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Show Spring ville Traveler Finds Far-AwayJLanci Excitk r Typical of Ceremonial Attire. . . n Max Simians Lauds Picturesque Country Half - Way Round the World Describes Distinctive Peoples and Habits (By MAX SIMKINS) j It is a calm statement of fact that there is no other country in the world j quite like South Africa. For in what other country may one see cities posses- i sing streets, public buildings, luxurious shops, theatres, and newspapers that not many cities below the half-million mark in Europe or America can surpass, and also primitive Kraals of straw and mud huts, with huge stretches of open J and forest country in which the . -. - - I , "; 4v - : : Can affr to Pay to A wife costs all the 1 to ten cows. as ,,tn. The natives are tious. Only last year observed a total ecll Ulh 1 and many of the na,?''' the end of the world 1 The more educated ,as 1 a trick of Hitler's 'Hi People. Scientist. klllu:i the world came to Z'M Also living inNSit thousand East Indians ' brought to South Afri ' harvest the large tl M h pown there each vea 1 increased so much th. ' cial problem hasarv a'M stay true to fi'2" and habits. Mla" f The most interest 'i ceremony to me as . the Indian fire-wa, , ceremony takes place ' aJ ' r ter. and the Infi around come to wi est! Ship. Si 80(1;, fese men.g0 day training period wh 'tfc i s.sts of living as ri h J" H, as possible, and gett " ' tion by the priestf " a Eight hours before f walking, they g0 to the companied by all tf There they dt, and the firewalkers selves m the river for hot t hey march to the scene jt firewalking, which is a square full of red hot coal- f Indians walk over these with their bare feet three times, according to the am,Jr' ( Continued on page tweut;, ' lion, the elephant, and the buffalo " wund.T in their thousana, killing and preying on one another and j on any man or animal who would I happen to get in their way? Where else may one meet two million white people who look tire same as yourselves, have almost ( I lie same interests, wear the same i fashions, drive the same kind of curs, see the same films, and also some eight million natives, a good many of whom live semi-civilized but a large proportion living very , much the same tribal life as they lived hundreds of years ago, before be-fore seeing the face of white men? South Africa is between 13,000 and 14,0 00 miles away from Springville. Before the war started the best route to take to get there was from New York to South ampton and from Southampton to Cape Town, which would take from 30 to 35 days of travel," so you can see how far away the country really is. There are now nearly ten million mil-lion people in the Union of South Africa, and of that number just two million are Europeans. These two million are made up of approximately ap-proximately 1,200,000 Dutch descent,, des-cent,, 750,000 British descent, 80,-000 80,-000 Jewish descent, and 70,000 German, Portuguese, Norwegian, and descent of other nationalities. But the country is being developed develop-ed by the Dutch and English people, peo-ple, which is producing a type of being, thought, outlook, and ambition ambi-tion that is neither Dutch nor British, Bri-tish, but just plain South African. There are two official languages lan-guages of the country, English and Afrikaans. The latter is a young language derived from the Dutch, but it has changed so much from the Dutch that a pure Dutchman Dutch-man cannot understand it. All radio ra-dio programs are broadcast in two languages; all government and commercial printing, advertisements advertise-ments and signs are printed in the two languages. In order to hold a government position one must read and write both languages. It has been officially computed that nearly two-thirds of the European population can now speak both English and Afrikaans. Then there are the six and a half million native peoples; the quarter of a million Asiatics, such as Indians, Malays, and a tew Author and missionary companion pose with bedecked natives. Mr. Simkins is at the righ Most of these natives come from Natal and Zululand, located on the east coast of South Africa. These natives live in a semi-civilized state. They wear very little clothing cloth-ing when living in their straw and mud huts, but are required to wear more when tlrey come into the cities. Their marriage customs cus-toms are centuries old and many odd practices prevail. The men can have as many wives as they Chinese; and three-quarters of a million people who are described as colored, which means that they have both white and native, or white and Asiatic, blood in them. Probably the most outstanding scenic attraction to me as a traveler tra-veler in that country and to you as a reader is the Victoria Palls. They were discovered by the explorer-missionary, David Livingstone. Living-stone. Livingstone in his work, for years had, heard the" natives talking talk-ing about the smoke that sounds, then they would tell him of a place in the Zambesi River where from a distance of five or six miles (they would never go nearer than that) they could see something happening that filled the air with vapor, made a strange noise that chilled them with fright and awe. . One day Livingstone determined to solve the mystery and made a diversion during one of his journeys. jour-neys. He saw columns of vapor, appropriatly called "smoke," arising aris-ing at a distance of five or six miles, exactly as when large tracts of grass are burned in Africa. Getting nearer, Livingstone was the first white man to view the Victoria Falls. I might say the Victoria Falls are twice as high and one and one-half times as wide at the Niagara Falls. They have not been commercialized and are the way nature intended them to be, surrounded with tropical vegetation and monkeys, and baboons ba-boons and other wild African animals. ani-mals. One interesting oddity was a floating swimming pool in the river, which was made to keep the crocodiles from eating the tourists. tour-ists. If you can realize as we step out of Johannesburg's three million mil-lion dollar railway station, that less than fiity years ago there wasn't a single railway line to be seen within three hundred miles! Pause a moment at the station exit, glance along the streets with modern stores and apartment houses ten stories high, and land so valuable that it is now being sold for $35 per square foot, and remind yourselves that nothing but tall grass was there only fifty-four fifty-four years ago. While today it is the richest gold mining city in the entire world. Over $40,000,000 is mined every month, which gives it the title of the "City of Gold." The many gold mines of Johannesburg Jo-hannesburg are operated by white miners, while black natives from all over South Africa do the man-villages man-villages called "compounds" where ual labor. These natives live in they are very well fed and cared for. They work for six months and save a little money, then they return to the country, where they live with their wives and do a lit-tle lit-tle farming for another six months |