African Switchback by Nicholas Mosley (1958)

African Switchback by Nicholas Mosley (Travel Book Club Edition). Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958. Hardcover. Used, Good Condition. 223 pp.

In 1957 Nicholas Mosley and Hugo Charteris, two novelists, made a journey by car from Dakar to Lagos across West Africa. Their route took them partly through the progressive and nationalist areas of the coast, but more especially to the primitive tribes of the interior; so that they seemed "to be moving up and down the country not only in space, but also in centuries, as if we were travellers on a time machine".

They saw the colourful world of French Senegal, and visited the Diamond Mines in Sierra Leone where hundreds of illicit diggers have rioted and died; they were present at a festival of the Toma tribe when the young girls of the tribe came out of the Sacred Forest after their years of initiation and attended the Independence Day celebrations of Ghana--the crisis-point of African Nationalism.

The story of this journey takes the reader through one of the most kaleidoscopic and fast-moving areas in the world and brings to life scenes and places at present in the forefront of the news; and also those of the mysterious African past which is disappearing so rapidly.

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