OLD PATHS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 889, 5 February 1930, Page 14

OLD PATHS

In Africa, long before the British came and built roads, small paths wound in and out of the bush, from village to village. These paths remain today and are still used. They are always winding because they were made by the feet of the natives who trod them, and a native cannot make a straight line. In Africa if you give something to your gardener to plant and want a straight line you must make it for him. Otherwise you will find your flowers straggling crookedly and untidily across the garden bed. These paths, when you see them in open grass country, wind in and out like a corkscrew. They are very narrow because they were worn by men walking in single file, as the natives always walk. Nowadays they are very often trodden by white men because there are still comparatively few roads for cars. Men making roads now in Africa or elsewhere find traces of roads made or begun many years ago. So men set their mark on a country as though they made it their own, leaving something of themselves that shall last for ever. Lately engineers building a road in Kenya came across a strip of an old road abandoned a good many years ago. The bush had crept up on either side to swallow it, but these men found on the stones the wheel marks of the old caravans that used to go up and down from the coast. In time the bush will quite cover these stones and the marks of the wheels until the road-maker comes that way again, and one feels that somehow he will be guided to the place where a road ran.

One of the oldest roads in Africa is the slave road, and parts of this still exist. Down this long road, all the way from Uganda to the coast, the unfortunate slaves were marched in chains. In those days there were great slave markets in Zanzibar. One feels that something of pain and suffering must be left on that road, if our lives mark the road we tread as we mark our countries and our homes.