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Show 7Jl0tfpAirt -- -:,f : . . " , U yJ I 1 ; ; , r - , - -s , 1 I.. . . - v 5 i "v -"" . s t " s ' ' - i Tomb of Cecil Rhodes. Prepared by National G-eofrraphlc Society, ' Washing-tun, D. C. WNU Service. A PIONEER country's memori-ials memori-ials are usually natural features. fea-tures. Rhodesia has Its In-daba In-daba tree and its Matopo hills. But the most curious spectacle extant associated with Rhodes is that deserted de-serted craterlike pit at the Kimber-ley Kimber-ley diamond mines, where he began digging the fortune which made possible pos-sible his future colonizing schemes. Picture Kimberley in the ISTOs. Atop a bucket, alongside the checkerboard check-erboard pattern of claims, sits a big rumple-haired slackly garbed English youth, staring into vacancy. In him Natal has lost a cotton grower, and the world will one day gain to put it thus since his name is Rhodes a Colossus. The English doctors gave this young Cecil John Rhodes a year or so to live, but the South African climate cli-mate has saved him. From death to diamonds, and from them to vast wealth, South African statesmanship, statesman-ship, and empire-building such will be the swiftly ascended rungs during dur-ing a life that will end at forty-nine forty-nine years. Meanwhile he dreams he is an incorrigible dreamer. Presently he will be making wills, based on some future, chimerical wealth, to the end of extending the British empire so vastly as to "render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity." The two Rhodesias, of which the Northern colony is almost double the size of the Southern, contain about two and a half million Ban-tus Ban-tus and but 61,000 persons of European Euro-pean descent. And over what an expanse ex-panse are these few scattered I One might roughly compare the area of the Rhodesias with that of the thirteen thir-teen states, or parts of states, lying south of Pennsylvania, east of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, eastward east-ward along the Gulf of Mexico, and north of a hypothetical line running through central Florida. Picture the above region as being occupied by a population only nine times that of Atlanta, Ga. a population popu-lation wherein the Bantu and white races are proportioned at 40 to 1. Consider, along with that, a civilization civiliza-tion only four decades old, and you have the basic elements of Rhodesia, Rho-desia, the pioneer colony. Land of Real Pioneers. In Rhodesia, individual effort has developed into co-operation, crop specializing into mixed farming, and a department of agriculture, having to do with the cultural and financing sides of Riiodesian husbandry, has come into being for the benefit of the pioneers. "Pioneer," be it noted, is strictly masculine. We have heard of the farmerette and the aviatrix, but never of the "pioneeress." Comparing Compar-ing the proportion of women to men in given countries, one finds that the older civilizations generally have an excess of the former over the latter, lat-ter, whereas the reverse is true of lands later settled, such as Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and Australia. Now, in this matter of male surplusage, the yet-younger Rhodesia out-tops almost all countries coun-tries and exceeds the above-named quartette by a "masculinity" of from four to seven times greater. That conveys, of course, no social so-cial picture of Rhodesia, where woman is playing her full part, as always. Rather, it tells the old story that the foot-free man strikes out for new lands and, in time, sends overseas for that "girl at home" to make the land worth living liv-ing in. And just here the governmental settlers-assistance schemes enter the picture. Somewhat similar in effect to the Homestead act that, in 1S02, called American pioneers to plant their homes on free western lands, the Rhodesian assistance schemes went much further, in offering nominally nom-inally free passages from England to the colony and, upon the settler's set-tler's arrival, free agricultural Instruction In-struction for a year. Like the homesteader, he pledged himself to remain for three years. Unlike the homesteader, he was subject to a minimum and a maximum maxi-mum of available capital, and bought his land, at a dollar or so per acre, on a 24-year installment plan. Settlers Have Good Homes. To reach a Rhodesian settler's . farmstead, you might possibly drive 20 wooded miles off the turnpike, and, If it is after nightfall, hear Borne stray lion gulping gutturally in the distance. Yet, once arrived, you find yourself in a true home that the man and his wife have made together. He and his native boys have built the house, planning it around a big central room with a wide hearth. She has made it bright with gay curtains, with the rugs brought from overseas, with the homeland's flowers. And the smart furniture? Well, Rhodesia has its teak, and it is astonishing what carpentry native "boys" can achieve with the assistance assist-ance of designs cut from household magazines, and the vicarious elbow grease of your constant presence. Across the broad acres the reaped corn stands In regimented stacks. There's a farm store where the settler set-tler sells to his native "boys." For amusements, there are horseback riding, hunting, fishing, books from public libraries, and maybe a radio set. As for educating the regional settlers' set-tlers' children, a minimum of ten pupils calls for the establishment of a governmental school. Failing that number, in sparsely peopled sections, there will be an "aided farm school," with a government grant for each child. Heading eastward from Salisbury, you soon find yourself nearing those mountains beyond which extends Portuguese territory. Completely cupped within their foothills' lofty profiles lies Umtali, eastern outpost of the Rhodesias. Nothing could reveal itself as a more charming surprise than this neat little town, tucked away on the colony's remote verge, its streets lined with tall flamboyant trees that rear their masses of scarlet blossoms against the mountain-rigged valley's vast-ness vast-ness of overhead blue. A 250-mlle swing around a circle centering on Umtali reveals it as Rhodesia's gateway to the wild heart of things, where waterfalls plunge over precipices, and primitive primi-tive forests clothe the land with silence, and nude peaks pile their shapes against the sky. The Matopo Hills. At times you traverse 50 miles of wild woodland that offer no more guiding features than a dry stream-, bed or some cement causeway, built at low level to allow seasonal torrents tor-rents to sweep across instead of under un-der it. Brilliantly plumaged birds flash past, groups of rock-perched baboons discuss family affairs. Issuance Is-suance into the open, with a mission church ahead, is an experience, while the passage of some other car is a downright sensation. Yet, though you would not have guessed it, there are often kraals near the road, and thus you get a glimpse of native corngrinding, snuff-making, snuff-making, hairdressing (as complicated complicat-ed a process as permanent-waving), and listen to a fat old grandmother telling Uncle Retnus stories in the original' version. Near Bulawayo you visit the Matopo hills. After a few hours' drive, the land begins heaping itself it-self into a wide series of rocky kopjes. Here nature seems to have worked haphazard, flinging so many great bowlders atop of so many pinnacles pin-nacles that one might well call the place the Valley of Balancing Stones. Now you clamber up the vast, smooth slant of a massive formation and find yourself on a rocky plateau, feeling antlike beside the huge, globular glob-ular bowlders that are perched there over "World's View." The bowlders immediately encircling encir-cling you are vivid with lichen, in reds, greens, and gold. A child would call this a fairy place, and dream of enchantments. Then sud-, denly one severe slab, imbedded over what was laid to rest In the blasted-out heart of the rock, tells you that here has been high burial : "This Power that wrought on us ' and goes j Back to the Power again . . ." Ah, power! Far better than any cathedral aisle does this "View of the World," Rhodes' self-chosen burial place, suit with the rugged power of the man. The gnarled pinnacles pin-nacles are his cathedral's spires, the richly hued bowlders his stained-glass stained-glass windows. Once, when Rhodes was a boy, he asked a gray-haired man why he should thus be busied planting oaks, since he would never live to see them full grown. Unforgettably for Rhodes, the veteran replied that he had the vision to see others sitting under the trees' shade when he himself him-self had gone. And well may Rhodesia he likened to an English oak, springing hy like vision frorr. the dust now resting under the slab in the Matopo hills. |