THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER
When the penniless younger son of the English society play is jilted
by the luxury-loving heroine, he invariably packs his portmanteau
and betakes himself to Rhodesia to make his fortune. Fifty years ago
he sought the golden fleece in California; thirty years ago he took
passage by P. & O. boat for the Australian diggings; ten years ago he
helped to swell the mad rush to the Yukon; to-day his journey's end
is the newest of the great, new nations—Rhodesia. He returns in the
fourth act, broad-hatted, bronzed, and boisterous, to announce that
he is the owner of a ten-thousand-acre farm, or a diamond field, or a
gold mine, or all of them, and that he has come home to find a girl
to share his farm-house on the Rhodesian veldt, where good cooking is
more essential in a wife than good clothes and a good complexion.
Now, beyond having a vague idea that Rhodesia is a frontier country
somewhere at the back of beyond, there is only about one in every
fifty of the audience who has any definite notion where or what it
really is. Picture, then, if you can, a territory about the size
of all the Atlantic States, from Florida to Maine, put together,
with the dry, dusty, sunny climate of southern California and the
fertile, rolling, well-watered, and well-wooded surface of Indiana;
picture such a country dropped down in the heart of equatorial
Africa—that is Rhodesia. It lies a little above and to the right of
that speckled yellow patch on the map of Africa which was labelled
in our school geographies the Kalahari Desert. Bearing the name
of the great empire-builder is the whole of that region which is
bounded on the north by the Congo and the sleeping-sickness, on the
east by Mozambique and the black-water fever, on the west by Angola
and the cocoa atrocities, and on the south by the Transvaal and the
discontented Dutch. It is watered by the Limpopo, which forms its
southernmost boundary; by the Zambezi, which separates Southern
Rhodesia from the northeast and northwest provinces; and by the
innumerable streams which unite to form the Congo.
When the railway which English _concessionaires_ are now pushing
inland from the coast of Angola to the Zambezi is completed, the front
door to Rhodesia will be Lobito Bay, thus bringing Bulawayo within
sixteen days of the Strand by boat and rail. At present, however, the
country must be entered through the cellar, which means Cape Town and
a railway journey of fourteen hundred miles; or by the side door at
Beira, a fever-stricken Portuguese town on the East Coast, which is
fortunate in being but a night's journey by rail from the Rhodesian
frontier and is, in consequence, the gateway through which British
jams, American harvesters, and German jack-knives are opening up inner
Africa to foreign exploitation.
The Rhodesia-bound traveller who escapes landing at Beira in a basket
is fortunate, for it has a poorly sheltered harbour and neither dock,
jetty, nor wharf, so that in the monsoon months, when the great
combers come roaring in from the Indian Ocean mountain-high, there is
about as much chance of getting the steam tender alongside the rolling
liner as there is of getting a frightened horse alongside a panting
automobile. If a dangerous sea is running, the disembarking passenger
is put into a cylindrical, elongated basket, a sort of enlarged
edition of those used for soiled towels in the lavatories of hotels; a
wheezing donkey-engine swings it up and outward and, if the man at the
lever calculates the roll of the ship correctly, drops it with a thud
on the deck of the tender plunging off-side.
Built on a stretch of sun-baked sand, between a miasmal jungle and the
sea, Beira is the hottest and unhealthiest place in all East Africa.
“It is one of the places that the Lord has overlooked,” remarked
a sallow-faced resident, as he took his hourly dose of quinine.
Even the paid-to-be-enthusiastic author of the steamship company's
glowing booklet hesitates at depicting this fever-haunted, sun-baked,
sand-suffocated seaport of Mozambique, contenting himself with the
noncommittal statement that “it is indescribable; it is just Beira.”
