Impressions of South Africa Part 4

The same natural conditions, however, which have made the plateau healthy, have kept it spa.r.s.ely peopled. Much of this high interior, whose settlement has occupied the last sixty years, is a desert unfit, and likely to be always unfit, for human habitation. Even in those parts which are comparatively well watered, the grazing for sheep and cattle is so scanty during some months of the year that farms are large, houses are scattered far from one another, and the population remains extremely thin. The Wilderness of the Karroo cuts off Cape Town and its comparatively populous neighbourhood from the inhabited, though thinly inhabited, pastoral districts of the Orange Free State. Between these two settled districts there are only a few villages, scattered at intervals of many miles along a line of railway four hundred miles in length. In the Free State and the Transvaal the white population is extremely spa.r.s.e, save in the mining region of the Wit.w.a.tersrand, because ranching requires few hands, and only a few hundred square miles out of many thousands have been brought under cultivation. Thus, while the coolness of the climate has permitted Europeans to thrive in these comparatively low lat.i.tudes, its dryness has kept down their numbers and has r.e.t.a.r.ded not only their political development, but their progress in all those arts and pursuits which imply a tolerably large and varied society. The note of South African life, the thing that strikes the traveller with increasing force as he visits one part of the country after another, is the paucity of inhabitants, and the isolated life which these inhabitants, except in six or seven towns, are forced to lead. This is the doing of nature. She has not severed the country into distinct social or political communities by any lines of physical demarcation, but she has provided such scanty means of sustenance for human life and so few openings for human industry unaided by capital, that the settlers (save where capital has come to their aid) remain few indeed, and one may call the interior of South Africa a vast solitude, with a few oases of population dotted here and there over it.

CHAPTER VII

ASPECTS OF SCENERY

The sketch I have given of the physical character of South Africa will doubtless have conveyed to the reader that the country offers comparatively little to attract the lover of natural scenery. This impression is true if the sort of landscape we have learned to enjoy in Europe and in the eastern part of the United States be taken as the type of scenery which gives most pleasure. Variety of form, boldness of outline, the presence of water in lakes and running streams, and, above all, foliage and verdure, are the main elements of beauty in those landscapes; while if any one desires something of more imposing grandeur, he finds it in snow-capped mountains like the Alps or the Cascade Range, or in majestic crags such as those which tower over the fiords of Norway. But the scenery of South Africa is wholly unlike that of Europe or of most parts of America. It is, above all things, a dry land, a parched and thirsty land, where no clear brooks murmur through the meadow, no cascade sparkles from the cliff, where mountain and plain alike are brown and dusty except during the short season of the rains.

And being a dry land, it is also a bare land. Few are the favoured spots in which a veritable forest can be seen; for though many tracts are wooded, the trees are almost always thin and stunted. In Matabililand, for instance, though a great part of the surface is covered with wood, you see no trees forty feet high, and few reaching thirty; while in the wilderness of the Kalahari Desert and Damaraland nothing larger than a bush is visible, except the scraggy and th.o.r.n.y mimosa.

These features of South Africa--the want of water and the want of greenness--are those to which a native of Western Europe finds it hardest to accustom himself, however thoroughly he may enjoy the brilliant sun and the keen dry air which go along with them. And it must also be admitted that over very large areas the aspects of nature are so uniform as to become monotonous. One may travel eight hundred miles and see less variety in the landscape than one would find in one-fourth of the same distance anywhere in Western Europe or in America east of the Alleghany Mountains. The same geological formations prevail over wide areas, and give the same profile to the hilltop, the same undulations to the plain; while in travelling northward toward the Equator the flora seems to change far less between 34 and 18 south lat.i.tude than it changes in the journey from Barcelona to Havre, through only half as many degrees of lat.i.tude.

There are, nevertheless, several interesting bits of scenery in South Africa, which, if they do not of themselves repay the traveller for so long a journey, add sensibly to his enjoyment. The situation of Cape Town, with a magnificent range of precipices rising behind it, a n.o.ble bay in front, and environs full of beautiful avenues and pleasure-grounds, while bold mountain-peaks close the more distant landscape, is equalled by that of few other cities in the world.

