Tramp Royale (24 page)

He knows he is sitting on a powder keg, but he does not like to talk about it. He prefers to talk about how you must "handle the natives," how you "mustn't spoil them."

These "pukka sahib" laddies who know so much about "how to treat natives" fail to see the native as an individual. In the
Ruys
the South African passengers thought it was funny, ridiculous, a bit bad for our face really, for Ticky and I to bother to know the names of the Chinese crew members with whom we came in daily contact. Many of them (I inquired) did not even know the names of their own room stewards-said names being posted on little cards outside each stateroom door. As for the barmen or deck boys, they would whistle and shout, "Hey! Charlie!"

This attitude applied even more strongly to the Dutch officers. The Dutch once had the worldwide reputation of being the perfect colonials . . . until the Indonesians chucked them out. An engineering officer in the
Ruys
told me that he did not know the name of a single Chinese among his own engineroom watchstanders; he simply knew which one was "Number One" through whom he bossed the others, nor did he know "Number One" by name. I inquired further and found that most of the Dutch officers did not know the names of their own room servants, although in some cases they had been waited on by the same Chinese for several voyages.

We sat successively with three Dutch officers in the course of the trip. As is usual aboard ship the same waiters would serve a table meal after meal, day after day. Yet the Dutch officers who sat with us seemed to find it amusingly odd, somehow undignified, and a rather startling exhibition of memory that Ticky and I always knew the names of the waiters.

They failed to notice that we got better and quicker service than they did, even better than the Captain got.

Of course, we weren't doing anything odd for Americans; I am not pinning a rose on myself. The usual run of American, if he eats twice in the same restaurant and draws the same waitress, will find out her name and call her by it thereafter. He may find out her name the first time, even if he expects never to eat there again, simply because he dislikes shouting, "Hey, you!" If he is served regularly by the same waitress or waiter he is certain to know the name.

This common American habit is not in itself democratic; it is just horse sense. I have emphasized it because, while it is a minor matter to us, simply good manners and convenience, it is a major, important, even crucial difference between us and most other Western white nations. Hell's bells, even a dog is easier to handle if you call him by name! Why can't these lunkheads see that?

The most important possession of any man is his own name. Without a name he has no face. The white man in the East has always emphasized the importance of keeping face himself, but he seems to have given little thought to the deadly danger of not giving face to natives.

In most other ways the South African white (or "European" as he always calls himself) is a remarkably pleasant fellow-jovial, sociable, warm, not at all distant with strangers, being much more like us than they are like the English in this respect. They tend to be somewhat anti-American in general, but not toward individual Americans. This anti-American attitude seems to derive first from a belief that we are stirring up a third world war (they have swallowed the Moscow line on that point), on a dislike for us as business competitors, and a generalized nationalism-South Africans are among the most nationalistic people in the world. They seem to dislike the English even more than they dislike us and speak of the day when they will divorce themselves from England completely-not "if," but "when."

This xenophobia takes the curious form with the Afrikander South African of tending to be a little surly with those who speak English instead of Afrikaans. The country is officially bilingual but a civil servant will be a lot more civil if addressed in Afrikaans-but he will be just as difficult about it with an English-speaking fellow citizen as with a foreigner.

This clinging to a national language spoken by no one else anywhere (Afrikaans is
not
Dutch, just as Pennsylvania Dutch is not German; it is a highly bastardized dialect derived from Dutch), this insistence on Afrikaans, is perhaps the most cross-grained symptom of their neurotic nationalism. Afrikaans is a language unnecessary and useless. It is spoken by less than two million people practically all of whom speak English as well-and English is spoken by more than a half billion people on this planet. It has no tradition worthy of the name, it has little literature; to use it for science or technology requires borrowing all the technical words from some other language. It requires almost everything in South Africa to be printed twice; it requires wasted years of study to acquire a second daily language, when the time could be spent learning Spanish or German. It has no use at all save to shut out the rest of the world.