The town has but three attractions: a broad-verandaed hotel where
they charge you forty cents for a lemonade with no ice in it; a golf
course, laid out by a newly arrived Englishman, who died of sunstroke
the first day he played on it; and a trolley system which makes every
resident the owner of his own street-car. The heat in Beira being
too great to permit of walking—a shaded thermometer not infrequently
climbs to one hundred and twenty degrees; the streets being too deep
in sand for the use of vehicles; and the tsetse-fly killing off horses
in a few days, those European traders and officials who are condemned
to dwell in Beira get about in “trolleys” of their own. These
two-seated, hooded conveyances, which are a sort of cross between a
hand-car, a baby-carriage, and the wheeled chairs on the board walk at
Atlantic City, are pushed by half-naked and perspiring natives over
a track which extends from one end of the town to the other and with
sidings into every man's front yard. It struck me, however, that the
most interesting things in Beira were the corrugated-iron shanty and
the stretch of wooden platform which mark the terminus of the railway,
and from which, in answer to my anxious queries, I was assured that a
train departed twice weekly for Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. I
used to sit on the veranda of the hotel and stare across the stretch
of burning sand at that wretched station as longingly as the small boy
stares at the red numeral on the calendar which indicates the Fourth
of July.
A temperature of one hundred and eighteen degrees in my compartment of
the sleeping-car; miasma rising in cloud wreaths from the jungle; a
station platform, alive with slovenly Portuguese soldiers with faces
as yellow as their uniforms; helmeted, gaunt-cheeked traders and
officials, and cotton-clad Swahilis, comprised my last recollection
of Beira and the terrible East Coast. The next morning I awoke in my
compartment shivering, not from fever but from cold. Gone, as though
in a bad dream, were the glaring sands, the steaming jungle, and the
sallow, fever-racked men. Instead, my car window framed a picture of
rolling, grass-covered uplands, dotted here and there with herds of
grazing cattle and substantial, whitewashed farm-houses, while back
of all was the gray-blue of distant mountains. As I looked at the
transformed landscape incredulously, the train halted at a way-station
swarming with broad-hatted, flannel-shirted, sun-tanned men with
clean-cut Anglo-Saxon faces. A row of saddle-horses were tied to the
station fence, while their owners stamped up and down the platform
impatiently, awaiting the sorting of the infrequent mail from home; a
democrat wagon and a clumsy Cape cart were drawn up in the roadway;
and at a house close by a woman in a sunbonnet was feeding chickens.
“Where are we?” I inquired of the guard, as he passed through the
train. “We're just into Rhodesia now, sir,” said he, touching his
cap. “This is Umtali, in Mashonaland.” (Now, if I had asked that same
question of a brakeman on one of our own railways, he would probably
have answered, with the independence of his kind: “Can't you read
the sign on the station for yourself?”) “Surely there must be some
mistake,” I said to myself. “This cannot be Central Africa, for where
are the impenetrable jungles through which Livingstone cut his way,
the savage animals which Du Chaillu shot, and the naked savages with
whom Stanley alternately battled and bartered? This is not Africa;
this is our own West, with its men in corduroy and sombreros and its
women in gingham, with its open, rolling prairies and its air like
dry champagne.” Indeed, throughout my stay in Rhodesia I could not
rid myself of the impression that I was back in the American West
of thirty years ago, before the pioneer, the prospector, and the
cow-puncher had retreated before the advance of the railway, the
harvester, and the motor-car.
The story of the taking and making of Rhodesia forms one of the
most picturesque and thrilling chapters in the history of England's
colonial expansion. About the time that the nineteenth century had
reached its turning-point, a strange tale, passing by word of mouth
from native kraal to native kraal, came at last to the ears of a
Scotch worker in the mission field of Bechuanaland. It was a tale of a
waterfall somewhere in the jungles of the distant north; a waterfall
so mighty, declared the natives, that the spray from it looked like
a storm cloud on the horizon and the thunder of its waters could
be heard four days' trek away. So the missionary, wearied with the
tedium of proselyting amid a peaceful people and restless with the
curiosity of the born explorer, set out on a long and lonely march to
the northward, through a country which no white man's eyes had ever
seen. It took him three years to reach the falls for which he started,
but when at last he stood upon the brink of the canyon and looked down
upon the waters of the Zambezi as they hurtled over four hundred feet
of sheerest cliff, he was so awed by their majesty and their beauty
that he named them after Victoria, the young English queen. Before he
left the missionary-explorer carved his name on the trunk of a near-by
tree, where it can be seen to-day; the name is David Livingstone.
