Tramp Royale (30 page)

What we did see was a rolling, sun-drenched land planted mostly in sugar cane but interspersed here and there with smaller fields of mealies (Indian corn), the staple of the natives. The hills were dotted with beehive grass huts. Here and there were women working in the fields. Along the roads were naked piccanins, older lads dress in breech-clout equivalents of animal tails, barefoot matrons with the high hairdress of married women, adolescent girls with their hair short, and a very occasional rich native on a bicycle. Men were scarce.

The impression was one of overpowering, bucolic peace. It was hard to remember that these sleepy farmers had produced some of the bloodiest fighting ever seen before they were subjugated. Around the time of Napoleon, King Tshaka (or "Chaka"-their clicks are not equivalent to our gutturals) introduced the stabbing assegai, and a military enveloping tactic much like that used by Alexander the Great; he and his successors consolidated all of this part of Africa into an empire. Every Zulu man was a warrior.

The warriors now are pulling rikshas in Durban (still in full war panoply) or are houseboys to the whites. They must work, to pay their head taxes and to buy wives. But waste not too many tears on the lost glories of the Zulu warrior. The Zulu was a conqueror, enslaving and killing-then had the bad luck to meet someone with the same idea but with better weapons. Without defending British colonialism one may at least note that Victoria's troops did not indulge in senseless orgies of blood after a victory. It was Tshaka's habit to kill off all above the age of adolescence when he conquered a tribe. He is reputed to have killed seven thousand of his own subjects when his mother died.

Eshowe, where the Zulus laid siege to the British, is a peaceful modern village now, where the Queen's commissioner supervises the administration of law, tribal and the white law over it, through the paramount and lesser chiefs. My impressions of it are neat brick buildings, a movie theater, a soda fountain and news stand, and an excellent lunch at a clean, modern hotel. Allan Quatermain would never have recognized it.

After lunch we left the highway and drove far out into the fields to visit Ntuli, a native sculptor who enjoys a measure of world fame. His home was the usual group of beehive huts surrounded by farm land. He was not there but his daughter set out his wares and we bought a bust of a Zulu woman. His style is realistic and accurate, with neither the exaggerations of traditional African art nor of the blobs called "modern" in our culture. He shapes what he sees and his eye is good.

We paid seven-and-six, $1.05, for this bust; at these prices Ntuli has become rich, for Zululand. As we left we met him coming home; he was riding a bicycle while wearing a Harris tweed jacket, trousers, shoes, white shirt, and necktie. The weather was such as to make any clothing, any exertion, an invitation to sunstroke, but he kept the jacket on, a perfect classroom example of the symbolism which Thorstein Veblen says is the fundamental motivation of our own society. His outfit was a
reductio ad absurdum
of our own symbolisms in dress but was laughable only if we are willing to laugh first at ourselves-and concede every argument of nudists.

Speaking of nudity, most pictures in travel magazines give the impression that Zulus still dress largely in beads and feathers with the skin mostly uncovered and with the mammary glands living their own lives, wild and free. This is both true and untrue. Those same travel magazines give the impression that the residents of the American far west (of which I am one) dress only in high-heeled boots, Stetsons, and Levi's. I do not own high-heeled boots, although I live in cattle country. But my next door neighbor hardly ever wears anything else. Much the same thing obtains in Zululand; the traditional tribal dress, or lack of it, is extremely common on the reservation. But the Zulus one encounters on the road or in town look much like poor country Negroes of our own deep south, being dressed usually in shabby equivalents of white man's clothes. Our guide told us that the natives were required to cover up when they came into town and that the ones we saw on the road were mostly going to or returning from town.

This explanation satisfied me until later in the day. We had returned the hundred miles from Zululand and were driving through an expensive residential suburb of Durban, which is a wealthy modem city. Suddenly I saw on the sidewalk near us a white child about four years old who was being hotly pursued by a young Zulu woman. An open front door made it evident that the child had made a break for freedom and was being chased down by its nursemaid. The only oddity about the scene was that the young woman was naked except for something wrapped around her waist.

