The curtain rises upon the Kafir peoples when the Portuguese landed on the east coast of Africa in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Arab sheiks then held a few of the coast villages, ruling over a mixed race, nominally Mohammedan, and trading with the Bantu tribes of the interior. The vessels of these Arabs crossed the Indian Ocean with the monsoon to Calicut and the Malabar coast, and the Indian goods they carried back were exchanged for the gold and ivory which the natives brought down. The principal race that held the country between the Limpopo and the Zambesi was that which the Portuguese called Makalanga or Makaranga, and which we call Makalaka. They are the progenitors of the tribes who, now greatly reduced in numbers and divided into small villages and clans, occupy Mashonaland. Their head chief was called the Monomotapa, a name interpreted to mean "Lord of the Mountain" or "Lord of the Mines." This personage was turned by Portuguese grandiloquence into an emperor, and by some European geographers into the name of an empire; so Monomotapa came to figure on old maps as the designation of a vast territory.
When, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch at the Cape began to learn something of the Kafirs who dwelt to the eastward, they found that there was no large dominion, but a great number of petty tribes, mostly engaged in war with one another. Some were half nomad, none was firmly rooted in the soil; and the fact that tribes who spoke similar dialects were often far away from one another, with a tribe of a different dialect living between, indicated that there had been many displacements of population of which no historical record existed. Early in the present century events occurred which showed how such displacements might have been brought about. In the last years of the eighteenth century Dingiswayo, the exiled son of the chief of the Abatetwa tribe, which lived in what is now Zululand, found his way to the Cape, and learned to admire the military organization of the British troops who were then holding the Colony. Returning home and regaining his throne, he began to organise and drill his warriors, who before that time had fought without order or discipline, like other savages. His favourite officer was Tshaka, a young chief, also exiled, who belonged to the then small tribe of Zulus. On the death of Dingiswayo, Tshaka was chosen its chief by the army, and the tribes that had obeyed Dingiswayo were thenceforward known under the name of Zulus. Tshaka, who united to his intellectual gifts a boundless ambition and a ruthless will, further improved the military system of his master, and armed his soldiers with a new weapon, a short, broad-bladed spear, fit for stabbing at close quarters, instead of the old light javelin which had been theretofore used. He formed them into regiments, and drilled them to such a perfection of courage that no enemy could withstand their rush, and the defeated force, except such as could escape by fleetness of foot, was slaughtered on the spot. Quarter had never been given in native wars, but the trained valour of the Zulus, and their habit of immediately engaging the enemy hand to hand, not only gave them an advantage like that which suddenly made the Spartan infantry superior to all their neighbours, but rendered their victories far more sanguinary than native battles had previously been Tshaka rapidly subjected or blotted out the clans that lived near, except the Swazis, a kindred tribe whose difficult country gave them some protection. He devastated all the region round that of his own subjects, while the flight before his warriors of the weaker tribes, each of which fell upon its neighbours with the assagai, caused widespread slaughter and ruin all over South-east Africa. Natal became almost a desert, and of the survivors who escaped into the mountains, many took to human flesh for want of other food. To the north of the Vaal River a section of the Zulu army, which had revolted under its general, Mosilikatze, carried slaughter and destruction through the surrounding country for hundreds of miles, till it was itself chased away beyond the Limpopo by the emigrant Boers, as will be related in the following chapter.
To trace the history of these various native wars would occupy far more space than I can spare. I will sum up their general results.
A new and powerful kingdom, far stronger than any other native monarchy we know to have existed before or since, was formed by the Zulus. It remained powerful under Dingaan (who murdered his half brother Tshaka in 1828), Panda (brother of Tshaka and Dingaan), and Cetewayo (son of Panda), till 1879, when it was overthrown by the British.
Various offshoots from the Zulu nation were scattered out in different directions. The Matabili occupied Matabililand in 1838. The Angoni had before that year crossed the Zambesi and settled in Nyassaland, where they are still formidable to their native neighbours and troublesome to the whites.
Kafir tribes from the north-east were chased southward into the mountain country now called Basutoland, most of which had been previously inhabited only by Bushmen, and here the Basuto kingdom was built up out of fugitive clans, by the famous chief Moshesh, between 1820 and 1840.
Some of the Bechuana tribes were driven from the east into their present seats in Bechuanaland, some few far north-west to the banks of the Zambesi, where Livingstone found them.
Not only what is now Natal, but most of what is now the Orange Free State, with a part of the Transvaal, was almost denuded of inhabitants. This had the important consequence of inducing the emigrants from Cape Colony, whose fortunes I shall trace in the following chapter, to move toward these regions and establish themselves there.
The Gaza tribe, of Zulu race, but revolters from Tshaka, broke away from that tyrant, and carried fire and sword among the Tongas and other tribes living to the west and north-west of Delagoa Bay. In 1833 they destroyed the Portuguese garrison there. In 1862 a chief called Mzila became their king, and established his dominion over all the tribes that dwell on the eastern slope of the Quathlamba Mountains, between the Limpopo and the Zambesi. He and his son Gungunhana, who in 1896 was seized and carried off by the Portuguese, were for a time at the head of the third great native power in South Africa, the other two being that of Cetewayo, which perished in 1879, and that of Lo Bengula, overthrown in 1893. All three chiefs were Zulus in blood. Originally small in number, this race has played by far the greatest part in the annals of the native peoples.
The career of Tshaka has deserved some description, because it changed the face of South Africa in a somewhat similar way, allowing for the difference of scale, to that in which the career of Tshaka's contemporary, Napoleon Bonaparte, changed the face of Europe. But in 1836, eight years after Tshaka's death, the white man, who had hitherto come in contact with the Kafirs only on the Zambesi and at a few points on the south-eastern and southern coast, began that march into the interior which has now brought him to the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Thenceforward the wars of the natives among themselves cease to be important. It is their strife with the European conqueror that is of consequence, and the narrative of that strife belongs to the history of the European colonies and republics, which will be given in the two succeeding chapters. This, however, seems the right place for some remarks on the government and customs of the Kafir tribes, intended to explain the conditions under which these tribes have met and attempted to resist the white strangers who have now become their rulers.
