Spanning [Doris Lessing's] entire career, [African Stories] includes every story she has written about Africa, from her earliest collection to the most recent…. Even in her first, This Was the Old Chief's Country, the stories are astonishingly mature and consistent, three among them having an enduring, diamond-hard quality.

"The Old Chief Mshlanga" hinges on the awakening of responsibility in a sensitive, adolescent girl when her attention is abruptly focused on the human realities beyond the traditional race attitudes that she'd previously adopted so casually. "Little Tembi" deals with the complex and bewildering relationship between a white farmer's wife and, as he grows to manhood, the African whose life she saved as a baby. In "Old John's Place" Mrs. Lessing brings a quality of freshness to the old tale of the maverick versus the remainder of the herd. The action is seen through the eyes of the teen-age girl...