THE HUMAN FACTOR IN CHANGING AFRICA. By Melville J. Herskovits. Alfred A. Knopf. 500 pp. $6.95.

COPPER TOWN: CHANGING AFRICA. The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt. By Hortense Powdermaker. Harper & Row. 391 pp. $7.95

The flood of recent writing about Africa has rushed in two directions. One has been the Tarzan-pygmy-Time Magazine-cannibal-witch doctor-Robert Ruark way. The other has been the slide rule and footnote way of the political scientist, studying the twists and turns of Dark Continent politicians as if they were all Lyndon Johnsons. But Africa is not a land of comic-strip characters or of leaders practiced in the fragile art of gentlemanly politics. Either approach ignores the human side of Africa. Anthropologists Melville J. Herskovits and Hortense Powdermaker, in their new books, try to illuminate just that.

Herskovits, sixty-seven-year-old director of the program of African Studies at Northwestern University, has long been known as a kind of grandfather of American scholarship on Africa. He started the Northwestern African program in 1947 - in those pre-Congo crisis days when courses on Africa attracted no more than a few oddballs and anthropology majors instead of the hundreds that now cram into lecture halls to get the word on Tshombe and Kwame and Tom Mboya. He has written many books, mostly on Africa, the Negro race and cultural anthropology.

In The Human Factor in Changing Africa, Herskovits tries to summarize decades of scholarship, so that the general reader can make something of the mystifying and ever-changing events of the continent. Herskovits concerns himself mostly with how the impact of colonial rule changed African cultures, and with how the cultures themselves changed some of the European innovations.

With his cultural insights, Herskovits continually sheds light on puzzling aspects of Africa. Why the wide African support for Lumumba after President Kassavubu deposed him? Herskovits: Other African leaders, trained under the French or British parliamentary system, did not understand the Belgian system which allows the chief of state to dismiss the prime minister without a vote in parliament. Why do African farmers shun modern methods? Herskovits: “African farmers are no more conservative than farmers elsewhere.” They will accept change when you show them the advantages - so long as the change does not tear them too far from their cultural beliefs. One problem, however, remains. In some areas, discrimination has taught Africans to suspect any advice that comes from a European. Why do the former French colonies keep so close to France? Herskovits: French-speaking African intellectuals, like Leopold Senghor of Senegal, have long pondered their own cultural values and fostered the philosophy of négritude, the essence of things African. They now can “face their former rulers with well-reasoned convictions of their own inner worth, and without having to reject the European contribution in order to secure the validity of their African cultural commitment.”

The sympathetic and sensitive approach of Herskovits brings understanding to the complications and confusions of Africa. But some gaps remain. Herskovits appears ill at ease among the problems of urban Africa, and his treatment of the cities seems perfunctory. In Africa, the anger and frustration and turmoil of cities erupt into nationalism and chaos and rebellion; they cannot be glossed over. In addition, Herskovits’ subject is so broad - the continuous changes of sub-Saharan Africa - that it and his wealth of evidence tend to keep the reader far from the human touches of Africa. This is probably inevitable when treating so broad a topic so thoroughly. Perhaps no one else could have done so full a job and carried the reader closer.

In Copper Town, Miss Powdermaker’s approach is much narrower, though her subject is as broad. She focuses on the town of Luanshya in the copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia and tries to define the moods and tensions of Africans caught in a swiftly changing society. She exploits the particular incident to illustrate the general movements in Africa.

An anthropologist who teaches at Queens College in New York, Miss Powdermaker has never specialized in African society. She has written earlier books on a Pacific island culture, a Deep South community and Hollywood. Her new book brims with psychoanalytical and anthropological theory, but most of this shrinks in importance and interest when read alongside a special bonus provided by the book. Her assistants spent much time in Luanshya writing down the everyday conversations of Africans. These are translated from the vernacular and offered in huge chunks in the book. They put us very close to Africa.

Here, for example, are the Africans of Luanshya watching an American cowboy movie, shouting, jumping, flexing their muscles with each blow on the screen:

Wheoo! He is intoxicated with a blow!

I know this cowboy. He does not play with anyone except his brother.

They all fear him because they cannot fight him.

Oh, that man will soon receive a blow.

He has let him go because the man is a weakling.

Ahass! One! One! Waan!

Look at that other man!

Oh, yes, that is the only man who can fight Jack! [The Africans, who, for the most part do not understand English, call the hero of every cowboy movie “Jack.”]

Look at his ears, they indicate that is a furious man!

That man in feathers is a Negro!

No. You do not know Negroes! He is a red Indian.

Look at that man. He is smoking opium.

What is it for?

Oh, so you do not know that it removes the sense of fear.

Hmm, Jack is very clever, he can fight them all.

Oh! Oh! Ooo! The cowards have retreated!

That is what I said.

Oh! Oh! Ooo! There they are. They are found by Jack.

One! Waan! [in unison with the blows].

Now next time he is going to that man who was smoking opium, who seems to be the leader of those cowards.

Oho! He is down already.

He is going to revenge on what they did to his son.

Whip. Oh-oo, he is caught by the neck by that whip.

One! Waaani!

Now the fight is hot.

Waan! Waan! There he goes through the window!

Wheooo! Wheooo! Waaan!

Ohoo, now those two heroes are the winners.

Yes, this is the kind of Jack we want.

Miss Powdermaker theorizes that cowboy movies particularly please those in a weak position in the power structure. “Male adolescents in the United States, feeling their growing male strength and powerless to use it against the control of their parents and other adults in authority enjoy cowboy films,’’ she writes. “For the Africans, a better folk hero could not have been invented.” She notes that “the hard-fighting cowboy, moving freely on his horse in wide-open spaces, surmounting all obstacles and always winning, is indeed an attractive hero for a people intensely fearful of losing some of their wide-open spaces to Europeans, who until recently held all the power.”

Time after time in her study, Miss Powdermaker cites evidence of European ignorance of Africans, the most glaring being the white insistence that the majority of the Africans were not opposed to the creation of the federations of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1953. “It was readily obvious that everyone, from school boys to illiterate adults, were against federation,” she writes. The Africans feared - with just cause - that the federation was designed by the whites of Southern Rhodesia to maintain control over the Africans of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Miss Powdermaker’s discussion of politics and nationalism, however, is dated. She began her field work in Northern Rhodesia in September, 1953, and remained until June, 1954. Her book was not published until eight years later. In the context of changing Africa, an era has passed. Her work dates from a time when the pressures of African nationalism were just beginning to mount, and it appears in a time when we need to understand how the Africans and Europeans of Luanshya are reacting to the full force of these pressures. Miss Powdermaker understands this deficiency. She had appealed to several foundations for a grant to allow her time to write the book earlier. They replied they would be happy to consider giving her money for another field trip but not for writing a book. Miss Powdermaker may be the victim of an academic world that still depreciates speed as an unseemly journalistic concept.

The Herskovits and Powdermaker books are both searching, understanding, valuable analyses of the human side of Africa, yet each, for its own reasons, lacks a true feel for some of the tensions and pressures and turmoil that characterize Africa today.

Stanley Meisler, a Washington newsman, has returned recently from a seven-month tour of Africa under a grant from the Ford Foundation.