WITH. MAC THROUGH AFRICA

LWE is close to the surface in Africa today. A great deal of what is visible to a visitor in the street is probably visible to a visiting Prime Minister from the cool, white and teak brown porch of a Government House, or from the tonneau of a passing Rolls-Royce (in which the only sound to be heard is the chanting of Africans for Free-dom ! Free-dom! or the voice of an African Prime Minister asking for a loan). Still, a visiting Prime Minister is kept cruelly busy, and his first impressions of Africa must differ in many ways from a more ordinary onlooker's. 1, for example, come home utterly confused about what Sir Roy Welensky really thinks of 'partnership' in Central Africa; and Mr. Macmillan is probably just as uninformed about the problems confronted by the manager of the `Kalamazoo-Shake-your-Head,' a high life nightclub in Accra. (In truth, the manager's problems boil down to one sentence: 'The people I hire either can't work the cash register, or they work it too well, man.' I'll wager Mr. Macmillan cannot condense Sir Roy so easily.) But at least we travelled roughly the same route and saw the same places at the same times.

Ghana January 6-11 `The more specifically and deliberately a Ghanaian speaks or writes, the less meaning you should attach -to it,' an acquaintance who had spent six fascinated months in Accra told me. 'It is when they get vague you should look for meaning.' His curiosity had been stirred weeks before when he discovered that a new café not far from his rooming house had been christened the `Open And Closed.' Puzzling over what inspired the name, he was relieved one day to see a sign- Painter at work on the cafe's sign. When he went to examine the results, he saw that the sign had been amended to say

OPEN AND CLOSED CAFE 100%

A connoisseur of this sort of thing—and almost all newcomers to Ghana become connoisseurs— soon finds a favourite `mammy wagon' slogan, these being the messages boldly emblazoned on the sagging, coughing lorries which daily trans- port cattieloads of Ghanaians in and out of the city. 'We love God but Where is' He?' is one. Mine, tentatively, is `Life is War—No. 1.' But scion the 'mammy wagons' may be no more; Nkrumah, intent not only on improving the transportation but also on acquiring for the State what has been a profitable monopoly of a few free-enterprisers, plans to push the wagons out of business with an extended State-run omnibus system. It will be a sad day for poets. Rut a safer one for peasants; a young British Army surgeon, stationed only a few weeks in Accra at the excellent British-built military hospital, has found to his restrained joy—he is an orthopredic man—that the mammy wagons a_ re a steady supplier of broken pelvises. 'Have had as many as six carted in at one time,' he said. By ROBERT MANNING The newcomer arrives for his first look at the first black African colony to win freedom with a certain unintended condescension. In Accra, this heightens first impressions almost to the level of surprise. The city prospers. It bustles and smiles with a frownless placidity. It is a flicker of calicoes and burnished copper shoulders; slums that fester; traffic that jangles fast past casually beau- tiful women toting loads on their heads, past slow, 9thooth movements of labourers in khaki, digging, toting, consulting, jabbering as they dig ditches, build neat packed-dirt sidewalks or clean, brush and plant flowers in the sparse brown.parks that are spotted through the better districts.

The government-built Ambassador hotel, one of two dozen new buildings that are notable for the simplicity of their lines, is one of the pleasantest surprises; clean, tasteful, air-condi- tioned and, alas, expensive (£3 a day for single bed, bath and breakfast), it far surpasses hostels I have been unfortunate enough to encounter in such scattered bastions of civilisation as Springfield, Ill., Blackpool or, for that matter, Manchester. For a country whose economy was in a state of some trepidation after Independence because the cocoa tree was infected by an epidemic of swollen ;hoot, Ghana is now

Robert Manning is chief of the 'Time'rLife' bureau in London. He was the only American journalist to cover the Prime Minister's tour in Africa throughout; and in this article he sums up his impressions of the journey from Accra to Cape Town.

prospering. The swollen shoot has been defeated; cocoa is bringing more than £250 a ton (of which Nkrumah's Government keeps more than £150); the Government has no national debt and some £60,000 in the bank. Still, one bad cocoa year could topple Nkrumah's prosperity as easily as his people are felling trees in the bush along the upper Volta river, where he is almost desperate to build the dam he thinks will convert Ghana from a one-crop farming country to a small but well-rounded country with an industrial quotient.