Constantinople and Naples, Bombay and San Francisco, cannot boast of more perfect or more varied prospects. There are some fine pieces of wood and water scenery along the south coast of Cape Colony, and one of singular charm in the adjoining colony of Natal, where the suburbs of Durban, the princ.i.p.al port, though they lack the grandeur which its craggy heights give to the neighbourhood of Cape Town have, with a warmer climate, a richer and more tropically luxuriant vegetation. In the great range of mountains which runs some seventeen hundred miles from Cape Town almost to the banks of the Zambesi, the scenery becomes striking in three districts only. One of these is Basutoland, a little native territory which lies just where Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, and Natal meet. Its peaks are the highest in Africa south of Mount Kilimanjaro, for several of them reach 11,000 feet. On the south-east this mountain-land, the Switzerland of South Africa, faces Natal and East Griqualand with a long range of formidable precipices, impa.s.sable for many miles. The interior contains valleys and glens of singular beauty, some wild and rugged, some clothed with rich pasture.

The voice of brooks, a sound rare in Africa, rises from the hidden depths of the gorges, and here and there torrents plunging over the edge of a basaltic cliff into an abyss below make waterfalls which are at all seasons beautiful, and when swollen by the rains of January majestic.

Except wood, of which there is unhappily nothing more than a little scrubby bush in the sheltered hollows, nearly all the elements of beauty are present; and the contrast between the craggy summits and the soft rich pasture and cornlands which lie along their northern base, gives rise to many admirable landscapes.

Two hundred miles north-north-east of Basutoland the great Quathlamba Range rises in very bold slopes from the coast levels behind Delagoa Bay, and the scenery of the valleys and pa.s.ses is said to be extremely grand. Knowing it, however, only by report, I will not venture to describe it. Nearly five hundred miles still farther to the north, in the district called Manicaland, already referred to, is a third mountain region, less lofty than Basutoland, but deriving a singular charm from the dignity and variety of its mountain forms. The whole country is so elevated that summits of 7000 or even 8000 feet do not produce any greater effect upon the eye than does Ben Lomond as seen from Loch Lomond, or Mount Was.h.i.+ngton from the Glen House. But there is a boldness of line about these granite peaks comparable to those of the west coast of Norway or of the finest parts of the Swiss Alps. Some of them rise in smooth shafts of apparently inaccessible rock; others form long ridges of pinnacles of every kind of shape, specially striking when they stand out against the brilliantly clear morning or evening sky. The valleys are well wooded, the lower slopes covered with herbage, so the effect of these wild peaks is heightened by the softness of the surroundings which they dominate, while at the same time the whole landscape becomes more complex and more n.o.ble by the mingling of such diverse elements. No scenery better deserves the name of romantic. And even in the tamer parts, where instead of mountains there are only low hills, or "kopjes"

(as they are called in South Africa), the slightly more friable rock found in these hills decomposes under the influence of the weather into curiously picturesque and fantastic forms, with crags riven to their base, and detached pillars supporting loose blocks and tabular ma.s.ses, among or upon which the timid Mashonas have built their huts in the hope of escaping the raids of their warlike enemies, the Matabili.

Though I must admit that South Africa, taken as a whole, offers far less to attract the lover of natural beauty than does Southern or Western Europe or the Pacific States of North America, there are two kinds of charm which it possesses in a high degree. One is that of colour.

Monotonous as the landscapes often are, there is a warmth and richness of tone about them which fills and delights the eye. One sees comparatively little of that whitish-blue limestone which so often gives a hard and chilling aspect to the scenery of the lower ridges of the Alps and of large parts of the coasts of the Mediterranean. In Africa even the grey granite or gneiss has a deeper tone than these limestones, and it is frequently covered by red and yellow lichens of wonderful beauty. The dark basalts and porphyries which occur in many places, the rich red tint which the surface of the sandstone rocks often takes under the scorching sun, give depth of tone to the landscape; and though the flood of midday suns.h.i.+ne is almost overpowering, the lights of morning and evening, touching the mountains with every shade of rose and crimson and violet, are indescribably beautiful. It is in these morning and evening hours that the charm of the pure dry air is specially felt.

