Twenty-Five Years in a Waggon in South Africa: Sport and Travel in South Africa

by Andrew A. Anderson

The stream from which the town is supplied with water is at the foot of the hill, about a third of a mile from the nearest huts. The country round is very bare of trees. Kaffir gardens are situated on the rising ground beyond the hill, upon which the town is built.

Kaffir corn is the principal food of the people. The women cultivate the land and bring water to their houses, so that there is a constant stream of them with their Kaffir pots going up and down the hill on all sides, conveying it to their houses. Most of the women have little black babies on their backs, supported by well-worn skins of the wild animals killed by the men; with little naked urchins running by their mother’s side, hanging on to the skin worn similar to a kilt, happy as they can be, talking to their neighbours as they meet, singing with all the lightness of a happy heart. They continue to suck until five or six years old.

When we compare their habits with civilised life, there is very little difference. They have the same routine of duty to go through daily in their household affairs, so far as cooking, keeping their huts in order, attending to their gardens and such things. The men make the karosses and attend to their cattle. The Matabele race live precisely in the same way, and have the same habits as their neighbours, the Bechuanas. The king has several country kraals, which he visits at different times for a change.

The country cannot boast of many good roads; there is only one direct from the south. Others from Mongwato go round to the west by the great salt-pan Makarakara. There are also two from the Tati district, and two from Gubuluwayo, and other hunting roads from Inyatine to the Zambese, Victoria Falls, and military kraals in various parts of the territory, many of them very good, others stony and with bad drifts.

Inyatine during the lifetime of Moselikatze was an extensive military station. After his death it was destroyed, and the king removed south, and eventually settled at Gubuluwayo; but it appears that lately he has abandoned that station, and fixed his residence in another locality.

The road from the king’s kraal to Sebenane station, where several roads branch off, one going to Panda-ma-Tenka, Mr G. Westbeech’s large store, passes through a sandy country with numerous pans and vleis, dry in winter, but containing water in summer. In the Lechuma valley beyond, Wankies, a chief, a few years ago, had possession of the country until Lo-Bengulu took it from him, and Wankies and his people crossed the Zambese and settled on its northern bank.

The Victoria Falls are considered to be included in the Matabele kingdom. Although this part of the country is 3000 feet above sea-level, it is very unhealthy during the summer months. Mr G. Westbeech, who has lived and hunted in the country for the last thirteen years, told me in 1878 he had had the fever over thirty times, and when he took quinine the dose would be a small teaspoonful. The country generally through this part is very pretty, in many portions park-like, with clumps of trees in groups; but the roads are fearfully sandy, and the want of water for some six and seven months of the year is a great drawback to the country improving.

But when the time comes, and the people of the Cape Colony are more alive to their own interests, instead of living in their present dormant state, devoting their attention to subjects of no real importance to their prosperity, they will see how vital it is to their interests to have a central railway up through Africa to the Congo basin, and to draw a vast trade south, that would otherwise flow to the west coast, and all the country that is situated on the north side of the Zambese river, up to what is included in the Congo state, a region of untold wealth, teeming with elephants, ostriches, and every kind of large game; thickly populated by intelligent races, who are alive to the advantage of those comforts that civilisation brings into the country. From a want of forethought the colonists have lost the west coast, and as far inland as the 20 degrees East longitude, and they will find the Germans no mean competitors in the interior trade of that vast region.

The Barotse tribe, in particular, which is very numerous, has already received great benefit from the English trade introduced first into the country by Mr Westbeech at the chief’s kraal on the north side of the Zambese, and afterwards by other traders, when the chief Secheke was alive.

The extent of this region north of the river, within a reasonable distance of a railway at the Victoria Falls, is 150,000 square miles. The distance of railway carriage from the Zambese river to Kimberley is 770 miles, to where a railway is already being constructed. A single line could be made at a trifling cost, as the country through which it would pass is comparatively a dead level; and beyond the Vaal river at Barkly, where a bridge is now being erected, only a few small streams would have to be crossed.