The Russians, of course, have begun to play on Ghana's Nasser-like preoccupation with this cure-all; and on the eve of Mr. Macmillan's visit the new Soviet Ambassador, a small, ingratiating man of forty-one, with a bouncy smiling de- meanour and monotonous, high-pitched com- mand of. English, went to Ghana's new University College to lecture a 'summer school' of about 400 Ghanaians. He discussed The Soviet Revolu- tion (`It was bloodless') and After—a subject which the Ambassador made seem even more extensive by his dry cascade of statistics and boosts for the achievements of Soviet Socialism. His audience was attentive, even enjoyed some of his jibes at the fripperies of America and the small size of 'the British Isles. And some may have been deeply impressed by his insistence that the Soviet Government was eager to hand out loans to all corners at only 2.5 per cent. interest 'and with absolutely no strings: we are interested not in profit, only in helping.' Still, I did not get the impression that Mr. Sytenko exactly carried the house, and at question time, though, in the words of an American onlooker, 'he got away with murder,' he was at least asked some of the right questions—about Hungary, lack of a political opposition, Russia's fear to admit free flow of foreign publications. There was a sophistication beneath the surface courtesy of some of the ques- tioners; one went into the complications of the Soviet electoral system and then, in a voice as Oxonian and as distant from the jungle as the Reform Club, concluded, 'At least, that's what we simple people in the bush are told.'

The University, which uses the London University syllabus, has a faculty of more than 200 and as yet only 650 students. The faculty, studded with some Europeans (including a few Hungarian refugees), contains only twenty Ghanaians. The rest are British, including the head. They dominate the University College just as they still dominate the Ghanaian Government at the operative levels. The Ghana Macmillan saw is populated with at least a fifth more Britons than the 4,000 who were there before Independence; and most of these are working for Nkrumah's Government, running his police, his economy and most of his Government De- partments. 'We value their services and look forward to many years of continued fruitful co- operation,' says Nkrumah. Since he is a practical man, who seems more and more to feel there is only a shrinking number of his countrymen to be relied on, we can safely presume he means it.

But Nkrumah's sincerity on other matters is open to debate—and debated it is at many levels of Ghanaian and foreign society in Accra. The cult of the individual expands; the pressures on the Opposition continue, though in a benign way compared to some places that make equal claims to democracy; the Parliament assumes more and more the obedient efficiency of a one-party house and helps Nkrumah weave his laws into a blanket to cover the skeleton of autocracy; though there is not the flaring corruption of a couple of years ago, there is still common talk of bribery and chicanery among the ministries—and the sight of new, Surrey-comfortable homes being built in the fashionable section of Accra for Ministers and sub-Ministers does not still the gossip. Few Ghanaians are really comfort- able at the knowledge that nearly fifty members of the Opposition, two of them MPs, are in de- tention without trial, although they may, when it is broached, scowl and snap, 'What about Banda'?' or smile acidly and say, `Yes, it's a technique we learned from the British.' There is something saddening about the lengths to which Nkrumah extends his personal powers and amends the laws to encircle an opposition that seems neither strong nor imaginative enough to threaten him. The Chief's aides shrug and say, The proof of assassination is the victim's body. We don't intend to let matters get that far.'

As the sign on the mammy wagon says, Life is War.

Nigeria

January 11-18 Only an hour by air away, Ghana, as seen from Nigeria, lies at the small end of the tele- scope. Nigeria is immensely larger, its people tougher and poorer, its problems and potentiali- ties bigger—all so much so that there is no place in Nigeria's chemistry for the tranquillity of Ghana. Nkrumah himself is dismissed in Lagos as an upstart whose achievements have been exaggerated because they came first. At a press conference given by the Federal Prime Minister for those of us who were following Macmillan, several of the questions concerned what Nkrumah had said at his press conference in Accra a few days earlier. 'I don't know why you attach any importance to what Mr. Nkrumah says,' snapped Sir Abubakar in mild exaspera- tion.

