Tramp Royale

by Robert A. Heinlein

  But since they still need dollar exchange they advertise heavily in our country to attract American tourists, then their real feelings toward outsiders show up in making it exceedingly difficult for a tourist to be admitted. We ran into this same curious ambivalence in two other small, nationalistic and suspicious countries: Indonesia and New Zealand-plead for tourists, then treat them like convicts being processed.

  Despite everything, it is an extremely pleasant country to visit-if your skin is the approved color. Cape Town is English in the very nicest sense, Durban is much like Florida, Johannesburg is like a boom city in Texas. The Johannesburgers show an American enthusiasm for the new, the big, the different, and the expensive; they speak of how much things cost and of the big operations they are in with the unashamed candor of a Texan or a Hollywood movie producer-they are so un-English that it is a bit of a shock to run across a cricket field there.

  But most of all, the beauty of South Africa makes one gasp.

  The Ruys was a very sociable ship, particularly with the South Africans aboard. There was a party of some sort almost every night; the ladies dressed for dinner and most of the men did, too, either in evening clothes or summer whites. On New Year's Eve there was, of course, an especially big party.

  I was away from the ballroom floor for a few minutes to replace a dress shirt that I had melted down. When I returned, a tall, handsome man was kissing my wife. Gathered in his left arm was a plump blonde, apparently a reserve.

  When Ticky was able to talk she said, "Dear, I want you to meet Sam."

  Sam stuck out a hand-a third one, I think-and shouted, "Hi, Bob! Have a drink! It's my birthday." He was red-faced and his shirt had melted down, too, but he did not seem to care. There were three silver ice buckets each with a magnum on a table by him; I congratulated him, sat down, and started sopping up champagne. Sam sat down with us for a moment, then got up hastily. "I missed one! Be right back-" He dashed across the room, grabbed another female, and bussed her.

  He ran down the whole female, first-class passenger list, plus the stewardess-who was not the usual old biddy, but should have been on an airline. I poured more of his champagne and hoped that there was no trench mouth aboard.

  This was how we happened to drive across South Africa.

  Sam invited us to do so with him about ten minutes later. The next morning it appeared that he had not forgotten it and really meant it. For the remainder of the trip to Cape Town we were bombarded with advice from other South Africans not to do so; according to them the Karoo Desert through which we would drive was unbeautiful, uninteresting, and unbearable in the summer; we would be hot, dirty, miserable, and bored-take an old hand's advice, son, and take the Blue Train, or fly.

  At last I got a little huffy about it and told one of them that we would go with Sam if we had to walk, dragging our sled behind us; he had invited us, damn it, and that was more than anyone else had done! It shut up the talk but did not change their minds.

  They were wrong. We enjoyed every mile of it.

  We arrived in Table Bay early in the morning, as usual, and with the customary morning-after malaise from the Captain's Dinner of the last night. Even so, I found it possible to second Sir Francis Drake's logbook entry of 1580: "This cape is a most stately thing, and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth." The Cape of Good Hope is as lovely as its name.

  Table Mountain, sitting over Cape Town and Table Bay, is a separate sight, some miles to the north of the Cape. The Table is a pleasing sight, but it is an ordinary mesa or butte, made exceptional by being the only one of its sort in the neighborhood, instead of being scattered around in quantity, New Mexico style. It forms a splendid background for an unusually lovely city.

  My own first glimpse of South African life was of stevedores on the dock. They were resting and playing a finger matching game-a game which I had played the same way in school as a boy, which is pictured in murals in ancient Pompeii, which is played also by the Australian aborigines, and by Hawaiians half a world away from Cape Town. This may have some great anthropological significance; for myself I was simply delighted with the odd fact.

