The Girls of Africa

From the imperious Queen of Sheba to pert Juliet Prowse, the African female has never ceased to arouse wanderlust in even the most worldly outlanders. Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, even wise King Solomon -- the number who have fallen victim to the sensuality of African women is legion. (And the legions range from Roman to Foreign.)

Today, a young man's idle dream of an idyl among the girls on the Dark Continent can be jet-propelled into reality in a matter of hours and for as little as $600. For those who can swing a safari, close examination of the customs and contours of African girls, from Afrikaner to Zulu, should prove most rewarding.

Like the continent itself, the girls of Africa are a study in contrasts. In (text continued overleaf) color, they run from pure, rich Jersey cream to café-aulait; from gold to bittersweet chocolate; from almost brick red to a lovely dark grape. Despite the common term, there are no black women. Even more striking than the contrast in color among African women is the contrast in their cultures. In the hills of South Africa's back country, a gleaming half-naked Herrero girl, her supple body arching to the pulse of a ritual dance, may pause for a moment and tilt her head up to watch a roaring plane streak south toward Johannesburg, where her betrothed has gone to work in the gold mines. At the same time, and only a few miles away at Johannesburg's Jan Smuts Airport, the blonde, well-tanned daughter of a British mining engineer may click off a jangling commercial, then straighten a nylon as she steps from her Aston-Martin to meet an old friend jetting in from America.

Contrasts among Africa's native tribes (as among white settlers) are often equally sharp. A lithe-limbed Watusi maiden differs far more from an Ituri Pygmy than a tall Norwegian does from a petite Parisienne; and a Masai girl is less similar to a Somba than a sensuous Sicilian to a sturdy Lapp. (text continued on page 120)

To widen the contrasts, Africa's 240,000,000 inhabitants share no common tongue, but speak more than 500 dialects. The leading language is imported Arabic, used by most of the Semitic peoples of the north. But the most beautiful is Swahili (a precise yet expressively rhythmic language in which the word for "caress" becomes a caressing kubembeleza).

Amid all its disunity, Africa -- at least most of it -- has been suddenly seized by an overdue urge to assert its native might. New nations emerge almost every month, proud and poor, growing to UN stature almost overnight.

Thrust into this march of progress, many tribal African women seem uncertain of where they want to go. But most are united in a desire to escape the bridal bondage and servitude that has often been their lot. They (text continued on page 150) Girls of Africa (continued from page 120) want to be able to travel where they please, work as they please and marry whom they please.

Like Gaul, all Africa is divided into three parts. In each, the girls are startlingly and pleasantly different.

The southern third of Africa -- the diamond and gold third -- is the home of the once-proud nation of the Hottentots, of the copper-skinned, slant-eyed Bushmen, of the dark-brown, Bantu-speaking Southern Negroes, and most significantly, of well over half of Africa's 6,000,000 white settlers.

Some of the most beautiful women in the world are found here -- white Afrikaners, dark-eyed Indians, alluring Cape Colored mulattoes and the part-Polynesians of Malagasy. But the racial policies that dominate most of southern Africa prevent the visitor from mingling with any but those within the confines of his own color-determined class. Only in the impoverished Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique is mixing fully acceptable -- a concession instituted to forestall revolution.

Color bars notwithstanding, the white man's curiosity about the ways of Africa's native girls goes back to the earliest explorations. (In 1704, an intrepid traveler named Peter Kolben greatly added to this interest by nothing in his Prefent State of the Cape of Good Hope: "I have often been affured by both Sexes of the Hottentots that they differ in their Veneral Embraces from Europeans." As to what this difference was, Kolben remained discreetly silent.)

Although South Africa's early Dutch settlers piously claimed no sexual interest in the local ladies, more than a half-million mulatto "Cape Coloreds" are descended from them.

For bachelor settlers who were willing to hold out for the girls back home, directors of the India Company got permission from the Dutch Government "to tranfport to the Cape fuch young Women from the Charitable Foundations and Orphans Houfes as were willing to go thither. Accordingly, a fine Troup of young Females were quickly levied for the Voyage; who, arriving fafely at the Cape, were by the Governour ... beftow'd upon fuch as wanted Wives, with all the Indulgence and Regard that could be fhewn to their feveral Fancies and Inclinations on fuch an Occafion."