Accra is a distant pastoral capital next to the throb and blare and stink of Lagos. To add an unneeded pungency to the big, street-lining wel- come that the city gave to Mr. Macmillan, the nightsoil collectors of Lagos's slums were so thoughtless as to go on strike. For as long as tra- dition can be traced, the job has been done by men from one tribe, the Egbe, near Kabba. But recently there has been agitation among the Egbe over the degrading nature of the work and the caste-like stigma, so, under pressure from home, the 200 Egbes went on strike. When we left, at least one of the newspapers was insisting that it was time for the Government to face the need for some modern sewers, an £8 million proposi- tion, to replace the almost stagnant, open-ditch drains of Lagos's slums—the worst, it is said, this side of Calcutta.

Yet the fetid, churning, oddly laughter-filled life of the slums almost cries out confidence; it can't get worse, so surely it must get better. Slowly, inadequately, betterment has come for some of the former slum-dwellers. One could see, if not hear, the sigh of relief that escaped Mr. Macmillan when his hosts hurried him from one of the slum alleys to one of the new government- built housing developments where, for 25s. per week per room (the average labourer earns only about 30s. per week), some of the better-off slum- dwellers have been able to move into three- and four-bedroom housing units. They are small, dreary and overcrowded already; but they are also neat, removed from the diseased air of the slums and already, of course, far over-subscribed. The Prime Minister was the epitome of home- bodiness when, visiting one of the houses, he peered about the living room and then into a five-by-six bedroom that was veritably oolonial- ised by one huge four-poster. 'Very snug,' said the Prime Minister soberly.

Lagos has all the drive and presumptions of a city that is the capital of the thirteenth most populous nation in the world and, in theory, Africa's most powerful country south of the Sahara. To prove the point, it has the seat of the Federal Government, blueprints for a huge and expensive complex of new parliamentary and government buildings, and the Parliament itself, which Mr. Macmillan inaugurated in a setting impressively brilliant with the trappings of African old and new, blended with those of British old and new.

Amid the parliamentary pomp, with Britain's Prime Minister seated in the aisle and with the varied colours of Nigeria—politics, skins and costumery—together under one roof, one almost succumbs to the sense of a real Nigerian nation- hood. But there is a flaw in this picture. The flaw wears flowing, emerald-green robes, and a golden- threaded turban, as he gazes with bright absor- bent eyes at the proceedings below. He is Sir Alhaji Ahmadu, the Sardauna of Sokhoto, ruler of Nigeria's large Northern Region, chief of the majority National People's Congress, and the most powerful single political personage of Nigeria's 35,000,000 people. When the Sardauna goes to Federal Parliament he sits not on the floor of the house but in the balcony. Though he could have chosen to be Federal Prime Minister, the Sardauna preferred to put his number-two man in the job and to keep for himself the job of running the Northern Region. Also in a figure- head seat, as President of the Senate, sits Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, leader of the Eastern Region. And in the role of Leader of the Opposition sits Chief Obafemi Awolowo, boss of the Western Region. Thus, three men outside the centre dominate the centre of Nigeria's Government, just as the three regions and their separate ways and ambitions cast shadows over the Federal experiment.

Ibadan, capital of Awolowo's Western Region and seat of his smoothly mechanised Action Group, is caught up in the preoccupation of proving to the rest of Nigeria that it is the richest, most capable and most forward-looking government in the Federation. A brisk, Ameri- can-style firm of London public relations experts prepares its pamphlets, furbishes its reputation and trumpets its achievements to the foreign press; it was one of them, presumably, who introduced sky-writing into Awolowo's Federal election campaign. In little more than three months, with the help of commercial TV meth from Britain, the Western Region inaugurated TV ('WNTV—First in Africa'). On the night Mr. Macmillan was there, if he could have torn him- self away from the formalities, he could have sat before one of perhaps 3,000 sets in operation (in a population of about 8,000,000) and, after 'God Save the Queen,' could have spent a zippy couple of hours with the old motion-picture version of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Africans' hunger for learning is nowhere more evident than in Ibadan, whose 500,000 inhabi- tants make out the largest indigenous population of any city in Africa. Bookstalls are everywhere; one street made of dirt tracks, rusted shanties and mud-walled huts had fifty bookstalls within a quarter of a mile, among them in rapid succes- sion The Times Bookshop, The Happy Book- shop, The Rational Bookshop, The Holy Book- shop, The Christian Bookshop, The Providential Bookshop and, an apparent interloper, The Olobokum Bookshop.

