savage or semi-civilized aboriginal peoples, which have been very
numerous since the tide of discovery began to rise in the end of the
fifteenth century, may be reduced to three classes.
The first of these classes includes the cases where the native race,
though perhaps numerous, is comparatively weak, and unable to assimilate
European civilization, or to thrive under European rule (a rule which
has often been harsh), or even to survive in the presence of a European
population occupying its country. To this class belong such cases as the
extinction of the natives of the Antilles by the Spaniards, the
disappearance of the natives of Southern Australia and Tasmania before
British settlement, the dying out, or retirement to a few reserved
tracts, of the aborigines who once occupied all North America east of
the Rocky Mountains. The Russian advance in Siberia, the advance of
Spanish and Italian and German colonists in the territories of La Plata
in South America, may be added to this class, for though the phenomena
are rather those of absorption than of extinction, the result is
practically the same. The country becomes European and the native races
vanish.
An opposite class of cases arises where Europeans have conquered a
country already filled by a more or less civilized population, which is
so numerous and so prolific as to maintain itself with ease in their
presence. Such a case is the British conquest of India. The Europeans in
India are, and must remain, a mere handful among the many millions of
industrious natives, who already constitute, in many districts, a
population almost too numerous for the resources of the country to
support. Moreover, the climate is one in which a pure European race
speedily dwindles away. The position of the Dutch in Java, and of the
French in Indo-China, is similar; and the French in Madagascar will
doubtless present another instance.
Between these two extremes lies a third group of cases--those in which
the native race is, on the one hand, numerous and strong enough to
maintain itself in the face of Europeans, while, on the other hand,
there is plenty of room left for a considerable European population to
press in, climatic conditions not forbidding it to spread and multiply.
To this group belong such colonizations as those of the Spaniards in
Mexico and Peru, of the Russians in parts of Central Asia, of the French
in Algeria and Tunis, of the Spaniards in the Canary Isles, and of the
English and Americans in Hawaii. In all these countries the new race and
the old race can both live and thrive, neither of them killing off or
crowding out the other, though in some, as in Hawaii, the natives tend
to disappear, while in others, as in Algeria, the immigrants do not much
increase. Sometimes, as in the Canary Isles and Mexico, the two elements
blend, the native element being usually more numerous, though less
advanced; and a mixed race is formed by intermarriage. Sometimes they
remain, and seem likely to remain, as distinct as oil is from water.
South Africa belongs to this third class of cases. The Dutch and the
English find the country a good one and become fond of it. There is
plenty of land for them. They enjoy the climate. They thrive and
multiply. But they do not oust the natives, except sometimes from the
best lands, and the contact does not reduce the number of the latter.
The native--that is to say, the native of the Kafir race--not merely
holds his ground, but increases far more rapidly than he did before
Europeans came, because the Europeans have checked intertribal wars and
the slaughter of the tribesmen by the chiefs and their wizards, and also
because the Europeans have opened up new kinds of employment. As,
therefore, the native will certainly remain, and will, indeed, probably
continue to be in a vast majority, it is vital to a comprehension of
South African problems to know what he has been and may be expected to
become.
The native races are three, and the differences between them are marked,
being differences not only of physical appearance and of language, but
also of character, habits, and grade of civilization. These three are
the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and those Bantu tribes whom we call Kafirs.
The Bushmen were, to all appearance, the first on the ground, the real
aborigines of South Africa. They are one of the lowest races to be found
anywhere, as low as the Fuegians or the "black fellows" of Australia,
though perhaps not quite so low as the Veddahs of Ceylon or the now
extinct natives of Tasmania. They seem to have been originally
scattered over all South Africa, from the Zambesi to the Cape, and so
late as eighty years ago were almost the only inhabitants of Basutoland,
where now none of them are left. They were nomads of the most primitive
type, neither tilling the soil nor owning cattle, but living on such
wild creatures as they could catch or smite with their poisoned arrows,
and, when these failed, upon wild fruits and the roots of plants. For
the tracking and trapping of game they had a marvellous faculty, such as
neither the other races nor any European could equal. But they had no
organization, not even a tribal one, for they wandered about in small
groups; and no religion beyond some vague notion of ghosts, and of
spirits inhabiting or connected with natural objects; while their
language was a succession of clicks interrupted by grunts. Very low in
stature, and possibly cognate to the pygmies whom Mr. H.M. Stanley found
in Central Africa, they were capable of enduring great fatigue and of
travelling very swiftly. Untamably fierce unless caught in childhood,
and incapable of accustoming themselves to civilized life, driven out of
some districts by the European settlers, who were often forced to shoot
them down in self-defence, and in other regions no longer able to find
support owing to the disappearance of the game, they are now almost
extinct, though a few remain in the Kalahari Desert and the adjoining
parts of northern Bechuanaland and western Matabililand, toward Lake
Ngami. I saw at the Kimberley mines two or three dwarf natives who were
said to have Bushmen blood in them, but it is no longer easy to find in
the Colony a pure specimen. Before many years the only trace of their
existence will be in the remarkable drawings of wild animals with which
they delighted to cover the smooth surfaces of sheltered rocks. These
drawings, which are found all the way from the Zambesi to the Cape, and
from Manicaland westward, are executed in red, yellow, and black
pigments, and are often full of spirit. Rude, of course, they are, but
they often convey the aspect, and especially the characteristic
attitude, of the animal with great fidelity.
The second native race was that which the Dutch called Hottentot, and
whom the Portuguese explorers found occupying the maritime region in the
south-west corner of the continent, to the east and to the north of the
Cape of Good Hope. They are supposed to have come from the north and
dispossessed the Bushmen of the grassy coast lands, driving them into
the more arid interior. But of this there is no evidence; and some have
even fancied that the Hottentot race itself may have been a mixed one,
produced by intermarriage between Bushmen and Kafirs. Be this as it may,
the Hottentots were superior to the Bushmen both physically and
intellectually. They were small men, but not pygmies, of a reddish or
yellowish black hue, with no great muscular power in their slender
frames. Their hair, very short and woolly, grew, like that of the
Bushmen, in small balls or tufts over the skull, just as grass tufts
grow separate from one another in the drier parts of the veldt. They
possessed sheep and also cattle, lean beasts with huge horns; and they
roved hither and thither over the country as they could find pasture for
their animals, doing a little hunting, but not attempting to till the
soil, and unacquainted with the metals. Living in tribes under their
chiefs, they fought a little with one another, and a great deal with the
Bushmen, who tried to prey upon their cattle. They were a thoughtless,
cheerful, good-natured, merry sort of people, whom it was not difficult
to domesticate as servants, and their relations with the Dutch settlers,
in spite of two wars, were, on the whole, friendly. Within a century
after the foundation of Cape Colony, their numbers, never large, had
vastly diminished, partly from the occupation by the colonists of their
best grazing-grounds, but still more from the ravages of small-pox and
other epidemics, which ships touching on their way from the East Indies
brought into the country. In A.D. 1713 whole tribes perished in this
way. I speak of the Hottentots in the past tense, for they are now, as a
distinct race, almost extinct in the Colony, although a good deal of
their blood has passed into the mixed coloured population of Cape Town
and its neighbourhood--a population the other elements of which are
Malays from the Dutch East Indies, and the descendants of slaves brought
from the West Coast of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. From unions between Hottentot women and the Dutch sprang the
mixed race whom the Dutch call Bastards and the English Griquas, and
who, though now dying out, like the French and Indian half-breeds of
Western Canada, played at one time a considerable part in colonial
politics. Along the south bank of the Orange River and to the north of
it, in Great Namaqualand, small tribes, substantially identical with the
Hottentots, still wander over the arid wilderness. But in the settled
parts of the Colony the Hottentot, of whom we used to hear so much, and
whom the Portuguese remembering the death of the viceroy D'Almeida (who
was killed in a skirmish in A.D. 1510), at one time feared so much, has
vanished more completely than has the Red Indian from the Atlantic
States of North America. And the extinction or absorption of the few
remaining nomads will probably follow at no distant date.
Very different have been the fortunes, very different are the prospects,
of the third and far more numerous South African race, those whom we
call Kafirs, and who call themselves Abantu or Bantu ("the people"). The
word "Kafir" is Arabic. It has nothing to do with Mount Kaf (the
Caucasus), but means an infidel (literally, "one who denies"), and is
applied by Mussulmans not merely to these people, but to other heathen
also, as, for instance, to the idolaters of Kafiristan, in the
Hindu-Kush Mountains. The Portuguese doubtless took the name from the
Arabs, whom they found established at several points on the East African
coast northward from Sofala, and the Dutch took it from the Portuguese,
together with such words as "kraal" (corral), and "assagai." The Bantu
tribes, if one may include under that name all the blacks who speak
languages of the same general type, occupy the whole of East Africa
southward from the Upper Nile, where that river issues from the great
Nyanza lakes, together with the Congo basin and most of South-west
Africa. They include various groups, such as the Ama-Kosa tribes (to
which belong the Tembus and Pondos), who dwell on the coast of Cape
Colony eastward from the Great Fish River; the Ama-Zulu group,
consisting of the Zulus proper (in Natal and Zululand), the Swazis, the
Matabili, farther to the north, and the Angoni, in Nyassaland, beyond
the Zambesi River; the Amatonga group, between Zululand and Delagoa Bay;
the Bechuana group, including the Bamangwato, the Basuto and the
Barolongs, as well as the Barotse, far off on the middle course of the
Zambesi; the Makalaka or Maholi, and cognate tribes, inhabiting
Mashonaland and Manicaland. The linguistic and ethnical affinities of
these groups and tribes are still very imperfectly known, but their
speech and their habits are sufficiently similar to enable us to refer
them to one type, just as we do the Finnic or the Slavonic peoples in
Europe. And they are even more markedly unlike the Hottentots or the
Bushmen than the Slavs are to the Finns, or both of these to those
interesting aborigines of northern Europe, the Lapps.
The Bantu or Kafirs--I use the term as synonymous--who dwell south of
the Zambesi are usually strong and well-made men, not below the average
height of a European. In colour they vary a good deal; some are as black
as the Gulf of Guinea negro, some rather brown than black. All have the
thick lips, the woolly hair, and the scanty beard of the negro, and
nearly all the broad, low nose; yet in some the nose is fairly high,
and the cast of features suggests an admixture of Semitic blood--an
admixture which could be easily explained by the presence, from a pretty
remote time, of Arab settlers, as well as traders, along the coast of
the Indian Ocean. As the Bantu vary in aspect, so do they also in
intelligence. No tribe is in this respect conspicuously superior to any
other, though the Zulus show more courage in fight than most of the
others, the Fingos more aptitude for trade, the Basutos more disposition
to steady industry. But, while the general level of intellect is below
that of the Red Indians or the Maoris or the Hawaiians (if rather above
that of the Guinea negroes), individuals are now and then found of
considerable talents and great force of character. Three such men as the
Zulu Tshka, the Basuto Moshesh, and the Bechuana Khama, not to speak of
those who, like the eloquent missionary Tiyo Soga, have received a
regular European education, are sufficient to show the capacity of the
race for occasionally reaching a standard which white men must respect.
And in one regard the Bantu race shows a kind of strength which the Red
Indians and Polynesians lack. They are a very prolific people, and under
the conditions of peace which European rule secures they multiply with a
rapidity which some deem alarming.
How long the various Bantu tribes have been in South Africa is a
question on which no light has yet been thrown, or can, indeed, be
expected. Some of them have a vague tradition that they came from the
north; but the recollections of savages seldom go back more than five or
six generations, and retain little except the exploits or the genealogy
of some conspicuous chief. When the Portuguese arrived in the end of the
fifteenth century, they found Kafirs already inhabiting the country from
Natal northward. But apparently they did not then extend as far to the
west of Natal as they do now; and there is no reason to think that
considerable parts of the interior, such as the region which is now the
Orange Free State and Basutoland, were not yet occupied, but left to the
wandering Bushmen. The Kafirs were then, and continued down to our own
time, in a state of incessant tribal warfare; and from time to time one
martial tribe, under a forceful chief, would exterminate or chase away
some weaker clan and reduce wide areas to a wilderness. Of any large
conquests, or of any steady progress in the arts either of war or of
peace, there is no record, and indeed, in the general darkness, no
trace. The history of the native races, so far as ascertainable, begins
with the advent of the whites, and even after their advent remains
extremely shadowy until, early in this century, the onward march of
settlement gave the Dutch and English settlers the means of becoming
better acquainted with their black neighbours.