Mountains fifty or sixty miles away stand out clearly enough to enable all the wealth of their colour and all the delicacy of their outlines to be perceived; and the eye realises, by the exquisitely fine change of tint between the nearer and the more distant ranges, the immensity and the harmony of the landscape. Europeans may think that the continuous profusion of sunlight during most of the year may become wearisome. I was not long enough in the country to find it so, and I observed that those who have lived for a few years in South Africa declare they prefer that continuous profusion to the murky skies of Britain or Holland or North Germany. But even if the fine weather which prevails for eight months in the year be monotonous, there is compensation in the extraordinary brilliancy of the atmospheric effects throughout the rainy season, and especially in its first weeks. During nine days which I spent in the Transvaal at that season, when several thunderstorms occurred almost every day, the combinations of suns.h.i.+ne, lightning, and cloud, and the symphonies--if the expression may be permitted--of light and shade and colour which their changeful play produced in the sky and on the earth, were more various and more wonderful than a whole year would furnish forth for enjoyment in Europe.

The other peculiar charm which South African scenery possesses is that of primeval solitude and silence. It is a charm which is differently felt by different minds. There are many who find the presence of what Homer calls "the rich works of men" essential to the perfection of a landscape. Cultivated fields, gardens, and orchards, farmhouses dotted here and there, indications in one form or another of human life and labour, do not merely give a greater variety to every prospect, but also impart an element which evokes the sense of sympathy with our fellow-beings, and excites a whole group of emotions which the contemplation of nature, taken by itself, does not arouse. No one is insensible to these things and some find little delight in any scene from which they are absent. Yet there are other minds to which there is something specially solemn and impressive in the untouched and primitive simplicity of a country which stands now just as it came from the hands of the Creator. The self-sufficingness of nature, the insignificance of man, the mystery of a universe which does not exist, as our ancestors fondly thought, for the sake of man, but for other purposes hidden from us and for ever undiscoverable--these things are more fully realised and more deeply felt when one traverses a boundless wilderness which seems to have known no change since the remote ages when hill and plain and valley were moulded into the forms we see to-day. Feelings of this kind powerfully affect the mind of the traveller in South Africa. They affect him in the Karroo, where the slender line of rails, along which his train creeps all day and all night across wide stretches of brown desert and under the crests of stern dark hills, seems to heighten by contrast the sense of solitude--a vast and barren solitude interposed between the busy haunts of men which he has left behind on the sh.o.r.es of the ocean and those still busier haunts whither he is bent, where the pick and hammer sound upon the Wit.w.a.tersrand, and the palpitating engine drags ma.s.ses of ore from the depths of the crowded mine. They affect him still more in the breezy highlands of Matabililand, where the eye ranges over an apparently endless succession of undulations clothed with tall gra.s.s or waving wood, till they sink in the blue distance toward the plain through which the great Zambesi takes its seaward course.

The wilderness is indeed not wholly unpeopled. Over the wide surface of Matabililand and Mashonaland--an area of some two hundred thousand square miles--there are scattered natives of various tribes, whose numbers have been roughly estimated at from 250,000 to 400,000 persons.

But one rarely sees a native except along a few well-beaten tracks, and still more rarely comes upon a cl.u.s.ter of huts in the woods along the streamlets or half hidden among the fissured rocks of a granite kopje.

The chief traces of man's presence in the landscape are the narrow and winding footpaths which run hither and thither through the country, and bewilder the traveller who, having strayed from his waggon, vainly hopes by following them to find his way back to the main track, or the wreaths of blue smoke which indicate the spot where a Kafir has set the gra.s.s on fire to startle and kill the tiny creatures that dwell in it.

Nothing is at first more surprising to one who crosses a country inhabited by savages than the few marks of their presence which strike the eye, or at least an unpractised eye. The little plot of ground the Kafirs have cultivated is in a few years scarcely distinguishable from the untouched surface of the surrounding land, while the mud-built hut quickly disappears under the summer rains and the scarcely less destructive efforts of the white ants. Here in South Africa the native races seem to have made no progress for centuries, if, indeed, they have not actually gone backward; and the feebleness of savage man intensifies one's sense of the overmastering strength of nature. The elephant and the buffalo are as much the masters of the soil as is the Kafir, and man has no more right to claim that the land was made for him than have the wild beasts of the forest who roar after their prey and seek their meat from G.o.d.