Mr. Macmillan got a taste of the educational process at Ibadan University and the first heckling of his tour. There was generally a good-natured, high-spirited tang to the crowd of 400 students with their varied and for the most part imper- sonal slogans. It bothered Macmillan's aides, and particularly an officious British policeman with red handlebar moustache, and a swagger stick with a tic (there still seem to be a few such colonial remainders in every police detachment in Nigeria), more than it should have; and it left the Prime Minister somewhat unsure of how to respond. They laughed, taunted and broke into a chanted refrain-

Free-dam, Free-dom, Everywhere there must be Free-dom-

that gave a thin feeling of being carried back- wards in time to a Georgia or Alabama planta- tion. But the spell broke when they broke into other words-- We want Jomo We want Jomo

We want Jomo Ken-yat-ta-

to a ridiculously familiar tune : 'Clementine.' Even Mr. Macmillan felt better at this, and unbent to the extent of rising in the open rear of a Rolls that might have cost the price of fifteen Nigerians' enrolment at Oxford or Cambridge for a couple of years. He stretched out his arms and said, in the only words of dialect he had learned up to then, `Kabo, kabo.' It means, 'Welcome, welcome.' The students burst into song again. Mr. Macmillan kept his good nature and was slowly driven off, looking like some kindly figure being gently tumbrilled back to the past after a brief visit to the present.

Then, though the singing faded in the distance, something odd about the demonstration remaine J. It was the realisation that, however deep the students' yearnings, they had not yet found their own vocabulary; and for music they relied on an old Methodist hymn and a college song.

There is less veneer of modernity in Enugu, capital of Zik's Eastern Region, and very little at all in the Northern Region. It is feudal Moslem territory, not so much Black African as. Middle Eastern with a heavy overlay of Pakistan and an inlay of Raj India. Here is the land of the Sardauna, of Emirs and their rhinestone palaces, of parched polo fields and, in Kaduna, the Sardauna's capital, a fives court just like the ones at Eton. The Sardauna is 'a strong-minded, con- fident man who does not suffer from an inferiority complex, though he is less insistent than some of his emirs that his subjects prostrate themselves by the roadside when his limousine passes.

The Northerners play hard, as Mr. Macmillan must have observed, especially on his final day there. The Emir of Zaria was the host. His palace, set back from the city on a dusty plain, is made of sun-bleached mud, with tattered banners and plump minarets poking gracelessly toward the sky. Arabic characters in mosaic proclaim at the front entrance that it is the domicile of the Emir of Zaria and his harem of two-score wives. But lest the yokels in the back rows miss it, a large sign in English proclaims that the repertory set is the EMIR'S PALACE.

Perhaps two thousand of the Emir's subjects lined the road outside, waving, chanting, gaping with curiosity as Cadillacs whirled up to dis- gorge the distinguished guests. Lady Dorothy viewed the harem, while her husband was escorted into the audience chamber for a meeting with the Emir's Cabinet. The two sat alone, then one by one the Ministers were summoned into the room, each squirming in on hands and knees with nose furrowing the Emir's rich carpeting. How Sir David Eccles would have enjoyed the look of inspiration that is said to have crossed Mr. Mac- millan's face as the Minister of Education made his way in (there was no Home Secretary).

Outside, excited by their tribal drummers and bemused by the antics of a few local clowns in dishevelled masks and tattered leopard skins jumping about the scene, some of the crowd began to push forward. One of the Emir's body- guards, a mounted Little Caesar played by the local Edward G. Robinson, spurred his dozing pony into the crowd and flailed about him with his whip until the fringe pushed back in terror. The Emir emerged with his guest. There were the usual speeches. 'My wife and I are indeed glad. . . .' A sound of querulous trumpets six feet long, a stirring of sound as a few thin layers of the Emir's cavalry shuffled forward in the motions of a limpid durbar charge, then in festoons of dust the Cadillacs made off for Kano and its modern airport, where the Emir of Kano's trumpeter still appears to serenade the arrival of a Royal Mail plane, just as in the past he greeted the camel caravans. Mr. Macmillan's day in Kismet was over, and so was his visit to Nigeria.

