TOURIST IN AFRICA

(6) Last Days

Salisbury—the Matopos—Capetown—flotne.

March 20. The changes in the city are greater than a first glance revealed. The streets, as all the inhabitants often remind one, are laid out so that a team of oxen could be turned in them. Last Year there was no 'traffic problem.' Now parking meters have sprung up everywhere and the lead- ing grocer has built a 'park' on his roof, ap- proached by a ramp like the Guggenheim Gal- lery in New York. Customers go down to the al1013 by lift, make their purchases and collect them at the door when they drive down. There are 'drive-in cinemas.' Every sign of the early settlers is disappearing Also the word 'settler,' Which is now held to be opprobrious and politi- eallY tendentious.

I have already remarked on the difficulties that face a modern traveller in the kaleidoscopic Changes of euphemism. In the old days 'settlers' were proud of their distinction from officials. Now they wish to be called plain 'Rhodesians,' fearing that their original name suggests recent and temporary occupation. The oddest manipu- lation of vocabulary is the one by which a white American is classified as a European and a black American as an 'alien native.' Native,' surely the most honourable appellation for white or black, is never used of whites and some blacks resent it. 'Nigger' (except as a term of affection used among niggers) and 'Kaffir' have long been thought offensive. `Bantu' is held to be inexact by anthropologists. 'African' is clearly too vague for use. I am told that in the USA one may say negro' but not 'negress.' They like to be called 'coloured.' But 'coloured' in most of Africa means mulatto. In my lifetime I have seen 'Anglo-Indian,' which I still use to describe my mother's family, come to mean Eurasian. Goanese for some mysterious reason are huffy if they are not called `Goans.' There is no end to the flood of genteelism that is eroding the ,ngtlage. Well, I don't suppose any blackamoors, niggers, Kaffirs, natives, Bantu or Africans will read this diary. Some whites may, so I apologise !Or calling some of them 'settlers,' but I don't Know how else without periphrasis to describe those nice, pinkish people who have come to Settle here.

Very few indeed of these settlers survive or descend from the original invaders of seventy Years ago. Those who do are very proud of it and display certificates of the fact, like armorial bearings, in their houses. Not all the 'pioneers' Were riff-raff. Missionary stock provides4inum- ber of the present leading citizens. But the immi- gration which has changed the character of the e.°untrY occurred since 1945. This change is illustrated in an exhibition which is now being held; a collection of furniture and objets d'art tent by private owners in the Federation. The catalogue emphasised its federal character, but everything (I think) comes from Southern• Rhodesia and almost everything has been brought here since 1945. It is organised and introduced by a youngish bachelor who keeps an antique shop, bubbles with the lore of Mr. Betjeman and Mr. Osbert Lancaster—he has settled at the moment on William IV as the 'nicest' period—and is himself an outstanding example of the change in charac- ter of modern Rhodesians from the pioneers. He chose and arranged the exhibits, as far as pos- sible as 'period rooms,' the last of which is a sly comment on the taste of his humbler neigh- bours—a room furnished with pieces of local manufacture more gruesome than anything to be seen even in the shop windows of England.

There are four colleators in Rhodesia with rich possessions; these have provided the most not- able pieces. But there are also single exhibits from many widely dispersed houses. John, for example, had lent the superb embroidered train worn by his great-great-grandmother at the christening of the King of Rome.

Not everything would attract interest or even be accepted for sale at Sotheby's. Indeed, from my own Somerset neighbours in a five-mile radius I could assemble a more varied and valuable exhibition than the whole Federation can afford. But the significance of the Salisbury Exhibition is that anything worth showing should be there at all; that it is now possible to illustrate with reasonably good examples almost every period of European taste. The recent settlers have brought their household gods with them. This, much more than the skyscrapers, impresses the tourist with a sense of the depth of European settlement. Also of its humanity; for the new settlers have not adopted the narrow habits of thought of their predecessors.