The Kafirs were savages, yet not of a low type, for they tilled the soil, could work in metals, spoke a highly developed language, and had a sort of customary law. The south-east coast tribes, Zulus, Pondos, Tembus, Kosas, inhabiting a fairly well-watered and fertile country, were, as a rule, the strongest men and the fiercest fighters; but the tribes of the interior were not inferior in intellect, and sometimes superior in the arts. Lower in every respect were the west-coast tribes. They dwelt in a poor and almost waterless land, and their blood was mixed with that of Hottentots and Bushmen. In every race the organization was by families, clans, and tribes, the tribe consisting of a number of clans or smaller groups, having at its head one supreme chief, belonging to a family whose lineage was respected. The power of the chief was, however, not everywhere the same. Among the Zulus, whose organization was entirely military, he was a despot whose word was law. Among the Bechuana tribes, and their kinsfolk the Basutos, he was obliged to defer to the sentiment of the people, which (in some tribes) found expression in a public meeting where every freeman had a right to speak and might differ from the chief.[9] Even such able men as the Basuto Moshesh and the Bechuana Khama had often to bend to the wish of their subjects, and a further check existed in the tendency to move away from a harsh and unpopular chief and place one's self under the protection of some more tactful ruler. Everywhere, of course, the old customs had great power, and the influence of the old men who were most conversant with them was considerable. The chief of the whole tribe did not interfere much with affairs outside his own particular clan, and was a more important figure in war-time than during peace. Aided by a council of his leading men, each chief administered justice and settled disputes; and it was his function to allot land to those who asked for a field to till, the land itself belonging to the tribe as a whole. The chiefs act gave a title to the piece allotted so long as it was cultivated, for public opinion resented any arbitrary eviction; but pasture-land was open to all the cattle of the clansmen. It was in cattle that the wealth of a chief or a rich man lay, and cattle, being the common measure of value, served as currency, as they serve still among the more remote tribes which have not learned to use British coin. Polygamy was practised by all who could afford it, the wife being purchased from her father with cattle, more or fewer according to her rank. This practice, called lobola, still prevails universally, and has caused much perplexity to the missionaries. Its evil effects are obvious, but it is closely intertwined with the whole system of native society. A chief had usually a head wife, belonging to some important house, and her sons were preferred in succession to those of the inferior wives. In some tribes the chief, like a Turkish sultan, had no regular wife, but only concubines. Among the coast tribes no one, except a chief, was suffered to marry any one of kin to him. There was great pride of birth among the head chiefs, and their genealogies have in not a few cases been carefully kept for seven or eight generations.
Slavery existed among some of the tribes of the interior, and the ordinary wife was everywhere little better than a slave, being required to do nearly all the tillage and most of the other work, except that about the cattle, which, being more honourable, was performed by men. The male Kafir is a lazy fellow who likes talking and sleeping better than continuous physical exertion, and the difficulty of inducing him to work is the chief difficulty which European mine-owners in South Africa complain of. Like most men in his state of civilization, he is fond of hunting, even in its lowest forms, and of fighting. Both of these pleasures are being withdrawn from him, the former by the extinction of the game, the latter by the British Government; but it will be long before he acquires the habits of steady and patient industry which have become part of the character of the inhabitants of India.
War was the natural state of the tribes toward one another, just as it was among the Red Indians and the primitive Celts, and indeed generally everywhere in the early days of Europe. Their weapons were the spear or assagai, and a sort of wooden club, occasionally a crescent-shaped battle-axe, and still less frequently the bow. Horses were unknown, for the ox, sheep, goat and dog were over all South Africa the only domesticated quadrupeds. One tribe, however, the Basutos, now breeds horses extensively, and has turned them to account in fighting. The rapid movement of their mounted warriors was one of the chief difficulties the colonial forces had to deal with in the last Basuto war. The courage in war which distinguished the tribes of Zulu and Kosa race was all the more creditable because it had not, like that of the Mohammedan dervishes of the Sudan, or of Mohammedans anywhere engaged in a jehad, a religious motive and the promise of future bliss behind it. The British army has encountered no more daring or formidable enemies. Nine wars were needed to subjugate the Kafirs of the southern coast, although till recently they had few firearms. But the natives had no idea of the tactics needed in facing a civilized foe. As in their battles with the Boers they were destroyed by the fire of horsemen riding up, delivering a volley, and riding off before an assagai could reach them, so in the great war with Cetewayo in 1879 they fought in the open and were mowed down by British volleys; and in 1893 the Matabili perished in the same way under the fire of riflemen and Maxim guns sheltered behind a laager of wagons.
Religion was a powerful factor in Kafir life; but religion did not mean the worship of any deity, for there was no deity. Still less had it any moral significance. To the Kafirs, as to most savage races, the world was full of spirits—spirits of the rivers, the mountains, and the woods. Most important were the ghosts of the dead, who had power to injure or to help the living, and who were therefore propitiated by offerings at stated periods, as well as on occasions when their aid was specially desired. This kind of worship, the worship once most generally diffused throughout the world, and which held its ground among the Greeks and Italians in the most flourishing period of ancient civilization, as it does in China and Japan to-day, was and is virtually the religion of the Kafirs. It was chiefly rendered to the ghosts of the chiefs, who retained in the spirit world the exceptional importance they had held among the living; and it had much weight in maintaining loyalty to a chief, because revolt against him was an insult to a powerful set of ghosts. The ghost dwelt at the spot where the body was buried, and it was therefore at the grave that the offerings, mostly of cakes and Kafir beer, were made. Occasionally animals were killed, not so much by way of sacrifice as for the sake of providing the ghost with a specially precious kind of food, though the two ideas run close together in most primitive worships.[10] Among the Matabili, for instance, there was once a year a great feast in honour of the king's ancestors, who were supposed to come and join in the mirth. It was also to the grave that those who wished to call up the ghost by spells went to effect their nefarious purpose, and the real place of interment of a great chief was for this reason sometimes concealed, I found at Thaba Bosiyo, the famous stronghold of the Basuto chief Moshesh, that his body had been secretly removed from the place where he was buried to baffle the wizards, who might try to use his ghost against the living. The ghost is, of course, apt to be spiteful, that of an uncle (I was told) particularly so; and if he is neglected he is extremely likely to bring some evil on the family or tribe. Sometimes the spirit of an ancestor passes into an animal, and by preference into that of a snake, not that it lives in the snake, but that it assumes this form when it wishes to visit men. A particular kind of green snake is revered by the Matabili for this reason. And most, if not all, tribes had an animal which they deemed to be of kin to them, and which they called their "siboko," a term apparently corresponding to the totem of the North American Indians. Creatures of this species they never killed, and some tribes took their name from it. Thus the Ba-Taung are the people of the lion; the Ba-Mangwato have the duyker antelope for their totem; and in the Basuto pitso (public meeting) an orator will begin by addressing his audience as "sons of the crocodile." Of human sacrifices there seems to be no trace. Men were killed for all possible reasons, but never as offerings. And, indeed, to have so killed them would have been to treat the ghosts as cannibals, a view foreign to native habits, for though human flesh has been resorted to in times of severe famine, it has never been regularly eaten, and the use of it excites disgust.
Whether the Kafirs had any idea of a supreme being is a question which has been much discussed. In several tribes the word, differently spelled "Umlimo" or "Mlimo" or "Molimo" (said to mean "hidden" or "unseen"), is used to denote either a power apparently different from that of the nature sprites or ghosts of the dead, or else the prophet or soothsayer who delivers messages or oracles supposed to emanate from this power. The missionaries have in their native versions of the Bible used the term to translate the word "God." Sometimes, among the Tongas at least, the word tilo (sky) is used to describe a mysterious force; as, for instance, when a man dies without any apparent malady, he is said to be killed by the tilo.[11] On the whole, after many inquiries from missionaries and others who know the natives well, I was led to the conclusion that the Kafirs have a vague notion of some power transcending that of common ghosts, and able to affect the operations of nature (as, for instance, to send rain), but far too dimly conceived to be properly describable as a divine being.[12] Or to put the thing in other words, the ordinary and familiar nature-sprites and ghosts of the departed do not exhaust the possibilities of super-human agency; for there remains, as among the Athenians whose altar St. Paul found (Acts xvii. 23), an "Unknown God," or rather unknown power, probably associated with the heavens above, whose interference may produce results not attainable through inferior spiritual agencies. One of the difficulties in reaching any knowledge of the real belief of the people is that they are usually examined by leading questions, and are apt to reply affirmatively to whatever the querist puts to them. Their thoughts on these dark subjects are either extremely vague and misty or extremely material; the world of abstract thought, in which European minds have learned to move with an ease and confidence produced by the possession of a whole arsenal of theological and metaphysical phrases, being to them an undiscovered country.