Central Africa January 18-21 Nigerian unity ultimately may prove real. Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, is not real—or, to save a quibble, is unreal. It neither looks nor sounds British. Walking about its streets, you would more readily conjure up some small mid- western American city in an area whose farmers have begun to strike oil on the back pasture. There are hamburger parlours, soda fountains and American movies almost to the exclusion of British. The streets have the straight and arid wideness of one of many cleanly but unimagina- tively planned American cities, with room for a lonesome sheriff to draw his six-guns. The new skyscrapers, built and being built to house the Insurance companies, the banks and the mining combines, are assuredly made of real stone. The neat, comfortable residences with mani- cured lawns and suede-brushed tennis courts are firm and comfortable to the touch. So is the elegant New Meikles Hotel; and its rates are very real indeed.

But something about Salisbury is wrong. It begins to intrude on the airplane coming in to the airport, when stewardesses pass out the inevitable immigration. forms. It asks the usual questions put by white authorities in Africa. Race? How much money do you carry? Previous crimes? But the Central African Federation is the Only one that solemnly asks a man to state the sex of his wife.

In the English-language newspapers, you read news of London, New York, Hollywood, Mos- cow, but you look very hard indeed to find news of West Africa. In the streets, at loading plat- forms, in backrooms and alleyways where there is menial work to be done there are Africans in limp shirts and shorts. Others vend newspapers on street corners or slide slowly past the OK Bazaar or the BP garage on an errand for their white employers. But there are not many Africans for the capital of a Federation where Africans outnumber whites by twenty-five to one. There are only 214,000 Europeans in Southern Rhodesia and 2,590,000 Africans; 292,000 to 7,560,000 in the Federation as a whole. This is the land of 'partnership' between the races. So where are all the African partners? The sheep'.; in the meadow, the cow's in the corn. But the haystack is all white.

The movie theatre in Salisbury where Mr. Macmillan gave his main speech was opened to blacks for this occasion only. Of course, almost none came—six out of some 2,000 by my count. The municipal luncheon given next day at the New Meikles Hotel was boycotted by the few Africans who were invited; they are not normally allowed into the hotel except to clean its rooms and toilet bowls and to tend its garbage. 'The invitations said R.S.V.P. How would you repondez?' asked an African, who learned his French while acquiring an MA at the University of Indiana. The answer is, `Touché.'

At the municipal drill hall, the Prime Minister of Great Britain was invited to meet the people who mattered in the capital of partnership. If he shook hands with everyone of the six or seven hundred people in the hall, he met, at the most, six, Africans—and each of these would have difficulty getting elected dog-catcher in a one- man-one-vote election.

It is against the law for an African to live in Salisbury; he must live in a separate community situated four or more miles from the city.

It is against the law for an African to drink an ordinary glass of beer or any other alcoholic drink (excepting kaffir beer) unless he has earned a university degree (which, to a Rhodesian African, is a blood-relative of the Jonker diamond) or has otherwise succumbed to the indignity of applying for and getting a special licence from the Government.

It is against the law for an African man to sleep with a white woman, but it is legal for a white man to sleep with an African woman. An African may lodge in only one hotel (the Jameson) and in the post office he must stand in a black line, wasting his white employer's time and money while the White Only clerks do cross- word puzzles.

If an American Negro were asked to pick a city he would prefer most to avoid, he could wisely name Jackson, Mississippi. In Salisbury one night at dinner I met an intelligent, gentle American Negress who now lives in Southern Rhodesia. 'If you had a practical choice, would you choose Rhodesia or Mississippi?' I asked her. She answered without hesitation, 'Mississippi.'