Today the white girls of South Africa are a far cry from those ragged workhouse waifs bound into wivery nearly 300 years ago. Grown opulent with the golden wealth of South African earth, the ruling whites live lives of power and comfort that rival the Pharaohs'.

Among the parochial Dutch Afrikaners, society is insufferably stuffy and inbred. The visiting male, despite impeccable background, will find that he needs the equivalent of an engraved introduction to break into the icy isolation that surrounds the fine-featured Dutch girls.

The gay, high-spirited daughters of South Africa's English gentry are quite another matter. Struggling to break out of their all-dressed-up-and-no-place-to-go provinciality, they are only too happy to treat the wayfarer to an exhausting display of pent-up wealth. This may include a formal riding to hounds, a champagne brunch under a spreading pepper tree, or an all-night cocktail party around a free-form pool. In the Rhodesias, the partying is endless -- beginning with "gin and it" (dry gin and Italian vermouth, served unchilled) at 10 A.M. on Sunday.

In the evening, after a dinner or dance at a fashionable South African country club, the landed English lass will want to take you for a stroll around the family estate to search the sky for the Southern Cross, that relatively obscure constellation which "blazes" in so many African novels. This star-crossed stroll will quickly prove that there is more to these comely colonists than mere money.

But no matter how modern the daughters of Britannia may seem, the potential visitor is well advised to avoid testing them on racial issues. Not one white girl in a thousand has a liberal attitude toward native Africans. Like their families, they still believe that bwana means "master" rather than "man."

Very few of South Africa's wellborn white girls work, but they all shop and can be found in profusion along the skyscraper canyon of Johannesburg's impressive Commission Street, darting in and out of fashionable salons and showrooms in colorful high-hemmed, low-backed sun dresses, or poised over cocktails at the Colony, Chez Sabaud or Three Vikings restaurants. (In South Africa, women may not enter bars.)

Among the girls who do work, secretarial jobs in mining and export firms provide fair pay and air conditioning; modeling provides better pay and a bad reputation. Cabaret singing and dancing are left to freewheeling bachelor girls from other countries. (Juliet Prowse got her start with Johannesburg's socially acceptable Festival Ballet Company.)

Reflecting the city's wealth, Johannesburg has a burgeoning entertainment industry. Road-show productions from London's West End play to packed houses and top American and English acts -- those not boycotting the country because of apartheid -- draw high salaries at the elegant and expensive Ciro's. But, as in Australia, most of the imported acts playing South Africa are either over the hill at home or still struggling to reach recognition. (Some show girls have remained in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban as callgirls, but they'll all tell you they're going back into showbiz -- as soon as they work up a new routine.)

Predictably, South Africa's blue laws are as stern as their Afrikaner enforcers. No Brigitte Bardot film has ever flickered there. Five Girls, an artfully sensitive nude photo study of five local beauties, by South African Sam Haskins cannot be sold in his own country. Even a book called Rape of the Earth was banned before the government found that it dealt with soil erosion.

With this atmosphere prevailing, the visiting male with more than an academic interest in the girls of South Africa will do well to consider -- as South Africans do themselves -- trekking to any one of several modern seaside resorts. In the summer, you can cool it in Cape Town, South Africa's most cosmopolitan and least restrained city; or in Durban ("the English city") where delicate Indian girls grace the streets; or in tiny, tidy Sea Point. In the winter (May to September) you and an inamorata can really get away from it all at the luxurious cliff-set Polana Hotel on the warm Indian Ocean in Lourenco Marques, Mozambique. It's an easy drive from Johannesburg.

Also included in the general sphere of southern Africa is the giant island of Madagascar or, as it is now known, the Malagasy Republic. Its women, exotic hybrids of Malayan, Polynesian, European and Negro stock, run the full spectrum of coloring and are among the most beautiful in all Africa. In the bazaar-lined street of Tananarive, the island's capital, they glide from stall to stall wearing delicate lambas, or shawls, of silk. The girls speak French in a dreamy singsong and those that will join you for a Pernod at a Paris-type sidewalk café will usually respond with enthusiasm to an invitation for a day at the city's fashionable race track or, if you're lucky, a weekend at Antsirabe, the local resort version of Vichy.

