Impressions of South Africa

NOTE

I have to thank Sir Donald Currie and Messrs. A.S. and G.G. Brown for the permission kindly given me to use the maps in the excellent "Guide to South Africa" (published by the Castle Mail Packets Company) in the preparation of the three maps contained in this volume; and I trust that these maps will prove helpful to the reader, for a comprehension of the physical geography of the country is essential to a comprehension of its history.

The friends in South Africa to whom I am indebted for many of the facts I have stated and views I have expressed are too numerous to mention: but I cannot deny myself the pleasure of returning thanks for the genial hospitality and unfailing kindness which I received in every part of the country.

September 13th, 1897.

MAPS AT END OF VOLUME

Political Map of South Africa.
Orographical Map of South Africa.
Rainfall Map of South Africa.

CONTENTS

AREA AND POPULATION OF THE SEVERAL COLONIES, REPUBLICS AND TERRITORIES IN SOUTH AFRICA

DATES OF SOME IMPORTANT EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA

INTRODUCTION

In the latter part of the year 1895 I travelled across South Africa from Cape Town to Fort Salisbury in Mashonaland, passing through Bechuanaland and Matibililand. From Fort Salisbury, which is only two hundred miles from the Zambesi, I returned through Manicaland and the Portuguese territories to Beira on the Indian Ocean, sailed thence to Delagoa Bay and Durban, traversed Natal, and visited the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Basutoland, and the eastern province Cape Colony. The country had long possessed a great interest for me, and that interest was increased by studying on the spot its physical character as well as the peculiar economic and industrial conditions which have made it unlike the other newly settled countries of the world. Seeing these things and talking with the leading men in every part of the country, I began to comprehend many things that had previously been obscure to me, and saw how the political troubles of the land were connected with the life which nature imposed on the people. Immediately after my return to Europe, fresh political troubles broke out, and events occurred in the Transvaal which fixed the eyes of the whole world upon South Africa. I had not travelled with the view of writing a book; but the interest which the events just mentioned have aroused, and which is likely to be sustained for a good while to come, leads me to believe that the impressions of a traveller who has visited other new countries may be useful to those who desire to know what South Africa is really like, and why it makes a noise and stir in the world disproportionate to its small population.

I have called the book "Impressions" lest it should be supposed that I have attempted to present a complete and minute account of the country. For this a long residence and a large volume would be required. It is the salient features that I wish to describe. These, after all, are what most readers desire to know: these are what the traveller of a few weeks or months can give, and can give all the better because the details have not become so familiar to him as to obscure the broad outlines.

Instead of narrating my journey, and weaving into the narrative observations on the country and people, I have tried to arrange the materials collected in a way better fitted to present to the reader in their natural connection the facts he will desire to have. Those facts would seem to be the following: (1) the physical character of the country, and the aspects of its scenery; (2) the characteristics of the native races that inhabit it; (3) the history of the natives and of the European settlers, that is to say the chief events which have made the people what they now are; (4) the present condition of the several divisions of the country, and the aspects of life in it; (5) the economic resources of the country, and the characteristic features of its society and its politics.

These I have tried to set forth in the order above indicated. The first seven chapters contain a very brief account of the physical structure and climate, since these are the conditions which have chiefly determined the economic progress of the country and the lines of European migration, together with remarks on the wild animals, the vegetation, and the scenery. Next follows a sketch of the three aboriginal races, and an outline of the history of the whites since their first arrival, four centuries ago. The earlier events are lightly touched on, while those which have brought about the present political situation are more fully related. In the third part of the book, asking the reader to accompany me on the long journey from Cape Town to the Zambesi Valley and back again, I have given in four chapters a description of the far interior as one sees it passing from barbarism to civilization—its scenery, the prospects of its material development, the life which its new settlers lead. These regions, being the part of the country most lately brought under European administration, seem to deserve a fuller treatment than the older and better-known regions. Three other chapters give a more summary account of Natal, of the Transvaal gold-fields, of that model republic the Orange Free State, and of Basutoland, a native state under British protection which possesses many features of peculiar interest. In the fourth and last division of the book several questions of a more general character are dealt with which could not conveniently be brought into either the historical or the descriptive parts. I have selected for discussion those topics which are of most permanent importance and as to which the reader is most likely to be curious. Among them are the condition of the natives, and their relations to the white people; the aspects of social and political life; the situation of affairs in the Transvaal in 1895, and the causes which brought about the Reform rising and the expedition of Dr. Jameson; and finally, the economic prospects of the country, and the political future of its colonies and republics.

