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A Continent Adrift
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19680 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1991 |
2,127 Words |
| Author
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Judith Chettle
Judith Chettle is a South Africa-born writer, now living in
the United States, and a frequent contributor to The World &
I . |
AFRICAN SILENCES
Peter Matthiessen
New York: Random House, 1991
240 pp., $21
Sometimes it seems that Africa, like some tropical Camelot adrift from the rest of the world, has become the repository of all the West's innocent dreams and unrealistic ideals. Expecting from that continent all that we could not find in our own, we demanded the impossible, and inevitably we have been disappointed by the reality.
Politically we hoped that independence born in "the winds of change" would provide a new order and fairer dispensation for Africa's newly liberated citizens, but instead of peaceful prosperity, coups, war, corruption, and famine have become endemic.
We hoped, almost as vainly and naively, that somehow Africa could once more be the great natural post-Eden game park it was before the Europeans upset the balance of man and the land. But politics, increased populations, and the inevitable legacies of contact with the West have led to diminished habitats, the near extinction of the rhinoceros and elephant, and, in some areas the disappearance of almost all wildlife.
It is a tribute, then, to naturalist and novelist Peter Matthiessen that in his latest book, African Silences, while acknowledging the terrible toll of the last thirty or so years, he is able to offer a realistic assessment, as well as some hope for Africa's wildlife. Unlike those who have given up on Africa, he retains a sympathetic but unsentimental appreciation of the continent's current plight.
Even more to his credit, Matthiessen in one of those rare chroniclers of man and animals who understands that the two are not natural antagonists but partners, with each needing the other even if the partnership is unequal.
Fate of the savanna wildlife
Like the character in his own short story "Lumumba Lives," Matthiessen is well aware of the brutal reality of nature. Observing a dark brook, a place of "passages and deaths" where snakes seize frogs and minnows are killed by insects, his hero, then a child, reflects on
how remote this dark brook was
...
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