12: A Few Last Thoughts and Some Sight-Seeing

View Larger Map
I stopped off in Johannesburg (A) and made a short trip to Pretoria (B). I saw one of the big gold mines near Johannesburg. The natives who did all the labor, were pretty raw, dressed in castoffs and slept on boards and blankets, and ate with their hands and no utensils. We watched them eat their noon meal which consisted of a big dab of corn meal mush slapped into a wash pan or pot, with a big ladle full of soup with vegetables and a little meat.

The quartz rock which contained gold was hauled up, crushed and concentrated using a cyanide process to leach out the gold from the sand. Huge piles of sand from the mines, would be blown by the winds sometimes, making things gritty in Johannesburg which nonetheless was a city several times as large as Salt Lake City.

This photo is unlabeled, but it appears it could be a gold mine.

 "Ramah", Johannesburg

May 1932 [Not sure how this could be May as he left Johannesburg on 

January 21, 1932 and Fawz is in the picture]

Elder Kenneth Y. Stringham

Sr. Muriel Groves

Elder Harold H. Smith

Mr. Esterhuizen

Prest. Don Mack Dalton

Elder Kenneth Sutherland

Elder Samuel L. Gardner

Sr. Groves Westerhuizen

Elder Clarence S. Barker

Elder Herman J. Smith

Mountain Goats at Johannesburg Zoo

Fine residential section (Park View) in background

Elders Thomas Y. Wilson

Harold H. Smith

Herman J. Smith

Newly completed
Kimberley
October 1931

Natives lived in huts and compounds on the edges of the towns. It was illegal at that time to hire a native for a skilled position. They also could not ride with whites on railroads. Apparently it would take a generation or more to educate them up to civilized standards. Law compliance then was good. Boer-Dutch at the time were ruling South Africa and they believed in keeping the natives segregated.

Once a family in Kimberley was invited to attend the wedding of their native maid to be held in the small Catholic Church at the Location (colored area) outside town. The maid had a family of several children but had never had money enough to be married before. The children stood with her in the wedding line.

Another time Elder Smith and I were in Bloemfontein and saw a long procession of blacks walking behind a hearse. We followed along and went to the colored cemetery. A prominent native had died. The natives, some of them well dressed, sobbed and cried and sang conventional Christian hymns in their native language with good volume and tone.

Native Funeral

Bloemfontein

November 1931

It was January 21 [1932] when I was on my way by railway from Johannesburg to Nelspruit (C), a small town at entrance to the higher portion of Kruger National Park. Lower parts were closed during hot weather because of danger from malaria. A guide picked me up and drove in a Model A Ford touring car. We saw thousands of wildebeests (brindled gnu) a lumbering buffalo-like animal, thousands of quaggas (zebras) and large numbers of many types of beautiful deer, including kudu, kind of like a moose elk, spring bok, (an antelope), and finally a lioness with three cubs. She started coming toward us, so we drove fast enough to keep well ahead of her.

Wildebeeste

Kruger National Park

January 1932

Zebra

Kruger National Park

January 1932