Since there were no deities and no idols, there were no priests; but the want of a priesthood was fully compensated by the presence of wizards; for among the Kafirs, as among other primitive peoples, there was and is an absolute belief in the power of spells, and of sorcery generally. These wizards, like the medicine men among the Red Indians, were an important class, second only to the chiefs. They were not a caste, though very often the son of a wizard would be brought up to the profession. The practitioners were on the lookout for promising boys, and would take and train one to witchcraft, imparting their secrets, which included a remarkable knowledge of the properties of various plants available for poison or healing. Sometimes the wizard acted as a physician; sometimes he would attempt to make rain; sometimes he would profess to deliver messages from the unseen world, and in these cases he might become a terrible power for mischief. Such a revelation made to the Kosa clans on the south coast in 1856-57, directing them to kill their cattle and destroy their grain, because the ghosts of their ancestors were coming to drive out the whites, led to the death by famine of more than 30,000 people. Such a revelation proceeding from a soothsayer, occasionally called the Mlimo, who dwelt in a cavern among granite rocks in the Matoppo Hills at a place called Matojeni, south-east of Bulawayo[13] (oracles have always tended to come from caves), had much to do with the rising of the Matabili in 1896. But the most frequent and most formidable work done by the wizard was that of "smelling out" persons who were bewitching others so as to cause sickness or misfortune. In this branch of his profession the wizard often became the engine of the jealousy or rapacity of the chief, who would secretly prompt him to denounce a prominent or a wealthy man. Suspicion being once roused, the victim had little chance: he was despatched, and his property seized by the chief. Witchcraft, and the murders it gave rise to, have been the darkest side of native life. The sorcerer has usually been the enemy of the missionary, who threatens his gains; but his power is now generally declining, and the British Government forbids the practice of smelling out witches, as well as many other shocking and disgusting rites which used to accompany the admission of boys and girls to the status of adults, or were practised at sundry festivals. Of the faith in minor and harmless spells one finds instances everywhere. In Matabililand, for instance, a boy was pointed out to me who had just been occupied in putting a charm into the footprint of a lion, in order to prevent the unwelcome visitor from returning; and nearly every native wears some kind of amulet.[14] These beliefs will take a long time to die, but the missionaries have now usually the good sense to see that they do little harm.
As their religious customs were rather less sanguinary than those of the Guinea Coast negroes, so the Kafirs themselves were, when the whites first saw them, somewhat more advanced in civilization. Compared with the Red Indians of America, they stood at a point lower than that of the Iroquois or Cherokees, but superior to the Utes or to the Diggers of the Pacific coast. They could work in iron and copper, and had some notions of ornament. Their music is rude, but not wholly devoid of melody, and they use instruments of stone, wood, and iron, by striking which a kind of tune can be played. Some tribes, such as the Tongas, have good voices, and a marked taste for music. They have some simple games, and a folk-lore which consists chiefly in animal tales, resembling those collected by Mr. Harris in his Uncle Remus, save that the hare plays among the Bantu peoples the part of Br'er Rabbit.[15] To poetry, even in its most rudimentary forms, they do not seem to have attained. Yet they are by no means wanting in intelligence, and have, with less gaiety, more sense of dignity and more persistence in their purposes than the Guinea negro.
When the Portuguese and Dutch first knew the Kafirs, they did not appear to be making any progress toward a higher culture. Human life was held very cheap; women were in a degraded state, and sexual morality at a low ebb. Courage, loyalty to chief and tribe, and hospitality were the three prominent virtues. War was the only pursuit in which chieftains sought distinction, and war was mere slaughter and devastation, unaccompanied by any views of policy or plans of administration. The people were—and indeed still are—passionately attached to their old customs, which even a king rarely ventured to disturb (though Tshaka is said to have abolished among his subjects the rite of circumcision, which is generally practised by the Kafirs); and it was probably as much the unwillingness to have their customs disturbed as the apprehension for their land that made many of the tribes oppose to the advance of the Europeans so obstinate a resistance. Though they feared the firearms of the whites, whom they called wizards, it was a long time before they realized their hopeless inferiority, and the impossibility of prevailing in war. Their minds were mostly too childish to recollect and draw the necessary inferences from previous defeats, and they never realized that the whites possessed beyond the sea an inexhaustible reservoir of men and weapons. Even the visit of Lo Bengula's envoys to England in 1891, when they were shown all the wonders of London, in order that through them the Matabili nation might be deterred from an attack on the whites, failed to produce any effect upon the minds of the young warriors, who were fully persuaded that they could destroy the few strangers in their country as easily as they had overthrown the Mashonas. The only chiefs who seem to have fully grasped the relative strength of the Europeans, and thus to have formed schemes of policy suitable to their inferior position, were Moshesh, who profited by the advice of the French missionaries, and Khama, who was himself a Christian and the pupil of missionaries. Nor did any chief ever rise to the conception of forming a league of blacks against whites.
The natives, as we shall see, have had harsh treatment from the Europeans. Many unjust things, many cruel things, many things which would excite horror if practised in European warfare, have been done against them. But whoever tries to strike the balance of good and evil due to the coming of the whites must remember what the condition of the country was before the whites came. As between the different tribes there was neither justice nor pity, but simply the rule of the strongest, unmitigated by any feeling of religion or morality. In war non-combatants as well as combatants were ruthlessly slaughtered, or reserved only for slavery; and war was the normal state of things. Within each tribe a measure of peace and order was maintained. But the weak had a hard time, and those who were rich, or had roused the enmity of some powerful man, were at any moment liable to perish on the charge of witchcraft. In some tribes, such as the Matabili, incessant slaughter went on by the orders of the king. Nothing less than the prolific quality of the race could have kept South Africa well peopled in the teeth of such a waste of life as war and murder caused.
Of the character of the individual native as it affects his present relations with the whites and the probable future of the race, I shall have to speak in a later chapter (Chapter XXI), as also of the condition and prospects of the Christian missions which exist among them, and which form the main civilizing influence now at work.
It is no less true of South Africa than it is of the old countries of Europe that to understand the temper of the people, the working of their government, the nature of the political problems which they have to solve, one must know something of their history. South Africa has had a great deal of history, especially in the present century, and there are few places in which recollections of the past are more powerful factors in the troubles of the present. In the short sketch I propose to give I shall advert only to the chief events, and particularly to those whose importance is still felt and which have done most to determine the relations of the European races to one another. The constitutional and parliamentary history of the two British colonies and the two Boer republics has been short and not specially interesting. The military history has been on a small scale. The economic and industrial history has been simple and remarkable only so far as the mines are concerned. But the history of the dealings of the white races with one another and with the blacks is both peculiar and instructive, and well deserves a fuller narrative and more elaborate treatment than I have space to give.
