THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS
The most significant thing I saw in South Africa was an old-fashioned
gabled, whitewashed house. The name of it is _Groote Schuur_, and it
stands in very beautiful grounds on the slopes of Table Mountain,
a mile or so at the back of Cape Town. That house was the home of
Cecil John Rhodes, who, more than any other man, was responsible
for the Boer War and for the resultant British predominance south
of the Congo, and in his will he directed that it should be used as
the official residence of the prime minister of that South African
confederation which his prophetic mind foresaw. The welding of the
Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State with the
British colonies of Natal and the Cape of Good Hope produced the great
antipodal commonwealth of which the empire-builder dreamed, but the
man who, as prime minister, dwells under _Groote Schuur's_ gabled
roof and directs the policies of the new nation is a member of that
Boer race which Rhodes hated and feared and whose political power he
firmly believed had been broken forever. Fortune never doubled in her
tracks more completely than when she made General Louis Botha, the
last leader of Boer troops in the field, the first prime minister of a
united South Africa.
Strange things have happened in South Africa in the dozen years that
have passed since the musketry crackled along the Modder and the
Tugela, for the country that the world believed had been won for
good and all by British arms is being slowly but surely rewon by
Boer astuteness. Already the bonds which hold the new Union of South
Africa to the British Empire have become very loose ones. The man
who, as prime minister, is the virtual ruler of the young nation, is
a far-sighted and sagacious Dutchman, while seven out of the eleven
portfolios in his cabinet are held by men of the same race. The Union
not only makes its own laws and fixes its own tariffs, but the leading
Dutch organ of the country recently went so far as to urge that, in
case Great Britain should become engaged in a European war, it would
be possible and might be proper for South Africa to declare its
neutrality and take no part in it. Not only is the white population
of the Union overwhelmingly Dutch, but in many parts of the country
English is becoming merely a subsidiary tongue, while it is not at all
unlikely, in view of the bill recently passed by the Parliament making
Dutch compulsory in the schools, that the language of the Netherlands
will eventually become the predominant tongue throughout all South
Africa. Most suggestive of all, perhaps, the Orange River Colony, upon
entering the Union, promptly reverted to its old name of the Orange
Free State, which it bore before the war with England. Indeed, it may
sadly perplex the historians of the future to decide who won the Boer
War.
If South Africa is to become a union in fact as well as in name its
people will have to face and solve the great national problems of
race and colour. Of these, the former are, if not the more important,
certainly the more pressing. Two of the four provinces of the Union,
remember, are British solely by right of conquest; a third is bound
by the closest ties of blood and tradition to the Dutch people; while
only one of the four is British in sentiment and population. Many
intelligent people with whom I talked, both in England and in Africa,
assured me that the formation of the Union was the first step toward
cutting the bonds which join South Africa to the mother country. While
most Englishmen scoff at any such suggestion, swaggeringly asserting
that they “have whipped the Dutch once and can do it again,” the
Dutch retort, on the other hand, that it took England, with all her
financial and military resources, four years, and cost her tens of
thousands of lives and millions of pounds, to conquer the two little
Boer republics, and that she would not have beaten them then if their
money had held out. Though there is certainly no love lost between the
English and the Boers, I think that the majority of the latter are
convinced that it is to their own best interests to be loyal to the
new government, in the direction of which they have, after all, the
greatest say.
The attitude which the British Government has adopted in its treatment
of the Boer population since the close of the war has been remarkable
for its generosity and far-sightedness. In all its colonial history
it has done few wiser things than the recognition of the military,
as well as the civic, ability of General Botha. Not only is this
sagacious Dutchman, who led the forces of the embattled Boers until
dispersed by the tremendously superior might of England, and then
inaugurated a guerilla warfare by which the conflict was prolonged for
two years with victories which will go down in history as notable,
now prime minister of the new nation, but, early in 1912, he was
appointed to the rank of general in that very army which he so long
and so valorously defied. This is, I believe, an almost unprecedented
instance of the wise and politic exercise of imperial authority in
the strengthening of imperial power and can hardly fail to result in
increasing the loyalty of South Africa's Boer population.
