BASUTOLAND: THE SWITZERLAND OF SOUTH AFRICA
ACROSS THE FREE STATE TO THE CALEDON RIVER 319
THE MISSIONARIES AND THE CHIEFS: LEROTHODI 322
THE ASCENT OF MOUNT MACHACHA 325
THABA BOSIYO AND ITS HISTORY 330
CONDITION AND PROSPECTS OF THE BASUTO NATION 336
PART IV
_SOME SOUTH AFRICAN QUESTIONS_
CHAPTER XXI
BLACKS AND WHITES
RELATIVE NUMBERS AND INFLUENCE OF EACH 345
SOCIAL CONDITION AND HABITS OF THE BLACKS 350
AVERSION OF THE WHITES FOR THE BLACKS 353
CIVIL AND LEGAL RIGHTS OF THE BLACKS 355
WHAT THE FUTURE OF THE BLACKS IS LIKELY TO BE 365
CHAPTER XXII
MISSIONS
INFLUENCE OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS ON VARIOUS RACES 370
HOW THE NATIVES RECEIVE THE MISSIONARIES 371
SLOW PROGRESS OF MISSION WORK 373
WHAT MAY BE HOPED FOR 377
CHAPTER XXIII
SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BRITISH COLONIES
THE DUTCH AND THE ENGLISH: THE DUTCH LANGUAGE 379
PLACIDITY OF SOUTH AFRICAN LIFE 383
LITERATURE, JOURNALISM, EDUCATION 386
THE CHURCHES 389
CHAPTER XXIV
POLITICS IN THE BRITISH COLONIES
THE FRAME OF COLONIAL GOVERNMENT 392
ABSENCE OF SOME FAMILIAR POLITICAL ISSUES 396
REAL ISSUES: RACE AND COLOUR QUESTIONS 399
GENERAL CHARACTER OF CAPE POLITICS 400
CHAPTER XXV
THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE TRANSVAAL IN 1895
THE OLD BOERS AND THE NEW IMMIGRANTS 405
CONSTITUTION AND GOVERNMENT OF THE REPUBLIC 409
UITLANDER DISCONTENT: THE NATIONAL REFORM UNION 413
THE CAPITALISTS: PREPARATIONS FOR A REVOLUTION 416
PRESIDENT KRUGER AND HIS POLICY 420
THE CHANCES FOR THE MOVEMENT: CAUSES OF ITS FAILURE 424
CHAPTER XXVI
ECONOMIC PROSPECTS
MATERIAL RESOURCES: TILLAGE AND PASTURE 433
MINERALS: THE GOLD-FIELDS AND THEIR DURATION 437
WILL MANUFACTURES BE DEVELOPED? 442
SOUTH AFRICA AS A MARKET FOR GOODS 446
FUTURE POPULATION: ITS INCREASE AND CHARACTER 447
CHAPTER XXVII
REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS
SOURCES OF THE TROUBLES OF SOUTH AFRICA 453
THE FRICTION OF DUTCH AND ENGLISH: AND ITS CAUSES 454
BRITISH POLICY IN ITS EARLIER AND LATER PHASES 458
FUTURE RELATIONS OF THE EUROPEAN AND NATIVE RACES 463
INTERNATIONAL POSITION OF SOUTH AFRICA 467
THE FUTURE RELATIONS OF BOERS AND ENGLISHMEN 469
PROSPECTS OF SOUTH AFRICAN CONFEDERATION 472
SOUTH AFRICA AND BRITAIN 474
APPENDIX
THE TRANSVAAL CONVENTION OF 1881 479
THE TRANSVAAL CONVENTION OF 1884 488
INDEX 495
AREA AND POPULATION OF THE SEVERAL COLONIES, REPUBLICS AND TERRITORIES
IN SOUTH AFRICA
_________________________________________________________________________
| | |
| | POPULATION IN 1891. |
| AREA IN SQUARE MILES. |_____________________________________|
| | | | |
| | European. | Coloured. | Total. |
|___________________________________|___________|_____________|___________|
| | | | | |
| _British_-- | | | | |
|Cape Colony (including | | | | |
| Walfish Bay) | 277,000 | 382,198 | 1,383,762 | 1,765,960 |
| | | | | |
|Basutoland | 10,293 | 578 | 218,624 | 219,202 |
| | | | | |
|Bechuanaland | | | | |
| (Protectorate) | 200,000(?)| 800(?)| 200,000(?)| --- |
| | | | | |
|Natal | 20,461 | 46,788 | 497,125 | 543,913 |
| | | | | |
|Zululand | 12,500(?)| 1,100 | 179,270(?)| 180,370 |
| | | | | |
|Tongaland (British) | 2,000(?)| none | 20,000(?)| --- |
| | | | | |
|Territories of British | | | | |
| South Africa Company,| | | | |
| south of the | | | | |
| Zabesi (Matabililand | | | | |
| and Mashonaland) | 142,000 | 7,000(?)| unknown | --- |
| | | (1899) | | |
|_______________________|___________|___________|_____________|___________|
| | | | | |
| _Independent_-- | | | | |
|South African Republic | | | | |
| (Transvaal) | 119,139 | 245,397(?)| 622,500(?)| 867,897 |
| | | | | |
|Swaziland (dependent | | | | |
| on South African | | | | |
| Republic) | 8,500 | 900(?)| 55,000(?)| --- |
| | | | | |
|Orange Free State | 48,326 | 77,716 | 129,787 | 207,503 |
|___________________________________|___________|_____________|___________|
| | | | | |
|Portuguese East Africa | 300,000(?)| 10,000(?)| 3,100,000(?)| --- |
| | | | | |
|German South West | | 2,025 | | |
| Africa | 320,000(?)| (1896) | 200,000(?)| --- |
|___________________________________|___________|_____________|___________|
DATES OF SOME IMPORTANT EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA
A.D.
Bartholomew Diaz discovers the Cape of Good Hope 1486
Vasco da Gama explores the East Coast of Africa 1497-8
The Dutch appear in the South African Seas 1595
First Dutch settlement in Table Bay 1652
Arrival of French Huguenot settlers 1689
Beginning of the Exploration of the Interior 1700
First Kafir War 1779
First British occupation of the Cape 1795-1803
Second British occupation of the Cape 1806
Cession of Cape Colony to Britain 1814
Conquests of Tshaka, the Zulu King 1812-1828
Arrival of a body of British settlers 1820
First British settlement in Natal 1824
English made the official language in Cape Colony 1825-1828
Equal Rights ordinance in favour of the Natives 1828
Emancipation of the Slaves 1834
Sixth Kafir War 1834
Emigration of the discontented Boers (the Great Trek) 1836-7
Conquest of Matabililand by Mosilikatze 1837
The emigrant Boers occupy Natal 1838
British occupation and annexation of Natal 1843
Two native "buffer States" created in the interior 1843
Seventh Kafir War; province of British Kaffraria created 1847
Orange River Sovereignty created 1848
Recognition of the Independence of the Transvaal Boers
(Sand River Convention) 1852
Recognition of the Independence of the Orange River Boers
(Bloemfontein Convention) 1854
Representative Government established in Cape Colony 1854
Establishment of a Constitution for the South African
Republic 1855-1858
Proclamation of a Protectorate over Basutoland 1868
Discovery of diamonds on the Lower Vaal River 1869
British occupation and annexation of Griqualand West 1871
Responsible Government granted to Cape Colony 1872
Delagoa Bay arbitration 1872-1875
British annexation of the Transvaal 1877
War with Cetewayo and conquest of Zululand 1879
Retrocession of the Transvaal 1881
Annexation of Southern and Protectorate over Northern
Bechuanaland 1884-1885
German occupation of Damaraland 1884
Convention of London with the Transvaal Republic 1884
Discovery of the Witwatersrand gold field 1885
Foundation of the British South Africa Company 1889
Conquest of Matabililand by the Company 1893
Responsible Government granted to Natal 1893
Protectorate declared over the Tonga Chiefs 1894
Rising at Johannesburg and expedition of Dr. Jameson from
Pitsani 1895
Outbreak of war between Britain and the two Dutch
Republics Oct. 1899
INTRODUCTION
In the latter part of the year 1895 I travelled across South Africa from
Cape Town to Fort Salisbury in Mashonaland, passing through Bechuanaland
and Matibililand. From Fort Salisbury, which is only two hundred miles
from the Zambesi, I returned through Manicaland and the Portuguese
territories to Beira on the Indian Ocean, sailed thence to Delagoa Bay
and Durban, traversed Natal, and visited the Transvaal, the Orange Free
State, Basutoland, and the eastern province Cape Colony. The country had
long possessed a great interest for me, and that interest was increased
by studying on the spot its physical character as well as the peculiar
economic and industrial conditions which have made it unlike the other
newly settled countries of the world. Seeing these things and talking
with the leading men in every part of the country, I began to comprehend
many things that had previously been obscure to me, and saw how the
political troubles of the land were connected with the life which nature
imposed on the people. Immediately after my return to Europe, fresh
political troubles broke out, and events occurred in the Transvaal which
fixed the eyes of the whole world upon South Africa. I had not travelled
with the view of writing a book; but the interest which the events just
mentioned have aroused, and which is likely to be sustained for a good
while to come, leads me to believe that the impressions of a traveller
who has visited other new countries may be useful to those who desire to
know what South Africa is really like, and why it makes a noise and
stir in the world disproportionate to its small population.
I have called the book "Impressions" lest it should be supposed that I
have attempted to present a complete and minute account of the country.
For this a long residence and a large volume would be required. It is
the salient features that I wish to describe. These, after all, are what
most readers desire to know: these are what the traveller of a few weeks
or months can give, and can give all the better because the details have
not become so familiar to him as to obscure the broad outlines.
Instead of narrating my journey, and weaving into the narrative
observations on the country and people, I have tried to arrange the
materials collected in a way better fitted to present to the reader in
their natural connection the facts he will desire to have. Those facts
would seem to be the following: (1) the physical character of the
country, and the aspects of its scenery; (2) the characteristics of the
native races that inhabit it; (3) the history of the natives and of the
European settlers, that is to say the chief events which have made the
people what they now are; (4) the present condition of the several
divisions of the country, and the aspects of life in it; (5) the
economic resources of the country, and the characteristic features of
its society and its politics.
These I have tried to set forth in the order above indicated. The first
seven chapters contain a very brief account of the physical structure
and climate, since these are the conditions which have chiefly
determined the economic progress of the country and the lines of
European migration, together with remarks on the wild animals, the
vegetation, and the scenery. Next follows a sketch of the three
aboriginal races, and an outline of the history of the whites since
their first arrival, four centuries ago. The earlier events are lightly
touched on, while those which have brought about the present political
situation are more fully related. In the third part of the book, asking
the reader to accompany me on the long journey from Cape Town to the
Zambesi Valley and back again, I have given in four chapters a
description of the far interior as one sees it passing from barbarism to
civilization--its scenery, the prospects of its material development,
the life which its new settlers lead. These regions, being the part of
the country most lately brought under European administration, seem to
deserve a fuller treatment than the older and better-known regions.
Three other chapters give a more summary account of Natal, of the
Transvaal gold-fields, of that model republic the Orange Free State, and
of Basutoland, a native state under British protection which possesses
many features of peculiar interest. In the fourth and last division of
the book several questions of a more general character are dealt with
which could not conveniently be brought into either the historical or
the descriptive parts. I have selected for discussion those topics which
are of most permanent importance and as to which the reader is most
likely to be curious. Among them are the condition of the natives, and
their relations to the white people; the aspects of social and political
life; the situation of affairs in the Transvaal in 1895, and the causes
which brought about the Reform rising and the expedition of Dr. Jameson;
and finally, the economic prospects of the country, and the political
future of its colonies and republics.
