Primeval Forest, The

Schweitzer, Albert. The Primeval Forest. Foreword by William H. Foege. The Albert Schweitzer Library. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. 239 pp.

Johns Hopkins University Press has undertaken an ambitious project to reissue at least the major works of Albert Schweitzer under the series name, The Albert Schweitzer Library. The Primeval Forest is among the first four books to be published in the series. With a new Foreword by William H. Foege, the book is in two independent parts. The first is "On The Edge of the Primeval Forest' and the second "More From the Primeval Forest:' The two parts were first published together by Macmillian in 1931.

"More From the Primeval Forest," a series of nine essays written between 1924 and 1927 which are unashamedly letters to financial backers in the United Kingdom, is concerned primarily with the problems of construction of the new hospital at Lambrene, Gabon. They are not likely to be of much interest to JTWS readers who are not specialists in missionary history.

The eleven essays in "On the Edge of the Primeval Forest" are an entirely different kettle of fish. First published in 1922, the essays are full of the excitement of a young man on a great adventure and his reflections and musings should be of the utmost interest to any serious or advanced student of the African situation. Schweitzer first explains how he came to be a doctor in the forest. He then describes his journey to Africa and his first impressions of his new station. The description of the journey is moving, powerful and comparable to the finest writing in Joseph Conrads' Heart of Darkness. His basic humanitarianism appears early in these essays. He is aghast by the amount of rum available and horrified that its sale and taxation is the way that Africans are expected to pay for the privilege of being colonized. His review of the medical problems before the missionaries is a minor, if now dated, course in tropical medicine. Yet, the reader will find ironic his condemnation of medicine men and African superstitions while he remains convinced that a mere flicker of sunlight on the beared head of an European leads immediately to sunstroke if not worse. He treats the stricken as though they had malaria, and ten years later has not changed his mind on the subject in the least.

A theme that runs through "On the Edge of the Primeval Forest" is the consequences of WWI in this remote area of modern Gabon. The community moves from rumor of war to its reality and then the reality of lack of imported food and medicine, inability to export products, higher prices, and declines in employment, to the displacement of populations. Schweitzer, however, unlike most Europeans of the period, clearly grasps that the war is doing irreparable damage to Europe's moral standing and thereby its ability to lead and govern in Africa.

The two most important essays in "On the Edge of the Primeval Forest," however, concern the lumber trade and the social problems of the community. The essay on the lumber trade is important because it is one of the few brief descriptions of timber harvesting and marketing to have survived from the period. The essay on social problems is important because it gives a clear picture of how Africa's contemporary social and economic problems came to be. The first social problem Schweitzer addresses is the labor problem. Are Africans lazy as the colonialists argue? Of course not, as anyone knows who has ever watched Africans at work on their own enterprises. Then why won't they work for Europeans? Because nature has provided so abundantly. The solution for Europeans is to create false demands through taxation and reliance on imported goods. That does get the folks to work, if only long enough to satisfy the demands that forced them to search for work in the first place. And so on. Schweitzer understands that African employment in European industries which pay for colonization is resulting in the destruction of civilization and that this is happening because the colonizers want the colony's books balanced annually. Colonial administration is living today at the expense of tomorrow. The same logic is applied to several topics-education, local industry, accumulation of wealth, polygamy, "wife purchase," and race relations-in what may be one of the most tightly reasoned essays in political economy every written. It is certainly a model of its style.

The two-page foreword that has been added to this edition is a travesty. We are warned that Sweitzer says things that will shock us. But it is easy to imagine that many of the things he says-his grudging acceptance of polygamy for example-shocked his contemporaries the more. True enough, his is not the language of the contemporary politically correct and we would be surprised if it were. And, while he views his patients as his brothers, they are little brothers. He is patronizing. He is, worse yet, a confirmed colonialist. His attack on colonialism is scathing but the attack is limited to the way colonies are managed, not to the fact and intentions of colonialism. He is a man of his times working in the Dark Continent for the betterment of his little brothers who are primitives, sometimes even savages.