The men who planned and brought the Union into being have had to pick
their steps with care, and more than once their ingenuity has been
taxed to the utmost to avoid the outcropping of racial jealousies and
enmities. The white population of South Africa, you should understand,
consists of three classes: the Boers, which means simply “tillers of
the soil,” and which is the name applied by the South African Dutch
to themselves; the Colonials, or British immigrants, most of whom
have come out with the intention of returning to England as soon as
they have made their fortunes; and, lastly, the Africanders, men
whose fathers were British immigrants, but who were themselves born
and bred in South Africa and who have intermarried with the Boers
so often that it is almost impossible to draw the line between the
races. Given these three factions, therefore, with their different
customs, ideals, and aspirations, and it needs no saying that the
task confronting those who are responsible for the smooth working of
the governmental machinery is no easy one. The political jealousy
existing between Briton and Boer in South Africa to-day is comparable
only to that which existed between Northerners and Southerners during
reconstruction days. The racial antagonism which arose over the
location of the Federal capital, and which threatened at one time to
upset the whole scheme of federation, was only overcome by the novel
expedient of creating two capitals instead of one, Pretoria, the old
capital of the Transvaal, where Krüger held sway, being made the
residence of the Governor-General and the seat of the executive power,
while the Parliament sits in Cape Town.
The Union Parliament consists of a Senate having forty members—eight
of whom are appointed by the Governor-General, the other thirty-two
being elected, eight by each province—and a House of Assembly with 121
members chosen as follows: Cape of Good Hope 51, Natal 17, Transvaal
36, and Orange Free State 17. No voter is disqualified by race or
colour, but the members of Parliament must be English subjects of
European descent who have lived in the colony for at least five years.
Now, a very great deal, so far as the well-being of the native races
of South Africa are concerned, depends upon the interpretation that
is given to the words “European descent.” In Cuban society every
one who is not absolutely black is treated as white, whereas in the
United States every one who is suspected of having even a “touch of
the tar brush” is treated as black. Though the Federal constitution is
very far from giving the native races a standing equal to that of the
whites, intelligent government of the natives is promised by a clause
which provides that four of the Senate, out of a total of forty, shall
be appointed because of their special knowledge of the wants and
wishes of the coloured population.
If the racial problem is the most pressing, the colour problem is by
far the most serious question before the people of South Africa, for
the blacks not only outnumber the whites four to one, but there is the
ever-present danger that rebellion may spring up among them without
the slightest warning. Apart from all other considerations, the very
numbers of the natives in South Africa form a dangerous element in
the problem, for there are close on five million blacks south of the
Limpopo as against a million and a quarter Europeans. If, in our own
South, where the blacks are only half as numerous as the whites, there
exists a problem of which no satisfactory solution has been offered,
how much more serious is the state of affairs in a country where a
handful of white men—themselves split into two camps by racial and
political animosities—are face to face with a vast, warlike, and
constantly increasing native population! In fact, the colour problem
which has arisen would be strikingly similar to that in our Southern
States were it not that there is a vast difference in type and
temperament between the South African native and the Southern darky.
The native races are three in number: the Bushmen, the aborigines
of South Africa, a race of pygmy savages of a very low order of
intelligence, who are fast becoming extinct; the Hottentots, a people
considerably more advanced toward civilisation but rapidly decreasing
from epidemics; and the Kaffirs, as the various sections of the great
Zulu race are commonly known, a warlike, courageous, and handsome
people who, since the British Government ended their inter-tribal
wars, are rapidly multiplying, having increased fifteen per cent
in the last seven years. Although the Europeans in South Africa
universally regard the Kaffirs with contempt, it is not altogether
unmixed with fear, for a nation of fighting men, such as the Zulus,
who organised a great military power, enacted a strict code of laws,
and held the white man at bay for a quarter of a century, will not
always remain in a state of subjection, nor will they tamely submit to
being driven into the wilderness north of the Zambezi, a solution of
the colour problem which has frequently been proposed.