The commercial growth of Salisbury, its tower- ing banks and insurance offices, its neatly dressed Rotarians, make one forget that it is also the seat of government—of two Governments, .in- deed, with two Parliaments, two Prime Ministers, a Governor-General and a Governor. John and Daphne and I were commanded to a large dinner party at Government House for a visiting British Minister It was a prett! sight when the ladies left the table to see them in their long dresses and long white gloves cluster round the door and curtsey like altar boys to the Governor-General. When they had left I found myself sitting next to a local cultivated bigwig. I attempted some- thing polite about how delightful his country was for a visit. He spoke, as politicians will, of the great progress and potentialities of his country.

I said: 'I think you are a bachelor. I should not care to bring up children here.'

'Why not?' rather sharply scenting politics. 'The accent.'

I think there was a glance of sympathy in his eye. He did not expatiate on the educational advantages, the salubrious climate, the oppor- tunities for enrichment. Instead he talked of his own upbringing in England.

When the Governor-General thinks a party has lasted long enough, he sends an ADC to play a record of the Death Song from King Kong.

March 21. There was racing this afternoon at Mirandellas. In living memory lions were shot where the racecourse now stands. John had a horse running. Daphne and I left him and his chaplain there and drove off into the native reserve in. search of a Jesuit missionary I had known in England. He did not know it then, but it was to be his brother who was sent out as head of the official inquiry into the riots in Nyasaland.

One does not see many Africans in Salisbury; fewer it seemed than in London. There are black porters in the larger shops and the white shop-girls are abominably rude to them. They are also rather rude to their white customers, for they are at pains to demonstrate that under God all white men were created equal. The well-paid plumber who comes out to work in a private house expects to sit down in the dining-room with the family. He has a black, ill-paid assistant who squats outside. Here, as in England, the champions of the colour bar are the classes whose modest skills many negroes can master.

Southern Rhodesia differs historically from, say, Uganda and Nyasaland. Here the whites came as conquerors; there the natives voluntarily put them§elves under the protection of the English Crown. The conquest was not a feast of arms to be remembered with pride, but it was an exercise of high chivalry compared with the occupation of Australia, where the settlers regularly put out poisoned food for the abor- igines. The tribes which were conquered were, in many cases, themselves recent conquerors. Force of arms had always been recognised in Africa as giving right of possession.

The visitor to Rhodesia sees as little of the natives as a visitor in the United States sees of the very poor. (But in Rhodesia the natives are proportionately more numerous than the desti- tute in America.) They have no obvious tribal characteristics. They are not beautiful like the Masai or buoyant like the Wachagga or pic- turesquely prehistoric like the Wagogo. All wear a drab uniform of shirt and shorts. They have the hang-dog air of the defeated people, which indeed they are.

What is known of Mashona history is ignominious; they were the prey of the Matabele before white men appeared in the country. Like the slum-dwellers of industrial England in the last century, they get very drunk rather often. They clearly enjoy football and splashing in the water. The missionaries say they have some enthusiasm in religious exercises But on the superficial observer—or on me at any rate—they cast a gloom not easily dispelled.

Colonel David Stirling, with whom I served in the war, came here on a commercial enterprise and was so depressed by the conditions of the natives that he has devoted the last ten years of his life to persuading the settlers that a 'multi- racial society' is not merely a politicians' cliché. But his Capricorn Society has made less impres- sion than he hoped.

As soon as we left the main road Daphne and I found ourselves in the same dusty, dreary country as surrounds Serima—rough tracks, low scrub, occasional patches of mealies and clusters of huts. We got lost; inquiries for a Mission led us to an Anglican school where boys were play- ing football; a teacher gave us a guide to the Jesuits. They were playing football there, too, and some boys were splashing in an iron water- tank. There were four or five priests, in their working clothes of shirts and shorts; two at least of them men of high scholarship. We had lost so much time in getting there that we could barely greet our friend before setting back. He does not repine either for Farm Street or for Salisbury. Although they are so near (when one knows the way) to Mirandellas, he and his com- panions see few white people except the Native Commissioner. Their life is devoted to the Mashona, at the central school and in touring the villages. I have seen lonelier and more comfort- less missions in many parts of the world—in British Guiana, for instance, where up-country I stayed with a solitary priest whose greeting was : 'You are most welcome. I have been hoping for someone to come and pull out two of my teeth'—but the outward aspect of this station has a penetrating drabness.