Back on the mainland, north across the rolling veld to the lush green jungles of Central Africa, slashed by the Equator, is the land of the Forest Negroes, dark-brown, broad-nosed people of medium height. The language is Bantu, Hausa or Swahili. Here, also, are the Caucasized Negroes of Ethiopia and the Somali Republic; tall, dark Nilotes of Uganda; gold-skinned Fulanis of the Republics of Mali and Chad who are a mixture of Caucasoid and Negroid stock; tiny Pygmies of the Congo's Ituri Forest; and the white and mulatto daughters of English planters, clerks and other settlers of Kenya and Tanganyika.

Skin color and physical size, however, are only the visible distinctions among the many contrasting women of Central Africa. The principal differences are tribal customs, until recently kept distinct by the barriers of mountains, rivers and tribal wars.

Polygamy is still widely practiced among the jungle tribes, as it is in North Africa. (Bope Mabinshe, octogenarian king of the Congo's huge Bakuba tribe, had, at his prime, a harem of 850 wives; by 1960 it had dwindled to a mere 200.) Unlike the women of the north, many Central African women encourage their husbands to take extra wives because the newcomers must act as the older wives' servants until they bear children of their own.

Polyandry -- the marriage of one woman to several men -- also exists in Central Africa, but only among the Nilotic Bahimas of Uganda's back country. A tall, handsome people with European eyes and probably one-fourth Caucasian blood, the Bahima women cover themselves from head to foot, while their men go naked. Outsiders know little about the Bahima girls' legendary talents as lovers because they traditionally remain faithful to their multiple husbands.

Although there is no official color bar in Central Africa (except in Kenya), most of the region's self-governing natives sternly object to fraternization between their girls and white men. Because of this tacit apartheid-in-reverse, the only native girls who will socialize with visiting males are apt to be prostitutes or university students -- and sometimes both.

Central Africa's pros are a lively, independent lot, not at all like their pathetic sisters in India and China. These brown-skinned beauties abound in the markets of Kano, Ibadan and Enugu in Nigeria, Accra in Ghana, and Léopoldville in the Congo. Here, too, are the bungalow girls -- educated, sophisticated young Africans dressed in Western fashion, talking English, smoking an endless succession of cigarettes. They specialize in adventures with foreigners and often serve as companion-housekeepers for lonely bachelors.

In this capacity, the fine-looking, coffee-brown Haya girls of Tanganyika have earned an unusual reputation as excellent mistresses in every European capital. Unlike most African girls (who seldom stray far from home), the Hayas are quite willing to travel overseas to work as indentured ayas (servants) or nannies. If they lose their first jobs, they have no trouble finding employment as live-in housekeepers for young bachelors.

Despite the angry efforts of their men to keep them at home, restless backcountry girls still flock to the easy freedom of the big coastal cities. But they often need considerable ingenuity to get there. Such was the case, not long ago, for a group of lusty young ladies from Bukoba, in the northwest corner of Tanganyika. More than 20 of them, deciding that hooking was easier than hoeing, determined to take off for the coastal capital, Dar es Salaam. But the young men of their district were equally determined to keep them at home. When the girls arrived at Bukoba's docks to catch the ferry boat across Lake Victoria, a picket line barred their way. Undaunted, the girls secretly chartered a plane, flew to the capital and set up their own bawdyhouse, complete with medical staff. In less than two years they had earned enough money to return to their tribe as comparatively wealthy, independent women. They used their earnings to buy their own plantations on the outskirts of Bukoba and now employ a number of the hotheads who picketed their ferry.

The girls of Central Africa are at their best when unencumbered by clothes, but only a few have remained untouched by the missionary's zeal to hide all that is natural. Still, on the high plateau of Jos in Nigeria, one can see high-breasted "naked pagans," as they are called, wandering through the markets dressed in nothing but two little bunches of fresh green leaves suspended from a thong. Although not generally beautiful, they are compelling in the milling crowd.

The Yorubas, a large Nigerian tribe, are particularly handsome and remarkable in that they wear clothes in various shades of blue only, with large blue headdresses. To the visitor, a Yoruba market becomes a blue lake rippling with movement. To enter it is to drown in a mass of femininity in which teenage girls carrying three cigarettes and a few lumps of sugar on head-borne tin plates stare up bold-eyed and demand a "dash" -- a tip -- as if they had given their bodies with one sultry look.