That the attitude of Great Britain toward the colour question in South
Africa is similar to that of the Northern States toward the same
problem in the South, while the attitude of the European settlers
is almost identical with that of the Southerners, is strikingly
illustrated by a case which recently occurred in South Africa, in
which a European jury found a native guilty of attempting to assault a
white woman, a crime as unknown under the old régime in South Africa
as it was in our own South before the Civil War. Though the judge
sentenced the man to death, the Governor-General promptly commuted
the sentence on the ground that the “fact of crime” had not been
established. Immediately a storm of protest and indignation arose
among the white population which swept the country from the Zambezi
to the Cape, the settlers asserting that if the decree of commutation
were to form a precedent, no white woman would be safe in South
Africa. The echoes of this controversy had not yet died away before
two other cases occurred which intensely aggravated the situation.
One was the case of a settler named Lewis, who shot a native for an
insult to his daughters, while the other was that of the Honourable
Galbraith Cole, a son of the Earl of Enniskillen, who killed a native
on the alleged charge of theft. Both men were tried by white juries
on charges of murder, and both were promptly acquitted, though Mr.
Cole, in spite of his acquittal, was deported from South Africa by the
government. As though to emphasise their colour prejudice, the lawyers
of the Union about this time took concerted action to prevent native
attorneys from practising among them. How, then, can the natives, who
form three fourths of the population of the new Union, and who are
far more children of the soil than the Europeans, be said to have
protection of their most elementary rights if they are to be debarred
from having men of their own colour and race to defend them, and if no
white jury can be trusted to do justice where a native is concerned?
The imperial government deserves the greatest credit, however, for
the steps it has taken to preserve his lands to the native. In the
native protectorates and reservations of Basutoland, Swaziland,
Bechuanaland, Griqualand, Tembuland, and Pondoland the government has
reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of the natives territories
considerably larger than the combined area of our three Pacific-coast
States. Though these territories are under the control of British
resident commissioners, the native chiefs are allowed to exercise
jurisdiction according to tribal laws and customs in all civil matters
between natives, special courts having been established to deal with
serious civil or criminal matters in which Europeans are concerned.
Though certain small areas of land in these rich territories are held
by whites, the bulk of the country is reserved for the exclusive use
and benefit of the natives, and it is not at all likely that any more
land will be alienated for purposes of settlement by Europeans. (Could
anything be in more striking contrast to our disgraceful treatment of
the Indian?) Though South Africa has much in common with Canada, and
with Australia, and with our own Southwest, it is, when all is said
and done, a black man's country ruled by the white man, and it is upon
the justice, liberality, and intelligence of this rule that the peace
and prosperity of the young nation must eventually depend.
Two great obstacles will always stand in the way of the white man
having an easy row to hoe in South Africa: the climate and the lack
of water. Though the climate of the uplands is pleasant and makes
men want to lead an outdoor life, I am not at all certain that it
tends to develop or maintain the keenness and energy characteristic
of dwellers in the north temperate zone. The climate of the coastal
regions is, moreover, distinctly bad, the sharply cold nights and the
misty, steaming days producing the coast fever, which is a combination
of rheumatism, influenza, dysentery, and malaria, and is very
debilitating indeed. The white man who intends to make his permanent
home in South Africa has, therefore, two alternatives: he can submit
to the exactions of the climate, take life easily, leave the black
bottle severely alone, and live a long but unprogressive life, or he
can exhaust his energies and undermine his health in fighting the
climate and die of old age at sixty. If the climate is not all that
is desirable for men, it is infinitely worse for animals, for every
disease known to the veterinarian abounds. Time and again the herds
of the country have been almost exterminated by the hoof-and-mouth
disease, or by the rinderpest, a highly contagious cattle distemper
which is probably identical with that “murrain” with which Moses
smote the herds of ancient Egypt and which helped to bring Pharaoh
to terms. In the low-lying regions along the East Coast, and in the
country north of the Limpopo it is necessary to keep horses shut up
every night until the poisonous mists and dew have disappeared before
the sun lest they contract the “blue-tongue,” a disease characterised
by a swollen, purplish-hued tongue which kills them in a few hours
by choking; while in certain other districts, especially in the
vicinity of the Zambezi and of the Portuguese territories, the deadly
tsetse-fly makes it impossible to keep domestic animals at all.