In these concluding chapters, as well as in the historical sketch, my
aim has been to set forth and explain facts rather than to pass
judgments upon the character and conduct of individuals. Whoever desires
to help others to a fair view of current events must try not only to be
impartial, but also to avoid expressing opinions when the grounds for
those opinions cannot be fully stated; and where controversy is raging
round the events to be described, no judgment passed on individual
actors could fail to be deemed partial by one set of partizans or by the
other. Feeling sure that the present problems will take some time to
solve, I have sought to write what those who desire to understand the
country may find useful even after the next few years have passed. And,
so far from wishing to champion any view or to throw any fresh logs on
the fire of controversy that has been blazing for the last few years, I
am convinced that the thing now most needed in the interests of South
Africa is to let controversies die out, to endeavour to forget the
causes of irritation, and to look at the actual facts of the case in a
purely practical spirit.
Altogether apart from its recent troubles, South Africa is an
interesting, and indeed fascinating subject of study. There are, of
course, some things which one cannot expect to find in it. There has not
yet been time to evolve institutions either novel or specially
instructive, nor to produce new types of character (save that of the
Transvaal Boer) or new forms of social life. There are no ancient
buildings, except a few prehistoric ruins; nor have any schools of
architecture or painting or literature been as yet developed. But
besides the aspects of nature, often weird and sometimes beautiful,
there are the savage races, whose usages and superstitions open a wide
field for research, and the phenomena of whose contact with the whites
raise some grave and gloomy problems. There are the relations of the two
European races--races which ought long ago to have been happily blended
into one, but which have been kept apart by a train of untoward events
and administrative errors. Few of the newer countries have had a more
peculiar or more chequered history; and this history needs to be studied
with a constant regard to the physical conditions that have moulded it.
Coming down to our own time, nowhere are the struggles of the past seen
to be more closely intertwined with the troubles of the present; nor
does even Irish history furnish a better illustration of the effect of
sentiment upon practical politics. Few events of recent times have
presented more dramatic situations, and raised more curious and
intricate issues of political and international morality, than those
which have lately been set before us by the discovery of the Transvaal
gold-fields and the rush of nineteenth-century miners and speculators
into a pastoral population which retains the ideas and habits of the
seventeenth-century. Still more fascinating are the problems of the
future. One can as yet do little more than guess at them; but the world
now moves so fast, and has grown so small, and sees nearly every part of
itself so closely bound by ties of commerce or politics to every other
part, that it is impossible to meditate on any great and new country
without seeking to interpret its tendencies by the experience of other
countries, and to conjecture the role it will be called on to play in
the world-drama of the centuries to come. I have sought, therefore, not
only to make South Africa real to those who do not know it, and to give
them the materials for understanding what passes there and following its
fortunes with intelligence, but also to convey an impression of the kind
of interest it awakens. It is still new: and one sees still in a fluid
state the substance that will soon crystallize into new forms. One
speculates on the result which these mingled forces, these ethnic habits
and historical traditions, and economic conditions, will work out. And
reflecting on all these things, one feels sure that a country with so
commanding a position, and which has compressed so much history into the
last eighty years of its life, will hold a conspicuous place in that
southern hemisphere which has in our own times entered into the
political and industrial life of the civilized world.
PART I
_NATURE_
CHAPTER I
PHYSICAL FEATURES
To understand the material resources and economic conditions of South
Africa, and, indeed, to understand the history of the country and the
political problems which it now presents, one must first know something
of its physical structure. The subject may seem dry, and those readers
who do not care for it may skip this chapter. But it need not be
uninteresting, and it is certainly not uninstructive. For myself, I can
say that not only South African history, but also the prospects of South
African industry and trade, were dark matters to me till I had got, by
travelling through the country, an idea of those natural features of the
southern part of the continent which have so largely governed the course
of events and have stamped themselves so deeply upon the habits of the
people. Some notion of these features I must now try to convey.
Fortunately, they are simple, for nature has worked in Africa, as in
America, upon larger and broader lines than she has done in Europe. The
reader will do well to keep a map beside him, and refer[3] constantly to
it, for descriptions without a map avail little.
Africa south of the Zambesi River consists, speaking broadly, of three
regions. There is a strip of lowland lying along the coast of the Indian
Ocean, all the way round from Cape Town, past Durban and Delagoa Bay and
Beira, till you reach the mouth of the Zambesi. On the south, between
Cape Town and Durban, this strip is often very narrow, for in many
places the hills come, as they do at Cape Town, right down to the sea.
But beyond Durban, as one follows the coast along to the north-east, the
level strip widens. At Delagoa Bay it is some fifteen or twenty miles
wide; at Beira it is sixty or eighty miles wide, so that the hills
behind cannot be seen from the coast; and farther north it is still
wider. This low strip is in many places wet and swampy, and, being
swampy, is from Durban northward malarious and unhealthful in the
highest degree. Its unhealthfulness is a factor of prime importance in
what may be called the general scheme of the country, and has had, as we
shall presently see, the most important historical consequences.
Behind the low coast strip rise the hills whose slopes constitute the
second region. They rise in most places rather gradually, and they
seldom (except in Manicaland, to be hereafter described) present
striking forms. The neighbourhood of Cape Town is almost the only place
where high mountains come close to the shore--the only place, therefore,
except the harbour of St. John's far to the east, where there is
anything that can be called grand coast scenery. As one travels inland
the hills become constantly higher, till at a distance of thirty or
forty miles from the sea they have reached an average height of from
3000 to 4000 feet, and sixty miles from 5000 to 6000 feet. These hills,
intersected by valleys which grow narrower and have steeper sides the
farther inland one goes, are the spurs or outer declivity of a long
range of mountains which runs all the way from Cape Town to the Zambesi
Valley, a distance of sixteen hundred miles, and is now usually called
by geographers (for it has really no general name) the Drakensberg or
Quathlamba Range. Their height varies from 3000 to 7000 feet, some of
the highest lying not far to the north-east of Cape Town. In one region,
however, several summits reach to 11,000 feet. This is Basutoland, the
country that lies at the corner where Cape Colony, Natal, and the Orange
Free State meet. It is a region remarkable in several respects, for its
scenery as well as for its history, and for the condition of the native
race that inhabits it, and I shall have to give some account of it in a
later chapter. These mountains of Basutoland are the loftiest in Africa
south of Kilimandjaro, and keep snow on their summits for several months
in the year.
Behind the Quathlamba Range the country spreads out to the north and
west in a vast tableland, sometimes flat, sometimes undulating,
sometimes intersected by ridges of rocky hills. This is the third
region. Its average height above the sea varies from 3000 to 5000 feet,
and the hills reach in places nearly 6000. Thus the Quathlamba Range may
be regarded as being really the edge of the tableland, and when in
travelling up from the coast one reaches the water-shed, or "divide" (an
American term which South Africans have adopted), one finds that on the
farther or northerly side there is very little descent. The peaks which
when seen from the slopes towards the coast looked high and steep are on
this inner side insignificant, because they rise so little above the
general level of the plateau. This plateau runs away inland to the west
and north-west, and occupies seven-eighths of the surface of South
Africa. It dips gently on the north to the valley of the Zambesi; but on
the west spreads out over the Kalahari Desert and the scarcely less arid
wastes of Damaraland, maintaining (except along the lower course of the
Orange River) an altitude of from 3000 to 4000 feet above the sea, until
within a comparatively short distance of the Atlantic Ocean.
The physical structure of the country is thus extremely simple. There is
only one considerable mountain-chain, with a vast table-land filling the
interior behind it, and a rough, hilly country lying between the
mountains and the low belt which borders on the Indian Ocean. Let the
reader suppose himself to be a traveller wishing to cross the continent
from east to west. Starting from a port, say Delagoa Bay or Beira, on
the Portuguese coast, the traveller will in a few hours, by either of
the railways which run westward from those ports, traverse the low strip
which divides them from the hill-country. To ascend the valleys and
cross the water-shed of the great Quathlamba Range on to the plateau
takes a little longer, yet no great time. Then, once upon the plateau,
the traveller may proceed steadily to the west for more than a thousand
miles over an enormous stretch of high but nearly level land, meeting no
considerable eminence and crossing no perceptible water-shed till he
comes within sight of the waves of the Atlantic. Or if he turns to the
north-west he will pass over an undulating country, diversified only by
low hills, till he dips slowly into the flat and swampy ground which
surrounds Lake Ngami, itself rather a huge swamp than a lake, and
descends very gradually from that level to the banks of the Zambesi, in
the neighbourhood of the great Victoria Falls. In fact, this great
plateau is South Africa, and all the rest of the country along the
sea-margin a mere appendage to it. But so large a part of the plateau
is, as we shall see presently, condemned by its dryness to remain
sterile and very thinly peopled, that the interior has not that
preponderating importance which its immense area might seem to give it.
It is not worth while to describe the minor ridges,--though some of
them, especially in Cape Colony, are abrupt and high enough to be called
Mountains,--for none has any great importance as affecting either
material or historical conditions. The longest are those which run
parallel to the dreary and almost uninhabited west coast, and form the
terraces by which the great plateau sinks down to the margin of the
Atlantic. Neither can I touch on the geology, except to observe that a
great part of the plateau, especially in the northern part and towards
the north-east end of the Quathlamba Range, consists of granite or
gneiss, and is believed to be of very great antiquity, _i.e._, to have
stood, as it now stands, high above the level of the sea from a very
remote period of the earth's history. The rocks of the Karroo region are
more recent. Nowhere in South Africa has any area of modern volcanic
action, much less any active volcano, been discovered. More ancient
eruptive rocks, such as greenstones and porphyries, are of frequent
occurrence, and are often spread out in level sheets above the
sedimentary beds of the Karroo and of the Basutoland and Free State
ranges.
Finally, it must be noted that the coast has extremely few harbours.
From Cape Town eastward and north-eastward there is no sheltered
deep-water haven till one reaches that of Durban, itself troubled by a
bar, and from Durban to the Zambesi no good ports save Delagoa Bay and
Beira. On the other side of the continent, Saldanha Bay, twenty miles
north of Cape Town, is an excellent harbour. After that the Atlantic
coast shows none for a thousand miles.
So much for the surface and configuration of the country. Now let us
come to the climate, which is a not less important element in making
South Africa what it is.
The heat is, of course, great, though less great than a traveller from
North Africa or India expects to find in such a latitude. Owing to the
vast mass of water in the southern hemisphere, that hemisphere is cooler
in the same latitude than is the northern. Cape Town, in latitude 34 deg.
S., has a colder winter and not so hot a summer as Gibraltar and
Aleppo, in latitude 36 deg. N. Still the summer temperature is high even at
Durban, in latitude 30 deg. S., while the northern part of the Transvaal
Republic, and all the territories of the British South Africa Company,
including Matabililand and Mashonaland, lie within the tropic of
Capricorn, that is to say, correspond in latitude to Nubia and the
central provinces of India between Bombay and Calcutta.
The climate is also, over most of the country, extremely dry. Except in
a small district round Cape Town, at the southern extremity of the
continent, there is no proper summer and winter, but only a dry season,
the seven or eight months when the weather is colder, and a wet season,
the four or five months when the sun is highest. Nor are the rains that
fall in the wet season so copious and continuous as they are in some
other hot countries; in many parts of India, for instance, or in the
West Indies and Brazil. Thus even in the regions where the rainfall is
heaviest, reaching thirty inches or more in the year, the land soon
dries up and remains parched till the next wet season comes. The air is
therefore extremely dry, and, being dry, it is clear and stimulating in
a high degree.
