The absence of equilibrium implies the presence of tensions; there are tensions in the life of everyone, but nowhere more so than in the life of those who are trying to live up to an ideal. Experience has proved this to be true. But it is the more true of the Christian, continually responding to the urge of grace or failing to do so. Even the great Apostle of the Gentiles was forced to admit that ‘praiseworthy intentions are always ready to hand, but I cannot find my way to the performance of them. It is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves, that I find myself doing.’ Yet such tensions can be an asset, provided we are clear about our goals. We cannot hope to eliminate tensions—trying to suppress or ignore them can only lead to worse effects—because they are due to our human nature wounded by the sin of our first parents. But we can hope to arrive at a state of harmony, a balance of tensions which will sustain us and even carry us forward.

Again it is even more true of the social worker whose function is, by definition, ‘to assess the disturbance of equilibrium in a given handicapped person, in his family, his social relationships, so as to give appropriate help.’ In order to do his job properly, the social worker has to place himself in a situation that is lacking equilibrium, and through empathy to share—at least to some extent—the client’s problems. The social worker is not to be considered as a person safe and dry who throws a lifebelt to somebody struggling in the water. He has himself to jump in the water and to encourage the person in difficulties to make the necessary strokes to remain afloat, and perhaps eventually to make for the shore.

Now that almost every African country north of Angola and Mozambique is independent, there may be a temptation in Western countries to shrug off entirely the cultural responsibility once held by Britain and France, and to limit Western action in Africa to Oxfam, economic assistance and technical co-operation. With the end of the colonial era, there is an understandable reluctance to create the impression in African countries that they are still in any sense under tutelage to the West, or even that they are undergraduates to be guided by Western dons. Yet there is a danger in leaning over too far backwards. The danger is that fastidiousness in trying to avoid giving the impression of interference may be understood by African minds as evidence that the West, in its unconfessed thoughts, still regards African countries as not mature enough to stand the ordinary rough-and-tumble of international exchange. Their reading of Western delicacy of manner may at bottom be right.

These two articles on the role of the West towards culture in Africa begin with the assumption that any culture has something of value to offer to another culture. Western culture is not valueless for Africa, nor is African culture without its lessons for the West. The relationship between cultures should rest on a basis of information and understanding, and their engagement in each other should be forthright enough to make motives clear, and humble enough to accept criticism. This article will try to sketch out some important features of the modern African cultural setting. A second will discuss some of the ways in which the West both is and should be culturally engaged in Africa.

Men of my unit went into two of those places the Nazis had efficiently called ‘concentration camps’, but for which there are other names: Buchenwald, near Weimar, and Ohrdruf, near Gotha. What struck the mind, and remained, was the unbelievable. The greater the horror, the more it was necessary to select details to make the whole have some reality. At Buchenwald, amid the fantastic complex of gas chambers and furnaces, the great sheds filled with human debris piled to the roofs, what seemed to affect the men most of all were some strange decorative plaques. A day or so afterwards, when an article in the service newspaper Stars and Stripes identified the objects as mounted pieces of tattooed human skin, the reaction was not quite melodramatic revulsion, but a more sudden, self-conscious formation of what had actually been seen. The journalistic account put things into place; the sentences, with their plain words and terse phrases, made the entire experience into something that had happened. One man rushed over to say that the things described in the article were the things he had held in his hands. Now, he knew that his experience had been real, and he knew what it was he had experienced.

At Ohrdruf, some indignant civilians from the neighbourhood were being put to work digging graves and burying the bodies left untidily about when the camp was hastily abandoned by the guards. There were corpses with blackening gouges in the sides and back. One or two walking cadavers, their filthy rags flapping, explained that some of the starving inmates of the camp were able to eat the livers and other organs of those who died. Then, much as guides denoting sights of interest to passing tourists, they pointed out the ingenious arrangement whereby the furnaces of the crematoria heated the buildings of the commandant’s headquarters.

Ever since the dawn of cinema there have been magicians. When Lumière resolutely took the path of realism in those first five-minute films, showing us undeniable trains, veritable fire-engines and disasters and humiliations only too recognisably from daily life, Melies had already chosen, quite as resolutely, to send a man to the moon, to present fairy coaches travelling through sleeping woods, to give us in short marvels instead of documentaries.

Two of the greatest magicians the cinema has ever known have been much in the news of late. Cocteau because in October he astonished us once again, as all those years ago he had done in obedience to Diaghilev’s command, dying this time in fact instead of with that hallucinatory backwards fall in Testament d’Orphee, when he commented gravely that since poets on occasion gave the impression of dying then their friends might permit themselves the appearance of weeping. And Orson Welles—so long a film-maker and still only middle- aged—because he has attempted perhaps the most impossible task of his never cautious career in bringing Kafka’s Trial to the screen, which reached London a good six months after it opened in Paris.

Cocteau always insisted that all the work he did, in any medium, was the work of a poet. Certainly none but a poet could have made his films, the first of which he even called Sang d’un Poete. Even in films which he did not actually direct himself, such as J.-P. Melville’s version of his play, Les Enjants Terribles, his influence was as immediately visible as those stars so invariably a part of his signature. Of those he did direct, there are some which more brilliantly exemplify bis power to bind an audience in a potent visual spell than others. First, L’Eternel Retour, his version of the Tristan story in modem idiom, which reached us after VE day; one will never forget the extraordinary richness—an almost overpowering richness—of the experience after all our years of cinematic austerity.