White Man's Burden

UHURU (555 pp.)--Robert Ruark--McGraw-Hill ($5.95).

If the late great Ernest Hemingway was a man of achievement in search of a public character to match, Robert Ruark is a public character still in search of the achievement that can justify it. After his initial success as a Scripps-Howard columnist, Ruark moved to Spain, found himself a handsome villa on the Costa Brava, bought a high-power rifle suitable for shooting big game, and discovered Africa. With the discovery, he declared himself a novelist. It was a mistake.

His latest novel, like the earlier Something of Value, completely muddies the complex events taking place in Africa. Ruark obviously considers black Africans unfit to govern themselves. In Uhuru, Africans are portrayed as civilized on the surface but ready at the first opportunity to revert to savagery. Ruark's sympathies are all with the white settlers. On page after page, the whites denounce "nigs," "coons," "wogs" and even "Chinks" until the vituperation becomes a bore.

As in Something of Value, the hero is a superhuman, inhuman colonial who slaughters Mau Mau while they are sleeping, does not spare women or children$#151;this would be a sign of weakness. The novel ends on a note of hope, from Ruark's point of view. One of the big African politicians gets a good dressing down from a colonial and finally recognizes that he should have stayed satisfied with his primitive life in the bush. "We are fast becoming a people of half-white, half-smart, half-civilized spivs and scoundrels and loafers and whores," he confesses.

Uhuru reads like one long adolescent tirade against the black man in Africa. Not only that, but Ruark exalts the very thing he most fears from the liberated African: irrational violence. This book is a paean to it.

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