Moravia Alberto. Which tribe do you belong to

FSG, 1974. — 226 p.Thirty-eight short short essays in literary journalism datelined Accra, Lagos, Zanzibar, Ngorongoro, Timbuktu, Kampala, Dar-es-Salaam, by a European humanist and novelist. The Africa that emerges from Moravia's observations and insights is ecstatic, archaic, quite literally prehistoric. Encountering an exotic Samburu couple in an Indian shop in Nairobi where he has gone to pick up his requisite can of corned beef, Moravia writes that ""between them and me there was an abyss of ten or fifteen thousand years."" Though that magical naturalistic eternal time inhabited by the African is a seductive alternative -- the complement to the intellectual rationalist situation of the European -- the radical discrepancy between the two cultures makes any relationship between them difficult, if not impossible. That puzzlement and wonder, that sense of other-worldliness, pervades Moravia's descriptions. Landscapes and individuals are delineated with the meticulous care of a speaker trying to find in his own expression the meaning of what he perceives. He writes peripatetically of hotels, marketplaces, villages, geography, wild life, tribesmen, colonialists, missionaries, merchants, slave traders, all with a curious affection for a people whose psychology he approaches -- at best -- in the romantic speculative flights of an imaginative writer, deliriously infatuated by his five recent journeys with ""mal d'Africa.