As far as I saw all labour about the place was done by black men except that which fell to the lot of the owner and two or three young men who lived with him and were learning the work under his care. These black men were Kafirs, Fingos, or Hottentots—so called, who lived each in his own hut with his wife and family. They received 26s. a month and their diet,—which consisted of two pound of meat and two pound of mealies a day each. The man himself could not eat this amount of food, but would no doubt find it little enough with his wife and children. With this he has permission to build his hut about the place, and to burn his master’s fuel. He buys coffee if he wants it from his master’s store, and in his present condition generally does want it. When in his hut he rolls himself in his blanket, but when he comes out to his work attires himself in some more or less European apparel according to regulation. He is a good humoured fellow, whether by nature a hostile Kafir, or a submissive Fingo, or friendly Basuto, and seems to have a pleasure in being enquired into and examined as to his Kafir habits. But, if occasion should arise, he would probably be a rebel. On this very spot where I was talking to him, the master of the farm had felt himself compelled during the last year,—1876—to add a couple of towers to his house so that in the event of an attack he might be able to withdraw his family from the reach of shot, and have a guarded platform from whence to fire at his enemies. Whether or not the danger was near as he thought it last year I am unable to say; but there was the fact that he had found it necessary so to protect himself only a few months since within twenty miles of Grahamstown! Such absence of the feeling of security must of course be injurious if not destructive to all industrial operations.
I may add with regard to ostrich farming that I have heard that 50 per cent. per annum on the capital invested has been not uncommonly made. But I have heard also that all the capital invested has not been unfrequently lost. It must be regarded as a precarious business and one which requires special adaptation in the person who conducts it. And to this must be added the fact that it depends entirely on a freak of fashion. Wheat and wool, cotton and coffee, leather and planks men will certainly continue to want, and of these things the value will undoubtedly be maintained by competition for their possession. But ostrich feathers may become a drug. When the nurse-maid affects them the Duchess will cease to do so.
Grahamstown is served by two ports. There is the port of Port Elizabeth in Algoa Bay which I have already described as a thriving town and one from which a railway is being made across the country, with a branch to Grahamstown. All the mail steamers from England to Capetown come on to Algoa Bay, and there is also a direct steamer from Plymouth once a month. The bulk of the commerce for the whole adjacent district comes no doubt to Port Elizabeth. But the people of Grahamstown affect Port Alfred, which is at the mouth of the Kowie river and only 35 miles distant from the Eastern Capital. I was therefore taken down to see Port Alfred.
I went down on one side of the river by a four-horsed cart as far as the confluence of the Mansfield, and thence was shewn the beauties of the Kowie river by boat. Our party dined and slept at Port Alfred, and on the following day we came back to Grahamstown by cart on the other side of the river. I was perhaps more taken with the country which I saw than with the harbour, and was no longer at a loss to know where was the land on which the English settlers of 1820 were intended to locate themselves. We passed through a ruined village called Bathurst,—a village ruined while it was yet young, than which nothing can be more painful to behold. Houses had been built again, but almost every house had at one time,—that is in the Kafir war of 1850,—been either burnt or left to desolation. And yet nothing can be more attractive than the land about Bathurst, either in regard to picturesque situation or fertility. The same may be said of the other bank of this river. It is impossible to imagine a fairer district to a farmer’s eye. It will grow wheat, but it will also grow on the slopes of the hills, cotton and coffee. It is all possessed, and generally all cultivated;—but it can hardly be said to be inhabited by white men, so few are they and so far-between. A very large proportion of the land is let out to Kafirs who pay a certain sum for certain rights and privileges. He is to build his hut and have enough land to cultivate for his own purposes, and grass enough for his cattle;—and for these he contracts to pay perhaps £10 per annum, or more, or less, according to circumstances. I was assured that the rent is punctually paid. But this mode of disposing of the land, excellent for all purposes as it is, has not arisen of choice but of necessity. The white farmer knows that as yet he can have no security if he himself farms on a large scale. Next year there may be another scare, and then a general attack from the Kafirs; or the very scare if there be no attack, frightens away his profits;—or, as has happened before, the attack may come without the scare. The country is a European country,—belongs that is to white men,—but it is full of Kafirs;—and then, but a hundred miles away to the East, is Kafraria Proper where the British law does not rule even yet.
No one wants to banish the Kafirs. Situated as the country is and will be, it cannot exist without Kafirs, because the Kafirs are the only possible labourers. To utilize the Kafir and not to expel him must be the object of the white man. Speaking broadly it may be said of the Colony, or at any rate of the Eastern district, that it has no white labourers for agricultural purposes. The Kafir is as necessary to the Grahamstown farmer as is his brother negro to the Jamaica sugar grower. But, for the sake both of the Kafir and of the white man, some further assurance of security is needed. I am inclined to think that more evil is done both to one and the other by ill defined fear than by actual danger.
