Black Man's Burden

RED STRANGERS -- Elspeth Huxley --Harper ($2.50).

Dull indeed is the author who cannot get some good laughs, provoke an occasional shudder, excite a few mildly erotic curiosities, inspire a self-congratulatory mood, in a book about African tribesmen. No dullard, Author Elspeth Huxley, a cousin-by-marriage of Novelist Aldous, has packed into Red Strangers well-above-average Africana for the money.

A three-generation story about the Kikuyu tribesmen of East Africa, written from the native point of view, it particularly delighted British reviewers by a mixture of sympathy and picturesqueness not unlike that in the novels of Julia Peterkin. In their primitive state (the subject of some 100 early pages) the Kikuyu people were well-built, well-adjusted savages, who observed strict tribal laws combining communal ownership of land with private initiative as regards goats and wives, the latter being worth about 30 of the former plus a batch of sugar-cane beer. Occasionally they fought a battle with the tall, handsome Masai. Their medicine man shrewdly advised them on all important matters.

To these well-governed, well-content heathens, British rule proclaimed itself taking over to preserve order and administer justice. In Kikuyu eyes British rule merely looked like the invention of lunatics. Even more incomprehensible was the Christian religion. Why, asked incredulous natives, did God scorn polygamy when "only poor men have one wife, and God does not like poor men." Why pray when there is no immediate bad luck! An old man, dying a few years after British occupancy, summed up for his generation: "Soon I shall die, for I have seen enough."

But although Author Huxley views the natives' misfortunes with sympathy, her sympathy with the whites makes Red Strangers a tragi-comedy rather than a tragedy. The final scene (after two generations of British rule): A young Kikuyu farmer takes his first ride in a plane, trudges boastfully home, pleased with himself and the white bwana, determined to name his forthcoming child Aeroplane.

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