An African Odyssey

Evolution, Posture and the Work of
F.M. Alexander

NEW UPDATED EDITION

A Memoir by Hugh Massey
With a Foreword by Walter Carrington

When Hugh Massey found himself in the Free French colony of Cameroon in West Africa during the Second World War, he had little idea that the ground was being laid for a personal research project which was to preoccupy him for most of his life. The combination of his observation of African wild life - great apes in particular - and his contact with different sections of the local African population came to take on an unexpected new perspective when he found himself the victim of TB. Such was the seriousness of his condition - in the days before new drug technology made the breakthrough in the treatment of this devastating disease - that he was considered effectively to have been given a death sentence. Seemingly by chance, but in Hugh’s view by destiny, he happened to come across the theories of F.M. Alexander, which offered him a faint ray of hope in his desperate situation. The extraordinary cure he was able to effect through this unorthodox approach led him to some radical conclusions concerning human evolution. In his view, the key to understanding the ascent of man lay in the matter of posture. Significantly, this was the lynchpin of Alexander’s whole theory of health and well being, as embodied in his internationally regarded Alexander Technique.

This new edition of An African Odyssey brings the story up to date in terms of certain recent remarkable developments that appear to further support Hugh Massey's theory of human evolution. They include the example of a relatively recent society of pygmy, monkey-like people whose remains have been discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia; the story of a monkey in a safari park in Israel who started to walk upright with human posture that hit the world media headlines, and the little known history of pygmy societies in places such as Australia.