Preface

The author, having travelled 400 000 miles in his life (he is 65 years of age), has visited various places in this country and abroad. He is going to India for the first time – most countries he visited abroad before were Western countries and he always departed from Cape Town harbour. His first journey in 1903 was to England to further his studies. From there he proceeded to Tuskegee, U.S.A. in 1913 before returning home at the start of the First World War. The second trip in 1928 was to Jerusalem to attend a conference. On the way there, he travelled through the following countries: England, France, Switzerland, Italy, Egypt and Palestine. The third journey was to a conference for Christian youth in Buffalo, Niagara Falls (U.S.A.) in 1931. The fourth trip in 1937 was to a meeting in Philadelphia, U.S.A., also via England. His fifth trip in 1949 is this journey to India through Portuguese East Africa, Lourenço Marques in Mozambique, Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam (Tanganyika), Mombasa (Kenya to Uganda), and the Seychelles and Maldives on the way to Goa and Bombay. The reason for this journey is the invitation sent to the whole world asking for delegates from 50 countries to meet with 50 delegates from India to discuss the ways and means of creating peace, so that countries worldwide would live in peace instead of settling their differences with weapons. This meeting is to be held near Calcutta, a city which faces China.

Departure

These days it is not easy to be permitted by the government to visit another country. The trouble of applying and being granted the passport took six months after many telegrams were sent. Strange, there was no reply to those telegrams because a certain official in Pretoria was not keen to issue the passport. Just a few days before the expiry of time he sent a telegram granting the passport, stating that the passport had been posted. Because I had given up hope by that stage, I had to hurry all my preparations, packing my luggage as well as providing for my family whom I was going to leave for a period of four months.