No man's land: the last of white Africa.

IN THE nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth, the white man could claim he owned Africa. But though he imposed his government and, in many places, his beliefs and customs upon it, Africa was never in his possession. Nor would it, nor could it, possess him. Some men, however, loved Africa, not for the gain or the power it gave them, but for its unfathomable soul. They loved it for its beauty, for its people, and especially for its extraordinary animal life, the game that has fascinated Europeans and Americans for more than a hundred years.

This excellent book tells the stories of some of these men, the last of their kind, who have given themselves to Africa, though they knew all along they could never put down genuine roots or be anything but alien to the native Africans. Nor could they successfully weather the rise of the new African nations. They hailed Africa; and almost at once began a long farewell to it. That is why Africa is for them a no-man's-land, a forbidden territory almost from the start.

John Heminway, who has traveled throughout the contenent and has made a number of wildlife films there, registers every nuance of an experience that is both joyous and haunted. He is an American who knows sub-Saharan Africa well. He has encountered a number of these castaways--shipwrecked sailors, he calls them--and describes them with insight and sympathy, and with exemplary detachment too. His white hunters occasionally recall those creations of his near-namesake, but not too closely for comfort. Heminway is not one of them, but he is as skilled as they are in the lore of the bush and the jungle. He has an instinctive feeling for the majesty of the animals he meets and sometimes shoots, and there is enough practical information here to make the book highly useful for the tenderfoot setting out on his first safari.

There are a number of memorable portraits, which provide the framework of narratives: Paul Ssali, the African warrior turned game protector in Uganda; Alan Root, the wildlife filmmaker who wanted his body left out on the savannah for the vultures and hyenas in repayment of old debts; above all, the royal bastard Latham Leslie-Moore, an ancient English colonial, so eccentric and idiosyncratic as to be triumphantly sane. But apart from Latham, who was his own raison d'etre, the characters in the book are more like stage hands, necessary for the setting of the scene, there primarily to draw the curtain back. The real focus is the fauna of the African landscape, and the landscape itself.

Here the evolution of the white man's attitude is most apparent. A hundred years ago, explorers saw themselves challenged by the appaling conditions of the wilderness they set out to conquer, where every form of life, man or beast, was an imminent danger. Today, as Heminway's style and manner show, the African animal is regarded with tender awe, or at least with an understanding tinged with the melancholy apprehension of its eventual fate. The old-fashioned explorer referred to the magnificent elephants and rhinos and giraffes and lions generically as "brutes" and massacred them with huge goose guns handed to him in relays by his bearers until nothing kicked or moved any longer. Today, the white hunter is likely to kill with reluctance, and then only because some rich thrill-seeker--usually American, of course--has hired him to do it. Heminway's account of such an expedition to the southern Sudan provides a marvelous illustration of this; so does his story of gorilla-watching in Uganda and the Congo, although here human beings play a different, if not less ironic, role.

The cheerful modesty with which Heminway conceives his pictures and sets down his words is not the least of the book's rewards. Here is a man who deserves to be trusted for both his companionship and his integrity. May Africa continue to trust him.