Many roads to Mecca

Saudi Arabian women may not drive cars and are supposed to cover up in black if walking in the street. Bikes for girls are frowned upon. Meanwhile a friend of ours was recently in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, meeting a trader in textiles. He required that she hang back three feet behind when walking through town. Last night we saw again the wonderful play by South African playwright, Athol Fugard, probably his best, put on by the Muizenberg Amateur Dramatic Society at the local Masque Theatre, just a few hundred meters from my favourite beach. It's called the 'Road to Mecca' and features two highly independent, clear-thinking women. One's an artist who conjures up a 'light-filled, glittering Mecca' out of her little home in a small South African village; the other is her best friend who teaches in Cape Town, hundreds of miles away. The irony of Miss Helen's 'Mecca' is that it is a holy place for her but a source of ridicule for the villagers around her. Its 'holiness' is not of the religious kind but a celebration of free thinking and creativity. It struck me that no woman in Mecca would dare and certainly would not be allowed to do what Miss Helen does. And at another level, such issues would never be aired on stage for general consumption. A society that treats its women so can only be poorer for it: masses of talent suppressed - not allowed to bloom and never discovered.  The lovely QSL card is from Radio Tashkent heard in Cape Town way back in 1968. In those days Communist countries had 100% verification records, no need to send return postage.