I called Mr. Brown's attention to it. "How about
that
?" He frowned. "Well, it is not exactly against the law; it is just considered bad form."

That evening Ticky and I attended a performance of a company of the Folies Bergère; it had its customary nude tableaux, as naked as any country scene in Zululand. There may be some thread of logic running through our tribal taboos concerning skin covering but I am unable to figure it out.

The following morning we had a few hours free in the city itself; we spent it, without success, in tramping or riding from one steamship booking office to another, trying to tie down passage from Singapore to Australia. All we achieved was sore feet and a detailed view of downtown Durban. The city spreads along the waterfront the way Chicago sprawls along the Lake; it is as modern as Chicago and much prettier. There are East Indians, Europeans, and Zulus in about the same numbers, each living in their own areas but mixing in the business district. Except for some in the Transvaal this was our first encounter with the East Indians. They are merchants and businessmen of great skill, equal to or exceeding the Chinese. They save every penny, save for a prevalent weakness for powerful, flashy American automobiles, and many of them are extremely wealthy, although they were originally imported as coolie labor in the cane fields.

The blacks hate them. The grave race riots of recent years in Durban were between Zulus and East Indians; the British were not directly involved. They have a reputation for cheating the Zulus at every turn. I cannot vouch for this either way, but it does seem evident that if unlimited immigration from India were permitted (which is what India wants) the Zulu, already crowded onto insufficient land by his present masters, would soon have nothing at all left. The Zulu is already extremely poor. The population density on his reservation land is already half again as high as it is elsewhere in the Union. He makes a slim living as a servant to the whites or working for the large corporate sugar cane plantations that surround his land; it may take him years to pay for his first wife. Marriage is expensive on their scale-eight oxen for a healthy fourteen-year-old maiden, up to twelve oxen for a princess. (Prices are almost twice that high in Swaziland, I never learned why.) After sweating for years to pay the
lobola
for his loved one (don't let the purchase custom fool you; these are love matches usually), he may still have to live away from home most of the time to gain cash for taxes and necessities while his wife sweats in the fields to keep food in the bellies of the piccanins.

Underneath the Zulu is still a warrior; if he finds, or believes, that the East Indians are making his present almost intolerable lot still harder there will be more bloodshed.

We sailed from South Africa later that day with very mixed feelings. I think relief predominated. South Africa is a country wonderful, beautiful, and rich-and terrifyingly mismanaged. There is no indication of any possibility that it will gradually evolve into a better and more humane civilization; the dominant minority is grimly determined not to give an inch. The whip is still their answer to the mutterings and rumblings from underneath. Mau Mau has not yet reached South Africa, but it is only a few miles to the north and there are known to be secret societies spreading among the Bantus, brotherhoods determined to avenge their wrongs and waiting for the Day.

When that day comes the houseboy from next door will be waiting to cut throats. In the meantime I can't see a blessed thing that we can do to prevent it.

IX
We Learn About Oriental Service

The depression engendered by South Africa we shook off almost at once; the voyage across the Indian Ocean to Singapore was almost idyllically pleasant. The weather was warm without being hot, the sea was calm, the motion of the ship almost imperceptible. We had acquired status and seniority now; we were invited to the Captain's table. The day we first boarded the
Ruys,
when we had been intimidated by her size and luxury, frightened by the brisk, well-dressed passengers who looked right through us, seemed remote and unlikely. We were old-timers who had been in the ship as long as anyone and longer than any but a couple from Buenos Aires. We were almost plank-owners and we enjoyed the status.

The crowd of first-class passengers was down to about half and still further reduced by East Indians who kept to themselves and by French-speaking Mauritians who kept almost as much to themselves. But there was a dance, or movies, or "horse races," or bingo, or some social event every night; there was a cocktail party before dinner each evening; there was swimming, sports, loafing, and long siestas in the daytime. It was hard to remember that somewhere over the wide blue horizon men were dying wretchedly in jungles, the veto was being exercised in the U.N., and the planet as a whole was moving steadily toward what threatened to be the final Armageddon. Under our keel slid the prehistoric continent of Gondwanaland and I lost the cribbage championship of the Indian Ocean-John Lloyd cut the jack when it was my first count and I was certain to go out. There ought to be a law!

