North of South; African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan
Africa arouses strongly contrasting reactions in two recent travelers to East Africa and the Sudan. Naipaul's grim, desiccated landscapes resemble not so much Kenya and Tanzania as a contemporary version of Hades, peopled by pimpled hippies, lost Asians, shabby, querulous whites, and Africans driven mad by their unavailing struggle to become Europeans. Hoagland, on the other hand, depicts his own-a white Westerner's-immersion in several Sudanese cultures: Arab and black, desert, city and bush. He relishes what he learns of local history and tradition and sensitively depicts the strangeness and beauty, the fearfulness, poverty and warmth of the land and people.
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