Book Reviews : A KIND OF HOMECOMING By E. R. BRAITHWAITE London, Frederick Muller, 1963. 268 pp. 21s

Abstract

95is that it should be on even a very short list. Dr. Mansur is a scholar with a remarkably wide range-which indeed she needs for a book which covers Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Ghana, with many side references to French West Africa and Nigeria. This is essentially a study of politics. Dr. Mansur covers first the origin and training of both the older traditional 61ites and of those who enrolled 'the masses' behind the campaign for independence. She then covers the circumstances in which power was gained, the process and tensions of constitution-making, and the nature of some of the main political parties today. The book brings out with admirable clarity the tension between the older privileged groups, who hoped to inherit power and a continuance of things as they were, and the revolutionaries for whom independence was to mean radical change. Parallel to this mainly economic and social struggle is the cultural uncertainty, between the ideal of Westernisation and that of traditional local culture; it is strange to remember the similar controversy between the Westernisers and the traditionalists in Tolstoy's Russia.It is no wonder that analysis of ideals in the developing countries reveals so many confusions. For, simultaneously, there are the reactions to the anti-colonial struggle; a social, economic and political revolution in full swing; a dilemma in culture; and the process of building a nation from groups with little homogeneity and less love for each other in the very recent past. Perhaps it is in the process of constitution-making that these confusions are most vividly seen. The long discussion on Pakistan, stretching over several years, included the controversy between secularists and the backers of a Muslim theocracy; between businessmen, lawyers and landlords and the democratic developers seeking land reform and local democracy; between regions and peoples.While the result on paper included obeisances to each interest group, the realities of political power in fact frustrated the rural reformers and produced a deadlock which President Ayub is still finding it hard to break.Although Dr. Mansur has included some of the events of 1961, the origin of this book lies in a doctoral dissertation for Harvard in 1960; it is the more interesting to see how far her theses have been sustained by later events. On such a basis the book comes out well, save perhaps in her view of the forces at work in Ghana. It is strange to find Ghana bracketed with India as countries where there is no 'single party rule' (p. 171), and there is certainly some over-emphasis on the continuity of party leadership based on Mansur has underestimated the inherent weaknesses of monolithic charismatic systems, because those take time to declare themselves and because the political and social environment pointed so strongly to this solution. There can always be a confusion between detecting historical forces and attributing to them a virtue or merely a power of persistence which they may lack.It would be an injustice to this excellent book to...