These features of South African nature, its silence, its loneliness, its drear solemnity, have not been without their influence upon the mind and temper of the European settler. The most peculiar and characteristic type that the country has produced is the Boer of the eastern plateau, the offspring of those Dutch Africanders who some sixty years ago wandered away from British rule into the wilderness. These men had, and their sons and grandsons have retained, a pa.s.sion for solitude that even to-day makes them desire to live many miles from any neighbour, a st.u.r.dy self-reliance, a grim courage in the face of danger, a sternness from which the native races have often had to suffer. The majesty of nature has not stimulated in them any poetical faculty. But her austerity, joined to the experiences of their race, has contributed to make them grave and serious, closely bound to their ancient forms of piety, and p.r.o.ne to deem themselves the special objects of divine protection.

PART II

_A SKETCH OF SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY_

CHAPTER VIII

THE NATIVES: HOTTENTOTS, BUSHMEN, AND KAFIRS

By far the most interesting features in the history of South Africa have been the relations to one another of the various races that inhabit it.

There are seven of these races, three native and four European. The European races, two of them, especially the Dutch and the English, are, of course, far stronger, and far more important as political factors, than are the natives. Nevertheless, the natives have an importance too, and one so great that their position deserves to be fully set forth and carefully weighed. For, though they are inferior in every point but one, they are in that point strong. They are prolific. They already greatly outnumber the whites, and they increase faster.

The cases of conflict or contact between civilized European man and savage or semi-civilized aboriginal peoples, which have been very numerous since the tide of discovery began to rise in the end of the fifteenth century, may be reduced to three cla.s.ses.

The first of these cla.s.ses includes the cases where the native race, though perhaps numerous, is comparatively weak, and unable to a.s.similate European civilization, or to thrive under European rule (a rule which has often been harsh), or even to survive in the presence of a European population occupying its country. To this cla.s.s belong such cases as the extinction of the natives of the Antilles by the Spaniards, the disappearance of the natives of Southern Australia and Tasmania before British settlement, the dying out, or retirement to a few reserved tracts, of the aborigines who once occupied all North America east of the Rocky Mountains. The Russian advance in Siberia, the advance of Spanish and Italian and German colonists in the territories of La Plata in South America, may be added to this cla.s.s, for though the phenomena are rather those of absorption than of extinction, the result is practically the same. The country becomes European and the native races vanish.

An opposite cla.s.s of cases arises where Europeans have conquered a country already filled by a more or less civilized population, which is so numerous and so prolific as to maintain itself with ease in their presence. Such a case is the British conquest of India. The Europeans in India are, and must remain, a mere handful among the many millions of industrious natives, who already const.i.tute, in many districts, a population almost too numerous for the resources of the country to support. Moreover, the climate is one in which a pure European race speedily dwindles away. The position of the Dutch in Java, and of the French in Indo-China, is similar; and the French in Madagascar will doubtless present another instance.

Between these two extremes lies a third group of cases--those in which the native race is, on the one hand, numerous and strong enough to maintain itself in the face of Europeans, while, on the other hand, there is plenty of room left for a considerable European population to press in, climatic conditions not forbidding it to spread and multiply.

To this group belong such colonizations as those of the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru, of the Russians in parts of Central Asia, of the French in Algeria and Tunis, of the Spaniards in the Canary Isles, and of the English and Americans in Hawaii. In all these countries the new race and the old race can both live and thrive, neither of them killing off or crowding out the other, though in some, as in Hawaii, the natives tend to disappear, while in others, as in Algeria, the immigrants do not much increase. Sometimes, as in the Canary Isles and Mexico, the two elements blend, the native element being usually more numerous, though less advanced; and a mixed race is formed by intermarriage. Sometimes they remain, and seem likely to remain, as distinct as oil is from water.

South Africa belongs to this third cla.s.s of cases. The Dutch and the English find the country a good one and become fond of it. There is plenty of land for them. They enjoy the climate. They thrive and multiply. But they do not oust the natives, except sometimes from the best lands, and the contact does not reduce the number of the latter.

The native--that is to say, the native of the Kafir race--not merely holds his ground, but increases far more rapidly than he did before Europeans came, because the Europeans have checked intertribal wars and the slaughter of the tribesmen by the chiefs and their wizards, and also because the Europeans have opened up new kinds of employment. As, therefore, the native will certainly remain, and will, indeed, probably continue to be in a vast majority, it is vital to a comprehension of South African problems to know what he has been and may be expected to become.

