Tramp Royale (25 page)

It is true that we are the main bulwark (perhaps the only one) between them and conquest by Moscow, but they certainly do not seem to be aware of it, so they can hardly dislike us for that.

One remark we did hear repeatedly; someone would say that he would like to buy this or that, made in America, or would like to travel in America, but "-we can't get the dollars, you know." This remark was always delivered accusingly, as if it were the fault of the United States and of this American, myself, in particular.

We tried to point out that American goods were very nearly forbidden entrance to the Union by embargolike restrictions placed by South Africa itself; we got nowhere. As for dollars for travel in the States I pointed out that there was an open-market quotation for South African pounds on the New York market; their money was acceptable.

This last was greeted with a shake of the head. "Oh, no! Currency restrictions, you know. We can't get the dollars."

The currency restrictions are entirely those imposed by South Africa, not by us-but it is true that South Africans are not permitted to take outside enough money for much travel. (When was the last time you met a South African tourist in the States?) This is an odd status for the nationals of the world's biggest gold producer. South Africa mines over half a billion dollars in raw gold each year, almost half of the free world's supply and enormously more than we produce. Yet her gold reserves are small, her national debt is very large (proportionately about the same as ours), and her currency is "soft" and is kept near par by drastic exchange regulations.

The conventional answer is that they are helping England, an answer I don't understand as there is no love lost between Dr. Malan's government and England. The conventional solution offered by South Africans is that it is up to the United States to do something about about it, to wit, devalue the dollar.

I was first tackled on this subject as soon as I boarded the
Ruys;
a Johannesburg businessman and financier asked me how soon I thought the United States intended to raise the price of gold? I answered in some surprise that I did not know it was in the wind.

He seemed startled at my answer and made it clear that he thought it was a certainty; the question was when? Later I heard him discussing my answer with another Johannesburger; my answer seemed to worry both of them.

This subject came up again some weeks later with an entirely different group of South Africans. Ticky and I were invited to have a drink with this group; the moment we were seated we were tackled bluntly and aggressively: "Why doesn't your country buy our gold production at sixty dollars an ounce?"

The tone was truculent; I could see that I was already accused, tried and convicted. But Ticky took over. "Why
should
we?"

"Eh? It's obvious. You can't expect us to buy your goods if you won't buy our gold."

"We
do
buy your gold . . . all of it you offer to sell, at thirty-five dollars an ounce."

"But you ought to pay more. You ought to pay sixty dollars an ounce."

We had heard this a wearisome number of times; Ticky rapidly reached her flash point. "Why should we? You wouldn't buy our goods if we did so; you've rigged your laws to shut us out. What sense is there in digging gold out of Johannesburg, us paying you sixty dollars an ounce-and then sticking it back in the ground in Fort Knox? What's sensible about that? If you don't like the gold price of the dollar, why don't you keep your gold and go on the gold standard yourselves? Then you could set the value of your pound at anything you wanted to and it would be hard money, at least as hard as the dollar. You could buy anything you wanted with it anywhere. That's all it takes; just quit complaining about the price of the dollar and go on the gold standard yourself!"

There was a shocked reply amounting to, "Oh, no, we couldn't do anything like
that
!"-as if Ticky had said something in terribly bad taste. No counter argument was offered and the group broke up with considerable chilliness on both sides.

I know that Ticky is not much of a theoretical economist and neither am I, but it does seem to me that there was more hard sense to her side of the argument than to theirs. I am not going to go into a discussion of the merits, demerits, and effects of devaluation, inflation, etc.-but I can't see anything in their argument but greed. It seems to me, too, to be a greed that is utterly reckless of the consequences on others; I may be wrong but I suspect that sudden devaluation of the dollar at a time when all other currencies are keyed to it might set off the biggest crash in history.

But this curious delusion that we are deliberately and wrongfully withholding their lollipop, from sheer meanness when we know better, may be the key to the oddly ambivalent attitude that we ran into all through South Africa. They have cast Uncle Sam simultaneously in the roles of Santa Claus and of the Devil.