March 22. A last tourist trip, to the Matopos. These famous hills are second only to the Eastern Highlands in natural beauty and they are much odder. At Leopard Rock there were compari- sons to be made with other scenery in other parts of the world. There is nothing I know at all like the Matopos. They comprise some fifty by thirty miles of bare granite and green valleys. The district caught the particular fancy of Cecil Rhodes and it is here by his wish that he is buried on a spot which he named 'the View of the World,' which he designated as a 'Valhalla' for the heroes of the country. It is therefore a region of particular sanctity to patriotic Rhodesians. Also to the Matabele, who first chose it as a burial place for their king, Mzilikazi, who led them here out of Zululand in 1838. When pioneers rifled this royal cave, Rhodes had it walled up and made formal reparation for the sacrilege with the sacrifice of black oxen. But there are older associations than the Matabele. The rock clefts are Covered with bushmen drawings of men, animals and unidentified shapes, categorised by archeologists into periods of varying skill, from, perhaps, before the beginning of the Christian era until shortly before the arrival of the Matabele.

Most modern Rhodesians seem to be morbidly incurious about native customs and beliefs. Their predecessors fought the natives, stole their cattle, tricked them into making concessions, but they perforce studied them in a rough and ready way and mixed with them. Dr. Jameson was sworn as a member of Lobengula's bodyguard and, in violation of his oath, led the attack against him. Selous, the most famous hunter and explorer of Rhodesia, had a black wife; a mulatto daughter of his lives in the outskirts of Salisbury today. The Afrikaan conception of apartheid would have been alien and (I think) outrageous to most of the early adventurers.

Next day, March 23, we left at dawn and took the aeroplane to Bulawayo. A car was wait- ing there to take us to breakfast at Government House. This is the house built by Rhodes for his own use on the site of Lobengula's kraal. It is a charming, low, shady building in the Dutch- colonial style. In an outbuilding there is the model of a reconstruction of the kraal as it stood in Lobengula's day, part cantonment, part cattle ranch. In the trim garden stands a surprisingly paltry tree which is pointed out as the one under which he held court. There is nothing else at Government House or anywhere in his kingdom to awake his memory; his grave is unknown, his treasure stolen or lost, his posterity unrecognised. But he haunts it yet, a deeply tragic figure from Shakespearian rather than from classical drama; Lear, Macbeth, Richard II, he has a touch of them all. What a part for Mr. Paul Robeson could be written of his doom. He was the victim of history. The Matabele kingdom was a military institution aptly organised to survive and prosper in any age before Lobengula's. He inherited a superb army and war was the condition of his authority. The young warriors had to blood their spears. If the white men had not entered Central Africa his dynasty might have lasted centuries. He was personally brave, majestic, intelligent and honourable. The curious thing is that he genuinely liked white men, protected them when it was in his power to annihilate, kept his word when he might have tricked them. The white men he met were mostly scoundrels. It is generally supposed that it was their avarice alone which overthrew him.

Mashonaland proved a disappointment to the prospectors. Driven by the hope of finding another Rand or another Kimberley they clamoured for Matabeleland. Contemporary accounts of Lobengula's last decade make sham( • ful reading. The white concession-hunters camped all round him; they brought hiln champagne and rifles; Dr Jameson treated him with morphia; a squadron of Life Guards paraded before him in full dress; the Jesuits designed a coat of arms for his carriage door. And all the time his regiments watched their hug naked monarch grow fat and muddled. He wrote personally to Queen Victoria for guidance. He sent ambassadors to Cape Town who were kid- napped or or murdered. And the young warriors grew mutinous.