The other great obstacle to the prosperity of South Africa is the
lack of water, for _less than one-tenth_ of the country is suitable
for raising any kind of a crop without water being led onto it—and
irrigation by private enterprise is out of the question, as even the
indomitable Rhodes was forced to admit. The government is fully alive
to the crying need for water, however, and a scheme for a national
system of irrigation is filling a large part of the Ministry of
Agriculture's programme. If carried out, this scheme will enormously
enlarge the area of tillage, for some of the regions now hopelessly
arid, such as the Karroo, have a soil of amazing fertility and need
only water to make them produce luxuriant crops. Were the rains of the
wet season conserved by means of the great tanks so common in India,
or were artesian wells sunk like those which have transformed the
desert regions of Algeria and Arizona, the vast stretch of the Karroo,
instead of being yellow with sand, might be yellow with waving corn.
Though agriculture is, and probably always will be, the least
important of the country's great natural sources of wealth, the
development of rural industries is, thanks to governmental assistance,
steadily progressing. Roads and bridges are being built, experimental
farms organised on a large scale, the services of scientific experts
engaged, blooded live-stock imported, agricultural banks established,
and literature dealing with agricultural problems is being distributed
broadcast over the country. The exports of fruit are steadily
increasing; sugar is being grown on the hot lands of Natal and might
be grown all the way to the Zambezi; tea has lately been introduced
in the coastal regions and would probably also flourish in the north;
the tobacco of the Transvaal is as good a pipe tobacco as any grown,
and those who have become accustomed to it will use no other; with
the exception of the olive, which does not thrive, and of the vine,
which succeeds only in a limited area around Cape Town, nearly all
of the products of the temperate zone and of subtropical regions can
be grown successfully. Though South Africa unquestionably presents
many promising openings in farming, in fruit-growing, and in truck
gardening, it is folly for a man to attempt any one of them unless he
possesses practical experience, a modest capital, and a willingness
to work hard and put up with many inconveniences, for in no other
English-speaking country are the necessities of life so dear and so
poor in quality, nowhere is labour so unsatisfactory, and nowhere is
lack of comfort so general.
South Africa's chief source of wealth is, and always will be, its
minerals. It was, strangely enough, the latest source to become
known, for nobody suspected it until, in 1867, a Boer hunter, his eye
caught by a sparkle among the pebbles on the Orange River, picked up
the first diamond. The diamonds found in that region since then have
amounted in value to nearly a billion dollars. Fifteen years after
the great diamond finds which sent the adventurers and fortune-seekers
of the world thronging to South Africa, came the still greater gold
discoveries on the Witwatersrand, or “The Rand,” as the reef of
gold-bearing quartz in the Transvaal is commonly called. The total
value of the gold production of the Rand for the twenty-five years
ending in June, 1910, was nearly one and a half billion dollars. But
though the Rand produces more gold than America and Australia put
together; though Kimberley has a virtual monopoly of the world's
supply of diamonds; though seams of silver, iron, coal, copper, and
tin are only waiting for capital and skill to unlock their treasures,
South Africa is, in the midst of this stupendous wealth, poor, for she
is as dependent on foreign sources for her food supply as England. In
other words, a region as large as all the States west of the Rocky
Mountains, in which flourish nearly all the products of every zone
from the Equator to the Pole, is unable to supply the wants of a white
population which is less than that of Connecticut. In California, on
the other hand, which is strikingly similar to South Africa in many
respects, the cultivation of the land kept pace with the production
of gold and eventually outstripped it. Until the mining industry of
South Africa is likewise put upon a solid agricultural foundation, the
country can never hope to be self-supporting.