  We were processed with exasperating slowness. It was long past lunch time before we were through customs. The customs examination was not outstandingly lengthy itself and we had Sam with us to smooth the way; the only mild hitch came over cigarettes. We had taken ashore the number which the regulations appeared to permit free of duty, but somehow we were wrong. I never did understand just how we were wrong, but it may have been that a single customs return for husband and wife was allowed one exemption, not two. In any case I was told to pay duty on half the cigarettes we were taking in for our personal use and I did so; the duty amounted to a hundred per cent.

  In the mean time Ticky was poking me in the ribs and urging mutiny. Her ultra-free soul had already been tried that morning by some exceptionally silly immigration questions. "Don't pay it!" she whispered, loud enough to be heard back on the ship. "Tell him to go to the Devil! If they don't like it, we'll go back aboard and not spend a damn cent in their confounded country. We aren't even asking to take enough in to last us through-it's an outrage!"

  The cost was not much but with Ticky it is always the principle of the thing-mere expense never fazes her. I hurriedly promised to skin her alive and sell her pelt and hustled her out of there. Sam and I closed in on her from both sides and marched her away while the customs officers pretended not to hear and looked smugly pleased. We found a taxi and headed up town.

  The plan was to pick up Sam's car, load all baggage in it, then see Cape Town. Departure into the desert would be made at sunrise the next morning. We would sleep aboard ship, as there were no hotel rooms to be had in Cape Town, it being the tail end of the holidays. In fact there were no train or plane reservations to be had for the same reason; had we not stuck with Sam's offer we would never have been able to cross Africa while the ship went the long way around the coast.

  Sam lived in Johannesburg and had left his car in the company garage of the Cape Town firm he represented in the north. We drove out to the plant and Sam left us with one of the company officers while he got his car. This gentleman was affable but I at once ran into something which seems to me to characterize the odd attitude of South Africans toward Americans. This man, whom I shall call "Mr. Smith"-he was not an Afrikander-said to me, "New York is filled with gangsters, eh?"

  I silently cursed Hollywood for the distorted impression of the U.S. given to the world by the movies and answered as quietly as I could, "Why, no, I wouldn't say so. Most of that sort of trouble died out with the repeal of Prohibition."

  Mr. Smith looked startled and said, "You misunderstood me. I meant the businessmen in New York."

  It seemed to be an unanswerable remark. Sam arrived with his car at that point and saved me from having to cope with it. But I asked him about it once we were out of earshot. "What did he mean?"

  "Oh, that-" Sam frowned and answered, "Nothing, really. It's just an expression. It means a man who is a good bargainer, aggressive. Almost a compliment."

  "It did not sound like one."

  "Well . . . some people aren't very tactful."

  I shut up as Sam obviously did not like the subject. But I do not think the term was complimentary; I think it was a smear name used so habitually by them about us that "Mr. Smith" forgot himself. From this and other remarks I reached the conclusion that the notion that Americans are all gangsters in business matters is something that "everybody knows" in South Africa.

  I am not an economist and I certainly shall not attempt to psychoanalyze an entire nation. But one does notice attitudes and there is always the itch to try to understand why. I confess that with respect to South Africa I could never figure out why . . . why the United States was regarded with a mixed aggressive-defensiveness.

  The reasons why we aren't liked in many nations are fairly obvious and have been discussed too often to warrant rehashing here, but none of the usual re
asons seem to apply in South Africa. The Union of South Africa is not even faintly communist, so that cannot be the source. "Dollar Imperialism" does not seem to be the trouble; while we have a little money invested there, you will not find American trade names spread around and American businessmen are conspicuous by their absence. We certainly have not displaced South Africa from world leadership, nor has South Africa experienced the sour taste of gratitude, either during or after the War-her role was more like our own, on a smaller scale.

  It is true that we are the main bulwark (perhaps the only one) between them and conquest by Moscow, but they certainly do not seem to be aware of it, so they can hardly dislike us for that.

  One remark we did hear repeatedly; someone would say that he would like to buy this or that, made in America, or would like to travel in America, but "-we can't get the dollars, you know." This remark was always delivered accusingly, as if it were the fault of the United States and of this American, myself, in particular.