In these concluding chapters, as well as in the historical sketch, my aim has been to set forth and explain facts rather than to pass judgments upon the character and conduct of individuals. Whoever desires to help others to a fair view of current events must try not only to be impartial, but also to avoid expressing opinions when the grounds for those opinions cannot be fully stated; and where controversy is raging round the events to be described, no judgment passed on individual actors could fail to be deemed partial by one set of partizans or by the other. Feeling sure that the present problems will take some time to solve, I have sought to write what those who desire to understand the country may find useful even after the next few years have passed. And, so far from wishing to champion any view or to throw any fresh logs on the fire of controversy that has been blazing for the last few years, I am convinced that the thing now most needed in the interests of South Africa is to let controversies die out, to endeavour to forget the causes of irritation, and to look at the actual facts of the case in a purely practical spirit.

Altogether apart from its recent troubles, South Africa is an interesting, and indeed fascinating subject of study. There are, of course, some things which one cannot expect to find in it. There has not yet been time to evolve institutions either novel or specially instructive, nor to produce new types of character (save that of the Transvaal Boer) or new forms of social life. There are no ancient buildings, except a few prehistoric ruins; nor have any schools of architecture or painting or literature been as yet developed. But besides the aspects of nature, often weird and sometimes beautiful, there are the savage races, whose usages and superstitions open a wide field for research, and the phenomena of whose contact with the whites raise some grave and gloomy problems. There are the relations of the two European races—races which ought long ago to have been happily blended into one, but which have been kept apart by a train of untoward events and administrative errors. Few of the newer countries have had a more peculiar or more chequered history; and this history needs to be studied with a constant regard to the physical conditions that have moulded it. Coming down to our own time, nowhere are the struggles of the past seen to be more closely intertwined with the troubles of the present; nor does even Irish history furnish a better illustration of the effect of sentiment upon practical politics. Few events of recent times have presented more dramatic situations, and raised more curious and intricate issues of political and international morality, than those which have lately been set before us by the discovery of the Transvaal gold-fields and the rush of nineteenth-century miners and speculators into a pastoral population which retains the ideas and habits of the seventeenth-century. Still more fascinating are the problems of the future. One can as yet do little more than guess at them; but the world now moves so fast, and has grown so small, and sees nearly every part of itself so closely bound by ties of commerce or politics to every other part, that it is impossible to meditate on any great and new country without seeking to interpret its tendencies by the experience of other countries, and to conjecture the rôle it will be called on to play in the world-drama of the centuries to come. I have sought, therefore, not only to make South Africa real to those who do not know it, and to give them the materials for understanding what passes there and following its fortunes with intelligence, but also to convey an impression of the kind of interest it awakens. It is still new: and one sees still in a fluid state the substance that will soon crystallize into new forms. One speculates on the result which these mingled forces, these ethnic habits and historical traditions, and economic conditions, will work out. And reflecting on all these things, one feels sure that a country with so commanding a position, and which has compressed so much history into the last eighty years of its life, will hold a conspicuous place in that southern hemisphere which has in our own times entered into the political and industrial life of the civilized world.

PART I

NATURE

CHAPTER I

PHYSICAL FEATURES

To understand the material resources and economic conditions of South Africa, and, indeed, to understand the history of the country and the political problems which it now presents, one must first know something of its physical structure. The subject may seem dry, and those readers who do not care for it may skip this chapter. But it need not be uninteresting, and it is certainly not uninstructive. For myself, I can say that not only South African history, but also the prospects of South African industry and trade, were dark matters to me till I had got, by travelling through the country, an idea of those natural features of the southern part of the continent which have so largely governed the course of events and have stamped themselves so deeply upon the habits of the people. Some notion of these features I must now try to convey. Fortunately, they are simple, for nature has worked in Africa, as in America, upon larger and broader lines than she has done in Europe. The reader will do well to keep a map beside him, and refer[3] constantly to it, for descriptions without a map avail little.

Africa south of the Zambesi River consists, speaking broadly, of three regions. There is a strip of lowland lying along the coast of the Indian Ocean, all the way round from Cape Town, past Durban and Delagoa Bay and Beira, till you reach the mouth of the Zambesi. On the south, between Cape Town and Durban, this strip is often very narrow, for in many places the hills come, as they do at Cape Town, right down to the sea. But beyond Durban, as one follows the coast along to the north-east, the level strip widens. At Delagoa Bay it is some fifteen or twenty miles wide; at Beira it is sixty or eighty miles wide, so that the hills behind cannot be seen from the coast; and farther north it is still wider. This low strip is in many places wet and swampy, and, being swampy, is from Durban northward malarious and unhealthful in the highest degree. Its unhealthfulness is a factor of prime importance in what may be called the general scheme of the country, and has had, as we shall presently see, the most important historical consequences.