Four European races have occupied the country. Of those, however, who came with Vasco da Gama from Lisbon in 1497 we shall have little to say, and of the handful who followed Herr Lüderitz from Bremen in 1883 still less. The interest of the tale lies in the struggles of two branches of the same Low-German stock, the Dutch and the English.
The first to appear on the scene were the men of Portugal, then in the fresh springtime of its power and with what seemed a splendid career of discovery and conquest opening before it.[16] Bartholomew Diaz, whose renown has been unjustly obscured by that of Vasco da Gama, discovered the Cape of Storms, as he called it,—the name of Good Hope was given by King John II.,—in 1486, and explored the coast as far as the mouth of the Great Fish River. In 1497-98 Da Gama, on his famous voyage to India, followed the southern and eastern coast to Melinda; and in 1502, on his second voyage, after touching at Delagoa Bay, he visited Sofala, which was then the port to which most of the gold and ivory came from the interior. Here he found Arabs established in the town, as they were in other maritime trading places all the way north to Mombasa. At what date they first settled there is unknown; probably they had traded along the coast from times long before Mohammed. They were superior to the native blacks, though mixed in blood, but of course far inferior to the Portuguese, who overthrew their power. In 1505 the Portuguese built a fort at Sofala, and from there and several other points along the coast prosecuted their trade with the inland regions, using the conquered Arabs as their agents. For a century they remained the sole masters not only of the South-east African seaboard, but of the Indian Ocean, no vessel of any other European country appearing to dispute their pre-eminence. They might, had they cared, have occupied and appropriated the whole southern half of the continent; but in the sixteenth century it was not of colonization, nor even so much of conquest, that monarchs, governors, and navigators thought, but of gold. Portugal had no surplus population to spare for settling her new territories, and—not to speak of Brazil—she had a far richer trade to develop in western India than anything which Africa could offer. It may now excite surprise that she should have taken no step to claim the long stretch of country whose shores her sailors had explored, from the mouth of the Orange River on the west to that of the Limpopo on the east. But there was no gold to be had there, and a chance skirmish with the Hottentots in Table Bay, in which the viceroy D'Almeida, returning from India, was killed in 1510, gave them a false notion of the danger to be feared from that people, who were in reality one of the weakest and least formidable among African races.
Accordingly, the Portuguese, who might have possessed themselves of the temperate and healthy regions which we now call Cape Colony and Natal, confined their settlements to the malarious country north of the tropic of Capricorn. Here they made two or three attempts, chiefly by moving up the valley of the Zambesi, to conquer the native tribes, or to support against his neighbours some chieftain who was to become their vassal. Their numbers were, however, too small, and they were too feebly supported from home, to enable them to secure success. When they desisted from these attempts, their missionaries, chiefly Dominican friars, though some Jesuits were also engaged in the work, maintained an active propaganda among the tribes, and at one time counted their converts by thousands. Not only missionaries, but small trading parties, penetrated the mysterious interior; and one or two light cannons, as well as articles which must have come to Africa from India, such as fragments of Indian and Chinese pottery, have been found many hundred miles from the sea.[17]
But on the whole the Portuguese exerted very little permanent influence on the country and its inhabitants. The missions died out, most of the forts crumbled away or were abandoned, and all idea of further conquest had been dropped before the end of last century. There were, indeed, two fatal obstacles to conquering or civilising work. One was the extreme unhealthiness both of the flat country which lies between the sea and the edge of the great interior plateau, and of the whole Zambesi Valley, up which most of the attempts at an advance had been made. Fever not only decimated the expeditions and the garrisons of the forts, but enervated the main body of settlers who remained on the coast, soon reducing whatever enterprise or vigour they had brought from Europe. The other was the tendency of the Portuguese to mingle their blood with that of the natives. Very few women were brought out from home, so that a mixed race soon sprang up, calling themselves Portuguese, but much inferior to the natives of Portugal. The Portuguese, even more than the Spaniards, have shown both in Brazil and in Africa comparatively little of that racial contempt for the blacks, and that aversion to intimate social relations with them, which have been so characteristic of the Dutch and the English. There have, of course, been a good many mulattos born of Dutch fathers in Africa, as of Anglo-American fathers in the West Indies and in the former slave States of North America. But the Dutch or English mulatto was almost always treated as belonging to the black race, and entirely below the level of the meanest white, whereas among the Portuguese a strong infusion of black blood did not necessarily carry with it social disparity.[18]
In the beginning of the seventeenth century the Dutch, prosecuting their war against the Spanish monarchy, which had acquired the crown of Portugal in 1581 and held it till 1640, attacked the Portuguese forts on the East African coast, but after a few years abandoned an enterprise in which there was little to gain, and devoted their efforts to the more profitable field of the East Indies. With this exception, no European power troubled the Portuguese in Africa. They had, however, frequent conflicts with the natives, and in 1834 were driven from their fort at Inhambane, between Sofala and Delagoa Bay, and in 1836 from Sofala itself, which, however, they subsequently recovered. It was not till the progress of inland discovery, and especially the establishment of a Boer republic in the Transvaal had made the coast seem valuable, that two new and formidable rivals appeared on the scene.
Under the combined operation of these causes such power as Portugal possessed on this coast declined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Except on the deadly banks of the Zambesi, she never had a permanent settlement more than fifty miles from the sea, and very few so far inland. The population that spoke Portuguese and professed Christianity did not exceed a few thousands, and of these the large majority were at least half Kafir in blood. It became plain that such life and force as the nation once possessed had, at any rate in Africa, died out, and that if ever the continent was to be developed it would not be by the race that had first explored it. Here, therefore, we may leave the eastern coast and the feeble settlers who shivered with ague in its swamps, and turn our eyes to the far south, where a new and more vigorous race began, a century and a half after the time of Vasco da Gama, to lay the foundations of a new dominion.
The first Teutonic people that entered the African continent were the Vandals in the fifth century. They came across the Straits of Gibraltar as conquerors, but they soon established a powerful fleet and acquired a maritime empire in the western Mediterranean. The second band of Teutons to enter were the Dutch. They were already a sea power active in the far East, whither they had been led by their war with Spain. But it was not as conquerors that they came, nor even as settlers intending to build up a colonial community. They came to establish a place of call for their vessels trading to India, where fresh water and vegetables might be obtained for their crews, who suffered terribly from scurvy on the voyage of six months or more from the Netherlands to the ports of Farther India. From the early years of the seventeenth century both Dutch and English vessels had been in the habit of putting in to Table Bay to refit and get fresh water. Indeed, in 1620 two English commanders had landed there and proclaimed the sovereignty of King James I, though their action was not ratified either by the king or by the English East India Company. In 1648 a shipwrecked Dutch crew spent six months in Table Valley, behind the spot where Cape Town now stands, and having some seeds with them, planted vegetables and got a good crop. They represented on their return to Holland the advantages of the spot, and in 1652 three vessels despatched by the Dutch East India Company disembarked a body of settlers, under the command of Jan van Riebeek, who were directed to build a fort and hospital, and, above all, to raise vegetables and obtain from the Hottentots supplies of fresh meat for passing ships. It is from these small beginnings of a kitchen-garden that Dutch and British dominion in South Africa has grown up.
