Word: pith
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...jolly good bash, in the best "sundowner" tradition. The big stone house on Kampala's Tank Hill swarmed with 180 laughing, hard-drinking whites clad in the most outlandish colonial costumes: solar topees and fly veils, pith helmets and mosquito boots. One girl came wrapped in a Union Jack. The idea was to spoof East Africa's rapidly fading tradition of Blimpism, and the guests had all been asked to "R.S.V.P. by native bearer in cleft stick or by tom-tom." Promptly at midnight the laughter stopped, and with mock solemnity everyone sang God Save the Queen...
This might not work with paper, but papyrus is tougher. It was made by cutting thin slices of the pith of the papyrus plant, laying them side by side and pressing two layers together with their grains running at right angles. Professor Bataille thinks that no glue or paste was used; the natural sap of the fresh-cut pith made the layers stick together. Sometimes the hot-water treatment restores the sheets until they are almost as good...
...African critics take Schweitzer's insistence on primitiveness as an insult, or a needless prolongation of "the white man's burden." Symbolically, they point out, he and his staff still wear pith helmets. The concept that the Dark Continent can make more progress through independence is, to Schweitzer, folly. Told that the Peace Corps is building primary schools all over Gabon, and that the little country has 14 medical students training in France, Dr. Schweitzer merely chuckles and says of the blacks: "You cannot change their mentality." Among his six doctors and 17 nurses, there...
That left the bowler-next to the pith helmet, the most unyielding of all the various head coverings man has devised over the centuries to keep water from trickling down his neck when it rains. Currently splayed across the pages of fashion magazines and topping almost every plastic mannequin in department-store windows across the country, bowlers are being sold to real-life women at a furious rate. Most popular in straw, they come in every possible fabric from linen to leopard, can be made to look entirely new by a switch in ribbon color or the substitution of feather...
...helicopter, the Viet Cong private travels up to 40 miles a day through jungle on rubber-soled canvas shoes. His uniform is the same black calico shirt and trousers worn by all Vietnamese peasants; on his long, stringy hair he wears either a floppy jungle cap or a pith helmet covered with netting into which he thrusts camouflage appropriate to the terrain through which he is moving. His full field pack contains only a waterproof nylon sheet, a mosquito net, a hammock and some rope...