Across this darkness there strikes one ray of light. It is a very faint
ray, but in the absence of all other light it is precious. It is that
which is supplied by the prehistoric ruins and the abandoned
gold-workings of Mashonaland.
CHAPTER IX
OUT OF THE DARKNESS--ZIMBABWYE
The ruined buildings of Mashonaland and Matabililand have excited in
recent years an amount of interest and curiosity which is
disproportionate to their number, size, and beauty, but by no means
disproportionate to their value as being the only record, scant as it
is, we possess of what has been deemed an early South African
civilization. I will describe in the fewest words such of these
buildings as I saw, leaving the reader of archaeological tastes to find
fuller details in the well-known book of that enterprising explorer, the
late Mr. Theodore Bent. Some short account of them seems all the more
needed, because the first descriptions published gave the impression
that they were far more considerable than they really are.
Scattered over the plateau of southern Mashonaland and Matabililand,
from its mountainous edge on the east to the neighbourhood of Tati on
the west, there are to be found fragments of walls built of small blocks
of granite resembling paving stones (usually about a foot long by six
inches high), but often larger, not cut smooth, but chipped or trimmed
to a fairly uniform size. These walls are without mortar or other
cementing material, but the stones are so neatly set together, and the
wall usually so thick, that the structure is compact and cohesive. The
walls are mostly thinner at the top than at the base. The only
ornamentation consists in placing some of the layers at an acute angle
to the other layers above and below, so as to produce what is called the
herring-bone pattern. Occasionally a different pattern is obtained by
leaving spaces at intervals between the horizontal stones of certain
layers, making a kind of diaper. In some cases this ornamentation,
always very simple, occurs only on one part of the wall, and it has been
said that it occurs usually if not invariably on the part which faces
the east. I heard of ten or twelve such pieces of wall in different
parts of the plateau, and saw photographs of most of these. Probably
others exist, for many districts, especially in the hills, have been
imperfectly explored, and trees easily conceal these low erections. One
was described to me, where the walls are the facings of seven terraces,
rising one above another to a sort of platform on the top. This I have
not seen; but it is probably similar to one which I did see and examine
at a place called Dhlodhlo, about fifty miles south-east of Bulawayo.
This group of ruins, one of the most interesting in the country, stands
high among rocky hills, from which a superb view is gained over the wide
stretches of rolling table-land to the north and north-west, a charming
situation which might have attracted the old builders did they possess
any sense of beauty. On a low eminence there has been erected such a
wall of such hewn, or rather trimmed, stones as I have just described.
It is now about twenty feet in height, and may have originally been
higher. On the eastern side this wall consists of three parts, each
about six feet high, with two narrow terraces, each from five to six
feet wide, between them, the second wall rising from the first terrace,
and the third or highest wall from the second terrace. On this side some
of the stone courses have the simple forms of ornamental pattern already
mentioned. On the opposite, or western and north-western, side only one
terrace and a low, unornamented wall of trimmed stones are now
discernible. To the north, still within what seems to have been the main
inclosing wall, are small inclosures built of trimmed stone, which may
have been chambers originally roofed with wood or bushes. At the top of
the highest wall there is at the north-north-west end a small level
platform of earth or rubble, which seems to have been filled in behind
the terraced walls. This platform is approached by a narrow passage
between walls of trimmed stone, at one point in which there appears to
have been a sort of narrow gateway barely wide enough for two persons to
pass. There is no trace of any stone building on the top of the
platform, and the remains of clay huts which one finds there may well be
quite modern. To the south of this principal structure there is a second
small hill or boss of granite, protected on three sides by steep sheets
of granite rock. Its top is inclosed by a low wall of trimmed stones,
now in places quite broken away, with no trace of any stone building
within. All round on the lower ground are large inclosures rudely built
of rough stones, and probably intended for cattle-kraals. They may be
quite modern, and they throw no light on the purpose of the ancient
buildings. Nor is much light to be obtained from the objects which have
been found in the ruins. When I was there they were being searched by
the Mashonaland Ancient Ruins Exploration Company, a company authorized
by the British South Africa Company to dig and scrape in the ancient
buildings of the country for gold or whatever else of value may be there
discoverable, an enterprise which, though it may accelerate the progress
of archaeological inquiry, obviously requires to be conducted with great
care and by competent persons. So far as I could observe, all due care
was being used by the gentleman in charge of the work at Dhlodhlo; but
considering how easy it is to obliterate the distinctive features of a
ruin and leave it in a condition unfavourable to future examination, it
seems desirable that the company should, as a rule, await the arrival of
trained archaeologists rather than hurry on explorations by amateurs,
however zealous and well intentioned. Of the objects found, which were
courteously shown to me, some are modern, such as the bits of pottery,
apparently Indian or Chinese, the bits of glass, the bullets and
fragments of flint-lock muskets, a small cannon, and an iron hammer.
These are doubtless of Portuguese origin, though it does not follow that
any Portuguese expedition ever penetrated so far inland, for they may
have been gifts or purchases from the Portuguese established on the
coast four or five hundred miles away. So, too, the silver and copper
ornaments found, and some of the gold ones (occasionally alloyed with
copper), which show patterns apparently Portuguese, may be recent. There
are also, however, some gold ornaments, such as beads, bangles (a
skeleton was found with bangles on the legs and a bead necklace), and
pieces of twisted gold wire, which may be far more ancient, and indeed
as old as the structure itself. A small crucible with nuggets and small
bits of gold goes to indicate that smelting was carried on, though the
nearest ancient gold-workings are six miles distant. Probably here, as
at Hissarlik and at Carthage, there exist remains from a long succession
of centuries, the spot having been occupied from remote antiquity.[6] At
present it is not only uninhabited, but regarded by the natives with
fear. They believe it to be haunted by the ghosts of the departed, and
are unwilling, except in the daytime and for wages paid by the
Exploration Company, to touch or even to enter the ruins. They can
hardly be persuaded even to relate such traditions as exist regarding
the place. All that has been gathered is that it was the dwelling of a
line of _mambos_, or chiefs, the last of whom was burned here by
Mosilikatze, the Matabili king, when he conquered the country sixty
years ago. (The place does show marks of fire.) But the buildings were
here long before the mambos reigned, and who built them, or why, no one
knows. The natives come sometimes to make offerings to ancestral ghosts,
especially when they ask for success in hunting; and if the hunt be
successful, strips of meat are cut off and placed in cleft sticks for
the benefit of the ghosts.
Three hypotheses have been advanced regarding the Dhlodhlo building. One
regards them as a fortress. The objection to this is that the terraced
and ornamented wall is so far from contributing to defence that it
actually facilitates attack; for, by the help of the terraces and of the
interstices among the stones which the ornamental pattern supplies, an
active man could easily scale it in front. Moreover, there is hard by,
to the north, a higher and more abrupt hill which would have offered a
far better site for a fort. The second view is that Dhlodhlo was a
mining station, where slaves were kept at work; but if so, why was it
not placed near the old gold-workings instead of some miles off, and of
what use were the terraced walls? The inquirer is therefore led to the
third view--that the building was in some way connected with religious
worship, and that the ornament which is seen along the eastern wall was
placed there with some religious motive. There is, however, nothing
whatever to indicate the nature of that worship, nor the race that
practised it, for no objects of a possibly religious character (such as
those I shall presently mention at Zimbabwye) have been found here.
I visited a second ruin among the mountains of Mashonaland, near the
Lezapi River, at a place called Chipadzi's grave, a mile from the kraal
of a chief named Chipunza. Here a rocky granite kopje, almost
inaccessible on two sides, is protected on one of the other sides by a
neatly built wall of well-trimmed stones, similar to that of Dhlodhlo,
but without ornament. The piece that remains is some fifty yards long,
five feet thick at the base, and eleven feet high at its highest point.
It is obviously a wall of defence, for the only erections within are
low, rough inclosures of loose stones, and three clay huts, one of which
covers the grave of Chipadzi, a chief who died some twenty years ago,
and who was doubtless interred here because the place was secluded and
already in a fashion consecrated by the presence of the ancient wall.
That the wall is ancient hardly admits of doubt, for it is quite unlike
any of the walls--there are not many in the country--which the Kafirs
now build, these being always of stones entirely untrimmed and very
loosely fitted together, though sometimes plastered with mud to make
them hold.[7] There is nothing to see beyond the wall itself, and the
only interest of the place is in its showing that the race who built
Dhlodhlo and other similar walls in Matibililand were probably here
also.
Much larger and more remakable is the group of ruins (situated seventeen
miles from Fort Victoria, in southern Mashonaland) which goes by the
name of the Great Zimbabwye. This Bantu word is said to denote a stone
building, but has often been used to describe the residence of a great
chief, whatever the materials of which it is constructed. It is a common
noun, and not the name of one particular place. Europeans, however,
confine it to this one ruin, or rather to two ruined buildings near
each other. One of these is on the top of a rocky and in parts
precipitous hill, the other in a valley half a mile from the foot of the
hill.
The first, which we may call the Fort, consists of a line of wall, in
parts double, defending the more accessible parts of the eastern and
south-eastern end of the hill or kopje, which is about 500 feet high,
and breaks down on its southern side in a nearly vertical sheet of
granite. The walls, which in some places are thirty feet high, are all
built of small trimmed blocks of granite such as I have already
described, without mortar, but neatly fitted together. They are in
excellent preservation, and are skilfully constructed in a sort of
labyrinth, so as to cover all the places where an enemy might approach.
From the openings in the wall, where doors were probably placed,
passages are carried inward, very narrow and winding, so that only one
person at a time can pass, and completely commanded by the high wall on
either side. Everything speaks of defence, and everything is very well
adapted, considering the rudeness of the materials, for efficient
defence. There is no sort of ornament in the walls, except that here and
there at the entrances some stones are laid transversely to the others,
and that certain long, thin pieces of a slaty stone, rounded so that one
might call them stone poles--they are about five to seven feet
long--project from the top of the wall. Neither is there any trace of an
arch or vaulted roof. None of what look like chambers has a roof. They
were doubtless covered with the branches of trees. Very few objects have
been found throwing any light on the object of the building or its
builders, and these have been now removed, except some small pieces of
sandstone, a rock not found in the neighbourhood, which (it has been
conjectured) may have been brought for the purposes of mining.
The other building is much more remarkable. It stands on a slight
eminence in the level ground between the hill on which the Fort stands
and another somewhat lower granite hill, and is about a third of a mile
from the Fort. It consists of a wall, rather elliptical than circular in
form, from thirty to forty feet high, fourteen feet thick near the
ground, and from six to nine thick at the top, where one can walk along
a considerable part with little difficulty. This wall is built of the
same small, well-trimmed blocks of granite, nicely fitted together, and
for more than half the circumference is in excellent preservation,
although shrubs and climbing vines have here and there rooted themselves
in it. The rest of it is more or less broken, and in one place quite
overthrown. There are two gates, at the west and the north. The wall is
quite plain, except for about one-third (or perhaps a little less) of
the outer face, where there is such an ornament as I have already
described, of two courses of stones set slantingly at an acute angle to
the ordinary flat courses above and below. These two courses are the
fifth and seventh from the top. In the space surrounded by the wall,
which is about three-quarters of an acre, are some small inclosures of
trimmed stone, apparently chambers. There is also a singular wall
running parallel to the inner face of the great inclosing wall for some
twenty yards, leaving between it and that inner face a very narrow
passage, which at one point must have been closed by a door (probably of
stone), for at that point steps lead up on either side, and hollow
spaces fit for receiving a door remain. At one end this passage opens
into a small open space, where the most curious of all the erections are
to be found, namely, two solid towers of trimmed stones. One of these is
quite low, rising only some five feet from the ground. The other is more
than forty feet high, overtopping the great inclosing wall (from which
it is eight feet distant) by about five feet, and has a bluntly conical
top. It reminds one a little of an Irish round tower, though not so
high, save that the Irish towers are hollow and this solid, or of a
Buddhist tope, save that the topes which are solid, are very much
thicker. There is nothing whatever to indicate the purpose of this
tower, but the fact that the space in which it and the smaller tower
stand is cut off from the rest of the enclosed area by a pretty high
wall seems to show that it was meant to be specially protected or was
deemed to be specially sacred.