Now let us note the influence upon the climate of that physical
structure we have just been considering. The prevailing wind, and the
wind that brings most of the rain in the wet season, is the east or
south-east. It gives a fair supply of moisture to the low coast strip
which has been referred to above. Passing farther inland, it impinges
upon the hills which run down from the Quathlamba Range, waters them,
and sometimes falls in snow on the loftiest peaks. A certain part of the
rain-bearing clouds passes still farther inland, and scatters showers
over the eastern part of the tableland, that is to say, over the
Transvaal, the Orange Free State, eastern Bechuanaland, and the
territories still farther north, toward the Zambesi. Very little
humidity, however, reaches the tracts farther to the west. The northern
part of Cape Colony as far as the Orange River, the western part of
Bechuanaland, and the wide expanse of Damaraland have a quite trifling
rainfall, ranging from four or five to ten inches in the whole year.
Under the intense heat of the sun this moisture soon vanishes, the
surface bakes hard, and the vegetation withers. All this region is
therefore parched and arid, much of it, in fact, a desert, and likely
always to remain so.
These great and dominant physical facts--a low coast belt, a high
interior plateau, a lofty, rugged mountain-range running nearly parallel
to, and not very far from, the shore of the ocean, whence the rainclouds
come, a strong sun, a dry climate--have determined the character of
South Africa in many ways. They explain the very remarkable fact that
South Africa has, broadly speaking, no rivers. Rivers are, indeed,
marked on the map--rivers of great length and with many tributaries; but
when in travelling during the dry season you come to them you find
either a waterless bed or a mere line of green and perhaps unsavoury
pools. The streams that run south and east from the mountains to the
coast are short and rapid torrents after a storm, but at other times
dwindle to feeble trickles of mud. In the interior there are, to be
sure, rivers which, like the Orange River or the Limpopo, have courses
hundreds of miles in length. But they contain so little water during
three-fourths of the year as to be unserviceable for navigation, while
most of their tributaries shrink in the dry season to a chain of pools,
scarcely supplying drink to the cattle on their banks. This is one of
the reasons why the country remained so long unexplored. People could
not penetrate it by following waterways, as happened both in North and
in South America; they were obliged to travel by ox-waggon, making only
some twelve or sixteen miles a day, and finding themselves obliged to
halt, when a good bit of grass was reached, to rest and restore the
strength of their cattle. For the same reason the country is now forced
to depend entirely upon railways for internal communication. There is
not a stream (except tidal streams) fit to float anything drawing three
feet of water.
It is a curious experience to travel for hundreds of miles, as one may
do in the dry season in the north-eastern part of Cape Colony and in
Bechuanaland, through a country which is inhabited, and covered in some
places with wood, in others with grass or shrublets fit for cattle, and
see not a drop of running water, and hardly even a stagnant pond. It is
scarcely less strange that such rivers as there are should be useless
for navigation. But the cause is to be found in the two facts already
stated. In those parts where rain falls it comes at one season, within
three or four months. Moreover, it comes then in such heavy storms that
for some hours, or even days, the streams are so swollen as to be not
only impassable by waggons, but also unnavigable, because, although
there is plenty of water, the current is too violent. Then when the
floods have ceased the streams fall so fast, and the channel becomes so
shallow, that hardly even a canoe will float. The other fact arises from
the proximity to the east coast of the great Quathlamba chain of
mountains. The rivers that flow from it have mostly short courses, while
the few that come down from behind and break through it, as does the
Limpopo, are interrupted at the place where they break through by rapids
which no boat can ascend.
[Footnote 3: In particular I will ask the reader to refer to the two
maps showing the physical features of the country which have been
inserted in this volume.]
CHAPTER II
HEALTH
The physical conditions just described determine the healthfulness of
the country, and this is a matter of so much moment, especially to those
who think of settling in South Africa, that I take the earliest
opportunity of referring to it.
The sun-heat would make the climate very trying to Europeans, and of
course more trying the farther north toward the Equator they live, were
it not for the two redeeming points I have dwelt on--the elevation and
the dryness of the interior. To be 3000, 4000, or 5000 feet above the
sea is for most purposes the same thing as being in a more temperate
latitude, and more than five-sixths in area of the districts which are
now inhabited by Europeans have an elevation of fully 3000 feet. Not
merely the tablelands of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, but
also by far the larger part of Cape Colony and nearly the whole of Natal
(excluding a small strip along the coast), attain this elevation. Thus
even in summer, when the heat is great during the day, the coolness of
the night refreshes the system. The practical test of night temperature
is whether one wishes for a blanket to sleep under. In Madras and Bombay
all the year round, in New York through several months of summer, in
Paris or sometimes even in London for a few days in July or August, a
light blanket is oppressive, and the continuance of the high day
temperature through the hours of darkness exhausts and enfeebles all but
vigorous constitutions. But in South Africa it is only along the coast,
in places like Durban, Delagoa Bay, or Beira, that one feels inclined to
dispense with a woollen covering at night, while in Johannesburg or
Bloemfontein a good thick blanket is none too much even in November,
before the cooling rains begin, or in December, when the days are
longest. In fact, the fall of temperature at sunset is often a source of
risk to those who, coming straight from Europe, have not yet learned to
guard against sudden changes, for it causes chills which, if they find a
weak organ to pounce upon, may produce serious illness. These rapid
variations of temperature are not confined to the passage from day to
night. Sometimes in the midst of a run of the usual warm, brilliant
weather of the dry season there will come a cold, bitter south east
wind, covering the sky with gray clouds and driving the traveller to put
on every wrap he possesses. I remember, toward the end of October, such
a sudden "cold snap" in Matabililand, only twenty degrees from the
equator. One shivered all day long under a thick greatcoat, and the
natives lit fires in front of their huts and huddled round them for
warmth. Chills dangerous to delicate people are apt to be produced by
these changes, and they often turn into feverish attacks, not malarial,
though liable to be confounded with malarial fevers. This risk of
encountering cold weather is a concomitant of that power of the
south-east wind to keep down the great heats, which, on the whole, makes
greatly for the salubrity of the country; so the gain exceeds the loss.
But new comers have to be on their guard, and travellers will do well,
even between the tropic and the equator, to provide themselves with warm
clothing.
Strong as the sun is, its direct rays seem to be much less dangerous
than in India or the eastern United States. Sunstroke is unusual, and
one sees few people wearing, even in the tropical north, those hats of
thick double felt or those sun-helmets which are deemed indispensable in
India. In fact, Europeans go about with the same head-gear which they
use in an English summer. But the relation of sun-stroke to climate is
obscure. Why should it be extremely rare in California, when it is very
common in New York in the same latitude? Why should it be almost unknown
in the Hawaiian Islands, within seventeen degrees of the equator? Its
rarity in South Africa is a great point in favour of the healthfulness
of the country, and also of the ease and pleasantness of life. In India
one has to be always mounting guard against the sun. He is a formidable
and ever-present enemy, and he is the more dangerous the longer you live
in the country. In South Africa it is only because he dries up the soil
so terribly that the traveller wishes to have less of him. The born
Africander seems to love him.
The dryness of the climate makes very strongly for its salubrity. It is
the absence of moisture no less than the elevation above sea-level that
gives to the air its fresh, keen, bracing quality, the quality which
enables one to support the sun-heat, which keeps the physical frame in
vigour, which helps children to grow up active and healthy, which
confines to comparatively few districts that deadliest foe of Europeans,
swamp-fever. Malarial fever in one of its many forms, some of them
intermittent, others remittent, is the scourge of the east coast as well
as of the west coast. To find some means of avoiding it would be to
double the value of Africa to the European powers which have been
establishing themselves on the coasts. No one who lives within thirty
miles of the sea nearly all the way south from Cape Guardafui to
Zululand can hope to escape it. It is frequent all round the great
Nyanza lakes, and particularly severe in the valley of the Nile from the
lakes downward to Khartoum. It prevails through the comparatively low
country which lies along the Congo and the chief tributaries of that
great stream. It hangs like a death-cloud over the valley of the
Zambesi, and is found up to a height of 3000 or 4000 feet, sometimes
even higher, in Nyassaland and the lower parts of the British
territories that stretch to Lake Tanganyika. The Administrator of German
East Africa has lately declared that there is not a square mile of that
vast region that can be deemed free from it. Even along the generally
arid shores of Damaraland there are spots where it is to be feared. But
Cape Colony and Natal and the Orange Free State are almost exempt from
it. So, too, are all the higher parts of the Transvaal, of Bechuanaland,
of Matabililand, and of Mashonaland. Roughly speaking, one may say that
the upper boundary line of malarial fevers in these countries is about
4500 feet above the sea, and where fevers occur at a height above 3000
feet they are seldom of a virulent type. Thus, while the lower parts of
the Transvaal between the Quathlamba Mountains and the sea are terribly
unhealthy, while the Portuguese country behind Delagoa Bay and Beira as
far as the foot of the hills is equally dangerous,--Beira itself has the
benefit of a strong sea-breeze,--by far the larger part of the recently
occupied British territories north and west of the Transvaal is
practically safe. It is, of course, proper to take certain precautions,
to avoid chills and the copious use of alcohol and it is specially
important to observe such precautions during and immediately after the
wet season, when the sun is raising vapours from the moist soil, when
new vegetation has sprung up, and when the long grass which has grown
during the first rains is rotting under the later rains. Places which
are quite healthful in the dry weather, such as Gaberones and the rest
of the upper valley of the rivers Notwani and Limpopo in eastern
Bechuanaland, then become dangerous, because they lie on the banks of
streams which inundate the lower grounds. Much depends on the local
circumstances of each spot. To illustrate the differences between one
place and another, I may take the case of the three chief posts in the
territories of the British South Africa Company. Buluwayo, nearly 4000
feet above the sea, is always practically free from malaria, for it
stands in a dry, breezy upland with few trees and short grass. Fort
Victoria, 3670 feet above the sea, is salubrious enough during the dry
season, but often feverish after the rains, because there is some wet
ground near it. Fort Salisbury, 4900 feet above the sea, is now
healthful at all times, but parts of it used to be feverish at the end
of the rainy season, until they were drained in the beginning of 1895.
So Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal Republic, is apt to be
malarious during the months of rain, because (although 4470 feet above
the sea) it lies in a well-watered hollow; while at Johannesburg, thirty
miles off, on the top of a high, bare, stony ridge, one has no occasion
to fear fever, though the want of water and proper drainage, as well as
the quantity of fine dust from the highly comminuted ore and "tailings"
with which the air is filled, had until 1896 given rise to other
maladies, and especially to septic pneumonia. These will diminish with a
better municipal administration, and similarly malaria will doubtless
vanish from the many spots where it is now rife when the swampy grounds
have been drained and the long grass eaten down by larger herds of
cattle.
It is apparently the dryness and the purity of the air which have given
South Africa its comparative immunity from most forms of chest disease.
Many sufferers from consumption, for whom a speedy death, if they
remained in Europe, had been predicted, recover health, and retain it
till old age. The spots chiefly recommended are on the high grounds of
the interior plateau, where the atmosphere is least humid. Ceres,
ninety-four miles by rail from Cape Town, and Beaufort West, in the
Karroo, have been resorted to as sanatoria; and Kimberley, the city of
diamonds, has an equally high reputation for the quality of its air.
However, some of the coast districts are scarcely less eligible, though
Cape Town has too many rapid changes of weather, and Durban too sultry a
summer, to make either of them a desirable place of residence for
invalids.