A great many Central African women do not wear clothes as we know them; rather, they wear cloths -- wrap-around sarongs printed in vivid colors and designs. The cloths are made in England, Belgium, Holland, Japan and India and their patterns follow no particular custom except that in ex-British territories, portraits of the Queen are popular and the cloth is worn so that Her Majesty stares out over the wearer's breasts and is duplicated on her seat. In Ghana, sarong patterns feature the smiling visage of Kwame Nkrumah.

Perhaps the most apparent affront to good taste and sense to be foisted upon Africans by overzealous missionaries is the "Mother Hubbard" -- that ugly neutralizer that also infests the South Pacific. The African version, called gomazi of "boarding" (after a boarding school for girls in Tanganyika), consists of at least six yards of cloth and is designed to obliterate all evidence of the female anatomy. In the words of anthropologist U. R. Ehrenfels, it makes even the prettiest African girl look "like a single, shapeless, waddling giant pear."

But men of the cloth cannot be blamed for all the sartorial sins of Central Africa. "Enlightened" natives who have come to think of their old tribal ways as chenzi (an outward sign of savagery), must also share the white man's burden. And they do -- by wearing layer after layer of totally unsuitable Western clothing. At Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, for example, only the European professors and their wives sport the short-sleeved cotton shirts and walking: shorts clearly dictated by the country's hot climate. Their students, in a stoical display of Victorian modesty, swelter under heavy wool clothes.

As with their clothing, Makerere's students have also -- for the most part -- adopted a super-Victorian morality. Only among the school's few Indian girls, liberated from strict parental control, can one find those who appreciate the American idiomatic verb "to swing."

Happily, the daughters of British ranchers and plantation owners in Kenya and Tanganyika are, like their counterparts in South Africa, likely to be hospitable to visiting males. Their version of hospitality, however, is apt to be as athletic as it is romantic. Most of these girls are crack shots, excellent equestriennes and mountain climbers, and may require you to test your mettle against towering Mt. Kenya or Kilmanjaro -- or big game -- before testing it themselves in other ways.

A relatively more sophisticated approach may be taken with city girls of Nairobi, where the wild animal bit can be limited to a visit to the local game reserve. A date in Nairobi should definitely start with tall, cool drinks at the New Stanley Hotel bar -- the most famous watering place in eastern Africa -- followed by a leisurely dinner at the Equator Inn, just outside the city. From there she may suggest a visit to the Equator Club, an African-style night club where the native entertainment is excellent, the imported acts only fair. Later, there is always the Southern Cross gambit.

The traveler who finds himself smitten with a Kenya colonial will find the many small but splendid hotels and lodges in Mombasa, Malindi and Nakuru to be perfect weekend hideaways. Drinking is a prime activity at these spots and the vigorous girls of Kenya are astonishingly good at it.

Moving out of Central Africa through the broad savannas of the southern Sudan, one reaches the final third of Africa -- the vast and trackless desert. Here live the dark Caucasoids, the long-haired Caucasized Negroes and the fair-skinned Tuaregs. These people, nomads and city dwellers alike, are mostly Moslems and their language is Arabic.

Northern Africa is the land of the veil -- that wispy symbol of hidden beauty and hidden fear. The beauty is that of the women, their soft, olive skin and sensuous curves hidden beneath long flowing djellabas which reveal only their delicate hands and great, gazelle-soft eyes, darkened with kohl. The fear is that of their Moslem men, who go home at midday for an hour or two of pleasure behind the ornate Moorish sun screens that hide the bedrooms of their whitewashed homes. With or without reason, they fear to expose the bodies and faces for their restive women to the view of strangers -- a view that can still earn an outsider a sudden scimitar slash.

But the winds of change are rending the veils of North Africa, even in the ageless monarchy of Morocco, where the feminist movement is led by Princess Lalla Aisha, daughter of the late King Mohammed V and sister of King Hassan II. The efforts of Aisha and her followers have resulted in a civil law which makes Morocco's former four-wife polygamy amy all but impossible except for the very rich. (While her father's wife -- or wives, no one knew for sure which was the case -- remained veiled and hidden from public life, Aisha often appeared in a bikini on Rabat's pleasant beaches, much to the joy of the King's enemies who flashed beachside photos of her as if they were dirty postcards.)