In many respects Johannesburg, the “golden city,” is the most
interesting place I have ever seen. In 1886 it was nothing but a
collection of miserable shanties. To-day “Joburg,” as it is commonly
called, is a city of a quarter of a million people, with asphalted
streets, imposing office buildings, one of the best street-railway
systems that I know, the finest hotel south of the Equator, and one
of the most beautiful country clubs in the world. It is a city of
contrasts, however, for you can stand under the _porte-cochère_ of
the palatial Carlton Hotel and hear the click of roulette balls,
the raucous scrape of fiddles, and the shouts of drunken miners
issuing from a row of gambling-hells, dance-halls, and gin palaces
still housed in one-story buildings of corrugated iron; a beplumed
and bepainted Zulu will pull you in a 'rickshaw, over pavements as
smooth and clean as those of Fifth Avenue, to a theatre where you
will have the privilege of paying Metropolitan Opera House prices to
witness much the same sort of a performance that you would find in a
Bowery music-hall; in the Rand Club you can see bronzed and booted
prospectors, fresh from the mining districts of Rhodesia or the
Congo, leaning over the bar, cheek-by-jowl with sleek, immaculately
groomed financiers from London and Berlin and New York. Johannesburg
is a spendthrift city, a place of easy-come and easy-go, for the
mine-workers are paid big wages, the mine-managers receive big
salaries, and the mine-owners make big profits, and they all spend
their money as readily as they make it. The English miner averages
five dollars a day, which he spends between Saturday night and Monday
morning in a drunken spree, while a native labourer will save enough
in a few months to keep him in idleness and his conception of comfort
for the rest of his life.
There is pleasant society in Johannesburg and much hospitality to a
stranger. I took nearly a score of letters of introduction with me to
the Rand, but one would have done as well, for you present one letter,
and at the dinner which the man to whom it is addressed promptly gives
for you at the Rand Club or at the Carlton you will meet several of
the other people to whom you bear introductions. Through their club
life and their business relations the English and Americans in South
Africa are linked together in acquaintance like rings in a shirt of
chain-mail, so that if a man in Bulawayo or Kimberley or Johannesburg
gets to living beyond his income, or loses heavily at cards, or pays
undue attention to another man's wife, they will be discussing his
affairs in the club bars or on the hotel verandas of Cape Town and
Durban within a fortnight. I found that nearly all of the mines on
the Rand are managed by Americans, and that the mine-owners, who are
nearly all English or German, preferred them to any other nationality,
which struck me as being very complimentary to the administrative
and mechanical abilities of our people. One of these American
mine-managers drove forty miles in his motor-car so as to shake hands
with me, merely because he had learned in a roundabout way that I
came from the same part of New York State as himself, while another
fellow-countryman, who had made a great fortune during the Boer War
by contracting to wash the clothes of the British army, and received
war-time prices for his work, kidnapped me from the hotel where I was
staying, and landed me, baggage and all, in his home, and actually
felt affronted when I tried to leave after a week.