Apart from all questions of specific complaints, there can be no doubt
as to the general effect of the climate upon health. The aspect of the
people soon convinces a visitor that, in spite of its heat, the country
is well fitted to maintain in vigour a race drawn from the cooler parts
of Europe. Comparatively few adult Englishmen sprung from fathers
themselves born in Africa are as yet to be found. But the descendants of
the Dutch and Huguenot settlers are Africanders up to the sixth or
seventh generation, and the stock shows no sign of losing either its
stature or its physical strength. Athletic sports are pursued as eagerly
as in England.
CHAPTER III
WILD ANIMALS AND THEIR FATE
When first explored, South Africa was unusually rich in the kinds both
of plants and of animals which it contained; and until forty or fifty
years ago the number, size, and beauty of its wild creatures were the
things by which it was chiefly known to Europeans, who had little
suspicion of its mineral wealth, and little foreboding of the trouble
that wealth would cause. Why it was so rich in species is a question on
which geology will one day be able to throw light, for much may depend
on the relations of land and sea in earlier epochs of the earth's
history. Probably the great diversities of elevation and of climate
which exist in the southern part of the continent have contributed to
this profuse variety; and the fact that the country was occupied only by
savages, who did little or nothing to extinguish any species nature had
planted, may have caused many weak species to survive when equally weak
ones were perishing in Asia and Europe at the hands of more advanced
races of mankind. The country was therefore the paradise of hunters.
Besides the lion and the leopard, there were many other great cats, some
of remarkable beauty. Besides the elephant, which was in some districts
very abundant, there existed two kinds of rhinoceros, as well as the
hippopotamus and the giraffe. There was a wonderful profusion of
antelopes,--thirty-one species have been enumerated,--including such
noble animals as the eland and koodoo, such beautiful ones as the
springbok and klipspringer, such fierce ones as the blue wildebeest or
gnu. There were two kinds of zebra, a quagga, and a buffalo, both huge
and dangerous. Probably nowhere in the world could so great a variety of
beautiful animals be seen or a larger variety of formidable ones be
pursued.
All this has changed, and changed of late years with fatal speed, under
the increasing range and accuracy of firearms, the increasing
accessibility of the country to the European sportsman, and the
increasing number of natives who possess guns. The Dutch Boer of eighty
years ago was a good marksman and loved the chase, but he did not shoot
for fame and in order to write about his exploits, while the
professional hunter who shot to sell ivory or rare specimens had hardly
begun to exist. The work of destruction has latterly gone on so fast
that the effect of stating what is still left can hardly be to tempt
others to join in that work, but may help to show how urgent is the duty
of arresting the process of extermination.
When the first Dutchmen settled at the Cape the lion was so common as to
be one of the every-day perils of life. Tradition points out a spot in
the pleasure-ground attached to the Houses of Parliament at Cape Town
where a lion was found prowling in what was then the commandant's
garden. In 1653 it was feared that lions would storm the fort to get at
the sheep within it, and so late as 1694 they killed nine cows within
sight of the present castle. To-day, however, if the lion is to be found
at all within the limits of Cape Colony, it is only in the wilderness
along the banks of the Orange River. He was abundant in the Orange Free
State when it became independent in 1854, but has been long extinct
there. He survives in a few spots in the north of the Transvaal and in
the wilder parts of Zululand and Bechuanaland, and is not unfrequent in
Matabililand and Mashonaland. One may, however, pass through those
countries, as I did in October, 1895, without having a chance of seeing
the beast or even hearing its nocturnal voice, and those who go hunting
this grandest of all quarries are often disappointed. In the strip of
flat land between the mountains and the Indian Ocean behind Sofala and
Beira, and in the Zambesi valley, there remain lions enough; but the
number diminishes so fast that even in that malarious and thinly peopled
land none may be left thirty years hence.
The leopard is still to be found all over the country, except where the
population is thickest; and as the leopard haunts rocky places, it is,
though much hunted for the sake of its beautiful skin, less likely to be
exterminated. Some of the smaller carnivora, especially the pretty
lynxes, have now become very rare. There is a good supply of hyenas, but
they are ugly.
Elephants used to roam in great herds over all the more woody districts,
but have now been quite driven out of Cape Colony, Natal, and the two
Dutch republics, save that in a narrow strip of forest country near the
south coast, between Mossel Bay and Algoa Bay, some herds are preserved
by the Cape government. So, too, in the north of the Transvaal there are
still a few left, also specially preserved. It is only on the east coast
south of the Zambesi, and here and there along that river, that the wild
elephant can now be found. From these regions it will soon vanish, and
unless something is done to stop the hunting of elephants the total
extinction of the animal in Africa may be expected within another
half-century; for the foolish passion for slaughter which sends
so-called sportsmen on his track, and the high price of ivory, are
lessening its numbers day by day. A similar fate awaits the rhinoceros,
once common even near the Cape, where he overturned one day the coach of
a Dutch governor. The white kind, which is the larger, is now all but
extinct, while the black rhinoceros has become scarce even in the
northern regions between the Limpopo and the Zambesi. The hippopotamus,
protected by his aquatic habits, has fared better, and may still be seen
plunging and splashing in the waters of the Pungwe, the Limpopo, and
other rivers in Portuguese East Africa. But Natal will soon know this
great amphibian no more; and within Cape Colony, where the creature was
once abundant even in the swamps that bordered Table Bay, he is now to
be found only in the pools along the lower course of the Orange River.
The crocodile holds his ground better, and is still a serious danger to
oxen who go down to drink at the streams. In Zululand and all along the
east coast, as well as in the streams of Mashonaland and Matabililand,
there is hardly a pool which does not contain some of these formidable
saurians. Even when the water shrinks in the dry season till little but
mud seems to be left, the crocodile, getting deep into the mud,
maintains a torpid life till the rains bring him back into activity. Lo
Bengula sometimes cast those who had displeased him, bound hand and
foot, into a river to be devoured by these monsters, which he did not
permit to be destroyed, probably because they were sacred to some
tribes.
The giraffe has become very scarce, though a herd or two are left in the
south of Matabililand, and a larger number in the Kalahari Desert. So,
also, the zebra and many of the species of antelopes, especially the
larger kinds, like the eland and the sable, are disappearing, while the
buffalo is now only to be seen (except in a part of the Colony where a
herd is preserved) in the Portuguese territories along the Zambesi and
the east coast. The recent cattle-plague has fallen heavily upon him.
So the ostrich would probably now remain only in the wilds of the
Kalahari had not large farms been created in Cape Colony, where young
broods are reared for the sake of the feathers. On these farms,
especially near Graham's Town and in the Oudtshorn district, one may see
great numbers; nor is there a prettier sight than that of two parent
birds running along, with a numerous progeny of little ones around them.
Though in a sense domesticated, they are often dangerous, for they kick
forward and claw downward with great violence, and the person whom they
knock down and begin to trample on has little chance of escape with his
life. Fortunately, it is easy to drive them off with a stick or even an
umbrella; and we were warned not to cross an ostrich-farm without some
such defence.
Snakes, though there are many venomous species, seem to be less feared
than in India or the wilder parts of Australia. The python grows to
twenty feet or more, but is, of course, not poisonous, and never assails
man unless first molested. The black _momba_, which is nearly as large
as a rattlesnake, is, however, a dangerous creature, being ready to
attack man without provocation, and the bite may prove fatal in less
than an hour. One sees many skins of this snake in the tropical parts of
South Africa, and hears many thrilling tales of combats with them. They
are no longer common in the more settled and temperate regions.
Although even in Cape Colony and the Dutch republics there is still more
four-footed game to be had than anywhere in Europe, there remain only
two regions where large animals can be killed in any considerable
numbers. One of these is the Portuguese territory between Delagoa Bay
and the Zambesi, together with the adjoining parts of the Transvaal,
where the lower spurs of the Quathlamba Range descend to the plain. This
district is very malarious during and after the rains, and most of it
unhealthy at all seasons. The other region is the Kalahari Desert and
the country north of it between Lake Ngami and the Upper Zambesi. The
Kalahari is so waterless as to offer considerable difficulties to
European hunters, and the country round Lake Ngami is swampy and
feverish. So far the wild creatures have nature in their favour; yet the
passion for killing is in many persons so strong that neither thirst nor
fever deters them, and if the large game are to be saved, it will
clearly be necessary to place them under legal protection. This has been
attempted so far as regards the elephant, rhinoceros, giraffe, and
eland. In German East Africa Dr. von Wissmann, the Administrator of that
territory, has recently (1896) gone further, and ordained restrictions
on the slaughter of all the larger animals, except predatory ones. The
governments of the two British colonies and the two Boer republics,
which have already done well in trying to preserve some of the rarest
and finest beasts, ought to go thoroughly into the question and enact a
complete protective code. Still more necessary is it that a similar
course should be taken by the British South Africa Company and by the
Imperial Government, in whose territories there still survive more of
the great beasts. It is to be hoped that even the lion and some of the
rare lynxes will ultimately receive consideration. Noxious as they are,
it would be a pity to see them wholly exterminated. When I was in India,
in the year 1888, I was told that there were only seven lions then left
in that vast area, all of them well cared for. The work of slaughter
ought to be checked in South Africa before the number gets quite so low
as this, and though there may be difficulties in restraining the natives
from killing the big game, it must be remembered that as regards many
animals it is the European rather than the native, who is the chief
agent of destruction.
The predatory creatures which are now most harmful to the farmer are
the baboons, which infest rocky districts and kill the lambs in such
great numbers that the Cape government offers bounties for their
slaughter. But no large animal does mischief for a moment comparable to
that of the two insect plagues which vex the eastern half of the
country, the white ants and the locusts. Of these I shall have something
to say later.
CHAPTER IV
VEGETATION
The flora of South Africa is extremely rich, showing a number of genera,
and of species which, in proportion to its area, exceeds the number
found in most other parts of the world. But whether this wealth is due
to the diversity of physical conditions which the country presents, or
rather to geological causes, that is, to the fact that there may at some
remote period have been land connections with other regions which have
facilitated the immigration of plants from various sides, is a matter on
which science cannot yet pronounce, for both the geology and the flora
of the whole African continent have been very imperfectly examined. It
is, however, worth remarking that there are marked affinities between
the general character of the flora of the south-western corner of South
Africa and that of the flora of south-western Australia, and similar
affinities between the flora of south-eastern and tropical Africa and
the flora of India, while the relations to South America are fewer and
much less marked. This fact would seem to point to the great antiquity
of the South Atlantic Ocean.
To give in such a book as this even the scantiest account of the plants
of South Africa would obviously be impossible. All I propose is to
convey some slight impression of the part which its vegetation, and
particularly its trees, play in the landscape and in the economic
conditions of the country. Even this I can do but imperfectly, because,
like most travellers, I passed through large districts in the dry
season, when three-fourths of the herbaceous plants are out of flower.
No part of the country is richer in beautiful flowers than the immediate
neighbourhood of Cape Town. This extreme south-western corner of Africa
has a climate of the south temperate zone; that is to say, it has a real
summer and a real winter, and gets most of its rain in winter, whereas
the rest of South Africa has only a wet season and a dry season, the
latter coming in winter. So, too, this corner round Cape Town has a
vegetation characteristically its own, and differing markedly from that
of the arid Karroo regions to the north, and that of the warm
subtropical regions in the east of the Colony and in Natal. It is here
that the plants flourish which Europeans and Americans first came to
know and which are still to them the most familiar examples of the South
African flora. Heaths, for instance, of which there are said to be no
less than three hundred and fifty species in this small district, some
of extraordinary beauty and brilliance, are scarcely found outside of
it. I saw two or three species on the high peaks of Basutoland, and
believe some occur as far north as the tropic on the tops of the
Quathlamba Range; but in the lower grounds, and even on the plateau of
the Karroo they are absent. The general aspect of the vegetation on the
Karroo, and eastward over the plateau into Bechuanaland and the
Transvaal, is to the traveller's eye monotonous--a fact due to the
general uniformity of the geological formations and the general dryness
of the surface. In Natal and in Mashonaland types different from those
of either the Cape or the Karroo appear, and I have never seen a more
beautiful and varied alpine flora than on a lofty summit of Basutoland
which I ascended in early summer. But even in Mashonaland, and in
Matabililand still more, the herbaceous plants make, at least in the
dry season, comparatively little show. I found the number of conspicuous
species less than I had expected, and the diversity of types from the
types that prevail in the southern part of the plateau (in Bechuanaland
and the Orange Free State) less marked. This is doubtless due to the
general similarity of the conditions that prevail over the plateau.