The history of this Dutch settlement presents a singular contrast to that of the Portuguese. During the first quarter of a century the few settlers kept themselves within the narrow limits of the Cape peninsula. In 1680 an outlying agricultural community was planted at Stellenbosch, twenty-five miles from Cape Town, but not till the end of the century was the first range of mountains crossed. Meantime the population began to grow. In 1658 the first slaves were introduced,—West African negroes,—a deplorable step, which has had the result of making the South African whites averse to open-air manual work and of practically condemning South Africa to be a country of black labour. Shortly afterwards the Company began to bring in Asiatic convicts, mostly Mohammedan Malays, from its territories in the East Indian Archipelago. These men intermarried with the female slaves, and to a less extent with Hottentot women, and from them a mixed coloured race has sprung up, which forms a large part of the population of Cape Town and the neighbouring districts. The influx of these inferior elements was balanced by the arrival in 1689 of about three hundred French Huguenots, a part of those who had taken refuge in Holland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. They were persons of a high stamp, more intelligent and educated than most of the previous settlers had been, and they brought with them a strong attachment to their Protestant faith and a love of liberty. From them many of the best colonial families are sprung. At first they clung to their language, and sought to form a distinct religious community; but they were ultimately compelled to join the Dutch Reformed Church, and the use of French was forbidden in official documents or religious services. Before the middle of the eighteenth century that language had disappeared, and the newcomers had practically amalgamated with their Dutch neighbours. The Company's government was impartially intolerant, and did not until 1780 permit the establishment of a Lutheran church, although many German Lutherans had settled in the country.
From the time when the settlers began to spread out from the coast into the dry lands of the interior a great change came upon them, and what we now call the distinctive South African type of character and habits began to appear. The first immigrants were not, like some of the English settlers in Virginia, men of good social position in their own country, attached to it by many ties, nor, like the English settlers in the New England colonies, men of good education and serious temper, seeking the freedom to worship God in their own way. They came from the humbler classes, and partly because they had few home ties, partly because the voyage to Holland was so long that communication with it was difficult, they maintained little connection with the mother country and soon lost their feeling for it. The Huguenot immigrants were more cultivated, and socially superior to the rude adventurers who had formed the bulk of the Dutch settlers, but they had of course no home country to look to. France had cast them out; Holland was alien in blood and speech. So it befell that of all the colonists that Europe had sent forth since the voyage of Columbus, the South African whites were those who soonest lost their bond with Europe, and were the first set of emigrants to feel themselves a new people, whose true home lay in the new land they had adopted. Thus early in South African annals were the foundations laid of what we now call the Africander sentiment—a sentiment which has become one of the main factors in the history of the country.
Nor was this all. When the comparatively small area of fertile land which could be cultivated without irrigation had been taken up, the keeping of cattle suggested itself as an easy means of livelihood. The pasture, however, was so thin that it was necessary to graze the cattle over wide stretches of ground, and the farther they went into the interior the scantier was the pasture and the larger therefore did the area of land become over which a farmer let his oxen or sheep run. This process of extending cattle-farms—if farms they can be called—over the interior was materially accelerated through the destruction of the nearer Hottentot tribes by the frightful outbreak of smallpox which begun in A.D. 1713, followed by another not less virulent in 1755. The Europeans suffered severely from it, the negroes, slave and free, still more, but the Hottentots most of all. In fact, it cleared them away from all the southern and western parts of the Colony and left these regions open to Europeans. Only the Bushmen remained, whose more solitary life gave them comparative immunity from contagion. Thus from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and during the whole of it, there was a constant dispersion of settlers from the old nucleus into the circumjacent wilderness. They were required to pay a sum amounting to five pounds a year for the use of three thousand morgen (a little more than six thousand acres) of grazing ground, and were accustomed at certain seasons to drive their herds up into the deserts of the Karroo for a change of feed, just after the time when the summer rains stimulate the scrubby vegetation of that desert region. These settlers led a lonely and almost nomadic life. Much of their time was passed in their tent-waggons, in which, with their wives and children, they followed the cattle from spot to spot where the pasture was best. They became excellent marksmen and expert in the pursuit of wild beasts. Some made a living by elephant-hunting in the wilderness, and those who tended cattle learned to face the lion. They were much molested by the Bushmen, whose stealthy attacks and poisoned arrows made them dangerous enemies, and they carried on with the latter a constant war, in which no quarter was given. Thus there developed among them that courage, self-reliance, and passion for independence which are characteristic of the frontiersman everywhere, coupled with a love of solitude and isolation which the conditions of western America did not produce. For in western America the numbers and ferocity of the Red Indians, and those resources of the land which encouraged the formation of agricultural and timber-producing communities, made villages follow the march of discovery and conquest, while in pastoral Africa villages were few and extremely small. Isolation and the wild life these ranchmen led soon told upon their habits. The children grew up ignorant; the women, as was natural where slaves were employed, lost the neat and cleanly ways of their Dutch ancestors; the men were rude, bigoted, indifferent to the comforts and graces of life. But they retained their religious earnestness, carrying their Bibles and the practice of daily family worship with them in their wanderings; and they retained also a passion for freedom which the government vainly endeavoured to restrain. Though magistrates, called landdrosts, were placed in a few of the outlying stations, with assessors taken from the people, called heemraden, to assist them in administering justice, it was found impossible to maintain control over the wandering cattle-men, who from their habit of "trekking" from place to place were called Trek Boers.[19] The only organization that brought them together was that which their ceaseless strife with the Bushmen enjoined. Being all accustomed to the use of arms, they formed war-parties, which from time to time attacked and rooted out the Bushmen from a disturbed area; and the government recognized these military needs and methods by appointing field-commandants to each district, and subordinate officers, called field-cornets, to each sub-district. These functionaries have become the basis of the system of local government among the South African Dutch, and the war-bands, called commandos, have played a great part in the subsequent military history of the country.
The eastward progress of expansion presently brought the settlers into contact with more formidable foes in the Bantu tribes, who dwelt beyond the Great Fish River. In 1779 some Kafir clans of the Kosa race crossed that river and drove off the cattle off the farmers to the west of it, and a war, the first of many fiercely fought Kafir wars, followed, which ended in the victory of the colonists.
All this while the Colony had been ruled by the Dutch East India Company through a governor and council, appointed by the directors in Holland, and responsible to them only—a system roughly similar to that which the English established in India during the eighteenth century. The administration was better or worse according to the character and capacity of the governor for the time being, but it was on the whole unpopular with the colonists, not merely because they were excluded from all share in it (except to some small extent in the courts of justice), but also because the Company kept in its own hands a monopoly of the trade, and managed trade with a view to its own commercial interests rather than to those of the community. Thus discontent grew, and this discontent was one of the causes which led to the dispersion of the people into the wilderness, whose remoteness secured to them a practical freedom. In 1779 disaffection had been so much stimulated by the maladministration of a weak governor, and by the news of the revolt of the American colonies against Great Britain, that delegates were sent to Holland to demand redress for their commercial and other grievances, as well as a share in the government of the Colony. The Company was by this time in financial straits, and less powerful with the States-general of the Netherlands than it had formerly been. Long negotiations followed, reforms were promised, and at last, in 1792, two commissioners were sent out to investigate and frame measures of reform. The measures they promulgated were, however, deemed inadequate by the more ardent spirits, and by those especially who dwelt in the outlying districts, where the government had exerted, and could exert, little control. In 1795, first at Graaf-Reinet and then at Swellendam, the people rose in revolt, not, as they stated, against the mother country, but against the Company. They turned out the landdrosts, and set up miniature republics, each with a representative assembly.