Outside the main inclosing wall are several small inclosures of
irregular shape, surrounded by similar walls of trimmed stones, but all
low and broken and with nothing inside. One of these joins on to the
main wall of the great inclosure.
This is all that there is to see at Zimbabwye. What I have described
seems little, and that little is simple, even rude. The interest lies in
guessing what the walls were built for, and by whom. Comparatively
little has been discovered by digging. No inscriptions whatever have
been found. Some figures of birds rudely carved in a sort of soapstone
were fixed along the top of the walls of the Fort, and have been removed
to the Cape Town museum. It is thought that they represent vultures, and
the vulture was a bird of religious significance among some of the
Semitic nations. Fragments of soapstone bowls were discovered, some with
figures of animals carved on them, some with geometrical patterns, while
on one were marks which might possibly belong to some primitive
alphabet. There were also whorls somewhat resembling those which occur
so profusely in the ruins of Troy, and stone objects which may be
phalli, though some at least of them are deemed by the authorities of
the British Museum (to whom I have shown them) to be probably pieces
used for playing a game like that of fox-and-geese. The iron and bronze
weapons which were found may have been comparatively modern, but the
small crucibles for smelting gold, with tools and a curious ingot-mould
(said to resemble ancient moulds used at tin workings) were apparently
ancient.
What purpose were these buildings meant to serve? That on the hill was
evidently a stronghold, and a stronghold of a somewhat elaborate kind,
erected against an enemy deemed formidable. The large building below can
hardly have been a place of defence, because it stands on level ground
with a high, rocky hill just above it, which would have afforded a much
stronger situation. Neither was it a mining station, for the nearest
place where any trace of gold has been found is seven miles away, and in
a mining station, even if meant to hold slave workers, there would have
been no use for a wall so lofty as this. Two hypotheses remain: that
this was the residence of a chief, or that it was erected for the
purposes of religious worship. It may have been both--a palace, so to
speak, with a temple attached. The presence of the inner inclosure,
guarded by its separate wall, and with its curious tower, is most
plausibly explained by supposing a religious purpose; for as religion is
the strangest of all human things, and that in which men most vary, so
it is naturally called in to explain what is otherwise inexplicable.
What, then, was the religion of those who built this shrine, if shrine
it was? The ornamentation of that part of the outer wall which faces the
rising sun suggests sun-worship. The phalli (if they are phalli) point
to one of the Oriental forms of the worship of the forces of nature. The
birds' heads may have a religious significance, and possibly the
significance which it is said that vultures had in the Syrian
nature-worship. These data give some slight presumptions, yet the field
for conjecture remains a very wide one, and there is nothing in the
buildings to indicate the particular race who erected the Fort and the
Temple (if it was a temple). However, the tower bears some resemblance
to a tower which appears within a town wall on an ancient coin of the
Phoenician city of Byblus; and this coincidence, slight enough, has,
in the dearth of other light, been used to support the view that the
builders belonged to some Semitic race.
Had we nothing but the ruined walls of Zimbabwye, Dhlodhlo, and the
other spots where similar ruins have been observed, the problem would be
insoluble. We could only say that the existing native races had at some
apparently distant time been more civilized than they are now and
capable of building walls they do not now build, or else we should
suppose that some now extinct race had built these. But there are other
facts known to us which suggest, though they do not establish, an
hypothesis regarding the early history of the country.
In very remote times there existed, as is known from the Egyptian
monuments, a trade from South-east Africa into the Red Sea. The
remarkable sculptures at Deir el Bahari, near Luxor, dating from the
time of Queen Hatasu, sister of the great conqueror Thothmes III. (B.C.
1600?), represent the return of an expedition from a country called
Punt, which would appear, from the objects brought back, to have been
somewhere on the East African coast.[8] Much later the Book of Kings (1
Kings ix. 26-28; x. 11, 15, 22) tells us that Solomon and Hiram of Tyre
entered into a sort of joint adventure trade from the Red Sea port of
Ezion-geber to a country named Ophir, which produced gold. There are
other indications that gold used to come from East Africa, but so far as
we know it has never been obtained in quantity from any part of the
coast between Mozambique and Cape Guardafui. Thus there are grounds for
believing that a traffic between the Red Sea and the coast south of the
Zambesi may have existed from very remote times. Of its later existence
there is of course no doubt. We know from Arabian sources that in the
eighth century an Arab tribe defeated in war established itself on the
African coast south of Cape Guardafui, and that from the ninth century
onward there was a considerable trade between South-east Africa and the
Red Sea ports--a trade which may well have existed long before. And when
the Portuguese began to explore the coast in 1496 they found Arab
chieftains established at various points along it as far south as
Sofala, and found them getting gold from the interior. Three things,
therefore, are certain--a trade between South-east Africa and the Red
Sea, a certain number of Arabs settled along the edge of the ocean, and
an export of gold. Now all over Mashonaland and Matabililand ancient
gold-workings have been observed. Some are quite modern,--one can see
the wooden supports and the iron tools not yet destroyed by rust,--and
it would seem from the accounts of the natives that the mining went on
to some small extent down to sixty years ago, when the Matabili
conquered the country. Others, however, are, from the appearance of the
ground, obviously much more ancient. I have seen some that must have
been centuries old, and have been told of others apparently far older,
possibly as old as the buildings at Zimbabwye. I was, moreover, informed
by Mr. Cecil Rhodes (who is keenly interested in African archaeology)
that he had seen on the high plateau of Inyanga, in eastern Mashonaland,
some remarkable circular pits lined with stone, and approached in each
case by a narrow subterranean passage, which can best be explained by
supposing them to have been receptacles for the confinement of slaves
occupied in tilling the soil, as the surrounding country bears mark, in
the remains of ancient irrigation channels, of an extensive system of
tillage where none now exists. The way in which the stones are laid in
these pit-walls is quite unlike any modern Kafir work, and points to the
presence of a more advanced race. Putting all these facts together, it
has been plausibly argued that at some very distant period men more
civilized than the Kafirs came in search of gold into Mashonaland,
opened these mines, and obtained from them the gold which found its way
to the Red Sea ports, and that the buildings whose ruins we see were
their work. How long ago this happened we cannot tell, but if the
strangers came from Arabia they must have done so earlier than the time
of Mohammed, for there is nothing of an Islamic character about the
ruins or the remains found, and it is just as easy to suppose that they
came in the days of Solomon, fifteen centuries before Mohammed. Nor can
we guess how they disappeared: whether they were overpowered and
exterminated by the Kafirs, or whether, as Mr. Selous conjectures, they
were gradually absorbed by the latter, their civilization and religion
perishing, although the practice of mining for gold remained. The
occasional occurrence among the Kafirs of faces with a cast of features
approaching the Semitic has been thought to confirm this notion, though
nobody has as yet suggested that we are to look here for the lost Ten
Tribes. Whoever these people were, they have long since vanished. The
natives seem to have no traditions about the builders of Zimbabwye and
the other ancient walls, though they regard the ruins with a certain
awe, and fear to approach them at twilight.
It is this mystery which makes these buildings, the solitary
archaeological curiosities of South Africa, so impressive. The ruins are
not grand, nor are they beautiful; they are simple even to rudeness. It
is the loneliness of the landscape in which they stand, and still more
the complete darkness which surrounds their origin, their object, and
their history, that gives to them their unique interest. Whence came the
builders? What tongue did they speak? What religion did they practise?
Did they vanish imperceptibly away, or did they fly to the coast, or
were they massacred in a rising of their slaves? We do not know;
probably we shall never know. We can only say, in the words of the
Eastern poet:
"They came like water, and like wind they went."
[Footnote 6: Mr. Neal, managing director of the Company, has been good
enough to inform me that since my visit he satisfied himself that there
had been occupations by different races and probably at widely distant
dates. Many skeletons have been found, with a good deal of gold jewelry,
and some bronze implements.]
[Footnote 7: This place is described by Mr. Selous in his interesting
book, _A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa_, pp. 339-341. He thinks the wall
as well built as those at the Great Zimbabwye. To me it seemed not so
good, and a little rougher even than the work at Dhlodhlo. Hard by is a
modern Kafir fort, Chitikete, with a plastered and loop-holed rough
stone wall, quite unlike this wall at Chipadzi's grave. This place is
further described in Chapter XVI.]
[Footnote 8: Maspero (_Histoire ancienne des Peuples d'Orient_, p. 169)
conjectures Somaliland]
CHAPTER X
THE KAFIRS: THEIR HISTORY AND INSTITUTIONS
The curtain rises upon the Kafir peoples when the Portuguese landed on
the east coast of Africa in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Arab
sheiks then held a few of the coast villages, ruling over a mixed race,
nominally Mohammedan, and trading with the Bantu tribes of the interior.
The vessels of these Arabs crossed the Indian Ocean with the monsoon to
Calicut and the Malabar coast, and the Indian goods they carried back
were exchanged for the gold and ivory which the natives brought down.
The principal race that held the country between the Limpopo and the
Zambesi was that which the Portuguese called Makalanga or Makaranga, and
which we call Makalaka. They are the progenitors of the tribes who, now
greatly reduced in numbers and divided into small villages and clans,
occupy Mashonaland. Their head chief was called the Monomotapa, a name
interpreted to mean "Lord of the Mountain" or "Lord of the Mines." This
personage was turned by Portuguese grandiloquence into an emperor, and
by some European geographers into the name of an empire; so Monomotapa
came to figure on old maps as the designation of a vast territory.
When, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch at the Cape
began to learn something of the Kafirs who dwelt to the eastward, they
found that there was no large dominion, but a great number of petty
tribes, mostly engaged in war with one another. Some were half nomad,
none was firmly rooted in the soil; and the fact that tribes who spoke
similar dialects were often far away from one another, with a tribe of a
different dialect living between, indicated that there had been many
displacements of population of which no historical record existed. Early
in the present century events occurred which showed how such
displacements might have been brought about. In the last years of the
eighteenth century Dingiswayo, the exiled son of the chief of the
Abatetwa tribe, which lived in what is now Zululand, found his way to
the Cape, and learned to admire the military organization of the British
troops who were then holding the Colony. Returning home and regaining
his throne, he began to organise and drill his warriors, who before that
time had fought without order or discipline, like other savages. His
favourite officer was Tshaka, a young chief, also exiled, who belonged
to the then small tribe of Zulus. On the death of Dingiswayo, Tshaka was
chosen its chief by the army, and the tribes that had obeyed Dingiswayo
were thenceforward known under the name of Zulus. Tshaka, who united to
his intellectual gifts a boundless ambition and a ruthless will, further
improved the military system of his master, and armed his soldiers with
a new weapon, a short, broad-bladed spear, fit for stabbing at close
quarters, instead of the old light javelin which had been theretofore
used. He formed them into regiments, and drilled them to such a
perfection of courage that no enemy could withstand their rush, and the
defeated force, except such as could escape by fleetness of foot, was
slaughtered on the spot. Quarter had never been given in native wars,
but the trained valour of the Zulus, and their habit of immediately
engaging the enemy hand to hand, not only gave them an advantage like
that which suddenly made the Spartan infantry superior to all their
neighbours, but rendered their victories far more sanguinary than native
battles had previously been Tshaka rapidly subjected or blotted out the
clans that lived near, except the Swazis, a kindred tribe whose
difficult country gave them some protection. He devastated all the
region round that of his own subjects, while the flight before his
warriors of the weaker tribes, each of which fell upon its neighbours
with the assagai, caused widespread slaughter and ruin all over
South-east Africa. Natal became almost a desert, and of the survivors
who escaped into the mountains, many took to human flesh for want of
other food. To the north of the Vaal River a section of the Zulu army,
which had revolted under its general, Mosilikatze, carried slaughter and
destruction through the surrounding country for hundreds of miles, till
it was itself chased away beyond the Limpopo by the emigrant Boers, as
will be related in the following chapter.
To trace the history of these various native wars would occupy far more
space than I can spare. I will sum up their general results.
A new and powerful kingdom, far stronger than any other native monarchy
we know to have existed before or since, was formed by the Zulus. It
remained powerful under Dingaan (who murdered his half brother Tshaka in
1828), Panda (brother of Tshaka and Dingaan), and Cetewayo (son of
Panda), till 1879, when it was overthrown by the British.