After we left the factory of Sam's firm he dropped us downtown; we set out to do some sightseeing. Time being limited I hired a taxi-a licensed guide and tour car seemed unnecessary since it was an English-speaking city. Taxis park in the middle of the street in Cape Town; I located one and asked the driver for a rate by the hour.

There was no rate by the hour, only by the mile . . . so I told him what we wanted to do and asked approximately how much it would cost by the hour. His answer indicated that we would probably cover twenty to thirty miles in city driving in an hour, which seemed reasonable, so I hired him, telling him to drive us around the city and point out the sights to us.

Thereafter we got just one piece of "information" out of him; I asked him how many people there were in Cape Town. He said that he did not know exactly but it was somewhere between eight and nine million. I did not argue but contemplated the beauty of it. Cape Town is actually a little over half a million and looks smaller, as much of the city is spread out down the Cape peninsula in formerly independent communities. The downtown part in front of Table Mountain has a lazy, sleepy quality more suited to a much smaller community and the suburbs are garden villages-the whole city is lovely.

Our driver immediately thereafter lost all command of the English language. Instead of driving us inside the main city he hunched over his wheel and tooled his car out into open country as quickly as possible; once on the open road he stepped his speed up to about sixty or better and held it there. Protests had no effect.

Having dinner in mind, I had set a time limit of two hours; he delivered us back into town and to the gangway of the
Ruys
exactly on time-having accomplished the maximum mileage possible without fatal accident. I paid the exact amount without a tip. But I was unable to be really angry at the trick he had played on us; by pouring on the gas and running up the mileage he had managed to take us all around Table Mountain and far down the Cape on a tour which we had reluctantly decided to forgo through lack of time. As it was we saw almost everything usually covered in a leisurely full-day tour.

But the scenery certainly whizzed past.

What we could see of it looked good. There are beautiful homes and gardens in the hills back of Table Mountain, fine bays and beaches and impressive formations, in particular the Twelve Apostles on the Marine Drive down toward Hout Bay on the Atlantic side; these are a dozen rugged mountain bastions facing the sea which might be apostles or anything else but are worth seeing. As we swung across the peninsula to return we had our first view of the Indian Ocean.

On our way back to the ship we passed a Dutch windmill, a relic of early colonial days. Many of the houses in Cape Town show Dutch gables, a particularly ungraceful architectural conceit which is loved uncritically by the local gentry for its historical associations. Cape Town was originally settled by the Dutch as fortress and revictualing station for their ships sailing to the Indies; it was not intended to be a colony at first. It changed hands several times but the principal settlers were Dutch burghers and their slaves. As a result of the Napoleonic Wars the English moved in and hung on; freeing of the slaves, the famous Voortrek north, the creation of new states, the Boer War, and today an independent nation muttering about seceding from the Commonwealth all followed the advent of the British almost as historic necessities. It would be a deceptive over-simplification to say that the Afrikanders hated the British for freeing the slaves and are still sullenly determined, a hundred and twenty years later, to hang onto slavery-but this abstraction has an element of truth in it.

We arranged with the night steward in the
Ruys
to be called at four a.m.-a horrid hour-and asked could we
please
have coffee, or at least tea. A few minutes after we were called there came a knock at our stateroom door and there was, not the night duty man, but the incomparable Kwai Yau, bearing a big tray. He had decided that we should not start off without a proper breakfast and had gotten up even earlier than we had to prepare it for us. If Kwai Yau were not about forty-five, with a home and family in Hong Kong, I would like to adopt him.

So we started out feeling merely a bit short on sleep instead of feeling three days drowned. It was not necessary to go through customs (which was not open then anyhow) since our baggage was all ashore; we merely had to present our gate passes and breeze on through. The early morning was chilly even though it was midsummer, January; Ticky had worn a coat. I had seen without noticing that she looked a bit lumpy in it.

