by Patrick Marnham
The Africa depicted by the news media—beset by poverty, wars of liberation and famine—is disheartening enough. This troubling book provides an even more horrifying picture. The author, a British journalist who has been visiting and writing about Africa since 1973, finds that in East Africa the predators, game wardens and even the paleontologists are all collaborating inadvertently to destroy wildlife. In West Africa foreign aid is in fact spoiling nature's balance. In a chapter on medicine and religion called "Blood and God," Marnham suggests that the invading colonialists' ways never really took hold but the old culture was too often wiped out. A visit to Albert Schweitzer's hospital in Gabon, for instance, shows that since his death the clinic's doctors have ignored his attempts to adapt to Africa's own culture—including use of traditional folk medicine—and have turned the place into a sterile Westernized hospital. That, according to Marnham, is an all too typical and ultimately tragic failure. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $10.95)
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