CYCLE TREK THRILLS

Evening Star, Issue 21007, 22 January 1932, Page 1

CYCLE TREK THRILLS

GIRLS AMONG NATIVES LIFE IN AFRICAN KRAALS. “ In my opinion an African kraal is on) of the safest places in the world.” Tb : i was the statement made to a ‘ Sunday Chronicle ’ representative recently by Miss Audrey Richards, who has returned from Rhodesia, where she spent a year alone in native kraals. Miss Richards, who is a slim, active girl, with curly, bobbed, auburn hair and a merry twinkle in her eye, is a daughter of tho late Sir Erie Richards, an Oxford professor of law. She was educated at a well-known girls’ school in Pent, took a degree at Oxford, and went out to study social anthropology in South Africa. The Board of Mantu Studies of Cape Town University and the British Rhodes trustees asked Miss Richards to spend a year in African kraals in Northeastern Rhodesia to study the effect of the recently-started copper mining industry on tho village life. It took her only a couple of months to perfect her knowledge of the dialects she was to use, and then with her younger sister she set off by lorry for 300 miles from the nearest railway station. Then' these two young girls, with fifteen native carriers, who were in charge of their tent, stores, books, and ammunition, set off to trek by bicycle from village to village. _ Sometimes they stayed a week in one village, sometimes three' weeks, and ai'-w a couple of months the younger sister had to return to England, and Miss Audrey Richards was left alone in the middle of Africa.

In one village Miss Richards discovered that it was considered a disgrace for any girl to bo unmarried over the ago of sixteen. Hastily she and her sister invented husbands, produced pictures of officials of the university at Capo Town to prove their existence. Next tho girls were obliged to invent a “ family ”! Pictures of smiling babies, quickly torn from the condensed milk tins in their stores, were pinned on tho tent walls, and were much admired by the native women. In ano icr village the sisters posed as widows, since in Africa the status of a widow is a high one, and much attention was paid to them in consequence. On another occasion they were announced as the “ sisters of King George.”