Everywhere the same hot days and cold nights, everywhere the same
dryness.
However, I must avoid details, especially details which would be
interesting only to a botanist, and be content with a few words on those
more conspicuous features of the vegetation which the traveller notes,
and which go to make up his general impression of the country.
Speaking broadly, South Africa is a bare country, and this is the more
remarkable because it is a new country, where man has not had time to
work much destruction. There are ancient forests along the south coast
of Cape Colony and Natal, the best of which are (in the former colony)
now carefully preserved and administered by a Forest Department of
Government. Such is the great Knysna forest, where elephants still roam
wild. But even in these forests few trees exceed fifty or sixty feet in
height, the tallest being the so-called yellow-wood, and the most useful
the sneeze-wood. On the slopes of the hills above Graham's Town and King
William's Town one finds (besides real forests here and there) immense
masses of dense scrub, or "bush," usually from four to eight feet in
height, sometimes with patches of the prickly-pear, an invader from
America, and a formidable one; for its spines hurt the cattle and make
passage by men a troublesome business. It was this dense, low scrub
which constituted the great difficulty of British troops in the fierce
and protracted Kafir wars of fifty years ago; for the ground which the
scrub covers was impassable except by narrow and tortuous paths known
only to the natives, and it afforded them admirable places for ambush
and for retreat. Nowadays a large part of the bush-covered land is used
for ostrich-farms, and it is, indeed, fit for little else. The scrub is
mostly dry, while the larger forests are comparatively damp, and often
beautiful with flowering trees, small tree-ferns, and flexile climbers.
But the trees are not lofty enough to give any of that dignity which a
European forest, say in England or Germany or Norway, often possesses,
and as the native kinds are mostly evergreens, their leaves have
comparatively little variety of tint. One of the most graceful is the
curious silver-tree, so called from the whitish sheen of one side of its
leaves, which grows abundantly on the slopes of Table Mountain, but is
found hardly anywhere else in the Colony.
If this is the character of the woods within reach of the coast rains,
much more conspicuous is the want of trees and the poorness of those
scattered here and there on the great interior plateau. In the desert
region, that is to say, the Karroo, the northern part of Cape Colony to
the Orange River, western Bechuanaland, and the German territories of
Namaqualand and Damaraland, there are hardly any trees, except small,
thorny mimosas (they are really acacias, the commonest being _Acacia
horrida_), whose scanty, light-green foliage casts little shade. On the
higher mountains, where there is a little more moisture, a few other
shrubs or small trees may be found, and sometimes beside a watercourse,
where a stream runs during the rains, the eye is refreshed by a few
slender willows; but speaking generally, this huge desert, one-third of
South Africa, contains nothing but low bushes, few of which are fit even
for fuel. Farther east, where the rainfall is heavier, the trees, though
still small, are more frequent and less thorny. Parts of the great plain
round Kimberley were tolerably well wooded thirty years ago, but the
trees have all been cut down to make mine props or for fire-wood. North
of Mafeking the rolling flats and low hills of Bechuanaland are pretty
fairly wooded, and so to a less degree are the adjoining parts of the
Transvaal and Matabililand. The road going north from Mafeking passes
through some three hundred miles of such woodlands, but a less beautiful
or interesting woodland I have never seen. The trees are mostly the
thorny mimosas I have mentioned. None exceed thirty, few reach
twenty-five, feet. Though they grow loosely scattered, the space between
them is either bare or occupied by low and very prickly bushes. The
ground is parched, and one can get no shade, except by standing close
under a trunk somewhat thicker than its neighbours. Still farther north
the timber is hardly larger, though the general aspect of the woods is
improved by the more frequent occurrence of flowering trees, some
sweet-scented, with glossy leaves and small white flowers, some with
gorgeous clusters of blossoms. Three are particularly handsome. One,
usually called the Kafir-boom, has large flowers of a brilliant crimson.
Another (_Lonchocarpus speciosus_[4]), for which no English name seems
to exist, shows lovely pendulous flowers of a bluish lilac, resembling
in colour those of the _wistaria_. The third is an arboraceous St.
John's wort (_Hypericum Schimperi_[4]), which I found growing in a
valley of Manicaland, at a height of nearly 4000 feet above the sea. All
three would be great ornaments to a south European shrubbery could they
be induced to bear the climate, which, in the case of the two latter
(for I hardly think the Kafir-boom would suit a colder air), seems not
impossible. In Manicaland, among the mountains which form the eastern
edge of the plateau, the trees are taller, handsomer, and more tropical
in their character, and palms, though of no great height, are sometimes
seen. But not even in the most humid of the valleys and on the lower
spurs of the range, where it sinks into the coast plain, nor along the
swampy banks of the Pungwe River, did I see any tree more than sixty
feet high, and few more than thirty. Neither was there any of that
luxuriant undergrowth which makes some tropical forests, like those at
the foot of the Nilghiri Hills in India or in some of the isles of the
Pacific, so impressive as evidences of the power and ceaseless activity
of nature.
The poverty of the woods in Bechuanaland and Matabililand seems to be
due not merely to the dryness of the soil and to the thin and sandy
character which so often marks it, but also to the constant grass-fires.
The grass is generally short, so that these fires do not kill the trees;
nor does one hear of such great forest conflagrations as are frequent
and ruinous in Western America and by no means unknown in the south of
Cape Colony. But these fires doubtless injure the younger trees
sufficiently to stunt their growth, and this mischief is, of course, all
the greater when an exceptionally dry year occurs. In such years the
grass-fires, then most frequent, may destroy the promise of the wood
over a vast area.
The want of forests in South Africa is one of the greatest misfortunes
of the country, for it makes timber costly; it helps to reduce the
rainfall, and it aggravates the tendency of the rain, when it comes, to
run off rapidly in a sudden freshet. Forests have a powerful influence
upon climate in holding moisture,[5] and not only moisture, but soil
also. In South Africa the violent rain-storms sweep away the surface of
the ground, and prevent the deposition of vegetable mould. Nothing
retains that mould or the soil formed by decomposed rock as well as a
covering of wood and the herbage which the neighbourhood of
comparatively moist woodlands helps to support. It is much to be desired
that in all parts of the country where trees will grow trees should be
planted, and that those which remain should be protected. Unfortunately,
most of the South African trees grow slowly, so where planting has been
attempted it is chiefly foreign sorts that are tried. Among these the
first place belongs to the Australian gums, because they shoot up faster
than any others. One finds them now everywhere, mostly in rows or groups
round a house or a hamlet, but sometimes also in regular plantations.
They have become a conspicuous feature in the landscape of the veldt
plateau, especially in those places where there was no wood, or the
little that existed has been destroyed. Kimberley, for instance, and
Pretoria are beginning to be embowered in groves of eucalyptus; Buluwayo
is following suit; and all over Matabililand and Mashonaland one
discovers in the distance the site of a farm-steading or a store by the
waving tops of the gum-trees. If this goes on these Australian
immigrants will sensibly affect the aspect of the country, just as
already they have affected that of the Riviera in south-eastern France,
of the Campagna of Rome, of the rolling tops of the Nilghiri Hills in
Southern India, from which, unhappily, the far more beautiful ancient
groves ("sholas") have now almost disappeared. Besides those gums,
another Australasian tree, the thin-foliaged and unlovely, but
quick-growing "beefwood," has been largely planted at Kimberley and some
other places. The stone-pine of Southern Europe, the cluster-pine
(_Pinus Pinaster_), and the Aleppo or Jerusalem pine (_Pinus
Halepensis_), have all been introduced and seem to do well. The
Australian wattles have been found very useful in helping to fix the
soil on sandy flats, such as those near Cape Town, and the bark of one
species is an important article of commerce in Natal, where (near
Maritzburg, for instance) it grows profusely. But of all the immigrant
trees none is so beautiful as the oak. The Dutch began to plant it round
Cape Town early in the eighteenth century, and it is now one of the
elements which most contribute to the charm of the scenery in this
eminently picturesque south-west corner of the country. Nothing can be
more charming than the long oak avenues which line the streets of
Stellenbosch, for instance; and they help, with the old-fashioned Dutch
houses of that quaint little town, to give a sort of Hobbema flavour to
the foregrounds.
The changes which man has produced in the aspect of countries, by the
trees he plants and the crops he sows, are a curious subject for inquiry
to the geographer and the historian. These changes sometimes take place
very rapidly. In the Hawaiian Islands, for instance, discovered by
Captain Cook little more than a century ago, many of the shrubs which
most abound and give its tone to the landscape have come (and that
mostly not by planting, but spontaneously) from the shores of Asia and
America within the last eighty years. In Egypt most of the trees which
fill the eye in the drive from Cairo to the pyramids were introduced by
Mehemet Ali, so that the banks of the Nile, as we see them, are
different not only from those which Herodotus saw, but even from those
which Napoleon saw. In North Africa the Central American prickly-pear
and the Australian gum make the landscape quite different from that of
Carthaginian or even of Roman times. So South Africa is
changing--changing all the more because many of the immigrant trees
thrive better than the indigenous ones, and are fit for spots where the
latter make but little progress; and in another century the country may
wear an aspect quite unlike that which it now presents.
[Footnote 4: I owe these names to the kindness of the authorities at the
Royal Gardens at Kew, who have been good enough to look through
fifty-four dried specimens which I collected and preserved as well as I
could while travelling through Mashonaland and Basutoland. Eleven of
these fifty-four were pronounced to be species new to science, a fact
which shows how much remains to be done in the way of botanical
exploration.]
[Footnote 5: It has been plausibly suggested that one reason why many
English rivers which were navigable in the tenth century (because we
know that the Northmen traversed them in vessels which had crossed the
German Ocean) but are now too shallow to let a row-boat pass, is to be
found in the destruction of the forests and the draining of the marshes
which the forests sheltered.]
CHAPTER V
PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF THE VARIOUS POLITICAL DIVISIONS
Hitherto I have spoken of South Africa as a natural whole, ignoring its
artificial division into Colonies and States. It may be well to complete
the account of the physical characteristics of the country by giving the
reader some notion of the aspects of each of the political divisions,
and thereby a notion also of their relative importance and resources as
wealth-producing regions.
CAPE COLONY
Cape Colony is a huge territory more than twice as large as the United
Kingdom. But very little of it is available for tillage, and much of it
is too arid even for stock-keeping. The population, including natives,
is only seven to the square mile. Nearly the whole of it is high
country. All along its westerly coast and its southerly coast there is a
strip of low ground bordering the ocean, which in some places is but a
mile or two wide, and in others, where a broad valley opens spreads
backward, giving thirty or forty square miles of tolerably level or
undulating ground. The rich wine and corn district round Stellenbosch
and Paarl and northward towards Malmesbury is such a tract. Behind this
low strip the country rises, sometimes in steep acclivities, up which a
road or railway has to be carried in curves and zigzags, sometimes in
successive terraces, the steps, so to speak, by which the lofty interior
breaks down towards the sea.