Which is exactly what many South Africans, most particularly the Afrikanders, want to do.

Many of them want to make South Africa self-sufficient in all respects; the policies of the present government are aimed at making the country independent both in food and in manufactured goods. They still would like to sell, but they don't want to buy anything if they can possibly help it, and aside from the regrettable necessities of trade they wish the rest of the world would go away and forget to come back. Clinging to a language which no one else can talk makes it easier for them to maintain this attitude. Psychiatrists have a name for this symptom when exhibited by individuals.

But since they still need dollar exchange they advertise heavily in our country to attract American tourists, then their real feelings toward outsiders show up in making it exceedingly difficult for a tourist to be admitted. We ran into this same curious ambivalence in two other small, nationalistic and suspicious countries: Indonesia and New Zealand-plead for tourists, then treat them like convicts being processed.

Despite everything, it is an extremely pleasant country to visit-if your skin is the approved color. Cape Town is English in the very nicest sense, Durban is much like Florida, Johannesburg is like a boom city in Texas. The Johannesburgers show an American enthusiasm for the new, the big, the different, and the expensive; they speak of how much things cost and of the big operations they are in with the unashamed candor of a Texan or a Hollywood movie producer-they are so un-English that it is a bit of a shock to run across a cricket field there.

But most of all, the beauty of South Africa makes one gasp.

The
Ruys
was a very sociable ship, particularly with the South Africans aboard. There was a party of some sort almost every night; the ladies dressed for dinner and most of the men did, too, either in evening clothes or summer whites. On New Year's Eve there was, of course, an especially big party.

I was away from the ballroom floor for a few minutes to replace a dress shirt that I had melted down. When I returned, a tall, handsome man was kissing my wife. Gathered in his left arm was a plump blonde, apparently a reserve.

When Ticky was able to talk she said, "Dear, I want you to meet Sam."

Sam stuck out a hand-a third one, I think-and shouted, "Hi, Bob! Have a drink! It's my birthday." He was red-faced and his shirt had melted down, too, but he did not seem to care. There were three silver ice buckets each with a magnum on a table by him; I congratulated him, sat down, and started sopping up champagne. Sam sat down with us for a moment, then got up hastily. "I missed one! Be right back-" He dashed across the room, grabbed another female, and bussed her.

He ran down the whole female, first-class passenger list, plus the stewardess-who was not the usual old biddy, but should have been on an airline. I poured more of his champagne and hoped that there was no trench mouth aboard.

This was how we happened to drive across South Africa.

Sam invited us to do so with him about ten minutes later. The next morning it appeared that he had not forgotten it and really meant it. For the remainder of the trip to Cape Town we were bombarded with advice from other South Africans not to do so; according to them the Karoo Desert through which we would drive was unbeautiful, uninteresting, and unbearable in the summer; we would be hot, dirty, miserable, and bored-take an old hand's advice, son, and take the Blue Train, or fly.

At last I got a little huffy about it and told one of them that we would go with Sam if we had to walk, dragging our sled behind us; he had
invited
us, damn it, and that was more than anyone else had done! It shut up the talk but did not change their minds.

They were wrong. We enjoyed every mile of it.

We arrived in Table Bay early in the morning, as usual, and with the customary morning-after malaise from the Captain's Dinner of the last night. Even so, I found it possible to second Sir Francis Drake's logbook entry of 1580: "This cape is a most stately thing, and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth." The Cape of Good Hope is as lovely as its name.

Table Mountain, sitting over Cape Town and Table Bay, is a separate sight, some miles to the north of the Cape. The Table is a pleasing sight, but it is an ordinary mesa or butte, made exceptional by being the only one of its sort in the neighborhood, instead of being scattered around in quantity, New Mexico style. It forms a splendid background for an unusually lovely city.

