The Last Colonial

THE OLD ORDER AND THE NEW by Wilfred Fowler. 294 pages. Macmillan. $5.

This is a remarkably likable novel about the last days of British rule in Africa. Novelist Fowler's main character is a British civil servant named Wood, and the book consists of two sets of his recollections--those from the beginning of his colonial career in the 1930s, and a sharply contrasting sheaf of observations made 30 years later as the colony in which he is stationed clamors for independence.

The narrative is a series of leisurely episodes, unconnected except by Wood's part in them. In the book's first section, when the British rule is still unchallenged, the stories are standard colonial reminiscences--a too friendly native official is seen to be a cheat and a murderer, Wood's manservant is shot with a poisoned arrow, a bumbling British doctor turns out to be more competent than first seemed true. This kind of thing is told and forgotten over whisky and soda, and the reader is a little surprised to find himself completely caught up in it. What is absorbing is the shrewd and unobtrusive way Wood makes his assessment of a variety of men. As his reminiscence turns to the years of British withdrawal from the colony, he earns the reader's deepening respect by judging the Africans who are coming to power by the same standards. If there is a moral to the book, it is the mild one that the African politicians who shout for reform and whoop up riots are essentially the same sort of men as the British consuls they are replacing. Novelist Fowler, who was a colonial officer in Asia and Africa for 30 years, allows himself only the faintest nostalgia; the best of his Africans is a fine old chief who cannot adjust to the disorder of independence and who fights more stubbornly than any Briton to preserve the old, colonial rule.

In the mood of the book's conclusion there is some confidence for the future.

Although Wood himself is as antique as his author's manner of writing, there will be men with his qualities of mind among the ruling Africans. Such men, Fowler suggests, will be able to calculate the mixed debt of resentment and gratitude they owe to the colonials.

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