  We tried to point out that American goods were very nearly forbidden entrance to the Union by embargolike restrictions placed by South Africa itself; we got nowhere. As for dollars for travel in the States I pointed out that there was an open-market quotation for South African pounds on the New York market; their money was acceptable.

  This last was greeted with a shake of the head. "Oh, no! Currency restrictions, you know. We can't get the dollars."

  The currency restrictions are entirely those imposed by South Africa, not by us-but it is true that South Africans are not permitted to take outside enough money for much travel. (When was the last time you met a South African tourist in the States?) This is an odd status for the nationals of the world's biggest gold producer. South Africa mines over half a billion dollars in raw gold each year, almost half of the free world's supply and enormously more than we produce. Yet her gold reserves are small, her national debt is very large (proportionately about the same as ours), and her currency is "soft" and is kept near par by drastic exchange regulations.

  The conventional answer is that they are helping England, an answer I don't understand as there is no love lost between Dr. Malan's government and England. The conventional solution offered by South Africans is that it is up to the United States to do something about about it, to wit, devalue the dollar.

  I was first tackled on this subject as soon as I boarded the Ruys; a Johannesburg businessman and financier asked me how soon I thought the United States intended to raise the price of gold? I answered in some surprise that I did not know it was in the wind.

  He seemed startled at my answer and made it clear that he thought it was a certainty; the question was when? Later I heard him discussing my answer with another Johannesburger; my answer seemed to worry both of them.

  This subject came up again some weeks later with an entirely different group of South Africans. Ticky and I were invited to have a drink with this group; the moment we were seated we were tackled bluntly and aggressively: "Why doesn't your country buy our gold production at sixty dollars an ounce?"

  The tone was truculent; I could see that I was already accused, tried and convicted. But Ticky took over. "Why should we?"

  "Eh? It's obvious. You can't expect us to buy your goods if you won't buy our gold."

  "We do buy your gold . . . all of it you offer to sell, at thirty-five dollars an ounce."

  "But you ought to pay more. You ought to pay sixty dollars an ounce."

  We had heard this a wearisome number of times; Ticky rapidly reached her flash point. "Why should we? You wouldn't buy our goods if we did so; you've rigged your laws to shut us out. What sense is there in digging gold out of Johannesburg, us paying you sixty dollars an ounce-and then sticking it back in the ground in Fort Knox? What's sensible about that? If you don't like the gold price of the dollar, why don't you keep your gold and go on the gold standard yourselves? Then you could set the value of your pound at anything you wanted to and it would be hard money, at least as hard as the dollar. You could buy anything you wanted with it anywhere. That's all it takes; just quit complaining about the price of the dollar and go on the gold standard yourself!"

  There was a shocked reply amounting to, "Oh, no, we couldn't do anything like that!"-as if Ticky had said something in terribly bad taste. No counter argument was offered and the group broke up with considerable chilliness on both sides.

  I know that Ticky is not much of a theoretical economist and neither am I, but it does seem to me that there was more hard sense to her side of the argument than to theirs. I am not going to go into a discussion of the merits, demerits, and effects of devaluation, inflation, etc.-but I can't see anything in their argument but greed. It seems to me, too, to be a greed that is utterly reckless of the consequences on others; I may be wrong but I suspect that sudden devaluation of the dollar at a time when all other currencies are keyed to it might set off the biggest crash in history.

  But this curious delusion that we are deliberately and wrongfully withholding their lollipop, from sheer meanness when we know better, may be the key to the oddly ambivalent attitude that we ran into all through South Africa. They have cast Uncle Sam simultaneously in the roles of Santa Claus and of the Devil.

  After we left the factory of Sam's firm he dropped us downtown; we set out to do some sightseeing. Time being limited I hired a taxi-a licensed guide and tour car seemed unnecessary since it was an English-speaking city. Taxis park in the middle of the street in Cape Town; I located one and asked the driver for a rate by the hour.