It would not have been difficult for the government to have reduced these risings by cutting off supplies of food. But now South Africa was suddenly swept into the great whirlpool of European politics, and events were at hand which made these petty local movements insignificant, save in so far as they were evidences of the independent spirit of the people.
From 1757, when the battle of Plassey was fought, the English power in India had been rapidly growing, and the Cape, which they had not cared to acquire in 1620, had now become in their eyes a station of capital importance. When war broke out between Britain and Holland in 1781, the English had attempted to seize the Colony, but retired when they found a strong French force prepared to aid the Dutch in its defence. Now they were again at war with Holland, which, over-run by the armies of revolutionary France, had become the Batavian Republic. In 1795 an English expedition, bearing orders from the Stadholder of the Netherlands, then a refugee in England, requiring the Company's officers to admit them, landed at Simon's Bay, and after some slight resistance obliged Cape Town and its castle to capitulate. Within a few months the insurgents at Swellendam and Graaf-Reinet submitted, and British troops held the Colony till 1802, when it was restored to the Batavian Republic on the conclusion of the peace of Amiens. Next year, however, war broke out afresh; and the English government, feeling the extreme importance, in the great struggle which they were waging with Napoleon, of possessing a naval stronghold as a half-way house to India, resolved again to occupy the Cape. In 1806 a strong force was landed in Table Bay, and after one engagement the Dutch capitulated. In 1814 the English occupation was turned into permanent sovereignty by a formal cession of the Colony on the part of the then restored Stadholder, who received for it and certain Dutch possessions in South America the sum of £6,000,000.
The European population of the Colony, which was thus finally transferred to the rule of a foreign though a cognate nation, consisted in 1806 of about 27,000 persons, mostly of Dutch, with a smaller number of German or French descent. They had some 30,000 black slaves, and of the aboriginal Hottentots about 17,000 remained. Nearly all spoke Dutch, or rather the rude local dialect into which the Dutch of the original settlers (said to have been largely Frieslanders), had degenerated. The descendants of the Huguenots had long since lost their French.
No people find it agreeable to be handed over to the government of a different race, and the British administration in the Colony in those days was, though restrained by the general principles of English law, necessarily autocratic, because representative institutions had never existed at the Cape. Still things promised well for the peace and ultimate fusion of the Dutch and English races. They were branches of the same Low-German stock, separated by fourteen hundred years of separate history, but similar in the fundamental bases of their respective characters. Both were attached to liberty, and the British had indeed enjoyed at home a much fuller measure of it than had the Dutch in the settled parts of the Colony. Both professed the Protestant religion, and the Dutch were less tolerant toward Roman Catholics than the English. The two languages retained so much resemblance that it was easy for an Englishman to learn Dutch and for a Dutchman to learn English. An observer might have predicted that the two peoples would soon, by intercourse and by intermarriage, melt into one, as Dutch and English had done in New York. For a time it seemed as if this would certainly come to pass. The first two British governors were men of high character, whose administration gave little ground for complaint to the old inhabitants. The Company's restrictions on trade had been abolished, and many reforms were introduced by the new rulers. Schools were founded, the administration of justice was reorganised under new courts, the breed of cattle and horses was improved, the slave-trade was forbidden, and missions to the natives were largely developed. Meanwhile local institutions were scarcely altered, and the official use of the Dutch language was maintained. The Roman-Dutch law, which had been in force under the Company's rule, was permitted to remain, and it is to-day the common law of all the British colonies and territories, as well as of the Boer Republics, in South Africa. Intermarriage began, and the social relations of the few English who had come in after 1806, with the many Dutch were friendly. In 1820 the British government sent out about five thousand emigrants from England and Scotland, who settled in the thinly occupied country round Algoa Bay on the eastern border of the Colony; and from that time on there was a steady, though never copious, influx of British settlers, through whose presence the use of the English language increased, together with a smaller influx of Germans, who soon lost their national individuality and came to speak either English or the local Dutch.
Before long, however, this fair promise of peace and union was overclouded, and the causes which checked the fusion of the races in the Colony, and created two Dutch Republics beyond its limits, have had such momentous results that they need to be clearly stated.
The first was to be found in the character of the Dutch population. They were farmers, a few dwelling in villages and cultivating the soil, but the majority stock-farmers, living scattered over a wide expanse of country, for the thinness of the pasture had made and kept the stock-farms very large. They saw little of one another, and nothing of those who dwelt in the few towns which the Colony possessed. They were ignorant, prejudiced, strongly attached to their old habits, impatient of any control. The opportunities for intercourse between them and the British were thus so few that the two races acquired very little knowledge of one another, and the process of social fusion, though easy at Capetown and wherever else the population was tolerably dense, was extremely slow over the country at large. A deplorable incident which befell on the eastern border in 1815 did much to create bad blood. A slight rising, due to the attempted arrest of a farmer on a charge of maltreating his native servant, broke out there. It was soon suppressed, but of the prisoners taken six were condemned to death and five were hanged. This harsh act, which was at the time justified as a piece of "necessary firmness," produced wide-spread and bitter resentment, and the mention of Slagter's Nek continued for many years to awaken an outburst of anti-British feeling among the Boers.
A second cause was the unwisdom of the British authorities in altering (between 1825 and 1828) the old system of local government (with the effect of reducing the share in it which the citizens had enjoyed), and in substituting English for Dutch as the language to be used in official documents and legal proceedings. This was a serious hardship, for probably not more than one-sixth of the people understood English. A third source of trouble arose out of the wars with the Kafirs on the eastern border. Since the first hostilities of 1779 there had been four serious struggles with the tribes who lived beyond the Fish River, and in 1834 a host of savages suddenly burst into the Colony, sweeping off the cattle and killing the farmers. After some hard fighting the Kafirs were reduced to sue for peace, and compelled by the governor to withdraw beyond the Keiskama River. But the British government at home, considering that the natives had been ill-treated by the colonists, and in fact provoked to war, overruled the governor, and allowed them to return to their old seats, where they were, no doubt, a source of danger to the border farmers. Thinking the home authorities either weak or perverse, the farmers bitterly resented this action, and began to look on the British Colonial Office as their enemy.
