Now and then one finds in some corner of a
daily paper a bit of out-of-the-way news of quite unusual interest. There was such a message in Tuesday's Daily Herald from its Cape Town correspon- dent telling of the discovery of a supposedly lost pigmy tribe of aborigines called Strandlopers in the Brandberg mountains in South- West Africa. There are apparently only about fifty of them ; they buy their wives with salt, make fire by friction between two sticks, hunt game with crude bows and arrows, and count only up to two. (This is unusual ; most primitive peoples can count up to the number of their fingers.) One surprising feature is the locality. The Strandlopers (or Strandloopers) were known to anthropologists ; the Encylopaedia Britannica speaks of them as "an extinct people whose remains are found in caves, shelters and kitchen-middens along the eastern coast of southern Africa." But it is possible, no doubt, that at one time this tribe spread over a wide area, which would account for survivors of it being found in the west, while most of its remains are in the east. Every effort, it may be hoped, will be made to preserve the few dozens of Strandlopers who still survive and to create conditions that will enable them to multiply. How far the temptation to civilise them should be resisted is a nice problem. It would be a great pity if they were civilised into normality.
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