South Africa Not a Fairyland

1896

Robert Perry, a Chicago contractor, who has been spending two months in Johannesburg, South Africa, says:

"I want to warn Americans to keep away from that part of the world. There is nothing to go there for. The climate is unhealthful, living is exorbitantly high, and the people who are there are almost in a starving condition.

"Africans do all the work in the mines, which are all owned by Barnato and Rhodes. The place is a desert where scarcely anything grows, and there is a water famine most of the time. Every imaginable thing is taxed heavily. Even Pretoria's own paper has printed a warning to the world to keep away from the place. The people who have lived there ten, or fifteen years are away behind the times. When I told them about the motorcycle and the kinetoscope, they thought I was telling fairy tales, and would not believe me." — Detroit Free Press.