Still None the Wiser is the final instalment of a memoir sub-titled A Mid-Century Passage, 1932 1967. Part travel, part biographical memoir, part history. It is as much a social and political record of the closing period of colonial West Africa as an account of the quirks and foibles of the British (and other) expatriates at the end of Empire. In 1954 the author aged 22, thwarted in love in London, joined an often eccentric group of expatriates who ran the oldest colonial Bank in West Africa. In Ghana and in Nigeria he experienced the passing of an era. Eric Robson the TV presenter wrote of None the Wiser and its sequel set against an historical background of Britain at war and mislaying an Empire (he) gives us a fascinating glimpse of a lost world. This final part of that memoir ends as Harold MacMillan’s Winds of Change blow the white man out of Africa.
The setting is a long-gone Africa which at its passing was known to few. In earlier centuries of European contact the West African Coast became The White Man’s Grave, when the author arrived it had become The White Man’s Headache.
As the author rightly says, this book is not for the faint-hearted or the nervously disposed. It is probably unsuitable for vegetarians and political correctness remained an unknown concept when many of the incidents he describes occurred. It took many years in the writing and perusing of old notes and diaries, names had to be changed not so much to protect the innocent (who as always are few in number) as much as to avoid offending the survivors among that fast dwindling band of those who were once known as Old Coasters. It perhaps describes a more honest world than we live in today.