It was not only the fortune-hunters who welcomed his fall. Before attacking, Rhodes sought the sanction of the missionaries, and g( t it. It is hard to realise now that at the time of the Diamond Jubilee many men of good will and intelligence thought the Pax Victoriatta a realit: • The bloody little forays of the Matabele seemed to them a shocking anachronism. Even now you will find people of some good will and son' e intelligence who speak of Europeans as having 'pacified' Africa. Tribal wars and Slavery were endemic before they came; no doubt they will break out again when they leave. Meantime under European rule in the first forty years of this century there have been three long wars in Africa on a far larger scale than anything perpetrated bY marauding spearmen, waged by white men against white, and a generation which has seen the Nazi regime in the heart of Europe had best stand silent when civilised and uncivilised notions are contrasted. But the missionaries genuinely believed that the autocrats, their fierce aristo• cracies and their witches were the only grave impediments to the establishment of the sign ( charity. Fr. Prestagc, SJ, who gave his whole life to natives of Rhodesia wrote: 'If ever there N% a just war, the Matabele War was just.'

Lobengula's flight after defeat, aged and ha stupefied; his pathetic attempts to make peace t giving a bag of sovereigns to two troopers (s0- stole it); his wagon of treasure—carrying what the rubbishy gifts of his European courticn ivory? gold?--driven into some cleft in the rock hidden, perhaps pilfered, perhaps still there; h disappearance across the river and death, it said, from smallpox, in an unknown spot; all th comprises the very stuff of poetic drama.

After breakfast we drove back to Bulawayo. has a quiet, old-fashioned air which, I am told. ti inhabitants do not particularly relish. Not lot ago it was the commercial capital of Rhodesi Now Salisbury has cut it out. There are no sk scrapers here. The shops have a sombl provincial respectability like those of the Scotti, Lowlands. The chemist has a panelled wind° surmounted by the traditional glass bottles

if

to

s, is is is coloured water and, inside, the drawers and jars with the Latin labels that used to delight one's childhood. Salisbury chemists are ablaze with advertisements of patent medicines, cosmetics and baby-foods.

Rhodes's original estate, which he left in trust to the colony, consists of 95,700 acres,, the agricul- tural and arable part divided into fifteen farms let to tenants, and the rocky remainder, which is laid out and maintained as a pleasure ground. This is the Matopo Park, entered through gates presented by a member of the Beit family, which encloses Rhodes's grave on his View of the World. Beyond this there are some quarter of a million acres added by proclamation in 1953.

These do not come under the control of the Rhodes Trustees but of the National Parks bePartment, who have laid out roads and gener- allY set out to make the place attractive to white tourists by reducing the number of native famil- ies. The natives had no wish to move. Many of them had quite clear memories of Rhodes's funeral, and of Colonel Rhodes's subsequent speech in Which, with undisguised emotion, he had said : 'As a proof that I know the white man and the Matabele will be brothers and friends for ever, I leave my brother's grave in your hands. I Charge you to hand down this sacred trust to Your sons that come after you and from genera- tion to generation and I know if you do this my brother will be pleased.' Would the Great White Chief be pleased, they asked, to see them turned out in under fifty years to make way for picnic parties from the cities? Eventually the decision was modified; some 700 families with ten head of cattle apiece have been allowed to remain.

One can now drive to the foot of the hill called 'the View of the World' and an easy climb takes ette to the summit The panorama is indeed stoPendous and worthy of all that has been Written and said of it. Rhodes in naming it did not claim it was the finest 'view' in the world; he Meant rather that from this quite modest e,minence one does in that clear light and un- oroken horizon get, as the guide-book says, 'a Strange impression of looking out over the utter- Most parts of the earth. It is a curious fact that aeroplanes have added nothing to our enjoyment ?f. height. The human eye still receives the most Intense images when .the observer's feet are Planted on the ground or on a building. The aero- Plane belittles all it discloses.