The native races are three, and the differences between them are marked, being differences not only of physical appearance and of language, but also of character, habits, and grade of civilization. These three are the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and those Bantu tribes whom we call Kafirs.

The Bushmen were, to all appearance, the first on the ground, the real aborigines of South Africa. They are one of the lowest races to be found anywhere, as low as the Fuegians or the "black fellows" of Australia, though perhaps not quite so low as the Veddahs of Ceylon or the now extinct natives of Tasmania. They seem to have been originally scattered over all South Africa, from the Zambesi to the Cape, and so late as eighty years ago were almost the only inhabitants of Basutoland, where now none of them are left. They were nomads of the most primitive type, neither tilling the soil nor owning cattle, but living on such wild creatures as they could catch or smite with their poisoned arrows, and, when these failed, upon wild fruits and the roots of plants. For the tracking and trapping of game they had a marvellous faculty, such as neither the other races nor any European could equal. But they had no organization, not even a tribal one, for they wandered about in small groups; and no religion beyond some vague notion of ghosts, and of spirits inhabiting or connected with natural objects; while their language was a succession of clicks interrupted by grunts. Very low in stature, and possibly cognate to the pygmies whom Mr. H.M. Stanley found in Central Africa, they were capable of enduring great fatigue and of travelling very swiftly. Untamably fierce unless caught in childhood, and incapable of accustoming themselves to civilized life, driven out of some districts by the European settlers, who were often forced to shoot them down in self-defence, and in other regions no longer able to find support owing to the disappearance of the game, they are now almost extinct, though a few remain in the Kalahari Desert and the adjoining parts of northern Bechua.n.a.land and western Matabililand, toward Lake Ngami. I saw at the Kimberley mines two or three dwarf natives who were said to have Bushmen blood in them, but it is no longer easy to find in the Colony a pure specimen. Before many years the only trace of their existence will be in the remarkable drawings of wild animals with which they delighted to cover the smooth surfaces of sheltered rocks. These drawings, which are found all the way from the Zambesi to the Cape, and from Manicaland westward, are executed in red, yellow, and black pigments, and are often full of spirit. Rude, of course, they are, but they often convey the aspect, and especially the characteristic att.i.tude, of the animal with great fidelity.

The second native race was that which the Dutch called Hottentot, and whom the Portuguese explorers found occupying the maritime region in the south-west corner of the continent, to the east and to the north of the Cape of Good Hope. They are supposed to have come from the north and dispossessed the Bushmen of the gra.s.sy coast lands, driving them into the more arid interior. But of this there is no evidence; and some have even fancied that the Hottentot race itself may have been a mixed one, produced by intermarriage between Bushmen and Kafirs. Be this as it may, the Hottentots were superior to the Bushmen both physically and intellectually. They were small men, but not pygmies, of a reddish or yellowish black hue, with no great muscular power in their slender frames. Their hair, very short and woolly, grew, like that of the Bushmen, in small b.a.l.l.s or tufts over the skull, just as gra.s.s tufts grow separate from one another in the drier parts of the veldt. They possessed sheep and also cattle, lean beasts with huge horns; and they roved hither and thither over the country as they could find pasture for their animals, doing a little hunting, but not attempting to till the soil, and unacquainted with the metals. Living in tribes under their chiefs, they fought a little with one another, and a great deal with the Bushmen, who tried to prey upon their cattle. They were a thoughtless, cheerful, good-natured, merry sort of people, whom it was not difficult to domesticate as servants, and their relations with the Dutch settlers, in spite of two wars, were, on the whole, friendly. Within a century after the foundation of Cape Colony, their numbers, never large, had vastly diminished, partly from the occupation by the colonists of their best grazing-grounds, but still more from the ravages of small-pox and other epidemics, which s.h.i.+ps touching on their way from the East Indies brought into the country. In A.D. 1713 whole tribes perished in this way. I speak of the Hottentots in the past tense, for they are now, as a distinct race, almost extinct in the Colony, although a good deal of their blood has pa.s.sed into the mixed coloured population of Cape Town and its neighbourhood--a population the other elements of which are Malays from the Dutch East Indies, and the descendants of slaves brought from the West Coast of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From unions between Hottentot women and the Dutch sprang the mixed race whom the Dutch call b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and the English Griquas, and who, though now dying out, like the French and Indian half-breeds of Western Canada, played at one time a considerable part in colonial politics. Along the south bank of the Orange River and to the north of it, in Great Namaqualand, small tribes, substantially identical with the Hottentots, still wander over the arid wilderness. But in the settled parts of the Colony the Hottentot, of whom we used to hear so much, and whom the Portuguese remembering the death of the viceroy D'Almeida (who was killed in a skirmish in A.D. 1510), at one time feared so much, has vanished more completely than has the Red Indian from the Atlantic States of North America. And the extinction or absorption of the few remaining nomads will probably follow at no distant date.

