Laurenço Marques, Mozambique The problem is how to get from this shore across the river, full of crocodile and hippos, over to that shore, about forty yards away, and the answer, in the absence of the bridge the government cannot afford to build, is a pontoon manned by four blacks, who push it across by leaning on long bamboo poles. They managed the operation, in a spirit of easy-going chaos, in about forty-five minutes. I am the most unmechanical person ever inflicted on the Machine Age, and yet I would have undertaken, given one hour, to have devised means of reducing that forty-five minutes to thirty, and without the use of a single tool unknown to the Stone Age. It isn’t that the four natives were facing an ad hoc problem: they are the regular ferry crew on a highway leading to the great game reservation at Gorongosa, visited last year by 22,000 people. They simply do not use their minds, and do not change their ways; and this is one of the problems the Portuguese (and other colonizers) face in Africa. Even so, native inertia is less of a burden to the Portuguese than the UN, and World Opinion.
Buckley
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