There is only one African barrister in Southern Rhodesia. (Generosity requires mention of the fact that there is also one in Northern Rhodesia and one in Nyasaland, according to the latest available statistics.) A special law had to be passed to allow the Salisbury barrister, Herbert Chitepo, thirty-three, to establish his office within the city limits. He is a tough, attrac- tive, London-trained lawyer, who has been practising law in Salisbury for six years, keeping his temper a great deal of the time. In that period he has been • asked to represent only two whites in court; his liberal white friends, of whom he has several, seem either to have failed him, over- looked his name, or live blessedly non-litigious lives. 'When it comes to a matter of such personal interest as a lawsuit, they think that an African won't get a fair hearing in court,' he explains. 'They are wrong, of course. I have always been fairly treated by the magistrates.'

It should be said that whites are not as blind or as single-minded in Salisbury as such random illustrations can make them seem. There is an irrationality about life there, but only some— probably a minority—of the whites are irra- tional. It is only seventy years since the Pioneers' column planted the Union Jack in the plot of ground that now lies before the New Meikles Hotel. There has been time for the growth of a generation of whites to whom Rhodesia is what 'To dois to rappeler, Raoul, viennent d'un climut terrible.' England was to Robert Browning in April. Some want Federation with Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia because they sense, unfortunately without much eloquence, that there is some- thing in Federation that could be beneficial for all. Some want it because they prefer it to the alternatives of union with South Africa or con- tinued indirect rule by London. Some want it simply because they think Federation is the post- ponement of black reality.

For all the same reasons, many others—most blacks and some whites—oppose it. One of the Federation's most influential copper barons said a few days before Mr. Macmillan arrived, 'There are only two things that will last in this part of the world—copper and Africans. Those are the two forces that must work together.'

The right-wing Rhodesians of the Dominion Party want to renounce Federation and join South Africa. `Federation is only a plan to saddle us with Nyasaland,' is the attitude; 'What good Is Nyasaland to us?' (But why assume that South Africa would want to add Southern Rhodesia to its already huge problems?) It was perhaps an anti-climax, but it should surely be no source of wonderment that Mr. Macmillan, after two carefully confusing statements, should have flown away in a fixed fog of ambiguity. He could not have done much else without under- mining the Monckton Commission before it began its inquiry. Having succeeded in leaving all sides somewhat confused and unsure of them- selves, he moved on in the trust that the Commis- sion would do more than emulate Belloc's Physicians who murmured as they took their fees, `There is no cure for this disease.'

South Africa

January 27-February 5

`You simply don't understand,' the young Afrikaaner insisted. 'Nobody seems to under- stand.' He was barely thirty, a strong and hand- some young man who was soon to inherit his ailing father's mixed farm. His two daughters were in school, old enough now to begin learn- ing the elements of the South African religion that is called apartheid. The father already be- lieved. I had just told him about an experience of an English photographer who lives in Johannesburg. The photographer had been awakened and told to rush to the Coalbrook mine. where over 400 miners were trapped below ground. The photographer rushed to the pit- head and asked an official, 'How many people down there?' Six,' the white official replied. The Photographer said with surprise, 'Why, I heard that there were many more than that.' Oh,' the official said with a shrug. If you count the natives.'

The young farmer insisted that the story could not be true. But, I said, I was told that it was. Then the mine official must be an idiot. 'Probably some ignoramus off the railroad,' he insisted. But wasn't this, in truth, an honest illustration of the Way most of South Africa's 3,000,000 whites look on its 12,000,000 blacks. 'No, no, no,' the young man protested. 'You simply don't understand.' He paused, and then blurted out, with a helpless gesture and a tone that was not vicious but gentle and imploring, 'They are different from

us This is a fact.' I wondered, as we talked, whether Dr. Verwoerd would at some point say to Mr. Macmillan, 'You simply don't understand.'

There was much to try to understand while the Prime Minister was there. In the wake of the Coalbrook disaster the newspapers reported the previous year's total mine fatalities—more than 700, all Africans. The police rounded up some

thirty Africans for trial for the Cato Manor massacre of nine policemen and looked for more. The treason trial was lurching through its fourth year. In Cape Town, inside the gracious House of Assembly where their late Britannic Majesties, King George V and Queen Mary, watch in full- length silence from the wall, Hon. Members pre- pared to enact a noble amendment to the law; a sharp Afrikaaner eye had glimpsed a loophole in apartheid's strictures against mixed bathing, so the Nationalists soberly voted to extend the colour bar on beaches to the three-mile limit. As he watched the Opposition United Party mem- bers walk across the floor to vote with Nationalists on the amendment, an English South African said with disgust, 'The English have thrown in the sponge. If this country is saved, the Afrikaaners will save it.'

