Ch. 1: Kimberly

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	CHAPTER ONE

	Kimberley A while ago, when I told a Johannesburg lady I was going to Kimberley, she said impatiently, "It will just be a waste of time. Kimberley's a dreary little place. It isn't a city at all; it's a state of mind. The people who live there are crazy about it— they're always bragging—but you couldn't induce me to spend any time there. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a backward little mining town with a terrible climate." Johannesburg is a younger city than Kimberley, and a larger one; with its skyscrapers, department stores, and movie houses, and its population of three quarters of a million, it is South Africa's pride, and will stand comparison with the other big towns of the world. The same can't be said for Kimberley, even though, as I discovered, its fifty-five thousand inhabitants, like city people everywhere, complain of a traffic problem. Johannesburg is there because of gold, but it has developed other interests and has become the largest city in the Union of South Africa; Kimberley is there because of diamonds, and although it has acquired some urbanity and an air of permanence it still is, as my Johannesburg acquaintance said, a mining town. (As she

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