British South Africa, like all of Africa, is wanting in seaports. In
fact, it has but few. However, it has one, WALFISH BAY, which
territorially does not belong to it, inasmuch as it is in the middle
of the coast of German Southwest Africa--the only port in that coast.
The principal port in British South Africa is CAPE TOWN (83,718),
which is also the capital and principal place. The next principal
ports are, for Cape Colony, PORT ELIZABETH (23,266) and EAST LONDON,
and for Natal, DURBAN. LORENZO MARQUEZ, on Delagoa Bay, and BEIRA, at
the mouth of the Pungwe, both in Portuguese East Africa, are natural
ports for northern British South Africa, and are used as such,
railways being constructed from them into the interior.
Railroad-making, indeed, is now the all-important matter in South
Africa. Lines are already built from Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East
London, Durban, and Lorenzo Marquez to the diamond-fields of Kimberley
and the gold-mines of Johannesburg. These also give to the pastoral
and agricultural parts of the interior facilities of access to the
sea. But the line from Cape Town to Kimberley is being rapidly
extended northward to Salisbury, the central point of the gold-fields
of Rhodesia, and already has reached BULAWAYO, 1600 miles from Cape
Town. The line from Beira is also to end at Salisbury. Already a
telegraph line extending from Salisbury northward has reached the west
shore of Lake Nyassa, and by the close of this year (1898) it will
reach the south end of Lake Tanganyika. It is proposed that the
railroad from Bulawayo shall follow this same route, and it is the
dream (or shall we say the hope?) of the empire-builders of South
Africa that this railway shall before many years be so far advanced
northward that it will meet the railway that is now being built from
Cairo southward through the continent along the Nile. Mr. Stanley
predicts that the "Cape to Cairo" railway will be an accomplished fact
before 1925. The white population of South Africa, even including the
Boer republics, is still less than 750,000.