Behind these terraces and slopes lies the great tableland described in a
preceding chapter. Though I call it a tableland, it is by no means flat,
for several long, though not lofty, ranges of hills, mostly running east
and west, intersect it. Some tracts are only 2000 feet, others as much
as 5000 feet, above the sea, while the highest hilltops approach 8000
feet. The part of this high country which lies between longitude 20 deg. and
25 deg. E., with the Nieuweld and Sneeuwberg mountains to the north of it,
and the Zwarte Berg to the south, is called the Great Karroo. (The word
is Hottentot, and means a dry or bare place.) It is tolerably level,
excessively dry, with no such thing as a running stream over its huge
expanse of three hundred miles long and half as much wide, nor, indeed,
any moisture, save in a few places shallow pools which almost disappear
in the dry season. The rainfall ranges from five to fifteen inches in
the year. It is therefore virtually a desert, bearing no herbage (except
for a week or two after a rainstorm), and no trees, though there are
plenty of prickly shrubs and small bushes, some of these succulent
enough, when they sprout after the few showers that fall in the summer,
to give good browsing to sheep and goats. The brilliancy of the air, the
warmth of the days, and the coldness of the nights remind one who
traverses the Karroo of the deserts of Western America between the Rocky
Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, though the soil is much less alkaline,
and the so-called "sage-brush" plants characteristic of an alkaline
district are mostly absent. To the north of the Karroo and of the
mountains which bound it, a similar district, equally arid, dreary, and
barren, stretches away to the banks of the Orange River, which here in
its lower course has less water than in its upper course, because, like
the Nile, it receives no affluents and is wasted by the terrible sun. In
fact, one may say that from the mountains dividing the southern part of
the Karroo from the coast lands all the way north to the Orange River, a
distance of nearly four hundred miles, nature has made the country a
desert of clay and stone (seldom of sand), though man has here and there
tried to redeem it for habitation.
The north-eastern part of the interior of Cape Colony is more generally
elevated than the south-western. From Graaf-Reinet northward to
Kimberley and Mafeking, and north-eastward to the borders of Basutoland,
the country is 4000 feet or more above sea-level; much of it is nearly
level, and almost all of it bare of wood. It is better watered than the
western districts, enjoying a rainfall of from ten to twenty-five inches
in the year, and is therefore mostly covered with grass after the rains,
and not merely with dry thorny bushes. Nevertheless, its general aspect
in the dry season is so parched and bare that the stranger is surprised
to be told that it supports great quantities of cattle, sheep, and
goats. The south-eastern part, including the Quathlamba Range, and the
hilly country descending from that range to the sea, has a still heavier
rainfall and is in some places covered with forest. Here the grass is
richer, and in the valleys there is plenty of land fit for tillage
without irrigation.
THE COLONY OF NATAL
Much smaller, but more favoured by nature, is the British colony of
Natal, which adjoins the easternmost part of Cape Colony, and now
includes the territories of Zululand and Tonga land. Natal proper and
Zululand resemble in their physical conditions the south-eastern corner
of Cape Colony. Both lie entirely on the sea slope of the Quathlamba
Range, and are covered by mountains and hills descending from that
range. Both are hilly or undulating, with a charming variety of surface;
and they are also comparatively well watered, with a perennial stream in
every valley. Hence there is plenty of grass, and towards the coast
plenty of wood also, while the loftier interior is bare. The climate is
much warmer than that of Cape Colony, and in the narrow strip which
borders the sea becomes almost tropical. Nor is this heat attributable
entirely to the latitude. It is largely due to the great Mozambique
current, which brings down from the tropical parts of the Indian Ocean a
vast body of warm water which heats the adjoining coast just as the Gulf
Stream heats the shores of Georgia and the Carolinas; and the effect of
this mass of hot water upon the air over it would doubtless be felt much
more in Natal were it not for the rapid rise of the ground from the sea
in that colony. Pietermaritzburg, the capital, is only some fifty miles
from the coast as the crow flies. But though it lies in a valley, it is
2225 feet above sea-level, and from it the country steadily rises
inland, till at Laing's Nek (the watershed between the Indian Ocean and
the Atlantic), the height of 5300 feet is reached, and the winter cold
is severe. Nearly the whole of Natal and four-fifths of Zululand may
thus be deemed a temperate country, where Europeans can thrive and
multiply. So far as soil goes it is one of the richest as well as one of
the fairest parts of South Africa. Tongaland, a smaller district, lies
lower and is less healthy.
GERMAN SOUTH-WEST AFRICA
Very different is the vast German territory (322,000 square miles) which
stretches northward from Cape Colony, bounded on the south by the Orange
River, on the north by the West African territories of Portugal, on the
east by Bechuanaland. Great Namaqualand and Damaraland constitute an
enormous wilderness, very thinly peopled, because the means of life are
very scanty. This wilderness is, except the narrow and sandy coast
strip, a high country (3000 to 4500 feet above sea-level) and a dry
country, drier even than the Karroo, and far too dry for any kind of
cultivation. Some parts, especially those in the south-west, are
hopelessly parched and barren; others have small bushes or grass; while
on the higher grounds and generally in the far northern parts, where the
Ovampo tribe dwell, grass is abundant, and as cattle can thrive there is
also population. Copper has been discovered in considerable quantities,
and other minerals (including coal) are believed to exist. But the
country, taken all in all, and excepting the little explored districts
of the north-east, toward the Upper Zambesi,--districts whose resources
are still very imperfectly known,--is a dreary and desolate region,
which seems likely to prove of little value. Germany now owns the whole
of it, save the port of Walfish Bay, which has been retained for and is
administered by Cape Colony.
PORTUGUESE SOUTH-EAST AFRICA
On the opposite side of the continent Portugal holds the country which
lies along the Indian Ocean from British Tongaland northward to the
Zambesi. Close to the sea it is level, rising gently westward in hills,
and in some places extending to the crest of the Quathlamba Mountains.
Thus it has considerable variety of aspect and climate, and as the rain
falls chiefly on the slopes of the mountains, the interior is generally
better watered than the flat seaboard, which is often sandy and
worthless. Much of this region is of great fertility, capable of
producing all the fruits of the tropics. But much of it, including some
of the most fertile parts, is also very malarious, while the heat is far
too great for European labour. When plantations are established
throughout it, as they have been in a few--but only a few--spots by the
Portuguese, it will be by natives that they will be cultivated. The
Kafir population is now comparatively small, but this may be due rather
to the desolating native wars than to the conditions of the soil.
So much for the four maritime countries. There remain the two Dutch
republics and the British territories which have not yet been formed
into colonies.
THE ORANGE FREE STATE
The Orange Free State (48,000 square miles) lies entirely on the great
plateau, between 4000 and 5000 feet above sea-level. It is in the main a
level country, though hills are scattered over it, sometimes reaching a
height of nearly 6000 feet. A remarkable feature of most of these hills,
as of many all over the plateau, is that they are flat-topped, and have
often steep, even craggy escarpments. This seems due to the fact that
the strata (chiefly sandstone) are horizontal; and very often a bed of
hard igneous rock, some, kind of trap or greenstone, or porphyry,
protects the summit of the hill from the disintegrating influences of
the weather. It is a bare land, with very little wood, and that small
and scrubby, but is well covered with herbage, affording excellent
pasture during two-thirds of the year. After the first rains, when these
wide stretches of gently undulating land are dressed in their new
vesture of brilliant green, nothing can be imagined more exhilarating
than a ride across the wide expanse; for the air is pure, keen, and
bracing, much like that of the high prairies of Colorado or Wyoming.
There are fortunately no blizzards, but violent thunderstorms are not
uncommon, and the hailstones--I have seen them as big as bantams'
eggs--which fall during such storms sometimes kill the smaller animals,
and even men. Dry as the land appears to the eye during the winter, the
larger streams do not wholly fail, and water can generally be got. The
south-eastern part of the Free State, especially along the Caledon
River, is extremely fertile, one of the best corn-growing parts of
Africa. The rest is fitter for pasture than for tillage, except, of
course, on the alluvial banks of the rivers, and nearly the whole region
is in fact occupied by huge grazing farms. As such a farm needs and
supports only a few men, the population grows but slowly. The Free State
is nearly as big as England and just as big as the State of New York;
but it has only 77,000 white inhabitants and about 130,000 natives.
THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC
Somewhat larger,--about as large as Great Britain and nearly two-thirds
the size of France--is the South African Republic, which we commonly
talk of as the Transvaal. Of its white population, which numbers some
170,000, two-thirds are in the small mining district of the
Witwatersrand. All the Transvaal, except a strip on the eastern and
another strip on the northern border along the river Limpopo, also
belongs to the great plateau and exhibits the characteristic features of
the plateau. The hills are, however, higher than in the Free State, and
along the east, where the Quathlamba Range forms the outer edge of the
plateau, they deserve to be called mountains, for some of them reach
7000 feet. These high regions are healthy, for the summer heats are
tempered by easterly breezes and copious summer rains. The lower parts
lying toward the Indian Ocean and the Limpopo River are feverish, though
drainage and cultivation may be expected to reduce the malaria and
improve the conditions of health. Like the Free State, the Transvaal is
primarily a pasture land, but in many parts the herbage is less juicy
and wholesome than in the smaller republic, and belongs to what the
Dutch Boers call "sour veldt." There are trees in the more sheltered
parts, but except in the lower valleys, they are small, and of no
economic value. The winter cold is severe, and the fierce sun dries up
the soil, and makes the grass sear and brown for the greater part of the
year. Strong winds sweep over the vast stretches of open upland, checked
by no belts of forest. It is a country whose aspect has little to
attract the settler. No one would think it worth fighting for so far as
the surface goes; and until sixteen years ago nobody knew that there was
enormous wealth lying below the surface.
BRITISH TERRITORIES--BECHUANALAND
Of one British territory outside the two colonies, viz., Basutoland, I
shall have to speak fully hereafter. A second, Bechuanaland, including
the Kalahari Desert, is of vast extent, but slender value. It is a level
land lying entirely on the plateau between 3,000 and 4000 feet above the
sea, and while some of its streamlets drain into the Limpopo, and so to
the Indian Ocean, others flow westward and northward into marshes and
shallow lakes, in which they disappear. One or two, however, succeed, in
wet seasons, in getting as far as the Orange River, and find through it
an outlet to the sea. It is only in the wet season that the streamlets
flow, for Bechuanaland is intensely dry. I travelled four hundred miles
through it without once crossing running water, though here and there in
traversing the dry bed of a brook one was told that there was water
underneath, deep in the sand. Notwithstanding this superficial aridity,
eastern Bechuanaland is deemed one of the best ranching tracts in South
Africa, for the grass is sweet, and the water can usually be obtained by
digging, though it is often brackish. There is also plenty of wood--thin
and thorny, but sufficiently abundant to diversify the aspect of what
would otherwise be a most dreary and monotonous region.
