Evolution, Posture and their Connection to Alexander Technique.

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 dying of TB.
Seemingly by chance, 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 and the belief that Man had evolved from monkeys rather than apes and that pygmies are our oldest ancestors.
In his view, the key to understanding the ascent of man lay in the matter of posture. The remarkable fact about Hugh Massey’s thesis, which he began to develop in outline in the late 1940s, is that at the present time, 50 to 60 years later, certain parallels seem to be emerging between his ideas and the work of respected mainstream scientific thought.
Recent discoveries, such as the monkey at a safari park in Israel that developed the ability to walk with the posture of a human or the discovery of Flores Man on a small island in Indonesia, add to it credibility.

Hugh’s account of his experiences and research in An African Odyssey make it, at one and same time, a travel book, an autobiography, an account of the efficaciousness of Alexander Technique and a theory of human evolution. The resulting structure of the book, which has been preserved editorially, was entirely appropriate to the author’s individuality, breadth of experience and wide-ranging interests.

150 x220mm, hardback. ISBN 9781842890004.

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