ABSTRACT
In The Black Man’s Place in South Africa, Mr. Peter Nielsen exhibits the peculiar faculty lacking in so many writers on race questions of penetrating beneath white man's civilizational coating and the externalities of crude African culture to find the "world ground" of humanity. If one accepts the current notion of Africa's having always been one of the universal enigmas, and at the same time concurs with Mr. Nielsen in his indetermism, one finds one's self confronted with the unexplained phenomena. A number of instances of rational thinking by native Africans uninfluenced by white man's civilization are cited in refutation of various advertisements of the puerility of the African's mind, his incapacity for sustained and purposive thinking. In determining the formative factors of civilization and consequently those causes that have made for African stagnation, the author while not wholly discrediting climatic or physico-environmental influences expresses doubt as to its generally accepted potency.