Today, among Morocco's comely commoners, there is far more fraternization with foreigners than even Aisha dreamed possible. Some Moroccan coeds, quick to adopt beatnik ways, have smoked their way into the hashish and kif parties of foot-loose American and European literati living in Safi, Port Lyautey, Fez and other exotic Moroccan cities. And Morocco, like Tunisia and Algeria, now sends stunning candidates to both the Miss World and Miss Universe contests. These liberated lasses are constantly on the lookout for good job (and marriage) offers overseas, because they know they have booted their chances with Morocco's male traditionalists who still may be heard to say, "Yes, but would you marry a girl who has gone to a movie with another man?"

In Algeria, both veil and veil-thinking were ripped to shreds by the grim necessities of the country's recently won revolution -- a war in which countless Algerian girls fought in the underground. At the same time, another kind of revolution has taken its toll of what was once Algeria's greatest desert attraction -- the sultry dancing girls of the Ouled Nail. These dark-skinned, nomadic beauties were the originators of the serpentine belly dance that left countless visitors to the oasis towns of Biskra and Bou-Saada forever dissatisfied with the girls back home. The Ouled Naïl girls doubled in brass -- or rather in gold (in the form of coins that adorned their jingling headdresses and necklaces) -- as bed partners for veil-weary businessmen and tourists. They were in no way considered social outcasts since they were "marabout" -- descended from Moslem holy men, and for the purely pragmatic reason that men far outnumber women in Africa's desert lands. Today the belly dancers of the Ouled Naïl have pretty much gone to pot and their dancing is not much better than what can be seen at most American navel-waving parlors. But some of them are still quite proficient at their alternate art and can be found in the pseudo seragli along the back streets of Algerian cities. Taxi drivers and street peddlers generally know their whereabouts.

In neighboring Tunisia, the contrast between old and new is best witnessed in an office building at the end of the day. Here, the secretaries, many with bleached-blonde coiffures, all in low-cut blouses and high heels, will prepare to leave for the evening in two quite different ways. Some, who live alone or with roommates, will freshen their make-up and hurry to meet a gentleman friend at a sidewalk café in Tunis' European sector; they will have cocktails or Khalifa wine before dining on skewered mechoui of lamb at the Kortoba or Brasserie de la Paix restaurant, as a prelude to a serious evening of gambling amid the magnificent Moorish decor of the Casino du Belcedere. At the same office, other girls who live at home will remove their make-up, dutifully don veils and djellabas and return to their families, who still demand respect for the old ways. "Our young girls," a Tunisian said recently, "are fully in the Modern Age, while their mothers are still in the Veil Age and their grandmothers remain in the Stone Age."

Egypt, from whence the most exotic tales of African women -- and the Alexandria Quartet -- have sprung, is no longer the sexiest country on the continent. In his zeal to rid the nation of the excesses engendered by free-loving King Farouk, Gamal Abdel Nasser has swung the pendulum far to the other side -- toward a kind of Moslem puritanism. Cairo has been scrubbed creosote clean of the vice that reigned along with Farouk. His international congress of consorts -- and there were hundreds of them -- have fled their plush apartments for new arrangements on the Riviera, in South America and even in the harems of oil-rich Arabia. So stringent are Egypt's new blue laws that belly dancers, while still allowed to churn, are not permitted to expose their navels. The oldest profession is strictly forbidden and those who still ply it are apt to be, literally, the oldest professionals.

But rules cannot kill romance and a visitor to Egypt may still strike up a pleasant liaison with an emancipated working girl. At Cairo's towering Nile Hilton hotel, for instance, many a wellborn Egyptian girl can be found working as a waitress. Egyptian girls prefer this kind of work because it pays more than three times as much as a government job and because it offers an excellent chance to snag a wealth-heeled visitor.