Various offshoots from the Zulu nation were scattered out in different
directions. The Matabili occupied Matabililand in 1838. The Angoni had
before that year crossed the Zambesi and settled in Nyassaland, where
they are still formidable to their native neighbours and troublesome to
the whites.
Kafir tribes from the north-east were chased southward into the mountain
country now called Basutoland, most of which had been previously
inhabited only by Bushmen, and here the Basuto kingdom was built up out
of fugitive clans, by the famous chief Moshesh, between 1820 and 1840.
Some of the Bechuana tribes were driven from the east into their present
seats in Bechuanaland, some few far north-west to the banks of the
Zambesi, where Livingstone found them.
Not only what is now Natal, but most of what is now the Orange Free
State, with a part of the Transvaal, was almost denuded of inhabitants.
This had the important consequence of inducing the emigrants from Cape
Colony, whose fortunes I shall trace in the following chapter, to move
toward these regions and establish themselves there.
The Gaza tribe, of Zulu race, but revolters from Tshaka, broke away from
that tyrant, and carried fire and sword among the Tongas and other
tribes living to the west and north-west of Delagoa Bay. In 1833 they
destroyed the Portuguese garrison there. In 1862 a chief called Mzila
became their king, and established his dominion over all the tribes that
dwell on the eastern slope of the Quathlamba Mountains, between the
Limpopo and the Zambesi. He and his son Gungunhana, who in 1896 was
seized and carried off by the Portuguese, were for a time at the head of
the third great native power in South Africa, the other two being that
of Cetewayo, which perished in 1879, and that of Lo Bengula, overthrown
in 1893. All three chiefs were Zulus in blood. Originally small in
number, this race has played by far the greatest part in the annals of
the native peoples.
The career of Tshaka has deserved some description, because it changed
the face of South Africa in a somewhat similar way, allowing for the
difference of scale, to that in which the career of Tshaka's
contemporary, Napoleon Bonaparte, changed the face of Europe. But in
1836, eight years after Tshaka's death, the white man, who had hitherto
come in contact with the Kafirs only on the Zambesi and at a few points
on the south-eastern and southern coast, began that march into the
interior which has now brought him to the shores of Lake Tanganyika.
Thenceforward the wars of the natives among themselves cease to be
important. It is their strife with the European conqueror that is of
consequence, and the narrative of that strife belongs to the history of
the European colonies and republics, which will be given in the two
succeeding chapters. This, however, seems the right place for some
remarks on the government and customs of the Kafir tribes, intended to
explain the conditions under which these tribes have met and attempted
to resist the white strangers who have now become their rulers.
The Kafirs were savages, yet not of a low type, for they tilled the
soil, could work in metals, spoke a highly developed language, and had a
sort of customary law. The south-east coast tribes, Zulus, Pondos,
Tembus, Kosas, inhabiting a fairly well-watered and fertile country,
were, as a rule, the strongest men and the fiercest fighters; but the
tribes of the interior were not inferior in intellect, and sometimes
superior in the arts. Lower in every respect were the west-coast tribes.
They dwelt in a poor and almost waterless land, and their blood was
mixed with that of Hottentots and Bushmen. In every race the
organization was by families, clans, and tribes, the tribe consisting of
a number of clans or smaller groups, having at its head one supreme
chief, belonging to a family whose lineage was respected. The power of
the chief was, however, not everywhere the same. Among the Zulus, whose
organization was entirely military, he was a despot whose word was law.
Among the Bechuana tribes, and their kinsfolk the Basutos, he was
obliged to defer to the sentiment of the people, which (in some tribes)
found expression in a public meeting where every freeman had a right to
speak and might differ from the chief.[9] Even such able men as the
Basuto Moshesh and the Bechuana Khama had often to bend to the wish of
their subjects, and a further check existed in the tendency to move away
from a harsh and unpopular chief and place one's self under the
protection of some more tactful ruler. Everywhere, of course, the old
customs had great power, and the influence of the old men who were most
conversant with them was considerable. The chief of the whole tribe did
not interfere much with affairs outside his own particular clan, and was
a more important figure in war-time than during peace. Aided by a
council of his leading men, each chief administered justice and settled
disputes; and it was his function to allot land to those who asked for a
field to till, the land itself belonging to the tribe as a whole. The
chiefs act gave a title to the piece allotted so long as it was
cultivated, for public opinion resented any arbitrary eviction; but
pasture-land was open to all the cattle of the clansmen. It was in
cattle that the wealth of a chief or a rich man lay, and cattle, being
the common measure of value, served as currency, as they serve still
among the more remote tribes which have not learned to use British coin.
Polygamy was practised by all who could afford it, the wife being
purchased from her father with cattle, more or fewer according to her
rank. This practice, called _lobola_, still prevails universally, and
has caused much perplexity to the missionaries. Its evil effects are
obvious, but it is closely intertwined with the whole system of native
society. A chief had usually a head wife, belonging to some important
house, and her sons were preferred in succession to those of the
inferior wives. In some tribes the chief, like a Turkish sultan, had no
regular wife, but only concubines. Among the coast tribes no one, except
a chief, was suffered to marry any one of kin to him. There was great
pride of birth among the head chiefs, and their genealogies have in not
a few cases been carefully kept for seven or eight generations.
Slavery existed among some of the tribes of the interior, and the
ordinary wife was everywhere little better than a slave, being required
to do nearly all the tillage and most of the other work, except that
about the cattle, which, being more honourable, was performed by men.
The male Kafir is a lazy fellow who likes talking and sleeping better
than continuous physical exertion, and the difficulty of inducing him to
work is the chief difficulty which European mine-owners in South Africa
complain of. Like most men in his state of civilization, he is fond of
hunting, even in its lowest forms, and of fighting. Both of these
pleasures are being withdrawn from him, the former by the extinction of
the game, the latter by the British Government; but it will be long
before he acquires the habits of steady and patient industry which have
become part of the character of the inhabitants of India.
War was the natural state of the tribes toward one another, just as it
was among the Red Indians and the primitive Celts, and indeed generally
everywhere in the early days of Europe. Their weapons were the spear or
assagai, and a sort of wooden club, occasionally a crescent-shaped
battle-axe, and still less frequently the bow. Horses were unknown, for
the ox, sheep, goat and dog were over all South Africa the only
domesticated quadrupeds. One tribe, however, the Basutos, now breeds
horses extensively, and has turned them to account in fighting. The
rapid movement of their mounted warriors was one of the chief
difficulties the colonial forces had to deal with in the last Basuto
war. The courage in war which distinguished the tribes of Zulu and Kosa
race was all the more creditable because it had not, like that of the
Mohammedan dervishes of the Sudan, or of Mohammedans anywhere engaged in
a _jehad_, a religious motive and the promise of future bliss behind it.
The British army has encountered no more daring or formidable enemies.
Nine wars were needed to subjugate the Kafirs of the southern coast,
although till recently they had few firearms. But the natives had no
idea of the tactics needed in facing a civilized foe. As in their
battles with the Boers they were destroyed by the fire of horsemen
riding up, delivering a volley, and riding off before an assagai could
reach them, so in the great war with Cetewayo in 1879 they fought in the
open and were mowed down by British volleys; and in 1893 the Matabili
perished in the same way under the fire of riflemen and Maxim guns
sheltered behind a laager of wagons.
Religion was a powerful factor in Kafir life; but religion did not mean
the worship of any deity, for there was no deity. Still less had it any
moral significance. To the Kafirs, as to most savage races, the world
was full of spirits--spirits of the rivers, the mountains, and the
woods. Most important were the ghosts of the dead, who had power to
injure or to help the living, and who were therefore propitiated by
offerings at stated periods, as well as on occasions when their aid was
specially desired. This kind of worship, the worship once most generally
diffused throughout the world, and which held its ground among the
Greeks and Italians in the most flourishing period of ancient
civilization, as it does in China and Japan to-day, was and is virtually
the religion of the Kafirs. It was chiefly rendered to the ghosts of the
chiefs, who retained in the spirit world the exceptional importance they
had held among the living; and it had much weight in maintaining loyalty
to a chief, because revolt against him was an insult to a powerful set
of ghosts. The ghost dwelt at the spot where the body was buried, and it
was therefore at the grave that the offerings, mostly of cakes and Kafir
beer, were made. Occasionally animals were killed, not so much by way of
sacrifice as for the sake of providing the ghost with a specially
precious kind of food, though the two ideas run close together in most
primitive worships.[10] Among the Matabili, for instance, there was once
a year a great feast in honour of the king's ancestors, who were
supposed to come and join in the mirth. It was also to the grave that
those who wished to call up the ghost by spells went to effect their
nefarious purpose, and the real place of interment of a great chief was
for this reason sometimes concealed, I found at Thaba Bosiyo, the famous
stronghold of the Basuto chief Moshesh, that his body had been secretly
removed from the place where he was buried to baffle the wizards, who
might try to use his ghost against the living. The ghost is, of course,
apt to be spiteful, that of an uncle (I was told) particularly so; and
if he is neglected he is extremely likely to bring some evil on the
family or tribe. Sometimes the spirit of an ancestor passes into an
animal, and by preference into that of a snake, not that it lives in the
snake, but that it assumes this form when it wishes to visit men. A
particular kind of green snake is revered by the Matabili for this
reason. And most, if not all, tribes had an animal which they deemed to
be of kin to them, and which they called their "_siboko_," a term
apparently corresponding to the totem of the North American Indians.
Creatures of this species they never killed, and some tribes took their
name from it. Thus the Ba-Taung are the people of the lion; the
Ba-Mangwato have the duyker antelope for their totem; and in the Basuto
_pitso_ (public meeting) an orator will begin by addressing his audience
as "sons of the crocodile." Of human sacrifices there seems to be no
trace. Men were killed for all possible reasons, but never as offerings.
And, indeed, to have so killed them would have been to treat the ghosts
as cannibals, a view foreign to native habits, for though human flesh
has been resorted to in times of severe famine, it has never been
regularly eaten, and the use of it excites disgust.
Whether the Kafirs had any idea of a supreme being is a question which
has been much discussed. In several tribes the word, differently spelled
"Umlimo" or "Mlimo" or "Molimo" (said to mean "hidden" or "unseen"), is
used to denote either a power apparently different from that of the
nature sprites or ghosts of the dead, or else the prophet or soothsayer
who delivers messages or oracles supposed to emanate from this power.
The missionaries have in their native versions of the Bible used the
term to translate the word "God." Sometimes, among the Tongas at least,
the word _tilo_ (sky) is used to describe a mysterious force; as, for
instance, when a man dies without any apparent malady, he is said to be
killed by the _tilo_.[11] On the whole, after many inquiries from
missionaries and others who know the natives well, I was led to the
conclusion that the Kafirs have a vague notion of some power
transcending that of common ghosts, and able to affect the operations of
nature (as, for instance, to send rain), but far too dimly conceived to
be properly describable as a divine being.[12] Or to put the thing in
other words, the ordinary and familiar nature-sprites and ghosts of the
departed do not exhaust the possibilities of super-human agency; for
there remains, as among the Athenians whose altar St. Paul found (Acts
xvii. 23), an "Unknown God," or rather unknown power, probably
associated with the heavens above, whose interference may produce
results not attainable through inferior spiritual agencies. One of the
difficulties in reaching any knowledge of the real belief of the people
is that they are usually examined by leading questions, and are apt to
reply affirmatively to whatever the querist puts to them. Their thoughts
on these dark subjects are either extremely vague and misty or extremely
material; the world of abstract thought, in which European minds have
learned to move with an ease and confidence produced by the possession
of a whole arsenal of theological and metaphysical phrases, being to
them an undiscovered country.
Since there were no deities and no idols, there were no priests; but the
want of a priesthood was fully compensated by the presence of wizards;
for among the Kafirs, as among other primitive peoples, there was and is
an absolute belief in the power of spells, and of sorcery generally.