Few places could be more unlike Johannesburg than Pretoria, the new
capital of the Union, only thirty miles away. It is as different
from the “golden city” as sleepy Bruges is from bustling Antwerp; as
Tarrytown, New York, is from Paterson, New Jersey. At first sight I
was surprised to find so English a town, but after I had strolled
in the shade of the wooden arcades formed by the broad verandas of
the shops I decided that the atmosphere of the city was Indian; the
rows of mud-bespattered saddle-horses tied to hitching-posts along
the main streets and the rural produce being sold from wagons in the
central market-place recalled our own West; but the substantial,
white-plastered houses, with their old-fashioned _stoeps_, their
red-brick sidewalks, and their prim and formal gardens, finally
convinced me that the town was, after all, Dutch. Every visitor to
Pretoria goes to see Krüger's house, the low, whitewashed dwelling
with the white lions on the _stoep_, where the stubborn old President
used to sit, smoking his long pipe and drinking his black coffee and
giving parental advice to his people. Across the way is the old Dutch
church where he used to hold forth on Sundays, with the gold hands
still missing from the clock-face on its steeple, for in the last days
of the South African Republic they were melted down and went to swell
the slender war-chest of the Boer army. In the cemetery hard by the
crafty, indomitable old man lies buried, while the hated flag against
which he fought so long flies over the capital where he collected his
guns and hatched his schemes of conquest, and within sight of his
black-marble tomb there are rising in brick and stone the great new
buildings which mark Pretoria as the capital of a united South Africa.
Thirty miles northward across the veldt from Pretoria is the great
hole in the ground known as the Premier Diamond Mine, the newest and
potentially the richest of the South African diamond fields. Here, in
January, 1905, the surface manager, a Scotchman named McHardy, while
strolling through the pit during the noon hour, saw the sparkle of
what he at first took to be a broken bottle. Prying it loose with
his stick from the surrounding rubble, he found it to be a diamond
as large as a good-sized orange. This remarkable stone, which is
the largest diamond heretofore found, has since become known to the
world as the Great Cullinan, being named after Sir Thomas Cullinan,
one of the owners of the mine. It is a pure white stone, 4 by 2-1/4
by 2 inches, weighing 3,025 carats, or 1.37 pounds, and worth in
the neighbourhood of a million dollars. As the surface cleavage
shows that it is undoubtedly a fragment of a much larger crystal,
one cannot but wonder what the original stone was like. The Great
Cullinan was immediately purchased by the Transvaal Government—or,
rather, the mine's share was purchased, for the government receives
sixty per cent of the value of all diamonds found—and presented to
King Edward. The question then arose of how so valuable a gem could
be transported to England in safety, for no sooner had its discovery
been announced than the criminals of the world began to lay their
plans to get possession of it. After many discussions and innumerable
suggestions and much newspaper comment, four men, armed to the teeth,
left the Premier Mine, carrying with them a red-leather despatch box.
Crossing the thirty miles of veldt to Pretoria under heavy escort,
they were conveyed in a private car to Cape Town; in the liner by
which they took passage to England a safe had been specially installed
and the red-leather despatch box was placed in it, two of the men
remaining on duty in front of it night and day. From Southampton a
special train took them up to London and a strong guard of detectives
and police surrounded them on their way to the bank at which the
diamond was to be delivered. When the despatch box was opened in the
presence of a group of curious officials it was found to contain
nothing more valuable than a lump of coal! The stone itself—and as
Sir Thomas Cullinan told me the story it is undoubtedly true—was
wrapped in cotton wool and tissue paper, put in a pasteboard box,
wrapped up in brown paper, and sent to England by parcels post, not
even the post-office authorities being given an inkling that it was
in the mails. I almost forgot to mention, by the way, that McHardy,
the discoverer of the great stone, was given a bonus of ten thousand
dollars, though it is a sad and peculiar commentary that within a year
his wife died, the bank in which he put the money failed, and his
house burned down.