Very different have been the fortunes, very different are the prospects, of the third and far more numerous South African race, those whom we call Kafirs, and who call themselves Abantu or Bantu ("the people"). The word "Kafir" is Arabic. It has nothing to do with Mount Kaf (the Caucasus), but means an infidel (literally, "one who denies"), and is applied by Mussulmans not merely to these people, but to other heathen also, as, for instance, to the idolaters of Kafiristan, in the Hindu-Kush Mountains. The Portuguese doubtless took the name from the Arabs, whom they found established at several points on the East African coast northward from Sofala, and the Dutch took it from the Portuguese, together with such words as "kraal" (corral), and "a.s.sagai." The Bantu tribes, if one may include under that name all the blacks who speak languages of the same general type, occupy the whole of East Africa southward from the Upper Nile, where that river issues from the great Nyanza lakes, together with the Congo basin and most of South-west Africa. They include various groups, such as the Ama-Kosa tribes (to which belong the Tembus and Pondos), who dwell on the coast of Cape Colony eastward from the Great Fish River; the Ama-Zulu group, consisting of the Zulus proper (in Natal and Zululand), the Swazis, the Matabili, farther to the north, and the Angoni, in Nya.s.saland, beyond the Zambesi River; the Amatonga group, between Zululand and Delagoa Bay; the Bechuana group, including the Bamangwato, the Basuto and the Barolongs, as well as the Barotse, far off on the middle course of the Zambesi; the Makalaka or Maholi, and cognate tribes, inhabiting Mashonaland and Manicaland. The linguistic and ethnical affinities of these groups and tribes are still very imperfectly known, but their speech and their habits are sufficiently similar to enable us to refer them to one type, just as we do the Finnic or the Slavonic peoples in Europe. And they are even more markedly unlike the Hottentots or the Bushmen than the Slavs are to the Finns, or both of these to those interesting aborigines of northern Europe, the Lapps.

The Bantu or Kafirs--I use the term as synonymous--who dwell south of the Zambesi are usually strong and well-made men, not below the average height of a European. In colour they vary a good deal; some are as black as the Gulf of Guinea negro, some rather brown than black. All have the thick lips, the woolly hair, and the scanty beard of the negro, and nearly all the broad, low nose; yet in some the nose is fairly high, and the cast of features suggests an admixture of Semitic blood--an admixture which could be easily explained by the presence, from a pretty remote time, of Arab settlers, as well as traders, along the coast of the Indian Ocean. As the Bantu vary in aspect, so do they also in intelligence. No tribe is in this respect conspicuously superior to any other, though the Zulus show more courage in fight than most of the others, the Fingos more apt.i.tude for trade, the Basutos more disposition to steady industry. But, while the general level of intellect is below that of the Red Indians or the Maoris or the Hawaiians (if rather above that of the Guinea negroes), individuals are now and then found of considerable talents and great force of character. Three such men as the Zulu Tshka, the Basuto Moshesh, and the Bechuana Khama, not to speak of those who, like the eloquent missionary Tiyo Soga, have received a regular European education, are sufficient to show the capacity of the race for occasionally reaching a standard which white men must respect.

And in one regard the Bantu race shows a kind of strength which the Red Indians and Polynesians lack. They are a very prolific people, and under the conditions of peace which European rule secures they multiply with a rapidity which some deem alarming.