These wizards, like the medicine men among the Red Indians, were an
important class, second only to the chiefs. They were not a caste,
though very often the son of a wizard would be brought up to the
profession. The practitioners were on the lookout for promising boys,
and would take and train one to witchcraft, imparting their secrets,
which included a remarkable knowledge of the properties of various
plants available for poison or healing. Sometimes the wizard acted as a
physician; sometimes he would attempt to make rain; sometimes he would
profess to deliver messages from the unseen world, and in these cases he
might become a terrible power for mischief. Such a revelation made to
the Kosa clans on the south coast in 1856-57, directing them to kill
their cattle and destroy their grain, because the ghosts of their
ancestors were coming to drive out the whites, led to the death by
famine of more than 30,000 people. Such a revelation proceeding from a
soothsayer, occasionally called the Mlimo, who dwelt in a cavern among
granite rocks in the Matoppo Hills at a place called Matojeni,
south-east of Bulawayo[13] (oracles have always tended to come from
caves), had much to do with the rising of the Matabili in 1896. But the
most frequent and most formidable work done by the wizard was that of
"smelling out" persons who were bewitching others so as to cause
sickness or misfortune. In this branch of his profession the wizard
often became the engine of the jealousy or rapacity of the chief, who
would secretly prompt him to denounce a prominent or a wealthy man.
Suspicion being once roused, the victim had little chance: he was
despatched, and his property seized by the chief. Witchcraft, and the
murders it gave rise to, have been the darkest side of native life. The
sorcerer has usually been the enemy of the missionary, who threatens his
gains; but his power is now generally declining, and the British
Government forbids the practice of smelling out witches, as well as many
other shocking and disgusting rites which used to accompany the
admission of boys and girls to the status of adults, or were practised
at sundry festivals. Of the faith in minor and harmless spells one finds
instances everywhere. In Matabililand, for instance, a boy was pointed
out to me who had just been occupied in putting a charm into the
footprint of a lion, in order to prevent the unwelcome visitor from
returning; and nearly every native wears some kind of amulet.[14] These
beliefs will take a long time to die, but the missionaries have now
usually the good sense to see that they do little harm.
As their religious customs were rather less sanguinary than those of the
Guinea Coast negroes, so the Kafirs themselves were, when the whites
first saw them, somewhat more advanced in civilization. Compared with
the Red Indians of America, they stood at a point lower than that of the
Iroquois or Cherokees, but superior to the Utes or to the Diggers of the
Pacific coast. They could work in iron and copper, and had some notions
of ornament. Their music is rude, but not wholly devoid of melody, and
they use instruments of stone, wood, and iron, by striking which a kind
of tune can be played. Some tribes, such as the Tongas, have good
voices, and a marked taste for music. They have some simple games, and a
folk-lore which consists chiefly in animal tales, resembling those
collected by Mr. Harris in his _Uncle Remus_, save that the hare plays
among the Bantu peoples the part of Br'er Rabbit.[15] To poetry, even in
its most rudimentary forms, they do not seem to have attained. Yet they
are by no means wanting in intelligence, and have, with less gaiety,
more sense of dignity and more persistence in their purposes than the
Guinea negro.
When the Portuguese and Dutch first knew the Kafirs, they did not appear
to be making any progress toward a higher culture. Human life was held
very cheap; women were in a degraded state, and sexual morality at a low
ebb. Courage, loyalty to chief and tribe, and hospitality were the three
prominent virtues. War was the only pursuit in which chieftains sought
distinction, and war was mere slaughter and devastation, unaccompanied
by any views of policy or plans of administration. The people were--and
indeed still are--passionately attached to their old customs, which
even a king rarely ventured to disturb (though Tshaka is said to have
abolished among his subjects the rite of circumcision, which is
generally practised by the Kafirs); and it was probably as much the
unwillingness to have their customs disturbed as the apprehension for
their land that made many of the tribes oppose to the advance of the
Europeans so obstinate a resistance. Though they feared the firearms of
the whites, whom they called wizards, it was a long time before they
realized their hopeless inferiority, and the impossibility of prevailing
in war. Their minds were mostly too childish to recollect and draw the
necessary inferences from previous defeats, and they never realized that
the whites possessed beyond the sea an inexhaustible reservoir of men
and weapons. Even the visit of Lo Bengula's envoys to England in 1891,
when they were shown all the wonders of London, in order that through
them the Matabili nation might be deterred from an attack on the whites,
failed to produce any effect upon the minds of the young warriors, who
were fully persuaded that they could destroy the few strangers in their
country as easily as they had overthrown the Mashonas. The only chiefs
who seem to have fully grasped the relative strength of the Europeans,
and thus to have formed schemes of policy suitable to their inferior
position, were Moshesh, who profited by the advice of the French
missionaries, and Khama, who was himself a Christian and the pupil of
missionaries. Nor did any chief ever rise to the conception of forming a
league of blacks against whites.
The natives, as we shall see, have had harsh treatment from the
Europeans. Many unjust things, many cruel things, many things which
would excite horror if practised in European warfare, have been done
against them. But whoever tries to strike the balance of good and evil
due to the coming of the whites must remember what the condition of the
country was before the whites came. As between the different tribes
there was neither justice nor pity, but simply the rule of the
strongest, unmitigated by any feeling of religion or morality. In war
non-combatants as well as combatants were ruthlessly slaughtered, or
reserved only for slavery; and war was the normal state of things.
Within each tribe a measure of peace and order was maintained. But the
weak had a hard time, and those who were rich, or had roused the enmity
of some powerful man, were at any moment liable to perish on the charge
of witchcraft. In some tribes, such as the Matabili, incessant slaughter
went on by the orders of the king. Nothing less than the prolific
quality of the race could have kept South Africa well peopled in the
teeth of such a waste of life as war and murder caused.
Of the character of the individual native as it affects his present
relations with the whites and the probable future of the race, I shall
have to speak in a later chapter (Chapter XXI), as also of the condition
and prospects of the Christian missions which exist among them, and
which form the main civilizing influence now at work.
[Footnote 9: See further as to this primary assembly the remarks on the
Basuto _Pitso_ in Chapter XX.]
[Footnote 10: Those who are curious on this subject may consult Mr.
Frazer's _Golden Bough_, and the late Mr. Robertson Smith's _Religion of
the Semites_, where many interesting and profoundly suggestive facts
regarding it are collected.]
[Footnote 11: As in Homer's day sudden deaths were attributed to the
arrows of Apollo or Artemis.]
[Footnote 12: M. Junod, a Swiss missionary at Delagoa Bay, who made a
careful study of the Tonga tribes, told me that they sometimes use the
word _shikimbo_, which properly denotes the ghost of an ancestor, to
denote a higher unseen power. And I was informed that the Basutos will
pray to the "lesser Molimos," the ghost of their ancestors, to ask the
great Molimo to send rain.]
[Footnote 13: This Mlimo--whether the name is properly applicable to the
divinity, whatever it was, or to the prophet, seems doubtful--belonged
to the Makalakas, but was revered by the Matabili, who conquered them.]
[Footnote 14: It need hardly be said that they have a full belief in the
power of certain men to assume the forms of beasts. I was told that a
leading British official was held to be in the habit, when travelling in
the veldt, of changing himself, after his morning tub, into a rat, and
creeping into his waggon, whence he presently re-emerged in human
shape.]
[Footnote 15: Several collections have been made of these tales. The
first is that of Bishop Callaway, the latest that of my friend Mr.
Jacottet, a Swiss missionary in Basutoland, who has published a number
of Basuto stories in his _Contes Populaires des Bassoutos_, and of
Barotse stories in another book.]
CHAPTER XI
THE EUROPEANS IN SOUTH AFRICA TILL 1854
It is no less true of South Africa than it is of the old countries of
Europe that to understand the temper of the people, the working of their
government, the nature of the political problems which they have to
solve, one must know something of their history. South Africa has had a
great deal of history, especially in the present century, and there are
few places in which recollections of the past are more powerful factors
in the troubles of the present. In the short sketch I propose to give I
shall advert only to the chief events, and particularly to those whose
importance is still felt and which have done most to determine the
relations of the European races to one another. The constitutional and
parliamentary history of the two British colonies and the two Boer
republics has been short and not specially interesting. The military
history has been on a small scale. The economic and industrial history
has been simple and remarkable only so far as the mines are concerned.
But the history of the dealings of the white races with one another and
with the blacks is both peculiar and instructive, and well deserves a
fuller narrative and more elaborate treatment than I have space to give.
Four European races have occupied the country. Of those, however, who
came with Vasco da Gama from Lisbon in 1497 we shall have little to say,
and of the handful who followed Herr Luederitz from Bremen in 1883 still
less. The interest of the tale lies in the struggles of two branches of
the same Low-German stock, the Dutch and the English.
The first to appear on the scene were the men of Portugal, then in the
fresh springtime of its power and with what seemed a splendid career of
discovery and conquest opening before it.[16] Bartholomew Diaz, whose
renown has been unjustly obscured by that of Vasco da Gama, discovered
the Cape of Storms, as he called it,--the name of Good Hope was given by
King John II.,--in 1486, and explored the coast as far as the mouth of
the Great Fish River. In 1497-98 Da Gama, on his famous voyage to India,
followed the southern and eastern coast to Melinda; and in 1502, on his
second voyage, after touching at Delagoa Bay, he visited Sofala, which
was then the port to which most of the gold and ivory came from the
interior. Here he found Arabs established in the town, as they were in
other maritime trading places all the way north to Mombasa. At what date
they first settled there is unknown; probably they had traded along the
coast from times long before Mohammed. They were superior to the native
blacks, though mixed in blood, but of course far inferior to the
Portuguese, who overthrew their power. In 1505 the Portuguese built a
fort at Sofala, and from there and several other points along the coast
prosecuted their trade with the inland regions, using the conquered
Arabs as their agents. For a century they remained the sole masters not
only of the South-east African seaboard, but of the Indian Ocean, no
vessel of any other European country appearing to dispute their
pre-eminence. They might, had they cared, have occupied and appropriated
the whole southern half of the continent; but in the sixteenth century
it was not of colonization, nor even so much of conquest, that monarchs,
governors, and navigators thought, but of gold. Portugal had no surplus
population to spare for settling her new territories, and--not to speak
of Brazil--she had a far richer trade to develop in western India than
anything which Africa could offer. It may now excite surprise that she
should have taken no step to claim the long stretch of country whose
shores her sailors had explored, from the mouth of the Orange River on
the west to that of the Limpopo on the east. But there was no gold to be
had there, and a chance skirmish with the Hottentots in Table Bay, in
which the viceroy D'Almeida, returning from India, was killed in 1510,
gave them a false notion of the danger to be feared from that people,
who were in reality one of the weakest and least formidable among
African races.
Accordingly, the Portuguese, who might have possessed themselves of the
temperate and healthy regions which we now call Cape Colony and Natal,
confined their settlements to the malarious country north of the tropic
of Capricorn. Here they made two or three attempts, chiefly by moving up
the valley of the Zambesi, to conquer the native tribes, or to support
against his neighbours some chieftain who was to become their vassal.
Their numbers were, however, too small, and they were too feebly
supported from home, to enable them to secure success. When they
desisted from these attempts, their missionaries, chiefly Dominican
friars, though some Jesuits were also engaged in the work, maintained an
active propaganda among the tribes, and at one time counted their
converts by thousands. Not only missionaries, but small trading parties,
penetrated the mysterious interior; and one or two light cannons, as
well as articles which must have come to Africa from India, such as
fragments of Indian and Chinese pottery, have been found many hundred
miles from the sea.[17]
But on the whole the Portuguese exerted very little permanent influence
on the country and its inhabitants. The missions died out, most of the
forts crumbled away or were abandoned, and all idea of further conquest
had been dropped before the end of last century. There were, indeed, two
fatal obstacles to conquering or civilising work. One was the extreme
unhealthiness both of the flat country which lies between the sea and
the edge of the great interior plateau, and of the whole Zambesi Valley,
up which most of the attempts at an advance had been made. Fever not
only decimated the expeditions and the garrisons of the forts, but
enervated the main body of settlers who remained on the coast, soon
reducing whatever enterprise or vigour they had brought from Europe. The
other was the tendency of the Portuguese to mingle their blood with that
of the natives. Very few women were brought out from home, so that a
mixed race soon sprang up, calling themselves Portuguese, but much
inferior to the natives of Portugal. The Portuguese, even more than the
Spaniards, have shown both in Brazil and in Africa comparatively little
of that racial contempt for the blacks, and that aversion to intimate
social relations with them, which have been so characteristic of the
Dutch and the English. There have, of course, been a good many mulattos
born of Dutch fathers in Africa, as of Anglo-American fathers in the
West Indies and in the former slave States of North America. But the
Dutch or English mulatto was almost always treated as belonging to the
black race, and entirely below the level of the meanest white, whereas
among the Portuguese a strong infusion of black blood did not
necessarily carry with it social disparity.[18]
In the beginning of the seventeenth century the Dutch, prosecuting their
war against the Spanish monarchy, which had acquired the crown of
Portugal in 1581 and held it till 1640, attacked the Portuguese forts on
the East African coast, but after a few years abandoned an enterprise in
which there was little to gain, and devoted their efforts to the more
profitable field of the East Indies. With this exception, no European
power troubled the Portuguese in Africa. They had, however, frequent
conflicts with the natives, and in 1834 were driven from their fort at
Inhambane, between Sofala and Delagoa Bay, and in 1836 from Sofala
itself, which, however, they subsequently recovered. It was not till the
progress of inland discovery, and especially the establishment of a Boer
republic in the Transvaal had made the coast seem valuable, that two new
and formidable rivals appeared on the scene.