Behind the low coast strip rise the hills whose slopes constitute the second region. They rise in most places rather gradually, and they seldom (except in Manicaland, to be hereafter described) present striking forms. The neighbourhood of Cape Town is almost the only place where high mountains come close to the shore—the only place, therefore, except the harbour of St. John's far to the east, where there is anything that can be called grand coast scenery. As one travels inland the hills become constantly higher, till at a distance of thirty or forty miles from the sea they have reached an average height of from 3000 to 4000 feet, and sixty miles from 5000 to 6000 feet. These hills, intersected by valleys which grow narrower and have steeper sides the farther inland one goes, are the spurs or outer declivity of a long range of mountains which runs all the way from Cape Town to the Zambesi Valley, a distance of sixteen hundred miles, and is now usually called by geographers (for it has really no general name) the Drakensberg or Quathlamba Range. Their height varies from 3000 to 7000 feet, some of the highest lying not far to the north-east of Cape Town. In one region, however, several summits reach to 11,000 feet. This is Basutoland, the country that lies at the corner where Cape Colony, Natal, and the Orange Free State meet. It is a region remarkable in several respects, for its scenery as well as for its history, and for the condition of the native race that inhabits it, and I shall have to give some account of it in a later chapter. These mountains of Basutoland are the loftiest in Africa south of Kilimandjaro, and keep snow on their summits for several months in the year.

Behind the Quathlamba Range the country spreads out to the north and west in a vast tableland, sometimes flat, sometimes undulating, sometimes intersected by ridges of rocky hills. This is the third region. Its average height above the sea varies from 3000 to 5000 feet, and the hills reach in places nearly 6000. Thus the Quathlamba Range may be regarded as being really the edge of the tableland, and when in travelling up from the coast one reaches the water-shed, or "divide" (an American term which South Africans have adopted), one finds that on the farther or northerly side there is very little descent. The peaks which when seen from the slopes towards the coast looked high and steep are on this inner side insignificant, because they rise so little above the general level of the plateau. This plateau runs away inland to the west and north-west, and occupies seven-eighths of the surface of South Africa. It dips gently on the north to the valley of the Zambesi; but on the west spreads out over the Kalahari Desert and the scarcely less arid wastes of Damaraland, maintaining (except along the lower course of the Orange River) an altitude of from 3000 to 4000 feet above the sea, until within a comparatively short distance of the Atlantic Ocean.

The physical structure of the country is thus extremely simple. There is only one considerable mountain-chain, with a vast table-land filling the interior behind it, and a rough, hilly country lying between the mountains and the low belt which borders on the Indian Ocean. Let the reader suppose himself to be a traveller wishing to cross the continent from east to west. Starting from a port, say Delagoa Bay or Beira, on the Portuguese coast, the traveller will in a few hours, by either of the railways which run westward from those ports, traverse the low strip which divides them from the hill-country. To ascend the valleys and cross the water-shed of the great Quathlamba Range on to the plateau takes a little longer, yet no great time. Then, once upon the plateau, the traveller may proceed steadily to the west for more than a thousand miles over an enormous stretch of high but nearly level land, meeting no considerable eminence and crossing no perceptible water-shed till he comes within sight of the waves of the Atlantic. Or if he turns to the north-west he will pass over an undulating country, diversified only by low hills, till he dips slowly into the flat and swampy ground which surrounds Lake Ngami, itself rather a huge swamp than a lake, and descends very gradually from that level to the banks of the Zambesi, in the neighbourhood of the great Victoria Falls. In fact, this great plateau is South Africa, and all the rest of the country along the sea-margin a mere appendage to it. But so large a part of the plateau is, as we shall see presently, condemned by its dryness to remain sterile and very thinly peopled, that the interior has not that preponderating importance which its immense area might seem to give it.

It is not worth while to describe the minor ridges,—though some of them, especially in Cape Colony, are abrupt and high enough to be called Mountains,—for none has any great importance as affecting either material or historical conditions. The longest are those which run parallel to the dreary and almost uninhabited west coast, and form the terraces by which the great plateau sinks down to the margin of the Atlantic. Neither can I touch on the geology, except to observe that a great part of the plateau, especially in the northern part and towards the north-east end of the Quathlamba Range, consists of granite or gneiss, and is believed to be of very great antiquity, i.e., to have stood, as it now stands, high above the level of the sea from a very remote period of the earth's history. The rocks of the Karroo region are more recent. Nowhere in South Africa has any area of modern volcanic action, much less any active volcano, been discovered. More ancient eruptive rocks, such as greenstones and porphyries, are of frequent occurrence, and are often spread out in level sheets above the sedimentary beds of the Karroo and of the Basutoland and Free State ranges.

Finally, it must be noted that the coast has extremely few harbours. From Cape Town eastward and north-eastward there is no sheltered deep-water haven till one reaches that of Durban, itself troubled by a bar, and from Durban to the Zambesi no good ports save Delagoa Bay and Beira. On the other side of the continent, Saldanha Bay, twenty miles north of Cape Town, is an excellent harbour. After that the Atlantic coast shows none for a thousand miles.