How long the various Bantu tribes have been in South Africa is a question on which no light has yet been thrown, or can, indeed, be expected. Some of them have a vague tradition that they came from the north; but the recollections of savages seldom go back more than five or six generations, and retain little except the exploits or the genealogy of some conspicuous chief. When the Portuguese arrived in the end of the fifteenth century, they found Kafirs already inhabiting the country from Natal northward. But apparently they did not then extend as far to the west of Natal as they do now; and there is no reason to think that considerable parts of the interior, such as the region which is now the Orange Free State and Basutoland, were not yet occupied, but left to the wandering Bushmen. The Kafirs were then, and continued down to our own time, in a state of incessant tribal warfare; and from time to time one martial tribe, under a forceful chief, would exterminate or chase away some weaker clan and reduce wide areas to a wilderness. Of any large conquests, or of any steady progress in the arts either of war or of peace, there is no record, and indeed, in the general darkness, no trace. The history of the native races, so far as ascertainable, begins with the advent of the whites, and even after their advent remains extremely shadowy until, early in this century, the onward march of settlement gave the Dutch and English settlers the means of becoming better acquainted with their black neighbours.

Across this darkness there strikes one ray of light. It is a very faint ray, but in the absence of all other light it is precious. It is that which is supplied by the prehistoric ruins and the abandoned gold-workings of Mashonaland.

CHAPTER IX

OUT OF THE DARKNESS--ZIMBABWYE

The ruined buildings of Mashonaland and Matabililand have excited in recent years an amount of interest and curiosity which is disproportionate to their number, size, and beauty, but by no means disproportionate to their value as being the only record, scant as it is, we possess of what has been deemed an early South African civilization. I will describe in the fewest words such of these buildings as I saw, leaving the reader of archaeological tastes to find fuller details in the well-known book of that enterprising explorer, the late Mr. Theodore Bent. Some short account of them seems all the more needed, because the first descriptions published gave the impression that they were far more considerable than they really are.

Scattered over the plateau of southern Mashonaland and Matabililand, from its mountainous edge on the east to the neighbourhood of Tati on the west, there are to be found fragments of walls built of small blocks of granite resembling paving stones (usually about a foot long by six inches high), but often larger, not cut smooth, but chipped or trimmed to a fairly uniform size. These walls are without mortar or other cementing material, but the stones are so neatly set together, and the wall usually so thick, that the structure is compact and cohesive. The walls are mostly thinner at the top than at the base. The only ornamentation consists in placing some of the layers at an acute angle to the other layers above and below, so as to produce what is called the herring-bone pattern. Occasionally a different pattern is obtained by leaving s.p.a.ces at intervals between the horizontal stones of certain layers, making a kind of diaper. In some cases this ornamentation, always very simple, occurs only on one part of the wall, and it has been said that it occurs usually if not invariably on the part which faces the east. I heard of ten or twelve such pieces of wall in different parts of the plateau, and saw photographs of most of these. Probably others exist, for many districts, especially in the hills, have been imperfectly explored, and trees easily conceal these low erections. One was described to me, where the walls are the facings of seven terraces, rising one above another to a sort of platform on the top. This I have not seen; but it is probably similar to one which I did see and examine at a place called Dhlodhlo, about fifty miles south-east of Bulawayo.

This group of ruins, one of the most interesting in the country, stands high among rocky hills, from which a superb view is gained over the wide stretches of rolling table-land to the north and north-west, a charming situation which might have attracted the old builders did they possess any sense of beauty. On a low eminence there has been erected such a wall of such hewn, or rather trimmed, stones as I have just described.