Under the combined operation of these causes such power as Portugal
possessed on this coast declined during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Except on the deadly banks of the Zambesi, she never had a
permanent settlement more than fifty miles from the sea, and very few so
far inland. The population that spoke Portuguese and professed
Christianity did not exceed a few thousands, and of these the large
majority were at least half Kafir in blood. It became plain that such
life and force as the nation once possessed had, at any rate in Africa,
died out, and that if ever the continent was to be developed it would
not be by the race that had first explored it. Here, therefore, we may
leave the eastern coast and the feeble settlers who shivered with ague
in its swamps, and turn our eyes to the far south, where a new and more
vigorous race began, a century and a half after the time of Vasco da
Gama, to lay the foundations of a new dominion.
The first Teutonic people that entered the African continent were the
Vandals in the fifth century. They came across the Straits of Gibraltar
as conquerors, but they soon established a powerful fleet and acquired a
maritime empire in the western Mediterranean. The second band of Teutons
to enter were the Dutch. They were already a sea power active in the far
East, whither they had been led by their war with Spain. But it was not
as conquerors that they came, nor even as settlers intending to build up
a colonial community. They came to establish a place of call for their
vessels trading to India, where fresh water and vegetables might be
obtained for their crews, who suffered terribly from scurvy on the
voyage of six months or more from the Netherlands to the ports of
Farther India. From the early years of the seventeenth century both
Dutch and English vessels had been in the habit of putting in to Table
Bay to refit and get fresh water. Indeed, in 1620 two English commanders
had landed there and proclaimed the sovereignty of King James I, though
their action was not ratified either by the king or by the English East
India Company. In 1648 a shipwrecked Dutch crew spent six months in
Table Valley, behind the spot where Cape Town now stands, and having
some seeds with them, planted vegetables and got a good crop. They
represented on their return to Holland the advantages of the spot, and
in 1652 three vessels despatched by the Dutch East India Company
disembarked a body of settlers, under the command of Jan van Riebeek,
who were directed to build a fort and hospital, and, above all, to raise
vegetables and obtain from the Hottentots supplies of fresh meat for
passing ships. It is from these small beginnings of a kitchen-garden
that Dutch and British dominion in South Africa has grown up.
The history of this Dutch settlement presents a singular contrast to
that of the Portuguese. During the first quarter of a century the few
settlers kept themselves within the narrow limits of the Cape peninsula.
In 1680 an outlying agricultural community was planted at Stellenbosch,
twenty-five miles from Cape Town, but not till the end of the century
was the first range of mountains crossed. Meantime the population began
to grow. In 1658 the first slaves were introduced,--West African
negroes,--a deplorable step, which has had the result of making the
South African whites averse to open-air manual work and of practically
condemning South Africa to be a country of black labour. Shortly
afterwards the Company began to bring in Asiatic convicts, mostly
Mohammedan Malays, from its territories in the East Indian Archipelago.
These men intermarried with the female slaves, and to a less extent with
Hottentot women, and from them a mixed coloured race has sprung up,
which forms a large part of the population of Cape Town and the
neighbouring districts. The influx of these inferior elements was
balanced by the arrival in 1689 of about three hundred French Huguenots,
a part of those who had taken refuge in Holland after the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. They were persons of a high stamp,
more intelligent and educated than most of the previous settlers had
been, and they brought with them a strong attachment to their Protestant
faith and a love of liberty. From them many of the best colonial
families are sprung. At first they clung to their language, and sought
to form a distinct religious community; but they were ultimately
compelled to join the Dutch Reformed Church, and the use of French was
forbidden in official documents or religious services. Before the middle
of the eighteenth century that language had disappeared, and the
newcomers had practically amalgamated with their Dutch neighbours. The
Company's government was impartially intolerant, and did not until 1780
permit the establishment of a Lutheran church, although many German
Lutherans had settled in the country.
From the time when the settlers began to spread out from the coast into
the dry lands of the interior a great change came upon them, and what we
now call the distinctive South African type of character and habits
began to appear. The first immigrants were not, like some of the English
settlers in Virginia, men of good social position in their own country,
attached to it by many ties, nor, like the English settlers in the New
England colonies, men of good education and serious temper, seeking the
freedom to worship God in their own way. They came from the humbler
classes, and partly because they had few home ties, partly because the
voyage to Holland was so long that communication with it was difficult,
they maintained little connection with the mother country and soon lost
their feeling for it. The Huguenot immigrants were more cultivated, and
socially superior to the rude adventurers who had formed the bulk of the
Dutch settlers, but they had of course no home country to look to.
France had cast them out; Holland was alien in blood and speech. So it
befell that of all the colonists that Europe had sent forth since the
voyage of Columbus, the South African whites were those who soonest lost
their bond with Europe, and were the first set of emigrants to feel
themselves a new people, whose true home lay in the new land they had
adopted. Thus early in South African annals were the foundations laid of
what we now call the Africander sentiment--a sentiment which has become
one of the main factors in the history of the country.
Nor was this all. When the comparatively small area of fertile land
which could be cultivated without irrigation had been taken up, the
keeping of cattle suggested itself as an easy means of livelihood. The
pasture, however, was so thin that it was necessary to graze the cattle
over wide stretches of ground, and the farther they went into the
interior the scantier was the pasture and the larger therefore did the
area of land become over which a farmer let his oxen or sheep run. This
process of extending cattle-farms--if farms they can be called--over the
interior was materially accelerated through the destruction of the
nearer Hottentot tribes by the frightful outbreak of smallpox which
begun in A.D. 1713, followed by another not less virulent in 1755. The
Europeans suffered severely from it, the negroes, slave and free, still
more, but the Hottentots most of all. In fact, it cleared them away from
all the southern and western parts of the Colony and left these regions
open to Europeans. Only the Bushmen remained, whose more solitary life
gave them comparative immunity from contagion. Thus from the beginning
of the eighteenth century, and during the whole of it, there was a
constant dispersion of settlers from the old nucleus into the
circumjacent wilderness. They were required to pay a sum amounting to
five pounds a year for the use of three thousand _morgen_ (a little more
than six thousand acres) of grazing ground, and were accustomed at
certain seasons to drive their herds up into the deserts of the Karroo
for a change of feed, just after the time when the summer rains
stimulate the scrubby vegetation of that desert region. These settlers
led a lonely and almost nomadic life. Much of their time was passed in
their tent-waggons, in which, with their wives and children, they
followed the cattle from spot to spot where the pasture was best. They
became excellent marksmen and expert in the pursuit of wild beasts. Some
made a living by elephant-hunting in the wilderness, and those who
tended cattle learned to face the lion. They were much molested by the
Bushmen, whose stealthy attacks and poisoned arrows made them dangerous
enemies, and they carried on with the latter a constant war, in which no
quarter was given. Thus there developed among them that courage,
self-reliance, and passion for independence which are characteristic of
the frontiersman everywhere, coupled with a love of solitude and
isolation which the conditions of western America did not produce. For
in western America the numbers and ferocity of the Red Indians, and
those resources of the land which encouraged the formation of
agricultural and timber-producing communities, made villages follow the
march of discovery and conquest, while in pastoral Africa villages were
few and extremely small. Isolation and the wild life these ranchmen led
soon told upon their habits. The children grew up ignorant; the women,
as was natural where slaves were employed, lost the neat and cleanly
ways of their Dutch ancestors; the men were rude, bigoted, indifferent
to the comforts and graces of life. But they retained their religious
earnestness, carrying their Bibles and the practice of daily family
worship with them in their wanderings; and they retained also a passion
for freedom which the government vainly endeavoured to restrain. Though
magistrates, called _landdrosts_, were placed in a few of the outlying
stations, with assessors taken from the people, called _heemraden_, to
assist them in administering justice, it was found impossible to
maintain control over the wandering cattle-men, who from their habit of
"trekking" from place to place were called Trek Boers.[19] The only
organization that brought them together was that which their ceaseless
strife with the Bushmen enjoined. Being all accustomed to the use of
arms, they formed war-parties, which from time to time attacked and
rooted out the Bushmen from a disturbed area; and the government
recognized these military needs and methods by appointing
field-commandants to each district, and subordinate officers, called
field-cornets, to each sub-district. These functionaries have become the
basis of the system of local government among the South African Dutch,
and the war-bands, called commandos, have played a great part in the
subsequent military history of the country.
The eastward progress of expansion presently brought the settlers into
contact with more formidable foes in the Bantu tribes, who dwelt beyond
the Great Fish River. In 1779 some Kafir clans of the Kosa race crossed
that river and drove off the cattle off the farmers to the west of it,
and a war, the first of many fiercely fought Kafir wars, followed, which
ended in the victory of the colonists.
All this while the Colony had been ruled by the Dutch East India Company
through a governor and council, appointed by the directors in Holland,
and responsible to them only--a system roughly similar to that which the
English established in India during the eighteenth century. The
administration was better or worse according to the character and
capacity of the governor for the time being, but it was on the whole
unpopular with the colonists, not merely because they were excluded from
all share in it (except to some small extent in the courts of justice),
but also because the Company kept in its own hands a monopoly of the
trade, and managed trade with a view to its own commercial interests
rather than to those of the community. Thus discontent grew, and this
discontent was one of the causes which led to the dispersion of the
people into the wilderness, whose remoteness secured to them a practical
freedom. In 1779 disaffection had been so much stimulated by the
maladministration of a weak governor, and by the news of the revolt of
the American colonies against Great Britain, that delegates were sent to
Holland to demand redress for their commercial and other grievances, as
well as a share in the government of the Colony. The Company was by this
time in financial straits, and less powerful with the States-general of
the Netherlands than it had formerly been. Long negotiations followed,
reforms were promised, and at last, in 1792, two commissioners were sent
out to investigate and frame measures of reform. The measures they
promulgated were, however, deemed inadequate by the more ardent spirits,
and by those especially who dwelt in the outlying districts, where the
government had exerted, and could exert, little control. In 1795, first
at Graaf-Reinet and then at Swellendam, the people rose in revolt, not,
as they stated, against the mother country, but against the Company.
They turned out the landdrosts, and set up miniature republics, each
with a representative assembly.
It would not have been difficult for the government to have reduced
these risings by cutting off supplies of food. But now South Africa was
suddenly swept into the great whirlpool of European politics, and events
were at hand which made these petty local movements insignificant, save
in so far as they were evidences of the independent spirit of the
people.
From 1757, when the battle of Plassey was fought, the English power in
India had been rapidly growing, and the Cape, which they had not cared
to acquire in 1620, had now become in their eyes a station of capital
importance. When war broke out between Britain and Holland in 1781, the
English had attempted to seize the Colony, but retired when they found a
strong French force prepared to aid the Dutch in its defence. Now they
were again at war with Holland, which, over-run by the armies of
revolutionary France, had become the Batavian Republic. In 1795 an
English expedition, bearing orders from the Stadholder of the
Netherlands, then a refugee in England, requiring the Company's officers
to admit them, landed at Simon's Bay, and after some slight resistance
obliged Cape Town and its castle to capitulate. Within a few months the
insurgents at Swellendam and Graaf-Reinet submitted, and British troops
held the Colony till 1802, when it was restored to the Batavian Republic
on the conclusion of the peace of Amiens. Next year, however, war broke
out afresh; and the English government, feeling the extreme importance,
in the great struggle which they were waging with Napoleon, of
possessing a naval stronghold as a half-way house to India, resolved
again to occupy the Cape. In 1806 a strong force was landed in Table
Bay, and after one engagement the Dutch capitulated. In 1814 the English
occupation was turned into permanent sovereignty by a formal cession of
the Colony on the part of the then restored Stadholder, who received for
it and certain Dutch possessions in South America the sum of L6,000,000.