John was a young Englishman fresh out of Oxford, who had joined the ship in Africa. Young, handsome, urbane, and invariably good-natured, he was an asset in any social group. When Ticky told him that his cumberbund should be Dubonnet in shade, rather than claret, he agreed, stripped it off and threw it overboard, and resumed dancing, all with smiling aplomb. (Ticky was left speechless.) We learned that he, like his father before him, had been a member of the "Gonfal Loungers" at Oxford, a club devoted to sitting on the steps in front of one of the buildings there and "observing ye good things God hath made."

"Women, you mean?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, but not necessarily. Just 'ye good things God hath made.' "

"Sounds like P. G. Wodehouse's Drones Club."

"Not exactly. Though I will say that some of the members of the Drones Club would be welcome in the Loungers."

In order to qualify for the Loungers after nomination it was necessary to get oneself arrested on Boat Race Night and be held overnight in jail. This, as John explained, was not easy to do-the second part, that is, about being held in jail overnight, because the University's proctors waited at the police station each Boat Race Night in order to take charge of any young gentlemen who had celebrated too boisterously; it was necessary to change one's appearance, accent, vocabulary, and manner so convincingly that a proctor with years of experience would not recognize the culprit as a University student and invoke the ancient immunities.

Another major asset was Bert and Molly, two Australians who sat with us at the Captain's table. Bert had been serving the United Nations all over the world for the past five years, as a forester in the Food & Agriculture staff. His last job had been to survey the potentialities of the Amazon Valley, and now they were returning home to buy a plantation in Queensland. Bert and Molly were as perfectly Australian as John was British-in accent, vocabulary, and attitudes. Bert maintained that all Australians grew to look like kangaroos; he illustrated it, with gestures, on himself and his wife. "They get long, pointed noses, ears that stick out, big soft brown eyes, and pear-shaped behinds. Watch for it, you'll see."

(When we got to Australia we could not help but remember this-and it did seem as if he were right. The power of suggestion, no doubt.)

There were Earl and Marianne, of Princeton, Buenos Aires, and Caracas. Earl was an investment banker by profession and a student of yoga by preference; he could assume the full lotus seat, then stand on his head-this, mind you, on the deck of a rolling ship. If you think this is easy, try just the first part: sit down on the floor and wrap yourself into the lotus seat, with the soles of both feet turned upwards in your lap. If you can untie yourself thereafter and walk away unassisted, you are about ready for your beginner's license.

There was the Captain himself, who managed always to be a warm and convivial host while continuing to be a very taut shipmaster. The
Ruys
was clean from stem to stern and perfectly run, but the Captain was always ready to dance all night and his table was usually about thirty minutes late for dinner because, ten minutes after the gong had sounded, the Captain would smile sheepishly and say, "I sink we haff time for annozzer one." So we would.

There were minor frictions, of course, such as South Africans demanding to know why we did not pay more for their gold, people who read us lectures on how the world would be perfectly safe if the United States would just refrain from trying to start a new war, and people who found everything about the United States just too dreadfully quaint and repulsive. Ticky and I tried to avoid such useless arguments but sometimes we were cornered. One South African demanded to know of me why Americans insisted on making such funny sounds instead of speaking English?

He himself was speaking a county dialect I could not identify but which I could hardly understand, but I pretended a politeness I did not feel and tried to explain that American was an independent variation of English, with its own spelling, pronunciation, and rules. This struck him as silly. So I asked him what English accent he wanted us to imitate?-Yorkshire, Oxonian, Cockney, Devon, or what? This ended the discussion without convincing either one of us.

The United Kingdom shows a much wider variation in speech in one tight little island than we do in our continent-wide spread. To have our American speech patronized sets my teeth on edge.