THE TERRITORIES OF THE BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA COMPANY
North of Bechuanaland and the Transvaal, and stretching all the way to
the Zambesi, are those immense territories which have been assigned to
the British South Africa Company as the sphere of its operations, and to
which the name of Rhodesia has been given. Matabililand and Mashonaland,
the only parts that have been at all settled, are higher, more
undulating, and altogether more attractive than Bechuanaland, with great
swelling downs somewhat resembling the Steppes of Southern Russia or the
prairies of Kansas. Except in the east and south-east, the land is
undulating rather than hilly, but in the south-west, towards the Upper
Limpopo, there lies a high region, full of small rocky heights often
clothed with thick bush--a country difficult to traverse, as has been
found during the recent native outbreak; for it was there that most of
the Kafirs took shelter and were found difficult to dislodge. Towards
the south-east, along the middle course of the Limpopo, the country is
lower and less healthy. On the northern side of the central highlands,
the ground sinks towards the Zambesi, and the soil, which among the
hills is thin or sandy, becomes deeper. In that part and along the river
banks there are great possibilities of agricultural development, while
the uplands, where the subjacent rock is granite or gneiss, with
occasional beds of slate or schist, are generally barer and more dry,
fit rather for pasture than for tillage. More rain falls than in
Bechuanaland, so it is only at the end of the dry season, in October,
that the grass begins to fail on the pastures. The climate, though very
warm,--for here we are well within the tropics,--is pleasant and
invigorating, for nowhere do brighter and fresher breezes blow, and the
heat of the afternoons is forgotten in the cool evenings. It is
healthy, too, except along the swampy river banks and where one descends
to the levels of the Zambesi, or into the Limpopo Valley.
The reader will have gathered from this general sketch that there are no
natural boundaries severing from one another the various political
divisions of South Africa. The north-eastern part of Cape Colony is
substantially the same kind of country as the Orange Free State and
Eastern Bechuanaland; the Transvaal, or at least three-fourths of its
area, is physically similar to the Free State; the boundary between Cape
Colony and Natal is an artificial one; while Matabililand and
Mashonaland present features resembling those of the Northern Transvaal,
differing only in being rather hotter and rather better watered. So far
as nature is concerned, the conditions she prescribes for the life of
man, the resources she opens to his energies, are very similar over
these wide areas, save, of course, that some parts are much richer than
others in mineral deposits. It is only along the frontier line which
divides Natal and the Portuguese dominions from the Transvaal and the
territories of the British South Africa Company that a political
coincides with a physical line of demarcation. Even German South-west
Africa differs scarcely at all from the Kalahari Desert, which adjoins
it and which forms the western part of Bechuanaland, and differs little
also from the north-western regions of Cape Colony. If the reader will
compare the two physical maps contained in this volume with the map
which shows the political divisions of the country he will notice that
these political divisions do not correspond with the areas where more or
less rain falls, or where the ground is more or less raised above the
sea or traversed by mountain chains. The only exception is to be found
in the fact that the boundary of Natal towards Basutoland and the Orange
Free State has been drawn along the watershed between the Indian Ocean
and the Atlantic, and that the boundary line between the Portuguese
territories and those of the Transvaal Republic and of the British South
Africa Company, is in many places the line of division between the
mountains and the low country. The Orange River and the Limpopo have, in
parts of their courses, been taken as convenient political frontiers.
But rivers, though convenient for this purpose to the statesman and the
geographer, are not natural boundaries in the true sense of the term.
And thus we may say that the causes which have cut up South Africa into
its present Colonies and States have been (except as aforesaid)
historical causes, rather than differences due to the hand of nature.
CHAPTER VI
NATURE AND HISTORY
Now that some general idea of how nature has shaped and moulded South
Africa has been conveyed to the reader, a few pages may be devoted to
considering what influence on the fortunes of the country and its
inhabitants has been exerted by its physical character. The history of
every country may be regarded as the joint result of three factors--the
natural conditions of the country itself, the qualities of the races
that have occupied it, and the circumstances under which their
occupation took place. And among savage or barbarous people natural
conditions have an even greater importance than they have in more
advanced periods of civilisation, because they are more powerful as
against man. Man in his savage state is not yet able to resist such
conditions or to turn them to serve his purposes, but is condemned to
submit to the kind of life which they prescribe.
This was the case with the first inhabitants of South Africa. They seem
to have entered it as savages, and savages they remained. Nature was
strong and stern; she spread before them no such rich alluvial plains as
tempted cultivation in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates.
Intellectually feeble, and without the patience or the foresight to
attempt to till the soil in a land where droughts are frequent and
disastrous, the Bushmen were content with killing game, and the
Hottentots with living on the milk of their cattle. Such a life, which
was one of uncertainty and often of hardship, permitted no accumulation
of wealth, gave no leisure, suggested no higher want than that of food,
and was in all respects unfavourable to material progress. Even the
Bantu people, who probably came later and were certainly more advanced,
for they carried on some little cultivation of the soil, remained at a
low level. Nature gave them, except in dry years, as much corn as they
needed in return for very little labour. Clothing they did not need, and
their isolation from the rest of the world left them ignorant of
luxuries. When the European voyagers found them at the end of the
fifteenth century, they were making little or no advance in the arts of
life.
Upon the growth of European settlements the influence of the physical
structure of the country has been very marked. When the Portuguese had
followed the long line of coast from the mouth of the Orange River to
that of the Zambesi, and from the mouth of the Zambesi northward to
Zanzibar, they settled only where they heard that gold and ivory could
be obtained. Their forts and trading stations, the first of which dates
from 1505, were therefore planted on the coast northward from the
Limpopo River. Sofala, a little south of the modern port of Beira, was
the principal one. Here they traded, and twice or thrice they made,
always in search of the gold-producing regions, expeditions inland.
These expeditions, however, had to traverse the flat and malarious strip
of ground which lies along the Indian Ocean. A large part of the white
troops died, and the rest arrived at the higher ground so much weakened
that they could achieve no permanent conquests, for they were opposed by
warlike tribes. In the course of years a small population speaking
Portuguese, though mixed with native blood, grew up along the coast. The
climate, however, destroyed what vigour the whites had brought from
Europe, and by degrees they ceased to even attempt to conquer or occupy
the interior. The heat and the rains, together with fever, the offspring
of heat and rains, checked further progress. Three centuries passed,
during which the knowledge of south-eastern Africa which the civilised
world had obtained within the twenty years that followed the voyages of
Vasco da Gama, was scarcely increased.
During those three centuries, America, which had not been discovered
till six years after Bartholomew Diaz passed the Cape of Good Hope, had
been, all except a part of the north-west, pretty thoroughly explored
and partitioned out among five European powers. Large and prosperous
colonies had sprung up and before the end of the eighteenth century one
great independent state had established itself. The discovery of
Australia and New Zealand came much later than that of America; but
within one century from the first European settlement in Australia (A.D.
1787) the whole continent, though its interior is uninviting, had been
traversed along many lines, and five prosperous European colonies had
grown to importance. The slow progress of exploration and settlement in
South Africa during so long a period is therefore a noteworthy
phenomenon which deserves a few observations.
As regards the Portuguese part of the East African coast, the
explanation just given is sufficient. As regards that part of the West
coast which lies south of the Portuguese colony of Angola, the natural
features of the country make no explanation needed. No more arid or
barren coast is to be found anywhere, and in its whole long stretch
there is but one tolerable port, that of Walfish Bay. The inland region
is scarcely better. Much of it is waterless and without herbage. No gold
nor ivory nor other article of value was obtainable. Accordingly, nobody
cared to settle or explore, and the land would probably be still lying
unclaimed had not the settlement of Herr Luederitz and a vague desire
for territorial expansion prompted Germany to occupy it in 1884.
The south coast, from the Cape to the Tugela River, was much more
attractive. Here the climate was salubrious, the land in many places
fertile, and everywhere fit for sheep or cattle. Here, accordingly, a
small European community, first founded in 1652, grew up and spread
slowly eastward and northward along the shore during the century and a
half from its first establishment. The Dutch settlers did not care to
penetrate the interior, because the interior seemed to offer little to a
farmer. Behind the well-watered coast belt lay successive lines of steep
mountains, and behind those mountains the desert waste of the Karroo,
where it takes six acres to keep a sheep. Accordingly, it was only a few
bold hunters, a few farmers on the outskirts of the little maritime
colony, and a few missionaries, who cared to enter this wide wilderness.
When exploration began, it began from this south-west corner of Africa.
It began late. In 1806, when the British took the Cape from the Dutch,
few indeed were the white men who had penetrated more than one hundred
miles from the coast, and the farther interior was known only by report.
For thirty years more progress was slow; and it is within our own time
that nearly all the exploration, and the settlement which has followed
quickly on the heels of exploration, has taken place. Just sixty years
ago the Dutch Boers passed in their heavy waggons from Cape Colony to
the spots where Bloemfontein and Pretoria now stand. In 1854-56 David
Livingstone made his way through Bechuanaland to the falls of the
Zambesi and the west coast at St. Paul de Loanda. In 1889 the vast
territories between the Transvaal Republic and the Zambesi began to be
occupied by the Mashonaland pioneers. All these explorers, all the
farmers, missionaries, hunters, and mining prospectors, came up into
South Central Africa from the south-west extremity of the continent
over the great plateau. They moved north-eastward, because there was
more rain, and therefore more grass and game in that direction than
toward the north. They were checked from time to time by the warlike
native tribes; but they were drawn on by finding everywhere a country in
which Europeans could live and thrive. It was the existence of this high
and cool plateau that permitted their discoveries and encouraged their
settlement. And thus the rich interior has come to belong, not to the
Portuguese, who first laid hold of South Africa, but to the races who
first entered the plateau at the point where it is nearest the sea, the
Dutch and the English. Coming a thousand miles by land, they have seized
and colonised the country that lies within sixty or eighty miles of the
ocean behind the Portuguese settlements, because they had good healthy
air to breathe during all those thousand miles of journey; while the
Portuguese, sunk among tropical swamps, were doing no more than maintain
their hold upon the coast, and were allowing even the few forts they had
established along the lower course of the Zambesi to crumble away.
The same natural conditions, however, which have made the plateau
healthy, have kept it sparsely peopled. Much of this high interior,
whose settlement has occupied the last sixty years, is a desert unfit,
and likely to be always unfit, for human habitation. Even in those parts
which are comparatively well watered, the grazing for sheep and cattle
is so scanty during some months of the year that farms are large, houses
are scattered far from one another, and the population remains extremely
thin. The Wilderness of the Karroo cuts off Cape Town and its
comparatively populous neighbourhood from the inhabited, though thinly
inhabited, pastoral districts of the Orange Free State. Between these
two settled districts there are only a few villages, scattered at
intervals of many miles along a line of railway four hundred miles in
length. In the Free State and the Transvaal the white population is
extremely sparse, save in the mining region of the Witwatersrand,
because ranching requires few hands, and only a few hundred square miles
out of many thousands have been brought under cultivation. Thus, while
the coolness of the climate has permitted Europeans to thrive in these
comparatively low latitudes, its dryness has kept down their numbers and
has retarded not only their political development, but their progress in
all those arts and pursuits which imply a tolerably large and varied
society. The note of South African life, the thing that strikes the
traveller with increasing force as he visits one part of the country
after another, is the paucity of inhabitants, and the isolated life
which these inhabitants, except in six or seven towns, are forced to
lead. This is the doing of nature. She has not severed the country into
distinct social or political communities by any lines of physical
demarcation, but she has provided such scanty means of sustenance for
human life and so few openings for human industry unaided by capital,
that the settlers (save where capital has come to their aid) remain few
indeed, and one may call the interior of South Africa a vast solitude,
with a few oases of population dotted here and there over it.
CHAPTER VII
ASPECTS OF SCENERY
The sketch I have given of the physical character of South Africa will
doubtless have conveyed to the reader that the country offers
comparatively little to attract the lover of natural scenery. This
impression is true if the sort of landscape we have learned to enjoy in
Europe and in the eastern part of the United States be taken as the type
of scenery which gives most pleasure. Variety of form, boldness of
outline, the presence of water in lakes and running streams, and, above
all, foliage and verdure, are the main elements of beauty in those
landscapes; while if any one desires something of more imposing
grandeur, he finds it in snow-capped mountains like the Alps or the
Cascade Range, or in majestic crags such as those which tower over the
fiords of Norway. But the scenery of South Africa is wholly unlike that
of Europe or of most parts of America. It is, above all things, a dry
land, a parched and thirsty land, where no clear brooks murmur through
the meadow, no cascade sparkles from the cliff, where mountain and plain
alike are brown and dusty except during the short season of the rains.
