FRIENDLY SOUTH AFRICA

Evening Star, Issue 21753, 22 June 1934, Page 12

FRIENDLY SOUTH AFRICA

COUNTRY OF ALLURING CHARM WARMLY HOSPITABLE PEOPLE There is . a saying that South Africa is a country which pulls. People from overseas visit it, and they have a trick of returning. Men who emigrated to it years before the Boer War and have made it their home have a yearning for the natal village (writes Ned Grant, in. the London ‘ Daily Telegraph.’ They strike their tents and buy a house in the Mother Country, but the veldt calls them and they go back to South Africa to die. For South Africa has Barrie’s “charm,” and charming countries, like charming people, are always sure of their appeal. The hospitality of South Africa -is proverbial. If you are British, you make many friends in a visit, and if you stay a month in Cape Town or Durban you have become a household word, especially if your surname begins with Mac. After those sordid sojourns in Europe, where the only interest shown in you is in the size of your tip, it is delightful to visit a land where it is more customary to give than to receive

As soon as you land you fall a victim to those hospitable clutches. Only after considerable experience can you develop enough social cunning to escape. You are beguiled into a house tor . a morning cup of tea. At noon you rise to bid farewell to your hostess. She is surprised. So is your host. S3o are the sons and daughters of the house. Even the native servants —“the boys’’’—look bewildered. You are given to understand that you have been invited to lunch. There is the table laid for you. You wait toTunch, you wait lor tea, you are possibly led to the dinner table, and you are lucky if you escape before midnight. You take a young lady in to dinner. Tennis is casually mentioned. Does the young lady play? She does. Would it be possible to fix up a game? The young lady would be delighted. You learn later that she is a champion, and has played with distinction on the centre court at Wimbledon. She is so anxious to please that she forgets she is a celebrity. , Do you play golf? Well, yes, but you have not brought your clubs. A plus two man sends his armoury of weapons. Yon are about to begin when the plus two man, working hard in distant Cape Town, sends his chauffeur with an urgent message. It appears that the licensing laws of South Africa are peculiar. (Is there any country in the world where the licensing laws are not peculiar?) Whisky cannot be served m the club, so the chauffeur has been sent with a special bottle of the plus two man s own brand, with apologies for the oversight. HELP ON THE ROAD. The courtesy of South African motorists amazes you in your Frst w®®*. After you have motored through /lululand or the Northern Transvaal you understand tbe punctilious stopping oi most motorists when they approach^a stationary car. “ O.K. ?” 0.K., thank you.” (O.K. is now a password in South Africa, and the “ boys love to roll it round their good-natured tongues.) , A breakdown in those lonely spaces is a serious matter and motorists are brotherly unto one another, especially when the roads aro flooded, when literally great walls of water descend on and overwhelm the bridges, and when shrewd farmers stand by with spans of oxen to pull derelict cars along roads that have become raging torrents. Courtesy first is the motto in a land where Nature is too capricious to be safe.

In the Northern Transvaal our car was waterlogged, and the carburettor refused to function. The car was. a new one, and my host was unfamiliar with its mechanism. Behind us lined up a venerable car containing an old Boer farmer, who might have come straight from Paul Kruger’s stoep, his wife, his daughter, and his grandson. The youth stayed with us three hours, hoping to get the engine going again. The old farmer, scarcely able to.talk a word of English, smoked his pipe continually. The ladies smiled when we begged them to leave us to our fate. The youth laboured on, and the car was pushed forward in triumph. My host begged the boy to accept a note. He refused.

Next week ho might be stranded and ho would require our help. There was a pretty and polite battle, and ultimately young Piet accepted the solatium. But to be sure that wq would not again be stranded the Afrikaans quartet followed us thirty miles off the road until we had crossed the Pienaar River. So much for racialism, O Dr Malan!

Much of the grace of South African hospitality springs from the women. The South African girl is as natural as a deer or a wild flower. She spends so much of her time in tbe open air that she has no bias towards poses. She knows that in a country where Nature is perpetually springing surprises she has no, time for subterfuges. If she is hard, well, she tells you she is granite. If she is soft-hearted she coos like one of the South African doves. To pretend to be what you arc not is the goal of many Western young women. That trick is beyond tbe daughters of the veldt. But do not imagine that the South Africans are simple and unsophisticated. Go to a cinema, particularly in Johannesburg!!, and you will find that the sob-stuff which melts a London audience sends young South Africa into roars of ribald laughter. Moreover, their treatment of some London stage favourite is cruel—and Salutary—in the extreme. The star who visits South Africa twice is running a risk. They are realists in the land of the Springbok. The hospitality and friendliness alone make a visit delightful, but the country itself is a treasure-trove of beauty. During my visit almost unprecedented rains, following upon the drought, had transformed the brown and dusty veldt into the greenness of the English coun-

tryside. Nature rejoiced, and the trees were clapping their hands. Blessed is the country with beautiful trees, and South Africa can boast of the jacaranda (surely one of the loveliest trees in the world), the flambuoyant, the gum tree, with its provocative red flower, stout oaks which advertise good soil, and plantation after plantation of fir and wattle. It is not surprising that man should build in harmony with the beauty around him. Is there in all the world anything to compare with the colonial architecture of South Africa, those placid houses, ..half Huguenot, half Dutch, with their lofty rooms of teak and stinkwood, the pure white gables, the cool stoeps, the oaks and mulberries which act as verdant sentinels, the gardens with their hydrangeas and almondsmelling oleanders, and stretching away across the plains to the mountains rows and rows of vines and great orchards of peach and pear trees. Rhodes himself, with his unerring instinct, immortalised that style in Groot Schuur, and he saw the value in these vast spaces and great hills and clear air of great masses of flowers. His vast vale of hydrangeas, his rows and rows of rich cannas, survive as tributes to his taste; and what the master began his friend Sir Herbert Baker has perpetuated. How often does one meet in travelling .throughout the Union the three arches of Sir Herbert! To reach the heart of a South African you must praise his house, and in most cases the praise is deserved. In stone a great tradition has been preserved, and the twentieth century is linked up with the Van der Stels of earlier times.