So much for the surface and configuration of the country. Now let us come to the climate, which is a not less important element in making South Africa what it is.

The heat is, of course, great, though less great than a traveller from North Africa or India expects to find in such a latitude. Owing to the vast mass of water in the southern hemisphere, that hemisphere is cooler in the same latitude than is the northern. Cape Town, in latitude 34° S., has a colder winter and not so hot a summer as Gibraltar and Aleppo, in latitude 36° N. Still the summer temperature is high even at Durban, in latitude 30° S., while the northern part of the Transvaal Republic, and all the territories of the British South Africa Company, including Matabililand and Mashonaland, lie within the tropic of Capricorn, that is to say, correspond in latitude to Nubia and the central provinces of India between Bombay and Calcutta.

The climate is also, over most of the country, extremely dry. Except in a small district round Cape Town, at the southern extremity of the continent, there is no proper summer and winter, but only a dry season, the seven or eight months when the weather is colder, and a wet season, the four or five months when the sun is highest. Nor are the rains that fall in the wet season so copious and continuous as they are in some other hot countries; in many parts of India, for instance, or in the West Indies and Brazil. Thus even in the regions where the rainfall is heaviest, reaching thirty inches or more in the year, the land soon dries up and remains parched till the next wet season comes. The air is therefore extremely dry, and, being dry, it is clear and stimulating in a high degree.

Now let us note the influence upon the climate of that physical structure we have just been considering. The prevailing wind, and the wind that brings most of the rain in the wet season, is the east or south-east. It gives a fair supply of moisture to the low coast strip which has been referred to above. Passing farther inland, it impinges upon the hills which run down from the Quathlamba Range, waters them, and sometimes falls in snow on the loftiest peaks. A certain part of the rain-bearing clouds passes still farther inland, and scatters showers over the eastern part of the tableland, that is to say, over the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, eastern Bechuanaland, and the territories still farther north, toward the Zambesi. Very little humidity, however, reaches the tracts farther to the west. The northern part of Cape Colony as far as the Orange River, the western part of Bechuanaland, and the wide expanse of Damaraland have a quite trifling rainfall, ranging from four or five to ten inches in the whole year. Under the intense heat of the sun this moisture soon vanishes, the surface bakes hard, and the vegetation withers. All this region is therefore parched and arid, much of it, in fact, a desert, and likely always to remain so.

These great and dominant physical facts—a low coast belt, a high interior plateau, a lofty, rugged mountain-range running nearly parallel to, and not very far from, the shore of the ocean, whence the rainclouds come, a strong sun, a dry climate—have determined the character of South Africa in many ways. They explain the very remarkable fact that South Africa has, broadly speaking, no rivers. Rivers are, indeed, marked on the map—rivers of great length and with many tributaries; but when in travelling during the dry season you come to them you find either a waterless bed or a mere line of green and perhaps unsavoury pools. The streams that run south and east from the mountains to the coast are short and rapid torrents after a storm, but at other times dwindle to feeble trickles of mud. In the interior there are, to be sure, rivers which, like the Orange River or the Limpopo, have courses hundreds of miles in length. But they contain so little water during three-fourths of the year as to be unserviceable for navigation, while most of their tributaries shrink in the dry season to a chain of pools, scarcely supplying drink to the cattle on their banks. This is one of the reasons why the country remained so long unexplored. People could not penetrate it by following waterways, as happened both in North and in South America; they were obliged to travel by ox-waggon, making only some twelve or sixteen miles a day, and finding themselves obliged to halt, when a good bit of grass was reached, to rest and restore the strength of their cattle. For the same reason the country is now forced to depend entirely upon railways for internal communication. There is not a stream (except tidal streams) fit to float anything drawing three feet of water.

It is a curious experience to travel for hundreds of miles, as one may do in the dry season in the north-eastern part of Cape Colony and in Bechuanaland, through a country which is inhabited, and covered in some places with wood, in others with grass or shrublets fit for cattle, and see not a drop of running water, and hardly even a stagnant pond. It is scarcely less strange that such rivers as there are should be useless for navigation. But the cause is to be found in the two facts already stated. In those parts where rain falls it comes at one season, within three or four months. Moreover, it comes then in such heavy storms that for some hours, or even days, the streams are so swollen as to be not only impassable by waggons, but also unnavigable, because, although there is plenty of water, the current is too violent. Then when the floods have ceased the streams fall so fast, and the channel becomes so shallow, that hardly even a canoe will float. The other fact arises from the proximity to the east coast of the great Quathlamba chain of mountains. The rivers that flow from it have mostly short courses, while the few that come down from behind and break through it, as does the Limpopo, are interrupted at the place where they break through by rapids which no boat can ascend.