And being a dry land, it is also a bare land. Few are the favoured spots
in which a veritable forest can be seen; for though many tracts are
wooded, the trees are almost always thin and stunted. In Matabililand,
for instance, though a great part of the surface is covered with wood,
you see no trees forty feet high, and few reaching thirty; while in the
wilderness of the Kalahari Desert and Damaraland nothing larger than a
bush is visible, except the scraggy and thorny mimosa.
These features of South Africa--the want of water and the want of
greenness--are those to which a native of Western Europe finds it
hardest to accustom himself, however thoroughly he may enjoy the
brilliant sun and the keen dry air which go along with them. And it must
also be admitted that over very large areas the aspects of nature are so
uniform as to become monotonous. One may travel eight hundred miles and
see less variety in the landscape than one would find in one-fourth of
the same distance anywhere in Western Europe or in America east of the
Alleghany Mountains. The same geological formations prevail over wide
areas, and give the same profile to the hilltop, the same undulations to
the plain; while in travelling northward toward the Equator the flora
seems to change far less between 34 deg. and 18 deg. south latitude than it
changes in the journey from Barcelona to Havre, through only half as
many degrees of latitude.
There are, nevertheless, several interesting bits of scenery in South
Africa, which, if they do not of themselves repay the traveller for so
long a journey, add sensibly to his enjoyment. The situation of Cape
Town, with a magnificent range of precipices rising behind it, a noble
bay in front, and environs full of beautiful avenues and
pleasure-grounds, while bold mountain-peaks close the more distant
landscape, is equalled by that of few other cities in the world.
Constantinople and Naples, Bombay and San Francisco, cannot boast of
more perfect or more varied prospects. There are some fine pieces of
wood and water scenery along the south coast of Cape Colony, and one of
singular charm in the adjoining colony of Natal, where the suburbs of
Durban, the principal port, though they lack the grandeur which its
craggy heights give to the neighbourhood of Cape Town have, with a
warmer climate, a richer and more tropically luxuriant vegetation. In
the great range of mountains which runs some seventeen hundred miles
from Cape Town almost to the banks of the Zambesi, the scenery becomes
striking in three districts only. One of these is Basutoland, a little
native territory which lies just where Cape Colony, the Orange Free
State, and Natal meet. Its peaks are the highest in Africa south of
Mount Kilimanjaro, for several of them reach 11,000 feet. On the
south-east this mountain-land, the Switzerland of South Africa, faces
Natal and East Griqualand with a long range of formidable precipices,
impassable for many miles. The interior contains valleys and glens of
singular beauty, some wild and rugged, some clothed with rich pasture.
The voice of brooks, a sound rare in Africa, rises from the hidden
depths of the gorges, and here and there torrents plunging over the edge
of a basaltic cliff into an abyss below make waterfalls which are at all
seasons beautiful, and when swollen by the rains of January majestic.
Except wood, of which there is unhappily nothing more than a little
scrubby bush in the sheltered hollows, nearly all the elements of beauty
are present; and the contrast between the craggy summits and the soft
rich pasture and cornlands which lie along their northern base, gives
rise to many admirable landscapes.
Two hundred miles north-north-east of Basutoland the great Quathlamba
Range rises in very bold slopes from the coast levels behind Delagoa
Bay, and the scenery of the valleys and passes is said to be extremely
grand. Knowing it, however, only by report, I will not venture to
describe it. Nearly five hundred miles still farther to the north, in
the district called Manicaland, already referred to, is a third mountain
region, less lofty than Basutoland, but deriving a singular charm from
the dignity and variety of its mountain forms. The whole country is so
elevated that summits of 7000 or even 8000 feet do not produce any
greater effect upon the eye than does Ben Lomond as seen from Loch
Lomond, or Mount Washington from the Glen House. But there is a boldness
of line about these granite peaks comparable to those of the west coast
of Norway or of the finest parts of the Swiss Alps. Some of them rise in
smooth shafts of apparently inaccessible rock; others form long ridges
of pinnacles of every kind of shape, specially striking when they stand
out against the brilliantly clear morning or evening sky. The valleys
are well wooded, the lower slopes covered with herbage, so the effect of
these wild peaks is heightened by the softness of the surroundings which
they dominate, while at the same time the whole landscape becomes more
complex and more noble by the mingling of such diverse elements. No
scenery better deserves the name of romantic. And even in the tamer
parts, where instead of mountains there are only low hills, or "kopjes"
(as they are called in South Africa), the slightly more friable rock
found in these hills decomposes under the influence of the weather into
curiously picturesque and fantastic forms, with crags riven to their
base, and detached pillars supporting loose blocks and tabular masses,
among or upon which the timid Mashonas have built their huts in the hope
of escaping the raids of their warlike enemies, the Matabili.
Though I must admit that South Africa, taken as a whole, offers far less
to attract the lover of natural beauty than does Southern or Western
Europe or the Pacific States of North America, there are two kinds of
charm which it possesses in a high degree. One is that of colour.
Monotonous as the landscapes often are, there is a warmth and richness
of tone about them which fills and delights the eye. One sees
comparatively little of that whitish-blue limestone which so often gives
a hard and chilling aspect to the scenery of the lower ridges of the
Alps and of large parts of the coasts of the Mediterranean. In Africa
even the grey granite or gneiss has a deeper tone than these limestones,
and it is frequently covered by red and yellow lichens of wonderful
beauty. The dark basalts and porphyries which occur in many places, the
rich red tint which the surface of the sandstone rocks often takes under
the scorching sun, give depth of tone to the landscape; and though the
flood of midday sunshine is almost overpowering, the lights of morning
and evening, touching the mountains with every shade of rose and crimson
and violet, are indescribably beautiful. It is in these morning and
evening hours that the charm of the pure dry air is specially felt.
Mountains fifty or sixty miles away stand out clearly enough to enable
all the wealth of their colour and all the delicacy of their outlines to
be perceived; and the eye realises, by the exquisitely fine change of
tint between the nearer and the more distant ranges, the immensity and
the harmony of the landscape. Europeans may think that the continuous
profusion of sunlight during most of the year may become wearisome. I
was not long enough in the country to find it so, and I observed that
those who have lived for a few years in South Africa declare they prefer
that continuous profusion to the murky skies of Britain or Holland or
North Germany. But even if the fine weather which prevails for eight
months in the year be monotonous, there is compensation in the
extraordinary brilliancy of the atmospheric effects throughout the rainy
season, and especially in its first weeks. During nine days which I
spent in the Transvaal at that season, when several thunderstorms
occurred almost every day, the combinations of sunshine, lightning, and
cloud, and the symphonies--if the expression may be permitted--of light
and shade and colour which their changeful play produced in the sky and
on the earth, were more various and more wonderful than a whole year
would furnish forth for enjoyment in Europe.
The other peculiar charm which South African scenery possesses is that
of primeval solitude and silence. It is a charm which is differently
felt by different minds. There are many who find the presence of what
Homer calls "the rich works of men" essential to the perfection of a
landscape. Cultivated fields, gardens, and orchards, farmhouses dotted
here and there, indications in one form or another of human life and
labour, do not merely give a greater variety to every prospect, but also
impart an element which evokes the sense of sympathy with our
fellow-beings, and excites a whole group of emotions which the
contemplation of nature, taken by itself, does not arouse. No one is
insensible to these things and some find little delight in any scene
from which they are absent. Yet there are other minds to which there is
something specially solemn and impressive in the untouched and primitive
simplicity of a country which stands now just as it came from the hands
of the Creator. The self-sufficingness of nature, the insignificance of
man, the mystery of a universe which does not exist, as our ancestors
fondly thought, for the sake of man, but for other purposes hidden from
us and for ever undiscoverable--these things are more fully realised and
more deeply felt when one traverses a boundless wilderness which seems
to have known no change since the remote ages when hill and plain and
valley were moulded into the forms we see to-day. Feelings of this kind
powerfully affect the mind of the traveller in South Africa. They affect
him in the Karroo, where the slender line of rails, along which his
train creeps all day and all night across wide stretches of brown desert
and under the crests of stern dark hills, seems to heighten by contrast
the sense of solitude--a vast and barren solitude interposed between the
busy haunts of men which he has left behind on the shores of the ocean
and those still busier haunts whither he is bent, where the pick and
hammer sound upon the Witwatersrand, and the palpitating engine drags
masses of ore from the depths of the crowded mine. They affect him still
more in the breezy highlands of Matabililand, where the eye ranges over
an apparently endless succession of undulations clothed with tall grass
or waving wood, till they sink in the blue distance toward the plain
through which the great Zambesi takes its seaward course.
The wilderness is indeed not wholly unpeopled. Over the wide surface of
Matabililand and Mashonaland--an area of some two hundred thousand
square miles--there are scattered natives of various tribes, whose
numbers have been roughly estimated at from 250,000 to 400,000 persons.
But one rarely sees a native except along a few well-beaten tracks, and
still more rarely comes upon a cluster of huts in the woods along the
streamlets or half hidden among the fissured rocks of a granite kopje.
The chief traces of man's presence in the landscape are the narrow and
winding footpaths which run hither and thither through the country, and
bewilder the traveller who, having strayed from his waggon, vainly hopes
by following them to find his way back to the main track, or the wreaths
of blue smoke which indicate the spot where a Kafir has set the grass on
fire to startle and kill the tiny creatures that dwell in it.
Nothing is at first more surprising to one who crosses a country
inhabited by savages than the few marks of their presence which strike
the eye, or at least an unpractised eye. The little plot of ground the
Kafirs have cultivated is in a few years scarcely distinguishable from
the untouched surface of the surrounding land, while the mud-built hut
quickly disappears under the summer rains and the scarcely less
destructive efforts of the white ants. Here in South Africa the native
races seem to have made no progress for centuries, if, indeed, they have
not actually gone backward; and the feebleness of savage man
intensifies one's sense of the overmastering strength of nature. The
elephant and the buffalo are as much the masters of the soil as is the
Kafir, and man has no more right to claim that the land was made for him
than have the wild beasts of the forest who roar after their prey and
seek their meat from God.
These features of South African nature, its silence, its loneliness, its
drear solemnity, have not been without their influence upon the mind and
temper of the European settler. The most peculiar and characteristic
type that the country has produced is the Boer of the eastern plateau,
the offspring of those Dutch Africanders who some sixty years ago
wandered away from British rule into the wilderness. These men had, and
their sons and grandsons have retained, a passion for solitude that even
to-day makes them desire to live many miles from any neighbour, a sturdy
self-reliance, a grim courage in the face of danger, a sternness from
which the native races have often had to suffer. The majesty of nature
has not stimulated in them any poetical faculty. But her austerity,
joined to the experiences of their race, has contributed to make them
grave and serious, closely bound to their ancient forms of piety, and
prone to deem themselves the special objects of divine protection.
PART II
_A SKETCH OF SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY_
CHAPTER VIII
THE NATIVES: HOTTENTOTS, BUSHMEN, AND KAFIRS
By far the most interesting features in the history of South Africa have
been the relations to one another of the various races that inhabit it.
There are seven of these races, three native and four European. The
European races, two of them, especially the Dutch and the English, are,
of course, far stronger, and far more important as political factors,
than are the natives. Nevertheless, the natives have an importance too,
and one so great that their position deserves to be fully set forth and
carefully weighed. For, though they are inferior in every point but one,
they are in that point strong. They are prolific. They already greatly
outnumber the whites, and they increase faster.