The European population of the Colony, which was thus finally
transferred to the rule of a foreign though a cognate nation, consisted
in 1806 of about 27,000 persons, mostly of Dutch, with a smaller number
of German or French descent. They had some 30,000 black slaves, and of
the aboriginal Hottentots about 17,000 remained. Nearly all spoke Dutch,
or rather the rude local dialect into which the Dutch of the original
settlers (said to have been largely Frieslanders), had degenerated. The
descendants of the Huguenots had long since lost their French.
No people find it agreeable to be handed over to the government of a
different race, and the British administration in the Colony in those
days was, though restrained by the general principles of English law,
necessarily autocratic, because representative institutions had never
existed at the Cape. Still things promised well for the peace and
ultimate fusion of the Dutch and English races. They were branches of
the same Low-German stock, separated by fourteen hundred years of
separate history, but similar in the fundamental bases of their
respective characters. Both were attached to liberty, and the British
had indeed enjoyed at home a much fuller measure of it than had the
Dutch in the settled parts of the Colony. Both professed the Protestant
religion, and the Dutch were less tolerant toward Roman Catholics than
the English. The two languages retained so much resemblance that it was
easy for an Englishman to learn Dutch and for a Dutchman to learn
English. An observer might have predicted that the two peoples would
soon, by intercourse and by intermarriage, melt into one, as Dutch and
English had done in New York. For a time it seemed as if this would
certainly come to pass. The first two British governors were men of high
character, whose administration gave little ground for complaint to the
old inhabitants. The Company's restrictions on trade had been abolished,
and many reforms were introduced by the new rulers. Schools were
founded, the administration of justice was reorganised under new courts,
the breed of cattle and horses was improved, the slave-trade was
forbidden, and missions to the natives were largely developed. Meanwhile
local institutions were scarcely altered, and the official use of the
Dutch language was maintained. The Roman-Dutch law, which had been in
force under the Company's rule, was permitted to remain, and it is
to-day the common law of all the British colonies and territories, as
well as of the Boer Republics, in South Africa. Intermarriage began, and
the social relations of the few English who had come in after 1806, with
the many Dutch were friendly. In 1820 the British government sent out
about five thousand emigrants from England and Scotland, who settled in
the thinly occupied country round Algoa Bay on the eastern border of the
Colony; and from that time on there was a steady, though never copious,
influx of British settlers, through whose presence the use of the
English language increased, together with a smaller influx of Germans,
who soon lost their national individuality and came to speak either
English or the local Dutch.
Before long, however, this fair promise of peace and union was
overclouded, and the causes which checked the fusion of the races in the
Colony, and created two Dutch Republics beyond its limits, have had such
momentous results that they need to be clearly stated.
The first was to be found in the character of the Dutch population. They
were farmers, a few dwelling in villages and cultivating the soil, but
the majority stock-farmers, living scattered over a wide expanse of
country, for the thinness of the pasture had made and kept the
stock-farms very large. They saw little of one another, and nothing of
those who dwelt in the few towns which the Colony possessed. They were
ignorant, prejudiced, strongly attached to their old habits, impatient
of any control. The opportunities for intercourse between them and the
British were thus so few that the two races acquired very little
knowledge of one another, and the process of social fusion, though easy
at Capetown and wherever else the population was tolerably dense, was
extremely slow over the country at large. A deplorable incident which
befell on the eastern border in 1815 did much to create bad blood. A
slight rising, due to the attempted arrest of a farmer on a charge of
maltreating his native servant, broke out there. It was soon suppressed,
but of the prisoners taken six were condemned to death and five were
hanged. This harsh act, which was at the time justified as a piece of
"necessary firmness," produced wide-spread and bitter resentment, and
the mention of Slagter's Nek continued for many years to awaken an
outburst of anti-British feeling among the Boers.
A second cause was the unwisdom of the British authorities in altering
(between 1825 and 1828) the old system of local government (with the
effect of reducing the share in it which the citizens had enjoyed), and
in substituting English for Dutch as the language to be used in official
documents and legal proceedings. This was a serious hardship, for
probably not more than one-sixth of the people understood English. A
third source of trouble arose out of the wars with the Kafirs on the
eastern border. Since the first hostilities of 1779 there had been four
serious struggles with the tribes who lived beyond the Fish River, and
in 1834 a host of savages suddenly burst into the Colony, sweeping off
the cattle and killing the farmers. After some hard fighting the Kafirs
were reduced to sue for peace, and compelled by the governor to withdraw
beyond the Keiskama River. But the British government at home,
considering that the natives had been ill-treated by the colonists, and
in fact provoked to war, overruled the governor, and allowed them to
return to their old seats, where they were, no doubt, a source of danger
to the border farmers. Thinking the home authorities either weak or
perverse, the farmers bitterly resented this action, and began to look
on the British Colonial Office as their enemy.
But the main grievance arose out of those native and colour questions
which have ever since continued to trouble South Africa. Slavery had
existed in the Colony since 1658, and had produced its usual
consequences, the degradation of labour, and the notion that the black
man has no rights against the white. In 1737 the first Moravian mission
to the Hottentots was frowned upon, and a pastor who had baptized
natives found himself obliged to return to Europe. The current of
feeling in Europe, and especially in England, which condemned the
"domestic institution" and sought to vindicate the human rights of the
negro, had not been felt in this remote corner of the world, and from
about 1810 onward the English missionaries gave intense offence to the
colonists by espousing the cause of the natives and the slaves, and
reporting every case of cruel or harsh treatment which came to their
knowledge. It is said that they often exaggerated, or made charges on
insufficient evidence, and this is likely enough. But it must also be
remembered that they were the only protectors the blacks had; and where
slavery exists, and a weak race is dominated by a strong one, there are
sure to be many abuses of power. When, in 1828, Hottentots and other
free coloured people were placed by governmental ordinance on an equal
footing with whites as regards private civil rights, the colonists were
profoundly disgusted, and their exasperation was increased by the
enactment of laws restraining their authority over their slaves, as well
as by the charges of ill-treating the natives which continued to be
brought against them by the missionaries. Finally, in 1834, the British
Parliament passed a statute emancipating the slaves throughout all the
British colonies, and awarding a sum of twenty million pounds sterling
as compensation to the slave-owners. The part of this sum allotted to
Cape Colony (a little more than three millions sterling) was
considerably below the value of the slaves (about 39,000) held there,
and as the compensation was made payable in London, most slave owners
sold their claims at inadequate prices. Many farmers lost the bulk of
their property, and labour became in many districts so scarce that
agriculture could hardly be carried on. The irritation produced by the
loss thus suffered, intensifying the already existing discontent, set up
a ferment among the Dutch farmers. Their spirit had always been
independent, and the circumstances of their isolated life had enabled
them to indulge it. Even under the government of their Dutch kinsfolk
they had been restless, and now they received, as they thought, one
injustice after another at the hands of alien rulers. To be watched and
denounced by the missionaries, to have black people put on a level with
them, to lose the fruits of their victory over the Kafirs--all these
things had been bad enough. Now, however, when their property itself was
taken away and slavery abolished on grounds they could neither
understand nor approve, they determined to endure no longer, and sought
for some means of deliverance. Rebellion against so strong a power as
that of Britain was evidently foredoomed to failure. But to the north
and east a great wild country lay open before them, where they could
lead that solitary and half-nomadic life which they loved, preserve
their old customs, and deal with the natives as they pleased, unvexed by
the meddlesome English. Accordingly, many resolved to quit the Colony
altogether and go out into the wilderness. They were the more disposed
to this course, because they knew that the wars and conquests of Tshaka,
the ferocious Zulu king, had exterminated the Kafir population through
parts of the interior, which therefore stood open to European
settlement. Thus it was that the Great Trek, as the Dutch call it,--the
great emigration, or secession, as we should say,--of the Dutch Boers
began in 1836, twenty-five years before another question of colour and
slavery brought about a still greater secession on the other side of the
Atlantic.
If the reader will here refer to the map, and measure from Cape Town a
distance of about four hundred and fifty miles to the east (to the mouth
of the Great Fish River), and about the same distance to the
north-north-east (to where the towns of Middelburg and Colesberg now
stand), he will obtain a pretty fair idea of the limits of European
settlement in 1836. The outer parts of this area toward the north and
east were very thinly peopled, and beyond them there was a vast
wilderness, into which only a few hunters had penetrated, though some
farmers had, during the last decade or two, been accustomed to drive
their flocks and herds into the fringe of it after the rains, in search
of fresh pastures. The regions still farther to the north and east were
almost entirely unexplored. They were full of wild beasts, and occupied
here and there by native tribes, some, like the various branches of the
Zulu race, eminently fierce and warlike. Large tracts, however, were
believed to be empty and desolate, owing to the devastations wrought
during his twenty years of reign by Tshaka, who had been murdered eight
years before. Of the existence of mineral wealth no one dreamed. But it
was believed that there was good grazing land to be found on the upland
that lay north of the great Quathlamba Range (where now the map shows
the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic). More to the south lay
the territory we now call Natal. It was described by those very few
persons who had explored it as fertile and well-watered, a country fit
both for tillage and for pasture; but wide plains and high mountains had
to be crossed to reach it by land from the north-west, and close to it
on the north-east was the main body of the Zulu nation, under King
Dingaan, the brother and sucessor of Tshaka.
Into this wilderness did the farmers set forth, and though some less
laudable motives may have been mingled with the love of independence and
the resentment at injustice which mainly prompted their emigration, it
is impossible not to admire their strenuous and valiant spirit. They
were a religious people, knowing no book but the Bible, and they deemed
themselves, like many another religious people at a like crisis of their
fortunes, to be under the special protection of Heaven, as was Israel
when it went out of Egypt into a wilderness not so vast nor so full of
perils as was that which the Boers were entering. Escaping from a sway
which they compared to that of the Egyptian king, they probably expected
to be stopped or turned back. But Pharaoh, though he had turned a deaf
ear to their complaints, was imbued with the British spirit of legality.
He consulted his attorney-general, and did not pursue them. The colonial
government saw with concern the departure of so many useful subjects.
But it was advised that it had no legal right to stop them, so it stood
by silently while party after party of emigrants--each householder with
his wife and his little ones, his flocks and his herds and all his
goods--took its slow way from the eastern or northern parts of the
Colony, up the slopes of the coast range, and across the passes that
lead into the high plateau behind. Within two years from 6,000 to 10,000
persons set forth. They travelled in large covered wagons drawn by ten
or twelve yoke of oxen, and they were obliged to travel in parties of no
great size, lest their cattle should exhaust the pasture along the track
they followed. There was, however a general concert of plan among them,
and most of the smaller groups united at spots previously fixed upon for
a rendezvous. All the men were armed, for the needs of defence against
the Bushmen, and the passion for killing game, had made the farmers
expert in the use of the rifle. As marksmen they were unusually steady
and skilful, and in the struggles that followed nothing but their
marksmanship saved them. Few to-day survive of those who took part in
this Great Trek, but among those few is Paul Kruger, now President of
the South African Republic, who followed his father's cattle as they
were driven forward across the prairie, being then a boy of ten.