At Rhodes's funeral the Bishop of Mashona- l_an. d read a poem of four stanzas composed by 4.1Pling for the occasion. The theme was Vision : Dreamer devout by vision led Beyond our guess and reach. The terms of panegyric amount almost to aPotheosis : There till the vision he foresaw

Splendid ahd whole arise And unimagined Empires draw To council 'neath his skies, The immense and brooding Spirit still, Shall quicken and control.

That was written only fifty-seven years ago and at every prediction has been belied. IR his own lifetime, and largely by his own InIprudence and dishonesty, he had seen lAfrikaancrs and British in South Africa hope- "sly embittered. Today his great project of the ttn-British Cape to ite has lost all mean- ing; the personal, honourable ascendency of Great White Chiefs has degenerated into apartheid. One is tempted to the trite contrast of the achievements of the politician and of the artist; the one talking about generations yet un- born, the Other engrossed in the technical problems of the task at hand; the one fading into a mist of disappointment and controversy, the other leaving a few objects of permanent value that were not there before him and would not have been there but for him. But Rhodes was not a politician; or rather ne was a minor one. He was a visionary and almost all he saw was hallucination.

He was not, as Jameson disastrously was, a man of action. He was neither a soldier nor an explorer. Much has beet made of the incident of his going out almost alone into the Matopos to make peace with the dissident Matabele. It was a courageous act, admirably performed, but in fact it was precisely what Fr. Prestage had done with another group of Matabele chiefs four months earlier. The Matabele were then hopeless and leaderless. The promised immunity to rifle fire had proved to be an illusion. They could have been a Considerable nuisance if they had con- tinued to sulk with their spears in the inaccessible hills; but they were a defeated people. The significant feature of the celebrated Indabas was the personal effect Rhodes made. He was known to the Matabele only by repute. There can be no doubt that after those meetings they looked to him with something of the awe they had accorded their kings. African politicians who are now idolised, might with profit remember how capriciously these emotions can be aroused among their people.

Rhodes was a financier. He made a huge fortune very young at a time when other huge fortunes were being made. But the Kimberley millionaires were few and they were not lucky prospectors but assiduous businessmen. Rhodes's predominant skill was in the market, in negotiat- ing combinations, monopolies and loans, in beguiling shareholders, in keeping up the price of Chartered Company stock when it never paid a dividend, in using first-hand information to buy and sell, in creating, imposing and preserving a legend of himself that calmed the stock market. And money for him was not an end; it was not the means to pleasure or even to personal power; it was the substance of his dreams.

There is an attractive side to Rhodes's character; his experimental farms; his taste in the houses he chose to live in; his respect for native pieties. The scholarships he founded at Oxford set a model which has been followed in other countries, whose confidence in their 'way of life' is so strong that they believe they must only be known to be loved. It is noteworthy that his scholarships were for Americans, colonials and Germans. The Latin countries were excluded. For his obsessive imagination was essentially puerile. His first Will, made before he had much to leave, provided for the foundation of a kind of secret society dedicated to the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race. He had a schoolboy's silly contempt for 'clagoes'; for the whole Mediterranean-Latin culture. He set out quite deliberately to provoke war with the Portuguese and was only stopped by Lord Salisbury. He saw in his fantastic visions of the future a world State of English, Germans and North Americans. But his most important associates both in South Africa and in Europe were nearly all Jews. That is the point, so often missed, of Belloc's 'Verses to a Lord.' There was no conceivable reason why Jews as much as Gentiles should not make fortunes in the diamond and gold fields, or why they should not welcome an exercise of force to facilitate their business. What was absurd was Rhodes's promoting their interests with idiotic cries of Anglo-Saxon racialism.

March 25. John and I gave a small dinner party, my own farewell combined with the 'coming-out' of his second daughter. At the table we were predominantly British; there was one Prussian; Rhodes would have approved of that; but there were also French, Hungarians, Greeks, the dagoes he wished to exclude from his mad Anglo-Saxon world; who now form a large and lively part of the population. The restaurant was Portuguese, newly opened at the top of one of the new tall buildings. French cooking has not yet reached Rhodesia (it is, I am told, rapidly dis- appearing from London) but Salisbury has now reached the degree of sophistication when restaurants go in and out of fashion. The Portuguese cooking and wine were excellent. We were far from the bottled sauces and tinned vegetables that used to encumber so many of the tables of British Africa.