The diamonds are found in beds of clay, of which there are two
layers: a soft, yellow clay, lying on or near the surface, and a hard,
blue clay, lying deeper. These clays, which are usually covered by a
thin stratum of calcareous rock, are supposed to be the remains of
mud pits due to volcanic action, such as the boiling springs of the
Yellowstone. Imagine a great hollow, looking like a gigantic bowl,
perhaps half a mile in diameter and one hundred feet deep, enclosed
by a series of barbed-wire fences and filled by thousands of Kaffir
workmen, looking, from a distance, like a gigantic swarm of ants—such
was my first impression of the Premier Mine. The native labourers,
who work in three shifts of eight hours each, after cleaving the
“hard-blue” with their picks, load it onto trolley-cars, which are
attached to a cable and hauled to the surface of the pit, where it
is spread on mile-long fields and exposed for several months to
rain, wind, and sun so as to effect decomposition. The softened
lumps of earth, after being brought into still smaller fragments by
the pickaxe, are then sent to the mills, where they are crushed,
pulverised, washed, and finally sent to the “greaser” to get at the
stones. Until very recently men had to be employed to sort the washed
“concentrates” and pick out the diamonds. But they would miss some.
And the men had to be guarded lest they steal the gems. And detectives
had to be hired to watch the guards who watched the men. But one day
a mine employee named Kirsten happened to notice that the diamonds,
no matter how small or discoloured, always stuck to a greasy surface,
just as iron filings stick to a magnet, while the dirt and other
stones did not. That was the suggestion which led to the invention of
the “Kirsten greaser,” a series of sloping boards, heavily coated with
grease, which are gently agitated as the mud and slime containing the
diamonds are slowly washed over them, and which never fail to collect
the precious stones.
At Kimberley, which is the only other diamond-producing district
of any importance in South Africa, the gem-bearing ground extends
over an area of but thirty-three acres, so that open mining has long
since given way to shafts, which have now been sunk to a depth of
two thousand five hundred feet, galleries being driven through the
producing ground at every forty-foot level, precisely as in a coal
mine. Kimberley has a romantic and picturesque history. In 1869 you
could not have found its name upon the map. In the following year
a Boer hunter, pitching his tent on the banks of the Orange River,
chanced to pick up a glittering stone from among the pebbles. The
news of his find making its way overland to Cape Town, the submarine
cables flashed it to every quarter of the globe, so that within a
twelvemonth adventurers and fortune-seekers had flocked there in
tens of thousands. By 1871 sixteen hundred claims, each thirty-one
feet square, were being worked, each man digging out the earth on
his own small plot, carrying it to one side, pulverising it by hand,
and sifting it for diamonds. The dirt from one claim would fall into
a neighbouring one, while some miners could not get their dirt out
at all without crossing another's property, so that quarrels and
lawsuits and shooting affrays soon began. About this time two quiet,
uncommunicative, shabbily clad men appeared at Kimberley and began to
buy up the various claims, until, before any one really appreciated
what was happening, the whole diamond industry of South Africa was
in their hands. Those men were Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Barnato,
and the great amalgamation which their skill and shrewdness effected,
now known as the DeBeers Consolidated Mining Company, was one of the
greatest _coups_ in the history of finance. It is this corporation
which the women of the world have to blame for keeping up the price of
diamonds, for the first thing it did was to close the greater part of
the Kimberley mines, keeping just enough open to produce the amount of
stones which experience has proved that Europe and America are able to
take at a price high enough to leave a gratifying profit. Although,
as a result of this policy, the price of diamonds has been well
maintained, the population of Kimberley has been greatly reduced, the
one great corporation, with its comparatively small staff of employees
and its labour-saving machinery, having taken the place of the horde
of independent adventurers of the early days.
It struck me that by far the most interesting sights, both at the
Kimberley and the Premier mines, were the so-called compounds, in
which the native labourers are confined, for the native who hires
out to work in a diamond mine must submit, during the term of his
contract, to as close confinement as a convict in a penitentiary;
he knows that he is in danger of being shot by the guards if he
attempts to escape; he is prepared to be searched daily with the same
minuteness which customs inspectors display in the case of a known
smuggler; and when his contract expires he has still to put up with
a fortnight's solitary confinement, in which emetics and cathartics
play an unpleasant part. The mine compounds are huge enclosures,
unroofed but covered with a wire netting to prevent anything being
thrown out over the walls. Around the interior of the wall are rows
of corrugated-iron huts, in which the natives live and sleep when
they are not at work, while the open space in the middle is used
for cooking, for washing, and for native games. The compounds are
surrounded by three lines of barbed-wire fence which are constantly
patrolled by armed sentries and illuminated at night by powerful
search-lights; every entrance is as jealously guarded as that of a
German fortress; and visitors are never admitted unless they bear a
pass signed by the administration and are accompanied by a responsible
official of the mine. Although the government—which, as I have already
remarked, takes sixty per cent of the mine's earnings—has made I. D.