For a quarter of a century the regions adjacent to the Zambezi were
disturbed only by migratory bands of natives and marauding animals.
Then Stanley came with his mile-long caravan of porters, halting long
enough to explore and map the region, on his historic march from coast
to coast. In the middle eighties a young English prospector, trekking
through the country with a single wagon, found that for which he was
seeking—gold. Likewise he saw that its verdure-clad prairies would
support many cattle and that its virgin soil was adapted for many
kinds of crops; that it was, in short, a white man's country. Unarmed
and unaccompanied, he penetrated to the kraal of Lobenguela, the
chief of the warlike Matabele, who occupied the region, and induced
him to sign a treaty placing his country under British protection.
The price paid him was five hundred dollars a month and a thousand
antiquated rifles; cheap enough, surely, for a territory three times
the size of Texas and as rich in natural resources as California. A
year later the British South Africa Company, a corporation capitalised
at thirty million dollars, under a charter granted by the Imperial
Government, began the work of exploiting the concession; naming it,
properly enough, after Cecil John Rhodes, the lone prospector who,
with the vision of a prophet, had foreseen its possibilities and by
whose unaided efforts it had been obtained. Such was the first step in
Rhodes's policy of British expansion northward—a policy so successful
that in his own lifetime he saw the frontiers of British Africa pushed
from the Orange River to the Nile.
To hand over a colonial possession, its inhabitants and its resources,
to be administered and exploited by a private corporation, sounds like
a strange proceeding to American ears. Imagine turning the Philippines
over to the Standard Oil Company and giving that corporation
permission to appoint its own officials, make its own laws, assess
its own taxes, and maintain its own military force in those islands.
That, roughly speaking, was about what England did when she turned
Rhodesia over to the chartered company. It should be remembered,
however, that, beginning when the European nations were entering
upon an era of economic exploration of hitherto virgin territories,
these chartered companies have played a large part in the history of
colonisation in general and in the upbuilding of the British Empire
in particular, though in the great majority of cases it was trade,
not empire, at which they aimed. Warned, however, by the fashion in
which the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company abused their
power, the British Government keeps a jealous eye on the activities of
the Rhodesian _concessionaires_, their charter, while conferring broad
trading privileges and great administrative powers, differing from
earlier instruments in neither delegating sovereignty nor granting an
exclusive monopoly.
The Rhodesia protectorate is the result of the consolidation of four
great native kingdoms: Mashonaland in the southeast, Matabeleland in
the southwest, Barotseland in the northwest, and in the northeast a
portion of the now separately administered protectorate of Nyasaland.
Practically the whole country is an elevated veldt, or plateau,
ranging from three thousand five hundred to five thousand feet above
sea-level; studded with granite kopjes which in the south attain to
the dignity of a mountain chain; well watered by tributaries of the
Congo, the Zambezi, and the Limpopo; and covered with a luxuriant
vegetation. Like California, _Southern_ Rhodesia has a unique and
hospitable climate, free from the dangerous heats of an African summer
and from cold winds in winter. Though the climate of nearly all of
Southern Rhodesia is suitable for Europeans, much of the trans-Zambezi
provinces, especially along the river valleys and in the low-lying,
swampy regions near the great equatorial lakes, reeks with malaria,
while in certain other areas, now carefully delimited and guarded by
governmental regulation, the tsetse-fly commits terrible ravages among
cattle and horses and the sleeping-sickness among men. The climate as
a whole, however, is characterised by a rather remarkable equability
of temperature, especially when it is remembered that Rhodesia extends
from the borders of the temperate zone to within a few degrees of
the equator. At Salisbury, the capital, for example, the mean July
temperature is 57.5° and for January 70.5°, the extremes for the year
ranging from 34° to 93°. It is a significant fact, however, that the
glowing prospectuses of the chartered company touch but lightly on
the climatic conditions which prevail north of the Zambezi, a region
from which, it struck me, the European settler who does not possess
a system that is proof against every form of tropical fever, a head
that is proof against sunstroke, and a mind which is proof against
that oftentimes fatal form of homesickness which the army surgeons
call nostalgia, is much more likely to go home in a coffin than in a
_cabine de luxe_.