But the main grievance arose out of those native and colour questions which have ever since continued to trouble South Africa. Slavery had existed in the Colony since 1658, and had produced its usual consequences, the degradation of labour, and the notion that the black man has no rights against the white. In 1737 the first Moravian mission to the Hottentots was frowned upon, and a pastor who had baptized natives found himself obliged to return to Europe. The current of feeling in Europe, and especially in England, which condemned the "domestic institution" and sought to vindicate the human rights of the negro, had not been felt in this remote corner of the world, and from about 1810 onward the English missionaries gave intense offence to the colonists by espousing the cause of the natives and the slaves, and reporting every case of cruel or harsh treatment which came to their knowledge. It is said that they often exaggerated, or made charges on insufficient evidence, and this is likely enough. But it must also be remembered that they were the only protectors the blacks had; and where slavery exists, and a weak race is dominated by a strong one, there are sure to be many abuses of power. When, in 1828, Hottentots and other free coloured people were placed by governmental ordinance on an equal footing with whites as regards private civil rights, the colonists were profoundly disgusted, and their exasperation was increased by the enactment of laws restraining their authority over their slaves, as well as by the charges of ill-treating the natives which continued to be brought against them by the missionaries. Finally, in 1834, the British Parliament passed a statute emancipating the slaves throughout all the British colonies, and awarding a sum of twenty million pounds sterling as compensation to the slave-owners. The part of this sum allotted to Cape Colony (a little more than three millions sterling) was considerably below the value of the slaves (about 39,000) held there, and as the compensation was made payable in London, most slave owners sold their claims at inadequate prices. Many farmers lost the bulk of their property, and labour became in many districts so scarce that agriculture could hardly be carried on. The irritation produced by the loss thus suffered, intensifying the already existing discontent, set up a ferment among the Dutch farmers. Their spirit had always been independent, and the circumstances of their isolated life had enabled them to indulge it. Even under the government of their Dutch kinsfolk they had been restless, and now they received, as they thought, one injustice after another at the hands of alien rulers. To be watched and denounced by the missionaries, to have black people put on a level with them, to lose the fruits of their victory over the Kafirs—all these things had been bad enough. Now, however, when their property itself was taken away and slavery abolished on grounds they could neither understand nor approve, they determined to endure no longer, and sought for some means of deliverance. Rebellion against so strong a power as that of Britain was evidently foredoomed to failure. But to the north and east a great wild country lay open before them, where they could lead that solitary and half-nomadic life which they loved, preserve their old customs, and deal with the natives as they pleased, unvexed by the meddlesome English. Accordingly, many resolved to quit the Colony altogether and go out into the wilderness. They were the more disposed to this course, because they knew that the wars and conquests of Tshaka, the ferocious Zulu king, had exterminated the Kafir population through parts of the interior, which therefore stood open to European settlement. Thus it was that the Great Trek, as the Dutch call it,—the great emigration, or secession, as we should say,—of the Dutch Boers began in 1836, twenty-five years before another question of colour and slavery brought about a still greater secession on the other side of the Atlantic.
If the reader will here refer to the map, and measure from Cape Town a distance of about four hundred and fifty miles to the east (to the mouth of the Great Fish River), and about the same distance to the north-north-east (to where the towns of Middelburg and Colesberg now stand), he will obtain a pretty fair idea of the limits of European settlement in 1836. The outer parts of this area toward the north and east were very thinly peopled, and beyond them there was a vast wilderness, into which only a few hunters had penetrated, though some farmers had, during the last decade or two, been accustomed to drive their flocks and herds into the fringe of it after the rains, in search of fresh pastures. The regions still farther to the north and east were almost entirely unexplored. They were full of wild beasts, and occupied here and there by native tribes, some, like the various branches of the Zulu race, eminently fierce and warlike. Large tracts, however, were believed to be empty and desolate, owing to the devastations wrought during his twenty years of reign by Tshaka, who had been murdered eight years before. Of the existence of mineral wealth no one dreamed. But it was believed that there was good grazing land to be found on the upland that lay north of the great Quathlamba Range (where now the map shows the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic). More to the south lay the territory we now call Natal. It was described by those very few persons who had explored it as fertile and well-watered, a country fit both for tillage and for pasture; but wide plains and high mountains had to be crossed to reach it by land from the north-west, and close to it on the north-east was the main body of the Zulu nation, under King Dingaan, the brother and sucessor of Tshaka.
Into this wilderness did the farmers set forth, and though some less laudable motives may have been mingled with the love of independence and the resentment at injustice which mainly prompted their emigration, it is impossible not to admire their strenuous and valiant spirit. They were a religious people, knowing no book but the Bible, and they deemed themselves, like many another religious people at a like crisis of their fortunes, to be under the special protection of Heaven, as was Israel when it went out of Egypt into a wilderness not so vast nor so full of perils as was that which the Boers were entering. Escaping from a sway which they compared to that of the Egyptian king, they probably expected to be stopped or turned back. But Pharaoh, though he had turned a deaf ear to their complaints, was imbued with the British spirit of legality. He consulted his attorney-general, and did not pursue them. The colonial government saw with concern the departure of so many useful subjects. But it was advised that it had no legal right to stop them, so it stood by silently while party after party of emigrants—each householder with his wife and his little ones, his flocks and his herds and all his goods—took its slow way from the eastern or northern parts of the Colony, up the slopes of the coast range, and across the passes that lead into the high plateau behind. Within two years from 6,000 to 10,000 persons set forth. They travelled in large covered wagons drawn by ten or twelve yoke of oxen, and they were obliged to travel in parties of no great size, lest their cattle should exhaust the pasture along the track they followed. There was, however a general concert of plan among them, and most of the smaller groups united at spots previously fixed upon for a rendezvous. All the men were armed, for the needs of defence against the Bushmen, and the passion for killing game, had made the farmers expert in the use of the rifle. As marksmen they were unusually steady and skilful, and in the struggles that followed nothing but their marksmanship saved them. Few to-day survive of those who took part in this Great Trek, but among those few is Paul Kruger, now President of the South African Republic, who followed his father's cattle as they were driven forward across the prairie, being then a boy of ten.