  There was no rate by the hour, only by the mile . . . so I told him what we wanted to do and asked approximately how much it would cost by the hour. His answer indicated that we would probably cover twenty to thirty miles in city driving in an hour, which seemed reasonable, so I hired him, telling him to drive us around the city and point out the sights to us.

  Thereafter we got just one piece of "information" out of him; I asked him how many people there were in Cape Town. He said that he did not know exactly but it was somewhere between eight and nine million. I did not argue but contemplated the beauty of it. Cape Town is actually a little over half a million and looks smaller, as much of the city is spread out down the Cape peninsula in formerly independent communities. The downtown part in front of Table Mountain has a lazy, sleepy quality more suited to a much smaller community and the suburbs are garden villages-the whole city is lovely.

  Our driver immediately thereafter lost all command of the English language. Instead of driving us inside the main city he hunched over his wheel and tooled his car out into open country as quickly as possible; once on the open road he stepped his speed up to about sixty or better and held it there. Protests had no effect.

  Having dinner in mind, I had set a time limit of two hours; he delivered us back into town and to the gangway of the Ruys exactly on time-having accomplished the maximum mileage possible without fatal accident. I paid the exact amount without a tip. But I was unable to be really angry at the trick he had played on us; by pouring on the gas and running up the mileage he had managed to take us all around Table Mountain and far down the Cape on a tour which we had reluctantly decided to forgo through lack of time. As it was we saw almost everything usually covered in a leisurely full-day tour.

  But the scenery certainly whizzed past.

  What we could see of it looked good. There are beautiful homes and gardens in the hills back of Table Mountain, fine bays and beaches and impressive formations, in particular the Twelve Apostles on the Marine Drive down toward Hout Bay on the Atlantic side; these are a dozen rugged mountain bastions facing the sea which might be apostles or anything else but are worth seeing. As we swung across the peninsula to return we had our first view of the Indian Ocean.

  On our way back to the ship we passed a Dutch windmill, a relic of early colonial days. Many of the houses in Cape Town show Dutch gables, a particularly ungraceful architectural conceit which is loved uncritically by the local gentry for its historical associations. Ca
pe Town was originally settled by the Dutch as fortress and revictualing station for their ships sailing to the Indies; it was not intended to be a colony at first. It changed hands several times but the principal settlers were Dutch burghers and their slaves. As a result of the Napoleonic Wars the English moved in and hung on; freeing of the slaves, the famous Voortrek north, the creation of new states, the Boer War, and today an independent nation muttering about seceding from the Commonwealth all followed the advent of the British almost as historic necessities. It would be a deceptive over-simplification to say that the Afrikanders hated the British for freeing the slaves and are still sullenly determined, a hundred and twenty years later, to hang onto slavery-but this abstraction has an element of truth in it.

  We arranged with the night steward in the Ruys to be called at four a.m.-a horrid hour-and asked could we please have coffee, or at least tea. A few minutes after we were called there came a knock at our stateroom door and there was, not the night duty man, but the incomparable Kwai Yau, bearing a big tray. He had decided that we should not start off without a proper breakfast and had gotten up even earlier than we had to prepare it for us. If Kwai Yau were not about forty-five, with a home and family in Hong Kong, I would like to adopt him.

  So we started out feeling merely a bit short on sleep instead of feeling three days drowned. It was not necessary to go through customs (which was not open then anyhow) since our baggage was all ashore; we merely had to present our gate passes and breeze on through. The early morning was chilly even though it was midsummer, January; Ticky had worn a coat. I had seen without noticing that she looked a bit lumpy in it.

  Once outside the guarded gate she began shedding cigarettes. She had tucked packs of them all over her person; the number totaled exactly the number we had been required to pay duty on the day before. I looked on helplessly, then turned to Sam. "We seem to have a smuggler. Want to turn around and turn her over to the guard?"