Once outside the guarded gate she began shedding cigarettes. She had tucked packs of them all over her person; the number totaled exactly the number we had been required to pay duty on the day before. I looked on helplessly, then turned to Sam. "We seem to have a smuggler. Want to turn around and turn her over to the guard?"

Sam grinned and answered, "No time this morning. Some other time."

"I am
not
a smuggler!" Ticky insisted. "This is just the legal amount that I was entitled to, only you let 'em gyp us."

"Look, darling, the law is what the local authorities say it is, not what you decide it is."

"I wasn't going to let them clip us!"

"Why in the name of habeas corpus would you risk jail for a few shillings? You wouldn't like the food. If I ever get you safely back aboard the
Ruys
I'm going to put a collar on you and chain you to your bunk!"

She stuck out her lower lip and said nothing, so the discussion ended. Deep in my heart I felt the same way about it she did, but it is not good to encourage lawlessness in Ticky; she is too ready to slug policemen at any time. The spirit of anarchy on which our country was founded shows gene reinforcement in her . . . if it is a genetic factor, as I strongly suspect it is.

We passed the statue of Jan van Riebeeck, founder of Cape Town, and headed across the sand flats that connect the peninsula with the mainland. Along here are slums, shanties called
pondokkies
lived in by "Capies" or Cape Town mixed-bloods. Cape Town itself seems to have no slums, for the reason that the natives and the "coloureds" live outside. This is a standard South African pattern; near every white city is a dreadful place called a "location" assigned to non-Europeans, where they may live out of sight of their legal betters.

After the flats we came to some lush farm land, then only twenty miles or so farther on we started up Du Toit's Kloof (or cliff), a steep climb up and over the mountains. Sam had a new Pontiac and was a skilled driver; we sailed up and up, through clouds and around sharp bends surrounded by fine rugged scenery. For the next fifty miles we seemed to be in Colorado.

Then we burst out of the last pass and into the desert-and had I been dumped there without warning I would have identified it as Route 66 through New Mexico and Arizona. The only evident difference was that we drove on the left side of the road. Beside the road was a railroad that should have been the Santa Fe; around us was arid open range and distant buttes. We stopped at Laingsburg, one hundred and seventy miles from Cape Town, for a second breakfast. It was still only nine a.m. but it was already quite hot. Laingsburg looked like any of a hundred small highway towns in our southwest, with Bantus substituted for Indians.

The restaurant was no better and no worse than we would have found in the New Mexico counterpart; lamb chops and eggs and toast and coffee were substantial and well-enough cooked. Ticky reported that the ladies' room in the garage was spotless, as was that of the men-I mention these two points, cooking and rest rooms, because both were satisfactory-to-excellent all through South Africa, whereas they certainly were not in countries we had yet to visit.

The car had been parked in such shade as could be found but was boiling hot to enter nevertheless. Once on the road we were quickly comfortable. I shall mention no more about the heat nor the appearance of the desert; driving through the Great Karoo is precisely like driving from border to border across New Mexico and Arizona, minus the Painted Desert and the Indians. Some people cannot stand the dry desert heat in either desert. I like it.

The differences lay in
fauna
-the desert
flora
looked familiar, even to yucca under another name. I suppose the varieties were different and many of the species, but from a car window these were not noticeable to me-I can tell an oak from an elm, but just barely.

But African
fauna
are unquestionably African. Even the cattle are different, most of them being Afrikander cattle, a breed almost as rangy as a longhorn but without quite so much spread to their horns. Each of the cattle had two companions-tick birds.

There are two entirely different birds in South Africa known as tick birds. One is a little brown fellow about the size of a robin which you will see mostly in the bush, crawling over deer and searching for ticks, as busy as a pup in a flower bed. The tick bird of the rhinoceros may be a third sort; I'm not sure. But the most prominent feathered friend called a tick bird is what we would call a snowy egret. Yes, I mean the bird which, if you are caught with its plumes in the United States, the Man puts you in jail and welds the lock solid. They may be a slightly different variety but the difference would matter only to another egret. (I may be weak on botany but I once won a prize for identifying birds . . . another bird guide.)