It takes a delicate gauge to detect any wind of change in such a miasma. But the gauge gently moves:

. . . in Durban, Mr. Macmillan attended another one of those garden parties devoid of even one of the Africans he was politely trying to meet. But in a drawing-room a few miles away, a group of white liberals, African Congress Party men and Indian politicians discussed the political situation with some of us who were following the Prime Minister. The newspapermen were luckier than Mr. Macmillan in their freedom of movement. The talk was of boycotts, of organis- ing workers, of turning the 'pass' system against its formulators, of controlling the urge for violence that boils up inside the African ghettoes like sour mash in a shebeen distillery. All the Africans were followers of Chief Luthuli and apostles of his non-violence. `It will have to be done without violence,' said one of them. But how long would Africans listen to these leaders? `Who can say for certain—but for a long time, I think. They believe us when we say that a rising is just what the Nationalists want. They under- stand when we say, "Look, man. Where are we going to get the guns?" It will be settled without blood.'

No one in the room demurred.

. . . in Johannesburg, quick-built. quick-tem- pered city where money is the root of all, it is

'Ma femme, elle ne me comprend pas.'

common gossip that Afrikaaners in big business are beginning to feel the need for a change. As they leave their mealic fields and rise in the financial and mining temples so long dominated by the English settlers, the Afrikaaners sense that if pushed to its extremes—if it is carried verwoerd, to coin a phrase—apartheid can bring political disaster and with it economic disaster. If Harry Oppenheimer's desire to keep working his mines will not change the tide, perhaps Anton Rupert's desire to make and sell more cigarettes will.

. . . in Cape Town, there is open unrest among Nationalist politicians as they contemplate the cost of Dr. Verwoerd's programme for Bantu States and then contemplate the votes it will cost them among higher-taxed Afrikaaner farmers. Young Nationalist MPs, stirring out of the isolationism of the portly uncles and bald fathers, have been travelling to Britain and Europe and returning to report with apprehen- sion that South African whites have become despised among their own kind.

Afrikaaners, everywhere, have begun to worry, and to make wry jokes, about the purse-lipped severity of the Dutch Reformed ministers who give apartheid its religious fervour, and about the excesses of the police. They are often lumped together for purposes of disparagement. An astonishing number of violations of the 'immora- lity' code which forbids intercourse between races are committed by men associated with the church or the police, 'Going to the rugger match tomorrow?' first man asks second man. 'There's no rugger match tomorrow,' says the second. `Yes there is.' says the first. 'Police against the Pastors for the Immorality Cup.' A few zephyrs do not a great wind make. But there they are, and every extra puff helps, including the good-sized one Mr. Macmillan took to the Union in his brief- case and uncorked on the day that capped his tour.

That night, on a high and fragrant farm above Cape Town, a jolly, well-to-do African Senator, his gracious wife and a score of their friends gave a braaivleis for the newspapermen who had made the long journey with Mr. Macmillan. It was a festive affair, spicy with the odours of plump sausages and Malayan kebab, and warm with wine. A coloured dance-band rolled sweet warm music across the hills and, safely back from the flicker of the charcoal fires and the sensitivi- ties of their white masters, African field-hands gently beat time and watched the fun. The hosts tried to hide their disappointment that, because of work and other commitments, most of their honoured guests had not come. They were hurt, but they fed laughter and hospitality to the few who had come, and made them more warm and welcome than they had dared hope. No one men- tioned Mr. Macmillan's speech, but the Senator made a short speech himself.

`You are our guests and we respect you. We hope you come, not as the spider who comes to the flower and sucks only poison, but the bee who comes and takes away honey.' A light breeze stirred leaves and rattled cornstalks against the barn wall. The party slowly melted.

We went home wondering, curiously : were we spiders or bees?