In mines of gold, of silver, and of diamonds Rhodesia is very rich;
agriculturally it is very fertile, for in addition to the native crops
of rice, tobacco, cotton, and india-rubber, the fruits, vegetables,
and cereals of Europe and America are profitably grown. The great
fields of maize, or “mealies,” as all South Africans call it, through
which my train frequently passed, constantly reminded me of scenes in
our own “corn belt”; but in the watch-towers which rise from every
corn-field, atop of which an armed Kaffir sits day and night to
protect the crops from the raids of wild pigs and baboons, Rhodesia
has a feature which she is welcome to consider exclusively her own.
Though Rhodesia is distinctly a frontier country, with many of a
frontier's defects, her towns—Salisbury, Bulawayo, Umtali, and the
rest—are not frontier towns as we knew them in Butte, Cheyenne,
Deadwood, and Carson City. There are saloons, of course, but they
are not of the “gin palace” variety, nor did it strike me that
intoxication was particularly common; certainly nothing like what
it used to be during the gold-rush days in Alaska or in our own
West. This may be due to the fantastic prices charged for liquor—a
whiskey-and-soda costs sixty cent—and then again it maybe due to
the fact that most of the settlers have brought their families with
them, so that, instead of spending their evenings leaning over green
tables or polished bars, they devote them to cricket, gardening, or
a six-weeks-old English paper. Though nearly every one goes armed,
the streets of the Rhodesian towns are as peaceable as Commonwealth
Avenue, in Boston, on a Sunday morning. Indeed, the commandant of
police in Bulawayo assured me that he had had only one shooting affray
during his term of office. In Rhodesia, should a man draw his gun as
the easiest means of settling a quarrel, his companions, instead of
responding by drawing theirs, would probably call a constable and have
him bound over to keep the peace. Even the rights of the natives are
rigidly safeguarded by law, an American settler in Umtali complaining
to me most bitterly that “it's more dangerous for a white man to kick
a nigger down here than it is for him to kill one in the States.” Now,
all this was rather disappointing for one who, like myself, was on the
lookout for the local colour and picturesqueness and whoop-her-up-boys
excitement which one naturally associates with life on a frontier;
but I might have expected just what I found, for wherever the flag
of England flies, whether over the gold-miners of the Yukon, the
ivory-traders of Uganda, or the settlers of Rhodesia, there will be
found the deep-seated respect of the Englishman for English order and
English law.
In my opinion the country club, more than any other single factor, has
contributed most to the making, socially and morally, of Rhodesia.
Though the American West is dotted with just such towns as Salisbury,
Bulawayo, Gwelo, and Umtali, with the same limitations, pitfalls,
and possibilities, the men's centre of interest, after the day's
work is over, is the saloon, the dance-hall, or the barber-shop
with a pool-room in the rear. They do things differently in central
Africa. In every Rhodesian town large enough to support one—and the
same is true of all Britain's colonial possessions—I found that a
“sports club” had been established on the edge of the town. Often
it was nothing but a ramshackle shed or cottage that had been given
a coat of paint and had a veranda added, but files of the English
newspapers and illustrated weeklies were to be found inside, while
from the tea tables on the veranda one overlooked half a dozen tennis
courts, a cricket ground, and a foot-ball field. It is here that
the settlers—men, women, and children—congregate toward evening,
to discuss the crop prospects, the local taxes, the latest gold
discoveries, and, above all else, the news contained in the weekly
mail from home. Why have not our own progressive prairie towns some
simple social system like this? It was in speaking of this very thing
that the mayor of Salisbury—himself an American-remarked: “In the
little, every-day things which make for successful colonisation of a
new country, you fellows in the States are twenty years behind us.”
