Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir

by Martha Gellhorn

think all the blacks will do on their own is destroy whatever civilization the whites brought them, and revert to their natural savagery.

The blacks begin their sex life at about the age of twelve. By twenty, young men are impotent and come to the pharmacy asking for aphrodisiacs. They also use native ones. A young man cannot marry because a wife costs 150,000 francs, a fortune. The result is that older men can afford a wife or wives. No woman is faithful; syphilis is general. If a man is caught as an adulterer, he must pay the injured husband a fee for the use of the deceitful wife: tribal courts attend to this. The blacks like children, and illegitimacy is no sin or shame, and the children mooch around contentedly in a general family huddle. It sounds rather nice and cosy and easygoing. The syphilis part is no good though, and perhaps explains some of the deformity I have seen, bad eyes, etc.

The Kolars insist that the blacks have no real feelings of personal affection, individual love, loyalty. They are attached to their family; they belong in it and would be helpless without it. There are also family

customs of hospitality, which put the kibosh forever on individual effort. Any relative (and everyone must have dozens and dozens) can come and park on a richer relative, gratis, thus literally eating him out of house and home. No one may refuse this burden or burdens (if richer, more relatives settle in). For if you do refuse you are socially outcast, a swine in the eyes of all; and also, if in need yourself one day, you would not find a single helping hand. There is not much use in getting ahead, acquiring the goods of this world, on the level of the average tribal black (maybe it d...

they give an impression—which I cannot remember anywhere else on my travels—of being at ease, no that’s not right: of taking life by the minute as it comes, without anxiety. What am I trying to say? That, if they have enough to eat, I think they are much better off as they are than they will be if our civilization gets hold of them.

Politics—the bungling management of the affairs of men—is a game played among themselves by a breed of professionals. What has politics to do with real daily life, as real people live it?

. Martha Gelhorn

Always delighted to grab any privileges I can get, I don’t like the sense of being privileged by law. I mistrust power for myself and everyone else, especially power bestowed by race, creed or colour. This works both ways;

I will never comprehend the theory and practice of cold toast.