It is now about twenty feet in height, and may have originally been higher. On the eastern side this wall consists of three parts, each about six feet high, with two narrow terraces, each from five to six feet wide, between them, the second wall rising from the first terrace, and the third or highest wall from the second terrace. On this side some of the stone courses have the simple forms of ornamental pattern already mentioned. On the opposite, or western and north-western, side only one terrace and a low, unornamented wall of trimmed stones are now discernible. To the north, still within what seems to have been the main inclosing wall, are small inclosures built of trimmed stone, which may have been chambers originally roofed with wood or bushes. At the top of the highest wall there is at the north-north-west end a small level platform of earth or rubble, which seems to have been filled in behind the terraced walls. This platform is approached by a narrow pa.s.sage between walls of trimmed stone, at one point in which there appears to have been a sort of narrow gateway barely wide enough for two persons to pa.s.s. There is no trace of any stone building on the top of the platform, and the remains of clay huts which one finds there may well be quite modern. To the south of this princ.i.p.al structure there is a second small hill or boss of granite, protected on three sides by steep sheets of granite rock. Its top is inclosed by a low wall of trimmed stones, now in places quite broken away, with no trace of any stone building within. All round on the lower ground are large inclosures rudely built of rough stones, and probably intended for cattle-kraals. They may be quite modern, and they throw no light on the purpose of the ancient buildings. Nor is much light to be obtained from the objects which have been found in the ruins. When I was there they were being searched by the Mashonaland Ancient Ruins Exploration Company, a company authorized by the British South Africa Company to dig and sc.r.a.pe in the ancient buildings of the country for gold or whatever else of value may be there discoverable, an enterprise which, though it may accelerate the progress of archaeological inquiry, obviously requires to be conducted with great care and by competent persons. So far as I could observe, all due care was being used by the gentleman in charge of the work at Dhlodhlo; but considering how easy it is to obliterate the distinctive features of a ruin and leave it in a condition unfavourable to future examination, it seems desirable that the company should, as a rule, await the arrival of trained archaeologists rather than hurry on explorations by amateurs, however zealous and well intentioned. Of the objects found, which were courteously shown to me, some are modern, such as the bits of pottery, apparently Indian or Chinese, the bits of gla.s.s, the bullets and fragments of flint-lock muskets, a small cannon, and an iron hammer.

These are doubtless of Portuguese origin, though it does not follow that any Portuguese expedition ever penetrated so far inland, for they may have been gifts or purchases from the Portuguese established on the coast four or five hundred miles away. So, too, the silver and copper ornaments found, and some of the gold ones (occasionally alloyed with copper), which show patterns apparently Portuguese, may be recent. There are also, however, some gold ornaments, such as beads, bangles (a skeleton was found with bangles on the legs and a bead necklace), and pieces of twisted gold wire, which may be far more ancient, and indeed as old as the structure itself. A small crucible with nuggets and small bits of gold goes to indicate that smelting was carried on, though the nearest ancient gold-workings are six miles distant. Probably here, as at Hissarlik and at Carthage, there exist remains from a long succession of centuries, the spot having been occupied from remote antiquity.[6] At present it is not only uninhabited, but regarded by the natives with fear. They believe it to be haunted by the ghosts of the departed, and are unwilling, except in the daytime and for wages paid by the Exploration Company, to touch or even to enter the ruins. They can hardly be persuaded even to relate such traditions as exist regarding the place. All that has been gathered is that it was the dwelling of a line of _mambos_, or chiefs, the last of whom was burned here by Mosilikatze, the Matabili king, when he conquered the country sixty years ago. (The place does show marks of fire.) But the buildings were here long before the mambos reigned, and who built them, or why, no one knows. The natives come sometimes to make offerings to ancestral ghosts, especially when they ask for success in hunting; and if the hunt be successful, strips of meat are cut off and placed in cleft sticks for the benefit of the ghosts.

Three hypotheses have been advanced regarding the Dhlodhlo building. One regards them as a fortress. The objection to this is that the terraced and ornamented wall is so far from contributing to defence that it actually facilitates attack; for, by the help of the terraces and of the interstices among the stones which the ornamental pattern supplies, an active man could easily scale it in front. Moreover, there is hard by, to the north, a higher and more abrupt hill which would have offered a far better site for a fort. The second view is that Dhlodhlo was a mining station, where slaves were kept at work; but if so, why was it not placed near the old gold-workings instead of some miles off, and of what use were the terraced walls? The inquirer is therefore led to the third view--that the building was in some way connected with religious wors.h.i.+p, and that the ornament which is seen along the eastern wall was placed there with some religious motive. There is, however, nothing whatever to indicate the nature of that wors.h.i.+p, nor the race that practised it, for no objects of a possibly religious character (such as those I shall presently mention at Zimbabwye) have been found here.

I visited a second ruin among the mountains of Mashonaland, near the Lezapi River, at a place called Chipadzi's grave, a mile from the kraal of a chief named Chipunza. Here a rocky granite kopje, almost inaccessible on two sides, is protected on one of the other sides by a neatly built wall of well-trimmed stones, similar to that of Dhlodhlo, but without ornament. The piece that remains is some fifty yards long, five feet thick at the base, and eleven feet high at its highest point.