BIKING FOR PLEASURE

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 103, 1 May 1926, Page 20

BIKING FOR PLEASURE

FROM KRAAL TO KRAAL.

When Captain Speke, in 1862, entered Uganda, the first white man to reacii this then unknown land, he could hardly have imagined that only 63 years later the King and his Ministers would attend in State a race meeting confined to riders of British bicycles (states the London "Daily Mail"). A recent mail brought the whole story of a wonderful two-days' race meeting held at Kampala, the capital of Uganda, attended by his Majesty the Kabaka, King of all the Uganda peoples, most of his Ministers from the Luike (the native Parliament), and many other local celebrities. Long before the start on the Friday morning over four thousand people were assembled, and the crowd swelled as the day went on, for it was a complete twodays' holiday in Kampala and district, everything else coming to a standstill for the great event. In addition to the usual races, there were'competitions in cycling, such as trick riding, riding round bottles, tilting the bucket on cycles, and amusing events, such as a potato-and-spoon race a-wheel, when the competitors were encouraged by war cries as fierce as once resounded when Livingstone and Stanley first explored the country, but cries now turned to more peaceful pursuits. The Uganda native has taken to cycling as keenly as anyone, and there are thousands of riders in the country, many of whom come long distances by bush track to support the members of their tribes who were competing. The prizes were distributed by the King at the end of the second day, his Majesty congratulating his people on the great success of the event, not only as a happy two-days' holiday, but as symbolic of the civilising and peaceful influence of British rule, which ' has turned what was once a barren land of warlike tribes into a part of the' great Empire of peace, so that the native can ride his bicycle as happily and as unmolested from kraal to kraal as he would from one village to another in England.