Living is expensive in Rhodesia, the prices of necessaries usually
being high and of luxuries ofttimes fantastic. To counterbalance
this, however, wages are extraordinarily high. It is useless to
attempt to quote wages, for the farther up-country a man gets the
higher pay he can command, so I will content myself with the bare
statement that for the skilled workman, be he carpenter, blacksmith,
mason, or wheelwright, larger wages are to be earned than in any part
of the world that I know. The same is true of the man who has had
practical experience in agriculture or stock-raising, there being a
steady demand for men conversant with dairying, cattle-breeding, and
irrigation. Let me drive home and copper-rivet the fact, however,
that in Rhodesia, as in nearly all new countries, where there is a
considerable native population to draw upon, there is no place for the
unskilled labourer.
For the man with resource and a little capital there are many roads to
wealth in British Africa. I know of one, formerly a laundry employee
in Chicago, who landed in Rhodesia with limited capital but unlimited
confidence. Recognising that the country had arrived at that stage of
civilisation where the people were tired of wearing flannel shirts,
but could not afford to have white ones ruined by Kaffir washermen,
he started a chain of sanitary up-to-date laundries, and is to-day
one of the wealthy men of the colony. If you ever had to pay one
of his laundry bills you would understand why. Another American,
starting business as a hotel-keeper in Salisbury, soon perceived
that the people were ripe for some form of amusement other than that
provided by the cricket fields and saloons; so he built a string of
cinematograph and vaudeville theatres combined, and to-day, on the
very spot where Lobenguela's medicine-men performed their bloody
rites a dozen years ago, you can hear the whir of the moving-picture
machine and see on the canvas screen a military review at Aldershot
or a bathing scene at Asbury Park. Still another American whom I met
has increased the thickness of his wallet by supplying prospectors
and settlers with sectional houses which are easily portable and can
be erected in an hour. Taking the circular, conical-roofed hut of the
Matabele as his model, he evolved an affair of corrugated iron which
combines simplicity, portability, and practicability with a low price,
so that to-day, as you travel through Rhodesia, you will see these
American-made imitations of Kaffir huts dotting the veldt.
Though Rhodesia has a black population of one million six hundred
thousand, as against twenty thousand whites, there has thus far been
no such thing as race troubles or a colour question, due in large
measure, no doubt, to the firm and just supervision exercised by
the British resident commissioners. Arms, ammunition, and liquor
excepted, natives and Europeans are under the same conditions. Land
has been set apart for tribal settlements, the mineral rights being
reserved to the company, but, if the native occupation is disturbed,
new lands must immediately be assigned, all disputes being ultimately
referrible to the British high commissioner. Those natives living
near the towns are segregated in settlements of their own, a native
under no circumstances being permitted to remain within the town
limits after nightfall, or to enter them in the day-time without a
pass signed by the commandant of police. Though possessing many of the
temperamental characteristics of the American negro, and in particular
his aversion for manual work, the Rhodesian native is, on the whole,
honest and trustworthy, a well-disciplined and efficient force of
native constabulary having been recruited from the warlike Barotse and
Matabele.
[Illustration: MORE WORK FOR THE PIONEER.
In the heart of the jungle in Northeastern Rhodesia near the Congo
border. This is the sort of country through which portions of the
“Cape-to-Cairo” railway will pass.]