March 26. The anniversary of Cecil Rhodes's death. Public notices had been inviting the citizens to commemorate the event at his statue in the main square of the town. The Governor was there, some police and some schoolchildren, but it was not an imposing gathering. Rhodes's picture hangs in all public places and in some private ones, but the cultus seems tepid. He is as much revered by the new generation of Salis- bury as, perhaps, is Abel Janszoon Tasman in Hobart. The 'immense and brooding Spirit' no longer 'quickens and controls.'

Early that afternoon I took the aeroplane for Cape Town.

All airports I know are forbidding; Johannes- burg, where we stopped late that afternoon, is, surely, the worst in the world. We were herded down into a concrete basement; a sort of bomb shelter furnished with half a dozen doors into which, one by one, we were directed. No one was seen to emerge. A lamp over the door gave the signal and a sallow young woman announced through a microphone 'Passenger Waugh will pro ceed to door number 3'. It was like the play of Dunsany's I once saw, in which a group of criminals were summoned to death by (I think) an oriental idol. When I reached the appointed place I found a civil enough young immigration officer who stamped my passport and released me by a further door into a passage which led to the upper level and a waiting room of the normal kind, The aeroplane brought me to Cape Town that night and I drove straight to the Pendennis Castle and slept on board in comfort.

March 27. Good Friday. We do not sail until evening, but I do not go ashore. It is pleasanter now to see from the decks the famous view of Table Mountain and the decent old city.

Anyone who travelled by troopship to the Middle East in the days when the Mediterranean was impassable, must have grateful—some, I believe, have tender—memories of the hospitality of Cape Town. After weeks at sea with blackened port-holes we found a town all alight, but much more than this we found what seemed to be the whole population extended to welcome us, the whole quay lined with cars to take us into the country. I remember the scene at night with the men returning to the ship, some drunk, some sober, all happy, laden, many of them, wjth great bunches of grapes like the illustrations in old bibles of the scouts returning to the Israelites in the desert with evidence of the Land of Promise flowing with milk and honey. It is a memory 'I prefer to maintain intact. Few peoples anywhere, I suppose, deserve the government they get. Too many English voices are at the moment raised to reproach the South Africans for me to join in the clamour.

Comfortable, uneventful days succeed one another; a sense of well-being and repose after not very arduous travel. A half-day's stop at Las Palmas to refuel; a morning pottering round the streets of that charming town. Then on again punctually and smoothly.

April 10. Southampton in the early morning; effortless disembarkation Nothing to record except appreciation of a happy fortnight. When last I returned from Africa it was by air, and I landed, like everyone else, cramped and sleep- less and fit only for days of recuperation. Today I came ashore buoyantly; very different from the old fellow who crept into the train south two months ago. That was the object of the trip.

I came abroad, as I noted at the time, with the intention of eschewing 'problems' and of seek- ing only the diverting and the picturesque. Alas, that is not possible. 'Problems' obtrude. There was in my youth a film which opened superbly with Buster Keaton as an invalid millionaire land- ing from his yacht in a Central American Republic. He is enjoying a rest-cure. The people of the country are enjoying a revolution. He pro- gresses, if I remember rightly, in a bath-chair, up the main street, totally unaware of the battle raging round him. As the dead and wounded double up before him. he raises his hat in acknowledgment of what he takes to be their bows Of welcome. One cannot long travel in that way. From Algeria to Cape Town the whole African continent is afflicted by political activities which it is fatuous to ignore and as fatuous to dub complacently an 'awakening' Men who have given their lives to the continent can do no more to predict the future than can the superficial tourist. All know that there is no solution in parliamentary democracy But, ironically enough, the British Empire is being dissolved on the alien principles which we ourselves imported, of nine- teenth-century Liberalism.