I have not space to tell, save in the briefest outline, the striking and
romantic story of the wanderings of the emigrant Boers and their
conflicts with the native tribes. The first party, like the first host
of Crusaders that started for the East in the end of the eleventh
century, perished miserably. It consisted of ninety-eight persons
travelling with thirty wagons. They penetrated far to the north-east,
into what is now the territory of the Transvaal Republic. Some were cut
off by the natives; some, reduced to a mere handful by fever and by the
loss of their cattle,--for they had ventured into the unhealthy lower
country to the south-east of the mountains, where the tsetse-fly
abounds,--made their way to the coast at Delagoa Bay. Another party,
formed by the union of a number of smaller bodies at Thaba 'Ntshu, a
rocky peak in the Orange Free State, visible on the eastern horizon from
the present town of Bloemfontein, advanced thence to the north, and
presently came in contact with a redoubtable branch of the Zulu race,
famous in later history under the name of Matabili. This tribe was then
ruled by the chief Umzilikazi, or Mosilikatze, a warrior of great energy
and talent. He had been one of Tshaka's favourite generals, but, having
incurred that king's displeasure, had fled, about A.D. 1817, with his
regiment to the north-west, and established his headquarters near a
place called Mosega (between Pretoria and Mafeking), in what is now the
Transvaal Republic. Thence he raided and massacred the Bechuanas and
other tribes of this region, though himself unable to withstand the main
Zulu nation, which, under Dingaan, was living farther to the south. The
Matabili provoked war by falling upon and destroying a detachment of the
emigrants. Intruders the latter doubtless were, but, as the Matabili
themselves had slaughtered without mercy the weaker Kafir tribes, the
Boers might think they need not feel any compunction in dealing out the
like measure to their antagonists. And, in point of fact, the emigrants
seem all through to have treated the natives much as Israel treated the
natives of Canaan, and to have conceived themselves to have Old
Testament authority for occupying the territories of the heathen, and
reducing them by the sternest methods to serfdom or submission. Here
they had an unprovoked massacre to avenge, and they showed equal
promptitude and courage. Pouncing upon Mosilikatze, they defeated his
vastly superior force with so great a slaughter that he fled
north-westward far away beyond the Limpopo River, and fell like a
thunderbolt upon the tribes who dwelt between that stream and the
Zambesi, killing many and making slaves of the rest. Here, with the
king's kraal of Buluwayo for its capital, was established the kingdom of
the Matabili, which remained as a terror to its neighbours till, in its
turn, destroyed by Dr. Jameson and the British South Africa Company in
1893. It was a curious chain of events that brought fire and slaughter
so suddenly, in 1837, upon the peoples of the Zambesi Valley. As the
conflicts of nomad warriors along the great wall of China in the fourth
century of our era set a-going a movement which, propagated from tribe
to tribe, ended by precipitating the Goths upon the Mediterranean
countries, and brought Alaric to the Salarian Gate of Rome, so the
collapse of the French monarchy, inducing the Revolution and the
consequent war with England, carried the English to the Cape, brought
the Boers into collision with the Matabili, and at last hurled the
savage host of Mosilikatze on the helpless Makalakas.
The defeat and expulsion of the Matabili left the vast territories
between the Orange River and the Limpopo in the hands of the Boer
immigrants. Within these territories, after much moving hither and
thither, those small and rude communities began to grow up which have
ripened, as we shall presently see, into the two Dutch republics of our
own time. But, meanwhile, a larger and better organized body of Boers,
led by a capable and much-respected man named Pieter Retief, marched
first eastward and then southward across the Quathlamba watershed, and
descended from the plateau into the richer and warmer country between
those mountains and the Indian Ocean. This region had been in 1820
almost depopulated by the invasions of Tshaka, and now contained scarce
any native inhabitants. A few Englishmen had since 1824 been settled on
the inlet then called Port Natal, where now the prosperous town of
Durban lies beneath the villas and orchards of Berea, and (having
obtained a cession of the maritime slip from King Tshaka) were
maintaining there a sort of provisional republic. In 1835 they had asked
to be recognised as a colony under the name of Victoria, in honour of
the young princess who two years afterwards mounted the throne, and to
have a legislature granted them. The British government, however, was
still hesitating whether it should occupy the port, so the emigrants did
not trouble themselves about its rights or wishes. Thinking it well to
propitiate the Zulu king, Dingaan, whose power over-shadowed the
country, the Boer leaders proceeded to his kraal to obtain from him a
formal grant of land. The grant was made, but next day the treacherous
tyrant, offering them some native beer as a sort of stirrup-cup before
their departure, suddenly bade his men fall upon and "kill the wizards."
The excellent Retief perished with his whole party, and a body of
emigrants not far distant was similarly surprised and massacred by a
Zulu army of overwhelming strength. These cruelties roused the rest of
the emigrants to reprisals, and in a fierce battle, fought on December
16, 1838, the anniversary of which is still celebrated by the people of
the Transvaal, a handful of Boers overthrew Dingaan's host. Like the
soldiers of Cortes in Mexico, they owed this, as other victories, not
merely to their steady valour, but to their horses. Riding up to the
line of savage warriors, they delivered a volley, and rode back before
an assagai could reach them, repeating this manoeuvre over and over
again till the hostile ranks broke and fled. Ultimately their forces,
united with those of a brother of Dingaan, who had rebelled against him
and had detached a large part of the Zulu warriors, drove Dingaan out of
Zululand in 1840. Panda, the rebel brother, was installed king in his
stead, as a sort of vassal to the Boer government, which was now
entitled the republic of Natalia, and the Boers founded a city,
Pietermaritzburg, and began to portion out the land. They deemed the
British authorities to have abandoned any claim to the country by the
withdrawal of a detachment of troops which had been landed at Port Natal
in 1838. But their action, and in particular their ejection from the
country of a mass of Kafirs whom they proposed to place in a district
already occupied by another tribe, had meanwhile excited the
displeasure of the government of Cape Colony. That government, though it
had not followed them into the deserts of the interior, had never
renounced, and indeed had now and then reasserted its right to consider
them British subjects. They, however, repudiated all idea of subjection,
holding British sovereignty to be purely territorial, so that when they
had passed out of the region which the British crown claimed they had
become a free and independent people, standing alone in the world. Their
attempt to establish a new white state on the coast was a matter of
serious concern, because it might affect trade with the interior, and
plant in a region which Britain deemed her own the germ of what might
become a new maritime power. And as the colonial government considered
itself the general protector of the natives, and interested in
maintaining the Kafirs between the Boer state and Cape Colony, the
attacks of the Boers on the Kafirs who lived to the west of them toward
the Colony, could not be permitted to pass unchecked. The British
government, though still unwilling to assume fresh responsibilities, for
in those days it was generally believed that the colonial possessions of
Britain were already too extensive, nevertheless ultimately concluded,
for the reasons given above, to assert its authority over Port Natal and
the country behind as far as the crest of the mountains. A small force
was accordingly sent to Port Natal in 1842. It was there besieged by the
Boer levies, and would have been forced to surrender but for the daring
ten days' ride through the whole breadth of Kaffraria of a young
Englishman, Richard King, who brought the news to Graham's Town, six
hundred miles distant. A force sent by sea relieved the starving
garrison after a siege of twenty-six days. The Boer forces dispersed,
but it was not till a year later that the territory of Natal was
formally declared a British colony. Lord Stanley, then colonial
secretary, was reluctant to take over the responsibilities of a new
dominion with a disaffected white population and a mass of savage
inhabitants, and only yielded to the urgent arguments of Sir George
Napier, then governor of the Cape. In 1843, after long and angry debates
(sometimes interrupted by the women, who passionately denounced the
British government), the Volksraad, or popular assembly of the tiny
republic, submitted to the British crown, having delivered a warm but
ineffectual protest against the principle of equal civil rights for
whites and blacks laid down by the British government. The colony of
Natal was then constituted, first (1845) as a dependency of Cape Colony,
afterward (1856) as a separate colony. A part of the Boers, estimated at
five hundred families, remained in it; but the majority, including all
the fiercer spirits, recrossed the mountains (some forthwith, some five
years later), with their cattle, and joined the mass of their
fellow-emigrants who had remained on the plateaus of the interior.
Meanwhile an immense influx of Kafirs, mostly from Zululand, although
many belonged to other tribes whom the Zulus had conquered, repopulated
the country, and in it the blacks have since been about ten times as
numerous as the whites. Thus ended the Dutch republic of Natalia, after
six years of troubled life. While it was fighting with the Zulus on the
east, and other Kafirs on the west, it was torn by incessant intestine
quarrels, and unable either to levy taxes, or to compel for any other
purpose the obedience of its own citizens. But its victories over
Dingaan's armies were feats of arms as remarkable as any South Africa
has seen. The English are not generally slow to recognize the fine
qualities of their adversaries, but they have done less than justice to
the resolution and the daring which the Boers displayed in these early
campaigns against the natives.[20]
With the British annexation of Natal ended the first of the attempts
which the emigrant Boers have made to obtain access to the sea. It was a
turning-point in the history of South Africa, for it secured to Great
Britain that command of the coast which has ever since been seen to be
more and more vital to her predominance, and it established a new centre
of English settlement in a region till then neglected, from whence large
territories, including Zululand and, recently, Southern Tongaland, have
been acquired. Although Britain purported to act, and, indeed, in a
certain sense did act, in self-defence, one cannot repress a feeling
that the Boer settlers, who had occupied a territory they found vacant
and had broken the power of the savage Zulu king, were hardly used. They
ought, at any rate, to have had earlier notice of British intentions.
But against this may be set the fact that the internal dissensions which
rent the infant republic would have sooner or later brought it to the
ground, compelling British intervention, and that the native races have
fared better under British control than they seemed likely to do under
that of the Boers, whose behaviour towards them, though little more
harsh than that of the English colonists, has been much less considerate
than that of the Imperial Government.
Hardly less troubled was the lot of the emigrants who had scattered
themselves over the wide uplands that lie between the Orange River and
the Limpopo. They, too, were engaged in incessant wars with the native
tribes, who were, however, less formidable than the Zulus, and much
cattle lifting went on upon both sides. Only one native tribe and one
native chief stand out from the confused tangle of petty raids and
forays which makes up (after the expulsion of the Matabili) the earlier
annals of the Boer communities. This chief was the famous Moshesh, to
speak of whose career I may digress for a moment from the thread of this
narrative. The Kafir races have produced within this century three
really remarkable men--men who, like Toussaint l'Ouverture in Hayti, and
Kamehameha I. in Hawaii, will go down in history as instances of the
gifts that sometimes show themselves even among the most backward races.
Tshaka, the Zulu, was a warrior of extraordinary energy and ambition,
whose power of organization enabled him to raise the Zulu army within a
few years to a perfection of drill and discipline and a swiftness of
movement which made them irresistible, except by Europeans. Khama, the
chief who still reigns among the Bechuanas, has been a social reformer
and administrator of judgment, tact, and firmness, who has kept his
people in domestic peace and protected them from the dangerous
influences which white civilization brings with it, while at the same
time helping them onward toward such improvements as their character
admits. Moshesh, chief of the Basutos, was born in the end of the
eighteenth century. He belonged to a small clan which had suffered
severely in the wars caused by the conquest of Tshaka, whose attacks
upon the tribes nearest him had driven them upon other tribes, and
brought slaughter and confusion upon the whole of South-eastern Africa.
Though only a younger son, his enterprise and courage soon made him a
leader. The progress of his power was aided by the skill he showed in
selecting for his residence and stronghold a flat topped hill called
Thaba Bosiyo, fenced round by cliffs, with pasture for his cattle, and
several springs of water. In this impregnable stronghold, from which he
drew his title of "chief of the mountain," he resisted repeated sieges
by his native enemies and by the emigrant Boers. The exploits of Moshesh
against his native foes soon brought adherents round him, and he became
the head of that powerful tribe, largely formed out of the fragments of
other tribes scattered and shattered by war, which is now called the
Basuto. Unlike most Kafir warriors, he was singularly free from
cruelty, and ruled his own people with a mildness which made him liked
as well as respected. In 1832 he had the foresight to invite
missionaries to come and settle among his people, and the following year
saw the establishment of the mission of the Evangelical Society of
Paris, whose members, some of them French, some Swiss, a few Scotch,
have been the most potent factors in the subsequent history of the
Basuto nation. When the inevitable collision between the Basutos and the
white men arrived, Moshesh, partly through counsels of the missionaries,
partly from his own prudence, did his best to avoid any fatal breach
with the British Government. Nevertheless, he was several times engaged
in war with the Orange River Boers, and once had to withstand the attack
of a strong British force led by the governor of Cape Colony. But his
tactful diplomacy made him a match for any European opponent, and
carried him through every political danger. Moshesh died, full of years
and honour, about twenty-eight years ago, having built up, out of the
dispersed remnants of broken tribes, a nation which has now, under the
guiding hand of the missionaries, and latterly of the British Government
also, made greater progress in civilization and Christianity than any
other Kafir race. Of its present condition I shall speak in a later
chapter.