KOUKA WON

Greymouth Evening Star, 22 February 1937, Page 3

KOUKA WON

A SUDANESE PRINCESS Princess Kouka, of El Fasher in the Sud.ap, .chosen by Walter Futter, the Aperiedn film director, to be Paul Robeson’s leading lady in his new film of the desert, sat in native dress on a sofa in an English Ijotel and asked a reporter of the “News Chronicle”: — “If 1 stay in Epglaaid, shall I become red and white like all of you? There is no sun and always, always it rains.” She talked French with a guttural Arpb pronunciation; She was dressed in a. pleated skirt of (scarlet silk that! swept from a high waist to the curv-ed-up toes of her Eastern shoes. A sash of crinison slashed with white was round lier hips. Between the red of her dress and the bright silverstriped blue of her bolero jacket flowed the thick white satin of her petticoat. Bound about her black, centreparted hair was a veil of gold lace threaded with blue silk cord, which She called her “turban.” Her neck was circled with a collar of red and yellow gold. From her ears swung flat gold hoops three inches in diameter.

Princess Kouka crossed swords with her father to be allowed to come to England when Mr. Futter, seeing her for a few minutes, said: “I must have that girl for my new picture. I don’t-care if she doesn’t speak English. I don’t care if she’s had no experience. She’s got what it takes.” Sheik Ibrahim Madhi held, with the conservatism of the. East, that a highbred Sudanese girl should not become a public player, should not change the silver coffee cups of the desert for the china of Europe, should not leave her native land.

But the princess spoke to him in her husky voice. And she had her way. She is to stay in England for three weeks, to learn enough English to speak her lines. The film will deal with the great annual gathering of the Saharan tribes to load the pink salt peculiar to only one area on the hacks of 15,000 camels and drive it home. “But we do not love our camels," said the princess. “We eat (hem. They are very good. Not the humps—the thigh.” To Kouka all Europeans are red and white. Even English policemen are not "wonderful.” They are just red and white faces.