Despite Nasser's regime, Egyptian girls still have a taste for luxury and will usually welcome all that the itinerant male can bestow. The sidewalk cafés of both Cairo and fashionable Alexandria are ideal places for striking up acquaintances over aperitifs, and an invitation to dinner at any of several elegant restaurants will likely be met with immediate acceptance. In Cairo, take her to the Kursaal, Ermitage, Regent, Groppi's, Le Grillion or Saint James for excellent European cuisine or to the Khumais for Egyptian specialties lavishly served on huge brass trays. Night life in Cairo, while no longer in its former Faroukian glory, is still lively. The Mokkattam Casino, Sahara City, Fontana, Abdine Palace and Auberge des Pyramides all feature dancing girls. But if you are more interested in dancing with your own date, the posh Belvedere Room atop the Nile Hilton is recommended, as is the Semiramis, the Meno House near the Pyramids and -- ironically -- the Khassed Kheir, Farouk's former yacht.

When it comes to being entertained by Egyptian girls and their families, you'll find that members of the military class are far more expansive than wealthier civilians. Fantastically high luxury taxes plus a fear of revealing private resources are responsible for this.

Venturing southwest from Egypt into the central Sahara, one finds the fairskinned Hamitic Tuaregs, a unique nomadic tribe. The Tuaregs are the exception that proves the rule of the veil in North Africa: The women, who are tall, beautiful and often fair haired, go barefaced while the men are masked behind blue veils.

Tuaregs also provide another strange exception by being the last people in Africa to continue breeding their own slaves, a Negroid group called the Bellah. The Bellah girls are initiated sexually before they are 10 and serve as concubines only until they are old enough to conceive. Afterward they are bred with members of their own race. While this practice is officially condemned, it has never been stopped because the Bellah docilely follow their masters across the desert.

Less organized forms of slavery also continue in North Africa, kept alive by the demand for odalisques (harem girls) among wealthy Arabians. The going price for a white girl, often lured into slavery through a phony promise of a theatrical or cabaret engagement, is enormous. Fair-skinned Egyptians, Tunisians, Lebanese and Syrians are also in great demand.

With the tightening of international control, the price of slaves has skyrocketed. In 1947 the rate ranged from $390 to $630 for a fair-looking female, but by 1953 a girl of 15 was fetching more than $2000. Today the price for any attractive fair-skinned woman is a minimum of $7000.

Only three years ago, according to the Anti-Slavery Report of June 1960, an Egyptian girl who looked like ex-Queen Soraya of Iran accused her husband-of-a-week of trying to sell her for $10,000. The man confessed to peddling his 65 former wives to agents of various Persian Gulf princes but insisted that none of them had complained. (If it seems strange that he was able to wed 65 women, it must be remembered that while Moslem law permits a man only four wives at a time, it also permits him to shed them by simply saying, "I divorce you," three times.)

While light-colored slave girls rank with Cadillacs as status symbols, Negro girls are also in demand as bedroom kijakazis (Swahili for slave girls) because of a belief that their skin remains cool in hot weather.

There remains in our survey of the girls of Africa one elusive type not confined to any single part of the continent. This is the genus Peregrina Americana -- the traveling American. She will be found in good measurement on tour or safari, in Peace Corps units and American embassies, and at nearly all African universities. While it may seem like carrying coals to Newcastle, the Made-in-U.S.A. miss can be a fine traveling companion.

Contrary to what you may have heard, there are attractive girls in the Peace Corps, but you may find among them a kind of reverse snobbery. Postcard writers notwithstanding, these dedicated good-will girls are apt to have little interest in you unless you are either a Corpsman or a native African.

Friendly, free and highly recommended are the embassy girls. They know the land around them, often speak the language, and most possess a keen taste for advenuture. Also, they generally have their own apartments.

If you are now ready to pack up and take off for Africa, one or two additional bits of information may be helpful.

First, never refer to any African girl as a "native." Although the term seems harmless and is, by dictionary definition, correct, Africans misinterpret it (just as white settlers misinterpret bwana) and consider it a slur.

Secondly, a knowledge of the local language may speed rapport but it is far from essential. Africa's girls, you'll find, speak as much with their eyes as with their tongues. They'll enjoy helping you to be understood and you will enjoy their help.

Finally, remember they are not simplex. They possess a proud awareness of their desirability and -- like desirable girls the world over -- must be tracked and lured like the flighty gazelle. But, as our accompanying photos indicate, the girls of Africa are well worth that effort.