Drinkers of Darkness

Bath, UK: Cedric Chivers, 1973. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. H/B 256 pages, condition is very good. this novel is obstensibly an account of the celebration of Christmas among the isolated group of white people at Mambango in East Africa, which includes only three women; the feast, an occasion for eating rather than worship, is to take place in a broiling climate, in heat and dust and dirt. To the African Christmas is meaningless, to the whites it means little enough. Christmas in Mambango is a failure. the petty frustrations of organising it help to blind the white people to the momentous event which it is brewing all round them and which represents a turning point in the history of the white man in Africa; when that event takes place they are bewildered to the point of helplessness, except for one or two braver spirits.