B. (illicit diamond-buying) a penal offence with a uniform punishment
of twenty years at hard labour, and though the mining companies
maintain espionage systems which rival those of many Continental
governments, no employee, from director down to day labourer, ever
being free from scrutiny, millions of dollars' worth of diamonds are
smuggled out of the mines each year. To encourage honesty, ten per
cent of the value of any stone which a workman may find is given to
him if he brings it himself to the overseer, well over a quarter of a
million dollars being paid out annually on stones thus found.
The compound of the Premier Mine contained, at the time of my visit,
something over twelve thousand natives, representing nearly every
tribe from Pondoland to the head-waters of the Congo. Here one sees
Zulus, Fingos, Pondos, Basutos, Bechuanas, Matabele, Mashonas,
Makalaka, and even Bushmen from the Kalahari country and Masai from
German East Africa, all attracted by the high wages, which range from
five to eight dollars a week. When the native's six-month contract
has ended, he takes his wages in British sovereigns—and his earnings
accumulate quickly because he can live on very little—goes home to his
own tribe, perhaps six weeks' journey away, buys a wife and a yoke
of oxen, and lives lazily ever after. Not all of the natives are of
so thrifty a turn of mind, however, for the company store holds many
attractions for them and they are heavy purchasers of camel's-hair
blankets, French perfumes, and imported cutlery, refusing almost
invariably to take anything but the best.
I have tried to paint for you a comprehensive, though necessarily an
impressionistic, picture of this great new nation that has sprung up
so quickly in the antipodes, and to give you at least a rough idea of
what its people, its soil, its towns, its climate, its resources, and
its problems are like. That South Africa will always be a country of
great mineral wealth there is little doubt, for, when the supplies
of gold and diamonds are exhausted, copper, iron, and coal should
still furnish good returns. Likewise, it will always be a great
ranching country, for nearly all of its vast veldt is ideal, both in
climate and pasturage, for live-stock. It will probably never become a
manufacturing country, for coal is of poor quality, there is neither
water power nor inland waterways, and labour is neither good nor
cheap. If, as I have already remarked, government irrigation can be
introduced as successfully as it has been in our own Southwest, and
if the malaria which makes the rich coast-lands almost uninhabitable
can be exterminated as effectually as we have exterminated it on the
Isthmus of Panama, I can see no reason why South Africa should not
eventually become one of the great agricultural countries of the
world. Though many South Africans look forward to a day when the
natives will begin to retire to the country north of the Zambezi, and
when a large European population will till their own farms, by their
own labour, with the aid of government-assisted irrigation, I am
personally of the opinion that South Africa will never become at all
evenly populated, but that it will always bear a marked resemblance to
our Southwest, with large areas devoted to the raising of sheep and
cattle, with certain other areas irrigated for the raising of fruit,
and with its population centred for the most part in towns scattered
at long distances from one another, but connected by rapid railway
communications.
Everything considered, South Africa is a country of big things—big
pay, big prices, big opportunities, big obstacles, big resources,
big rewards—and she needs young men to help her fight her battles and
solve her problems. So, if I were a youngster, with the sheep-skin of
a technical or agricultural school in my pocket, a few hundred dollars
in my purse, and a longing for fortune and adventure in my heart,
I think that I should walk into one of those steam-ship offices in
Bowling Green and book a passage for that land of which some one has
said, “Fortune knocks at a man's door once in most countries, but in
South Africa she knocks twice.”