The foundations of Empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment, always.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire fell because the component peoples were urged to attribute their ills to thwarted nationalism. No one, I suppose, in their former dominions had a happier or better life as the result of 'self-determination', though Czechs and Croats and Magyars were enormously more civilised in 1918 than the native nations of Africa today.

I suppose the nearest historical comparison to modern Africa is the reality behind the fiction of Buster Keaton's Latin America. The Spanish monarchy was dispossessed by local revolution- aries who spoke the already antiquated language of the Enlightenment. A century of chaos and tyranny followed and is not yet everywhere abated.

The consciences of the English are unnaturally agitated by Africa. The questions that greet the returned tourist are not: 'Did you have a good time?' but: 'What about apartheid? What about Hola? What about the imprisonment of the politicians?' I can only reply : 'Don't know.'

In Tanganyika I found nothing but good will towards the Africans darkened with grave doubts of the future. In Rhodesia there is an infection from the south of racial insanity. I heard of a Catholic woman who was offended because an itinerant priest said Mass for her on her stoep with a black server. But the story was told me as something disgusting.

I heard people of 'pioneer stock' say: 'You can't understand. We remember the time when these people threatened to kill us,' while at the same time cordially entertaining Germans. The more recent, more civilised immigrants have none of these unreasoning emotions. They regard the natives as a peasantry and treat them accordingly, but if their sons go to local schools they are in danger of picking up more than an unattractive accent. Every year in Rhodesia the status of the native is being slightly raised. Apartheid is the creation of the Boers. It is the spirit of egalitar. ianism, literally, cracked. Stable and fruitful societies have always been elaborately graded. The idea of a classless society, is so unnatural to man that his reason, in practice, cannot bear the strain. Those Afrikaaner youths claim equalitY with you, gentle reader. They, regard themselves as being a cut above the bushmen. So they accept one huge cleavage in the social order and fan- tastically choose pigmentation as the determining factor. Cardinal Garcias and the Hottentot ale equal on one side; you, gentle reader, and the white oaf, equal on the other; and there is it" passage across that preposterous frontier.

I was witness, many years ago, to a bapPY product of this disordered logic, when, having run short of money in Cape Town, I travelled home third class. I embarked with some slight apprehensions, which were quite otiose. Our quarters were clean, our food abundant and palatable; there was only one privation—tack of space. We were four in a cabin and there %ins. simply not enough room for all of us to sit oll deck or in the saloon. I forget how many baths and lavatories there were, but I remember there was usually a queue. One black man travelled with us. In deference to South African suscepti. bilities he had a four-berth cabin to himself More than this he had a lavatory, a bath rooui and an armchair all placarded : 'For the use 01 non-European passengers only.' He was a mall of studious disposition and he had a very corn: fortable voyage. I greatly envied his three N\ solitude.

In Washington, DC, when I was last there, I visited a segregated Pets' Cemetery. The loved ones were separated not by their own colour but by that of their owners; black and white pets (if white women lay indifferently in one quarter; black and white pets of black women in another.

Racialism is dotty and rather modern, but it i5 widespread. One is certainly not more conscioos of it in Africa (except in the Union) than America.

And acts of violence by the police are also widespread everywhere in the world. It would be interesting to know how often during the lait five years the Indian police have (quite properly) opened fire on rioters and charged them with lathis. These incidents are not given much prominence in the English papers. It was ri” impression, when I was in India lately and read' ing the local press, that there was rioting sonic' where in that huge country almost every dal.. No one in his senses thinks it a good thing that Kenya prison warders should kill their prisoners. but no one in his senses should think it peculiat to Kenya. Cruelty and injustice are endemic everywhere. It is noble to expiate the sins of mankind vicariously in a hermit's cell. Failing that heroi': remedy, let me gratefully accept the good thing.' that the world still offers and do not, I beg Yog' try and impute guilt for things entirely outside my control. I have had a happy two months and I won't le' the weekly papers spoil them for me.

THE END