John Povey

Book Reviews : M. Lawrence, Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists. New York, Praeger, 1969, 209 pp.,

ence. Terraces are certainly found in East Africa and if every stone structure had to have a Phoenician origin the Phoenicians must have had a busy time throughout Africa! Had analogies been wanted for the Inyanga stone ruins Bruwer need only have looked at the University of Witwatersrand’s impressive programme of mapping stone enclosures in the Transvaal, where Dr. Revil Mason’s team has located more than 2,000 ruins and securely dated them to a post 1500 AD. context. The only merit of this rather pathetic apologia of pre-1910 explorers and diggers, like Theodore Bent and R. N. Hall, is some excellent photographs of Zimbabwe illustrated by permission of the Rhodesian Department of Tourism. This is perhaps one of the worst examples of selective comparative history to appear in recent years and by comparing random objects out of context an equally implausible case could be made for Zimbabwe as an Indonesian or