Science: Civilization? No Thanks!

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The nomad pygmies of South-West Africa, who are fleet as deer, roam unchecked over the vast deserts bordering on Bechuanaland. They are not above hunting down domesticated cattle and playing tag with avenging white policemen. Game Warden Dr. P. J. Schoeman has long thought the energetic Bushmen ought to have their own private reserve. But first he needed to win his wards some popular support.

By jungle telegraph, he passed the word that he was planning to give away free tobacco rations. Some 40 pygmies showed up for the handout. Of these, Schoeman was able to persuade only 18 to help him in his experiment. The 18 made the long trek south to Cape Town, so that the white men at South Africa's tercentenary exposition this week could see the pygmies in the flesh. Only men and married women went along because, as any pygmy knows, a maiden who drinks water from alien springs will become sterile.

From the pygmy point of view, the trip has been more or less of a failure. They are content enough to eat Cape Town's plentiful food, but aside from the salt, they are not very fond of a civilized diet. They like their own everyday dishes, berries, roots and snake meat, better. As for all the other benefits of civilization, only the sewage system impresses them. Their loose loincloths, they say, are far superior to tight-fitting civilized clothing, and their own home brew, made from melons, has more kick than the white man's firewater.

Warden Schoeman is worried that the little visitors may like their lazy life in Cape Town so much that they will not want to go back to Okavango. But he feels sure that sooner or later they will realize a home in the bush is worth two automobiles in Cape Town. Eventually, inquisitive scientists will have to track them down to their desert home.