain leaking through the thatch but from the saliva of Kikuyu visitors, who believed spitting to be an anti-curse courtesy. In the isolated mission outpost, Leakey and his siblings learned Kikuyu along with English, and all his life he dreamed in Kikuyu. He was initiated into the tribe, with full rites, as “Wakaruigi, son of the Sparrow-hawk.” His playmates, the games they played, the bedtime stories he heard, were all African. Though his family several times made the long trip back to England, the boy found himself, when he entered British public school, in 1919, painfully disadvantaged—unfamiliar with cricket, accustomed to playing football barefooted, incapable of swimming (crocodiles discourage this recreation in Africa), innocent of Greek and of firsthand encounter with the theatre, yet habituated to an independence improper for English schoolboys: at the age of thirteen, in accordance with Kikuyu custom, he had built himself a house and begun to live in it alone; at English boarding school he was required to get permission to go shopping, and to wear a straw hat and dark suit on a Sunday country walk. So his outlook was biased rather differently from the conventional “homo Victorianus,” colonial subspecies; on his digs he insisted, to the scandal of Kenyan white settlers, on both digging beside his “boys” and carrying water with them. His imperfect indoctrination into European ways not only made his schooling awkward (at Cambridge he was rebuked for playing tennis in shorts and a sort of bush jacket) but may account for an abrasiveness that rubs through the memoirist’s civil manners, for his unseemly delight in academic contests, which he always wins, and for the earthiness and voracity of his scientific approach.

For instance, in
By the Evidence
he heartily advises all would-be zoologists, “Always, as a matter of routine, examine the stomach contents of any dead animal to which you have access,” and by way of illustration relates with a zest not quite infectious his own delighted discoveries of “a mass of water beetles” in the stomach of a giant pangolin, of millipedes and centipedes inside a civet, of cucumber seeds and red biting ants in an aardvark, and of “bracelets, beads, necklaces, and many other indisputable indications of the human meals that had been eaten” inside
a crocodile he has shot. There is something savage about Leakey’s resourcefulness—he tells us how to replace a broken car spring with strips of green hardwood and freshly skinned goat hide—and uncanny about his luck. “Leakey’s luck” was a phrase coined by his rival prehistorians. On holiday in England, he was approached by a neighbor about some flakes of flint in one of his fields; though the spot had been snubbed by British archaeologists, Leakey opportunely dug, and uncovered, he tells us, “an example of the earliest known dwelling anywhere in England.” The casual skills proclaimed in this volume range from dog judging to handwriting analysis, of both the English and the Gujarati scripts. He displays by his own account authoritative expertness in museum curatorship, ornithology, the care of sick animals, the primitive art of string figures. During the war he functions as spy, broadcaster in African languages, graphologist, even footprint castmaker. Some of his sentences are downright comic in their bustle of enterprise:

But there was nothing comic, or especially lucky, about the archaeological discoveries that are Leakey’s main accomplishment. From the age of twelve, when he began to collect obsidian arrowheads lying about Kabete, he had a passionate, rather patriotic faith in East Africa’s richness for the study of Man’s prehistory. The Zinjanthropus skull came to light after thirty years, off and on, of “crawling up and down … with eyes barely inches from the ground.” The spot in the Olduvai Gorge where Zinjanthropus was found is marked by a plaque, and can be reached through a little detour off the main road from the Serengeti Plain to the Ngorongoro Crater; it has become a tourist spot. But even now it seems lonely and barren and strange; a few orange-cloaked Masai herdsmen wander in the middle distance as if the immensities of African
space were still untroubled. The great, lovable antagonist of Leakey’s memoirs (and the first volume more vividly conveys this than does the second) is African space. The difficulty of getting there, of nursing machines through roadless terrain, of locating water sources in a geologically parching land, of finding a significant bone in an ocean of rubble—against such odds Leakey, no mere scientist, looms as a hero.

African space of another kind, and patience of a more literary sort, figure in Walter Abish’s remarkable, ludicrously programmatic novel
Alphabetical Africa
. The adventure Mr. Abish has set himself is to compose a novel of twice twenty-six chapters, of which the first employs only words beginning with “A,” the second words beginning with “A” and “B,” and so on up to “Z,” by which time the full lexical possibilities of the English language are available; then, from “Z” to “A,” he moves back down the alphabet, subtracting letters one by one until the last chapter, like the first, is composed entirely of words beginning with “A.” The hardships of such a journey should not be underestimated; “A” brings with it a handy number of articles and connectives, but not until “H” is reached can the pronoun “he” and the helper verb “have” be used, and for all but the fourteen chapters between “T” and “T” such virtually indispensable formations as “the,” “to,” “they,’ “their,” and “this” must be dispensed with. A character called Queen Quat cannot appear until after the middle of the ascending alphabet is reached, and must perish on the downhill side when her letter vanishes. Fortunately, Mr. Abish’s style, even when unhampered by artificial constraints, is rather chastened and elliptic, so his fettered progress is steadier than you might imagine. Here is a paragraph from the first chapter: