by
Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.
The Africans, by David Lamb, New York, Random House, 1982, 363 pp. $17.95, Hardcover.
********************
I wrote this critical book review in 1985 as a young Ph. D, student. Have my views changed 30 years later?
David Lamb, author and journalist, opens the book with a bang whose reverberations might remind the reader of the typical modern “Hollywood” plots or reminiscences of the diaries of early European colonial explorers in Africa. There is only one exception; the modern technology – alas, the little that still works in Africa – enables him to travel virtually the whole of Africa in four years during the late 1970s.
In the introduction, Lam places the proverbial carrot in front of the reader’s eyes. What book about Africa can be “good” without droughts, death, wars, ignorance, massacres, superstition, coup d’états, political turmoil, contradictions and other juicy alleged excesses that can tantalize any reader? Lamb though, claims he is only trying to answer the question; “What is Africa and who are the Africans?” Lamb further summarizes what he found or discovered in Africa and how he did it. From his base in Nairobi, Kenya, he travelled 300,000 miles by air, road and rail through 48 Sub-Saharan African countries including South Africa. He talked to presidents, villagers, university professors, guerilla leaders and many others.
From the opening chapter, the details about Africa begin to unfold and in some cases spill out. For example, in the first chapter, Lamb describes the “portrait of a continent”. In it the reader learns about impoverishment in Guinea-Bissau, the growing Sahara desert, poor farming, lack of population control because of ignorance and superstition. “Only Gabon, in West Africa, has managed to achieve population stability – largely because 30 percent of the women have venereal disease.”(p. 18) Over Two Hundred thousand Hutus were massacred in 1972 by the Watusi because of tribal conflict. According to Lamb, there are only four black African countries where there has been political stability and meaningful economic development; Kenya, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and Malawi. The book has a total of 18 brief chapters that address issues such as “Collision of Past and Present”, “The Ghost of Idi Amin”, “The Colonial Heritage”, and “Culture Shock.”
A politically astute reader all along is anxious to lean about the political hot potato; the racist South African society. He rightly devotes an entire chapter to this matter. He describes the high level of economic development and at the same time the racial polarization. He predicts the blood shed that will occur unless South Africa eliminates its racist policies.
This book contains mountains of information which, if carefully sifted, should be useful particularly for the African, the Africanist and those in the black diaspora who wish to search for positive changes in the progress, knowledge and understanding of the African continent as a part of humanity. There are myriad useful facts about African economies, politics, social characteristics, tragic problems and contradictions that seem unique to the continent and its individuals.
But unfortunately, this useful information is shrouded in tints of outrageous anecdotes that should be dismissed as largely garbage by most intelligent readers. For example, sex is perhaps the most emotion laden and sensational issue in the human contemporary civilization. When David Lamb states that population control in Gabon has been achieved because 30 percent of the women have venereal disease is to deliberately open a can of worms whether his statement is “objective” or not. In this and other curious sexual and other innuendo and unwarranted generalizations, one cannot fail to see the grim cultural ethnocentric implications of the anecdotes.
The author in numerous instances projects serious contradictions which he erroneously attributes to the African inhabitants but which clearly reside in the author’s own intellect. For example, Lamb claims that the more he stayed in Africa the less he understood the African character. (p.234) “But the African often becomes a deepening mystery.” (p. 235) But in many volumes of words, he tells the reader in very clear and strong words devoid of any tinge of hesitancy what the African is all about.
Also, Lamb claims that Africans have resilience which “extends beyond any logical human limits”; crops fail, children die, “his government can treat him grievously and still carries on, uttering no protest, sharing no complaints”. (p. 235) At the same time Lamb devotes a whole chapter to political “Coups and Countercoups” in Africa. He also ignores that there were bloody liberation wars in Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya. All this and much more is obvious evidence that Africans “protest”. Has David Lamb ever “experienced” with an African family whose child has died and what type of anguish and subsequent searching personal actions and behavior modification that emanate from such tragic incidents?
I recommend this book particularly for mature, well informed and seasoned Africanists. For only they can be trusted to possess the ability to sift through the subtle Western European or more specifically the American propaganda coating that is hidden in the book. For it is one thing to say that an economic statistic of a certain African country has declined by 60 percent but quite another to say African children are “deprived” or “unstimulated” because they do not have toys of the Western European stock to play with when they are growing up.
Those who are being introduced to Africa for the first time are advised to either steer clear of this book or trust themselves to read it with extraordinary caution. Otherwise instead of gaining useful knowledge, they will end up unwittingly consolidating their prejudices and racial stereotypes about Africans as constituting “pygmies, jungle, heat and lions” ironically the stereotypes that Lamb detests.
Post Script: This review was rejected for publication by over at least half a dozen African and Black Studies journals. The tone of the polite but hostile rejections by the editors was that of consternation and being stunned at the criticism of the book. I found the unpublished review in my old papers. I have not edited it. Have my views changed from when I was a young Ph. D. student 30 years ago in 1985 compared to now? Absolutely not to my surprise. My views or perspectives on this book have remained the same. One journal asked me to revise the review. Since as a young scholar “publish or perish” is such an urgent matter if you wish to climb the ladder of success and be accepted in the academic community, I reluctantly agreed to revise the review. This is how a heavily edited, shorter, less critical version of the review was published in the “African Social Research” a publication of the Institute of the African Studies of the University of Zambia at the time.
**************
TITLE: Book Review The Africans, by David Lamb, New York,
Random House, 1982.
AUTHOR: Mwizenge S. Tembo
Affiliation: Research Fellow at the Institute for African
Studies, University of Zambia,
Lusaka, Zambia. Currently on
Study leave at Michigan State
University.
ADDRESS: Michigan State University,
1575 I Spartan Village,
East Lansing,
MICHIGAN 48823
DATE: 18th January, 1985.