I have not space to tell, save in the briefest outline, the striking and romantic story of the wanderings of the emigrant Boers and their conflicts with the native tribes. The first party, like the first host of Crusaders that started for the East in the end of the eleventh century, perished miserably. It consisted of ninety-eight persons travelling with thirty wagons. They penetrated far to the north-east, into what is now the territory of the Transvaal Republic. Some were cut off by the natives; some, reduced to a mere handful by fever and by the loss of their cattle,—for they had ventured into the unhealthy lower country to the south-east of the mountains, where the tsetse-fly abounds,—made their way to the coast at Delagoa Bay. Another party, formed by the union of a number of smaller bodies at Thaba 'Ntshu, a rocky peak in the Orange Free State, visible on the eastern horizon from the present town of Bloemfontein, advanced thence to the north, and presently came in contact with a redoubtable branch of the Zulu race, famous in later history under the name of Matabili. This tribe was then ruled by the chief Umzilikazi, or Mosilikatze, a warrior of great energy and talent. He had been one of Tshaka's favourite generals, but, having incurred that king's displeasure, had fled, about A.D. 1817, with his regiment to the north-west, and established his headquarters near a place called Mosega (between Pretoria and Mafeking), in what is now the Transvaal Republic. Thence he raided and massacred the Bechuanas and other tribes of this region, though himself unable to withstand the main Zulu nation, which, under Dingaan, was living farther to the south. The Matabili provoked war by falling upon and destroying a detachment of the emigrants. Intruders the latter doubtless were, but, as the Matabili themselves had slaughtered without mercy the weaker Kafir tribes, the Boers might think they need not feel any compunction in dealing out the like measure to their antagonists. And, in point of fact, the emigrants seem all through to have treated the natives much as Israel treated the natives of Canaan, and to have conceived themselves to have Old Testament authority for occupying the territories of the heathen, and reducing them by the sternest methods to serfdom or submission. Here they had an unprovoked massacre to avenge, and they showed equal promptitude and courage. Pouncing upon Mosilikatze, they defeated his vastly superior force with so great a slaughter that he fled north-westward far away beyond the Limpopo River, and fell like a thunderbolt upon the tribes who dwelt between that stream and the Zambesi, killing many and making slaves of the rest. Here, with the king's kraal of Buluwayo for its capital, was established the kingdom of the Matabili, which remained as a terror to its neighbours till, in its turn, destroyed by Dr. Jameson and the British South Africa Company in 1893. It was a curious chain of events that brought fire and slaughter so suddenly, in 1837, upon the peoples of the Zambesi Valley. As the conflicts of nomad warriors along the great wall of China in the fourth century of our era set a-going a movement which, propagated from tribe to tribe, ended by precipitating the Goths upon the Mediterranean countries, and brought Alaric to the Salarian Gate of Rome, so the collapse of the French monarchy, inducing the Revolution and the consequent war with England, carried the English to the Cape, brought the Boers into collision with the Matabili, and at last hurled the savage host of Mosilikatze on the helpless Makalakas.
The defeat and expulsion of the Matabili left the vast territories between the Orange River and the Limpopo in the hands of the Boer immigrants. Within these territories, after much moving hither and thither, those small and rude communities began to grow up which have ripened, as we shall presently see, into the two Dutch republics of our own time. But, meanwhile, a larger and better organized body of Boers, led by a capable and much-respected man named Pieter Retief, marched first eastward and then southward across the Quathlamba watershed, and descended from the plateau into the richer and warmer country between those mountains and the Indian Ocean. This region had been in 1820 almost depopulated by the invasions of Tshaka, and now contained scarce any native inhabitants. A few Englishmen had since 1824 been settled on the inlet then called Port Natal, where now the prosperous town of Durban lies beneath the villas and orchards of Berea, and (having obtained a cession of the maritime slip from King Tshaka) were maintaining there a sort of provisional republic. In 1835 they had asked to be recognised as a colony under the name of Victoria, in honour of the young princess who two years afterwards mounted the throne, and to have a legislature granted them. The British government, however, was still hesitating whether it should occupy the port, so the emigrants did not trouble themselves about its rights or wishes. Thinking it well to propitiate the Zulu king, Dingaan, whose power over-shadowed the country, the Boer leaders proceeded to his kraal to obtain from him a formal grant of land. The grant was made, but next day the treacherous tyrant, offering them some native beer as a sort of stirrup-cup before their departure, suddenly bade his men fall upon and "kill the wizards." The excellent Retief perished with his whole party, and a body of emigrants not far distant was similarly surprised and massacred by a Zulu army of overwhelming strength. These cruelties roused the rest of the emigrants to reprisals, and in a fierce battle, fought on December 16, 1838, the anniversary of which is still celebrated by the people of the Transvaal, a handful of Boers overthrew Dingaan's host. Like the soldiers of Cortes in Mexico, they owed this, as other victories, not merely to their steady valour, but to their horses. Riding up to the line of savage warriors, they delivered a volley, and rode back before an assagai could reach them, repeating this manœuvre over and over again till the hostile ranks broke and fled. Ultimately their forces, united with those of a brother of Dingaan, who had rebelled against him and had detached a large part of the Zulu warriors, drove Dingaan out of Zululand in 1840. Panda, the rebel brother, was installed king in his stead, as a sort of vassal to the Boer government, which was now entitled the republic of Natalia, and the Boers founded a city, Pietermaritzburg, and began to portion out the land. They deemed the British authorities to have abandoned any claim to the country by the withdrawal of a detachment of troops which had been landed at Port Natal in 1838. But their action, and in particular their ejection from the country of a mass of Kafirs whom they proposed to place in a district already occupied by another tribe, had meanwhile excited the displeasure of the government of Cape Colony. That government, though it had not followed them into the deserts of the interior, had never renounced, and indeed had now and then reasserted its right to consider them British subjects. They, however, repudiated all idea of subjection, holding British sovereignty to be purely territorial, so that when they had passed out of the region which the British crown claimed they had become a free and independent people, standing alone in the world. Their attempt to establish a new white state on the coast was a matter of serious concern, because it might affect trade with the interior, and plant in a region which Britain deemed her own the germ of what might become a new maritime power. And as the colonial government considered itself the general protector of the natives, and interested in maintaining the Kafirs between the Boer state and Cape Colony, the attacks of the Boers on the Kafirs who lived to the west of them toward the Colony, could not be permitted to pass unchecked. The British government, though still unwilling to assume fresh responsibilities, for in those days it was generally believed that the colonial possessions of Britain were already too extensive, nevertheless ultimately concluded, for the reasons given above, to assert its authority over Port Natal and the country behind as far as the crest of the mountains. A small force was accordingly sent to Port Natal in 1842. It was there besieged by the Boer levies, and would have been forced to surrender but for the daring ten days' ride through the whole breadth of Kaffraria of a young Englishman, Richard King, who brought the news to Graham's Town, six hundred miles distant. A force sent by sea relieved the starving garrison after a siege of twenty-six days. The Boer forces dispersed, but it was not till a year later that the territory of Natal was formally declared a British colony. Lord Stanley, then colonial secretary, was reluctant to take over the responsibilities of a new dominion with a disaffected white population and a mass of savage inhabitants, and only yielded to the urgent arguments of Sir George Napier, then governor of the Cape. In 1843, after long and angry debates (sometimes interrupted by the women, who passionately denounced the British government), the Volksraad, or popular assembly of the tiny republic, submitted to the British crown, having delivered a warm but ineffectual protest against the principle of equal civil rights for whites and blacks laid down by the British government. The colony of Natal was then constituted, first (1845) as a dependency of Cape Colony, afterward (1856) as a separate colony. A part of the Boers, estimated at five hundred families, remained in it; but the majority, including all the fiercer spirits, recrossed the mountains (some forthwith, some five years later), with their cattle, and joined the mass of their fellow-emigrants who had remained on the plateaus of the interior. Meanwhile an immense influx of Kafirs, mostly from Zululand, although many belonged to other tribes whom the Zulus had conquered, repopulated the country, and in it the blacks have since been about ten times as numerous as the whites. Thus ended the Dutch republic of Natalia, after six years of troubled life. While it was fighting with the Zulus on the east, and other Kafirs on the west, it was torn by incessant intestine quarrels, and unable either to levy taxes, or to compel for any other purpose the obedience of its own citizens. But its victories over Dingaan's armies were feats of arms as remarkable as any South Africa has seen. The English are not generally slow to recognize the fine qualities of their adversaries, but they have done less than justice to the resolution and the daring which the Boers displayed in these early campaigns against the natives.[20]