THE SACRED GIRAFFE

Hokitika Guardian, 24 May 1926, Page 4

THE SACRED GIRAFFE

A favourite device both in fiction and “ serious ” literature is io depict our civilisation as it will appear to the eyes of an age in the distant future. This enables the author to show up our follies and shortcomings the assumption being that mankind in remote days to come will be far superior to our own contemporaries. This method has been adopted in “The Sacred Giraffe,” which purports to be the second volume of the posthumous works of J ulio Areeval, edited by Salvador de Afadariaga. The period is 5000 years hence. The white race has disappeared from the face of the earth, wiped out by the coloured people. The American Empire is wholly blade. The centre of culture and scholarship is Africa. Ebon is tho capital city of the negroes, the sacred giraffe is the object of their worship, and woman is the dominant sex. Europe has been submerged in an ancient geological upheaval. Its very existence is doubted by some savants who regard it as a figment of folk lore, a lost continent of Atlantis as it were.

However, a few relics survive from which archaeologists draw widely differing conclusions about the white race. .Here we have a thrust at our own habit of reconstructing past civilisations from the scantiest material'. The idea is developed with great ingenuity, am] finite logically. Thus the eminent Poetoross Bela delivers to the Royal Ebonite Institute of Learning an address m which she sums up the knowledge possessed by the Ebonites in regard to Europe and the white race. She claims that her own researches have led to epoch-making discoveries. She has found an “ Oxford Book of English Verse,” and from internal evidence deduces that all the fragments of English poetry that have come down to the Ebonites were composed by one and the same poet, a man named Oxford. In precisely the same way the “ Iliad,” the “ Odyssey,” and the so-called “ Homeric Hymns ” were once attributed to one man, Homer; although it is now definitely established that they were the work of many hands. Indeed, throughout Ebonian civilisation is simply our own inverted—war, government, science and the arts arc the specialty of the female sex. while males (who are known as “ the fair sex”) are relegated to the home and the children. Some of the males take an interest in things of the mind—these are the “ thin lips,” but most are well content with their lot. Some advanced female thinkers, however, believe that a wider sphere should be opened to males. Doctoress Shawa, for instance, does not subscribe to the conventional view that men are timid. No doubt they are in the fights and quarrels of daily life. But observe them, in those fields in which they are required by social custom to hold their own. “ Seo how firm is their handling of servants, how relentless their bargaining with grasping shopkeepers, and last, but not least, how* bokl their imagination in matters of personal attire.” What woman, she asks, would dare to appear in public adorned with the exuberance and originality which is considered quite normal in the sons and husbands of the Ebonite ladies ? What passes for timidity, Inherent in the masculine character, is nothing hut shyness clue to their mode of life. Let men come out into the arena, let them develop their 'minds, prophesies Doctoress Shawa, and they will soon vie with women in decision, responsibility, and self-reliance. And so the travesty continues. Contemporary polities, music, art, and social institutions are satirised; while some of the Ebonite Indies are the feminine counterparts, thinly disguised, of masculine celebrl ties of our own day

GHENT LAAV COURTS ABLAZE. BRUSSELS March 2. The Palais de Justice at Ghent, which took 10 years to' build (1830-46), was burned out in 8 hours this morning. It was just after 4 'a.m. when a policeman saw flames bursting through the roof and gave the alarm. Despite the efforts of the fire brigade the fire, fanned by a strong breeze, gained the upper hand, and lat midday four granite walls and the ground floor were all that remained of the building.