Highways of steel bisect Rhodesia in both directions. From Plumtree,
on the borders of Bechuanaland, the Rhodesian section of the
great Cape-to-Cairo system stretches straight across the country
to Bwana M'kubwa, on the Congo frontier, while another line, the
Rhodesia, Mashonaland, and Beira, links up, as its name indicates,
the transcontinental system with the East Coast. Though the
much-advertised Zambezi Express is scarcely the “veritable train de
luxe” which the railway folders call it, it is a comfortable enough
train nevertheless, with electric-lighted dining and sleeping cars,
the latter being fitted, as befits a dusty country, with baths. The
dining-car tariff is on a sliding scale; the farther up-country you
travel the higher the prices ascend. Between Cape Town and Mafeking
the charges for meals seemed to me exceedingly reasonable (fifty cents
for breakfast, sixty cents for luncheon, and seventy-five cents for
dinner); between Mafeking and Bulawayo they are only moderate; between
Bulawayo and the Zambezi they are high; and north of the Zambezi—when
you can get any food at all—the charges for it are exorbitant. When
the section to Lake Tanganyika is completed only a millionaire can
afford to enter the dining-car. It speaks volumes for the development
of British South Africa, however, that one can get into a sleeping-car
in Cape Town and get out of it again, six days later, on the navigable
head-waters of the Congo, covering the distance of nearly two thousand
five hundred miles at a total cost of eighty dollars—and much of it
through a country which has been opened to the white man scarcely a
dozen years.
Just as every visitor to the United States heads straight for
Niagara, so every visitor to South Africa purchases forthwith a
ticket to the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, the mighty cataract in
the heart of Rhodesia which is the greatest natural wonder in the
Dark Continent and, perhaps, in the world. The natives call the falls
_Mosi-oa-tunya_, which means “Thundering Smoke,” and you appreciate
the name's significance when your train halts at daybreak at a wayside
station, sixty miles away, and you see above the tree-tops a cloud of
smoky vapour and hear a low humming like a million sewing-machines. It
is so utterly impossible for the eye, the mind, and the imagination to
grasp the size, grandeur, and beauty of the Victoria Falls that it
is futile to attempt to describe them. If you can picture an unbroken
sheet of water forty city blocks in width, or as long as from the
Grand Central Station, in New York, to Washington Square, hurtling
over a precipice twice as high as the Flatiron Building, you will have
the best idea that I can give you of what the Victoria Falls are like.
They are unique in that the level of the land above the falls is the
same as that below, the entire breadth of the second greatest river in
Africa falling precipitately into a deep and narrow chasm, from which
the only outlet is an opening in the rock less than one hundred yards
wide. From the Boiling Pot, as this seething caldron of waters is
called, the contents of the Zambezi rush with unbridled fury through a
deep and narrow gorge of basaltic cliffs, which, nowhere inferior to
the rapids at Niagara, extends with many zigzag windings for more than
forty miles. My first glimpse of the falls was in the early morning,
and the lovely, reeking splendour of the scene, as the great, placid
river, all unconscious of its fate, rolls out of the mysterious depths
of Africa, comes suddenly to the precipice's brink, and plunges in one
mighty torrent into the obscurity of the cavern below, the rolling
clouds of spray, the trembling earth, the sombre rain-forest on the
opposite bank, and a rainbow stealing over all, made a picture which
will remain sharp and clear in my memory as long as I live.
The Outer Lands are almost all exploited; the work of the pioneer and
the frontiersman is nearly finished, and in another decade or so we
shall see their like no more. Rhodesia is the last of the great new
countries open to colonisation under Anglo-Saxon ideals of government
and climatically suitable for the propagation of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Though the handful of hardy settlers who have already made it their
home speak with the burr of the shires instead of the drawl of the
plains; though they wear corded riding-breeches instead of leather
“chaps”; and stuff Cavendish into their pipes instead of rolling their
cigarettes from Bull Durham, they and the passing plainsmen of our own
West are, when all is said and done, brothers under their skins.
With the completion of the Cape-to-Cairo trunk line and its subsidiary
systems to either coast, with the exploitation of the mineral
deposits which constitute so much of Rhodesia's wealth, and with the
harnessing of the great falls and the utilisation of the limitless
power which will be obtainable from them, this virgin territory in the
heart of Africa bids fair to be to the home and fortune seekers of
to-morrow what the American West was to those of yesterday, and what
northwestern Canada is to those of to-day. A few years more and it
will be a developed and prosperous nation. To-day it is the last of
the world's frontiers, where the hardy and adventurous of our race are
still fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation.