Message of Love and Brotherhood to Africa — Page 17
17 Begum shook hands with more than twenty- five thousand men and women. In different meetings some twenty-five to thirty thousand men and women participated, which means that our adult population there is somewhere between two to three hundred thousand. By the grace of God, the Sublime, it is a big population. During the tour of these countries we shook hands with a very large number of people, embraced thousands and caressed thousands of children, and yet throughout the journey we did not come across any case of body odour with the exception of one or two persons, and one or two in thousands do not count at all. In short, they are very clean and so very particular about cleanliness that throughout the six countries I have travelled wherever I came across a water shed, I saw Africans busy in laundering their dresses. They are given to washing thrice a day. If right here now I were to ask (which I would not) how many people go to bath, hardly a few hundred would be found to having bath twice a day. There are among them some who change five times a day. They are very fond of robes—they gave me quite a few in token of their love. They don different robes