My own first glimpse of South African life was of stevedores on the dock. They were resting and playing a finger matching game-a game which I had played the same way in school as a boy, which is pictured in murals in ancient Pompeii, which is played also by the Australian aborigines, and by Hawaiians half a world away from Cape Town. This may have some great anthropological significance; for myself I was simply delighted with the odd fact.

We were processed with exasperating slowness. It was long past lunch time before we were through customs. The customs examination was not outstandingly lengthy itself and we had Sam with us to smooth the way; the only mild hitch came over cigarettes. We had taken ashore the number which the regulations appeared to permit free of duty, but somehow we were wrong. I never did understand just how we were wrong, but it may have been that a single customs return for husband and wife was allowed one exemption, not two. In any case I was told to pay duty on half the cigarettes we were taking in for our personal use and I did so; the duty amounted to a hundred per cent.

In the mean time Ticky was poking me in the ribs and urging mutiny. Her ultra-free soul had already been tried that morning by some exceptionally silly immigration questions. "Don't pay it!" she whispered, loud enough to be heard back on the ship. "Tell him to go to the Devil! If they don't like it, we'll go back aboard and not spend a damn cent in their confounded country. We aren't even asking to take enough in to last us through-it's an outrage!"

The cost was not much but with Ticky it is always the principle of the thing-mere expense never fazes her. I hurriedly promised to skin her alive and sell her pelt and hustled her out of there. Sam and I closed in on her from both sides and marched her away while the customs officers pretended not to hear and looked smugly pleased. We found a taxi and headed up town.

The plan was to pick up Sam's car, load all baggage in it, then see Cape Town. Departure into the desert would be made at sunrise the next morning. We would sleep aboard ship, as there were no hotel rooms to be had in Cape Town, it being the tail end of the holidays. In fact there were no train or plane reservations to be had for the same reason; had we not stuck with Sam's offer we would never have been able to cross Africa while the ship went the long way around the coast.

Sam lived in Johannesburg and had left his car in the company garage of the Cape Town firm he represented in the north. We drove out to the plant and Sam left us with one of the company officers while he got his car. This gentleman was affable but I at once ran into something which seems to me to characterize the odd attitude of South Africans toward Americans. This man, whom I shall call "Mr. Smith"-he was not an Afrikander-said to me, "New York is filled with gangsters, eh?"

I silently cursed Hollywood for the distorted impression of the U.S. given to the world by the movies and answered as quietly as I could, "Why, no, I wouldn't say so. Most of that sort of trouble died out with the repeal of Prohibition."

Mr. Smith looked startled and said, "You misunderstood me. I meant the businessmen in New York."

It seemed to be an unanswerable remark. Sam arrived with his car at that point and saved me from having to cope with it. But I asked him about it once we were out of earshot. "What did he mean?"

"Oh, that-" Sam frowned and answered, "Nothing, really. It's just an expression. It means a man who is a good bargainer, aggressive. Almost a compliment."

"It did not sound like one."

"Well . . . some people aren't very tactful."

I shut up as Sam obviously did not like the subject. But I do not think the term was complimentary; I think it was a smear name used so habitually by them about us that "Mr. Smith" forgot himself. From this and other remarks I reached the conclusion that the notion that Americans are all gangsters in business matters is something that "everybody knows" in South Africa.

I am not an economist and I certainly shall not attempt to psychoanalyze an entire nation. But one does notice attitudes and there is always the itch to try to understand why. I confess that with respect to South Africa I could never figure out why . . . why the United States was regarded with a mixed aggressive-defensiveness.

The reasons why we aren't liked in many nations are fairly obvious and have been discussed too often to warrant rehashing here, but none of the usual reasons seem to apply in South Africa. The Union of South Africa is not even faintly communist, so that cannot be the source. "Dollar Imperialism" does not seem to be the trouble; while we have a little money invested there, you will not find American trade names spread around and American businessmen are conspicuous by their absence. We certainly have not displaced South Africa from world leadership, nor has South Africa experienced the sour taste of gratitude, either during or after the War-her role was more like our own, on a smaller scale.