A review by
Carroll Quigley in The Washington Xxxxx
Star, 25 February 1966,
of a book:
AFRICA'S SEARCH FOR IDENTITY,
by Victor C. Ferkiss.
Xxxxx: George Brazillier Co., 19xx
"The Dark Continent's Dilemma"
By CARROLL QUIGLEY
AFRICA'S SEARCH FOR IDENTITY.
By Victor C. Ferkiss. Brazillier. 346 pages. $6.50.
For a number of years I have been lecturing on
Africa to a variety of audiences, chiefly at the Foreign Service
Institute and the Brookings Institution. Invariably I have been asked to
recommend a book on the subject which would provide a picture of Africa
which was not either journalistic superficiality nor myopic
specialization. There had been no such book. But now there
is. This new volume by Victor Ferkiss, professor of political science at
Georgetown University, is the best single volume now available on
Africa.
Such high praise must be justified. In any such
book as this, presenting Africa to the well-informed general reader, we
should expect four qualities: It should be based on broad knowledge; it
should display deep understanding of the relationships between facts; it
should be written in a sufficiently attractive style to make its reading
a pleasure rather than a chore; and it should have broad perspective,
both in time and in social analysis, to give real meaning to the
subject.
“Africa's Search for Identity" has all four of
these qualities in a high degree. Anyone familiar with the subject will
recognize that each of Ferkiss' lucid sentences is based on a thorough
understanding of recent research and recent debates by experts on the
subject. In each case Ferkiss explains the issues in a few words,
unambiguously takes a stand, and defends it with a nice combination of
erudition and commonsense. And in doing this, he shows a combination of
historical understanding, of basic economic understanding, of
sociological perspective, of the nature of power, and of the
complexities of anthropological investigation to be found in no other
book on Africa known to me. Best of all, his presentation is written in
a very attractive style, which is clear, succinct, and rather wry.
The volume is organized in a roughly chronological
order. An introduction on the basic facts of geography, race, and
language, is followed by chapters on early history, the European
penetration, the imperialist scramble; the movement toward independence,
and the present period of growing problems and disillusionment. The
whole process leads to the problem expressed in the book's title:
Africa, with its old patterns of life now shattered and quite alien ones
being thrust upon it, is confused and frustrated and seeks to discover
its real identity, in a fashion even more frantic than we see in our own
adolescence. The story, as told by Ferkiss, is a convincing and
tragic one. He has the ability to see the real meaning behind the
words, slogans, and propaganda devices which have so confused African
studies, and has, as well, the unusual capacity to see many of the
problems through African eyes. He shows clearly how the old Africa
was held together, even in its most chaotic periods, by kinship, social
reciprocity, and religious feelings. The destruction of these and the
effort to create a "modern" Africa based on Europe's patterns of
weapon-control, impersonal legal and constitutional behavior, on the
mechanism of an atomistic economic market, all governed by abstract
laws, scientific rules, and alien points of view has simply destroyed
the old patterns without putting any satisfying new ones in their place.
Ferkiss is especially good at cutting through the
misunderstandings which have hounded our relations with Africa from the
beginning. He shows, for example, bow the African tribal leader and
African ideas of land-ownership were completely different from those of
Europeans, resulting in utter confusion when the intruding Europeans
insisted in acting as if they were the same. Tribal chiefs were not
despots but were the spokesmen for a consensus reached by lengthy,
informal discussion; land was not owned at all in our sense, and did not
become a basis of economic and political power as it did in Europe, with
the result that conquering African tribes, while enserfing men, usually
left land-ownership to the conquered. Both chief and land had
strong religious, or at least spiritual, aspects which were unrecognized
by modern Europeans, and the individualistic assumptions of these latter
were completely alien to the African inability to conceive of the
individual apart from his kinship group.
On issue after issue of this kind Ferkiss shows
how the European and Islamic intrusions, by breaking down the old ways
and forcing upon the African completely new (and usually
incomprehensible) alien ways have almost totally shattered African
lives, have made it almost impossible for them to satisfy their less
material needs, or even to retain their self-respect, and have set them
off into a frantic search for identity.