Along the coast of the Colony there are various sea ports, none of which are very excellent as to their natural advantages, but each of which seems to have a claim to consider itself the best. There is Capetown of course with its completed docks, and Simon’s Bay on the other side of the Cape promontory which is kept exclusively for our men of war. Then the first port, eastwards, at which the steamers call is Mossel Bay. These are the chief harbours of the Western Province. On the coast of the Eastern Province there are three ports between which a considerable jealousy is maintained, Port Elizabeth, Port Alfred, and East London. And as there is rivalry between the West and East Provinces, so is there between these three harbours. Port Elizabeth I had seen before I came up to Grahamstown. From Grahamstown I travelled to Port Alfred, taken thither by two patriotic hospitable and well-instructed gentlemen who thoroughly believed that the commerce of the world was to flow into Grahamstown via Port Alfred, and that the overflowing produce of South Africa will, at some not far distant happy time, be dispensed to the various nations from the same favoured harbour. “Statio bene fida carinis,” was what I heard all the way down,—or rather promises of coming security and marine fruitfulness which are to be results of the works now going on. It was all explained to me,—how ships which now could not get over the bar would ride up the quiet little river in perfect safety, and take in and discharge their cargoes on comfortable wharves at a very minimum of expense. And then, when this should have been completed, the railway from the Kowie’s mouth up to Grahamstown would be a certainty, even though existing governments had been so shortsighted as to make a railway from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown—carrying goods and passengers ever so far out of their proper course.
It is a matter on which I am altogether unable to speak with any confidence. Neither at Port Elizabeth, or at the mouth of the Kowie where stands Port Alfred, or further eastwards at East London of which I must speak in a coming chapter, has Nature done much for mariners, and the energy shown to overcome obstacles at all these places has certainly been very great. The devotion of individuals to their own districts and to the chances of prosperity not for themselves so much as for their neighbours, is almost sad though it is both patriotic and generous. The rivalry between places which should act together as one whole is distressing;—but the industry of which I speak will surely have the results which industry always obtains. I decline to prophesy whether there will be within the next dozen years a railway from Port Alfred to Grahamstown,—or whether the goods to be consumed at the Diamond Fields and in the Orange Free State will ever find their way to their destinations by the mouth of the Kowie;—but I think I can foresee that the enterprise of the people concerned will lead to success.
CHAPTER XI.
BRITISH KAFRARIA.
It is not improbable that many Englishmen who have not been altogether inattentive to the course of public affairs as affecting Great Britain may be unaware that we once possessed in South Africa a separate colony called British Kafraria, with a governor of its own, and a form of government altogether distinct from that of its big brother the Cape Colony. Such however is the fact, though the territory did not, perhaps, attract much notice at the time of its annexation. Some years after the last Kafir war which may have the year 1850 given to it as its date, and after that wonderful Kafir famine which took place in 1857,—the famine which the natives created for themselves by destroying their own cattle and their own food,—British Kafraria was made a separate colony and was placed under the rule of Colonel Maclean. The sanction from England for the arrangement had been long given, but it was not carried out till 1860. It was not intended that the country should be taken away from the Kafirs;—but only the rule over the country, and the privilege of living in accordance with their own customs. Nor was this privilege abrogated all at once, or abruptly. Gradually and piecemeal they were to be introduced to what we call civilization. Gradually and piecemeal the work is still going on,—and so progressing that there can hardly be a doubt that as far as their material condition is concerned we have done well with the Kafirs. The Kafir Chiefs may feel,—certainly do feel,—that they have been aggrieved. They have been as it were knocked about, deprived of their power, humiliated and degraded, and, as far as British Kafraria is concerned, made almost ridiculous in the eyes of their own people. But the people themselves have been relieved from the force of a grinding tyranny. They increase and multiply because they are no longer driven to fight and be slaughtered in the wars which the Chiefs were continually waging for supremacy among each other. What property they acquire they can hold without fear of losing it by arbitrary force. They are no longer subject to the terrible superstitions which their Chiefs have used for keeping them in subjection. Their huts are better, and their food more constantly sufficient. Many of them work for wages. They are partially clothed,—sometimes with such grotesque partiality as quite to justify the comical stories which we have heard at home as to Kafir full dress. But the habit of wearing clothes is increasing among them. In the towns they are about as well clad as the ordinary Irish beggar,—and as the traveller recedes from the towns he perceives that this raiment gradually gives way to blankets and red clay. But to have got so far as the Irish beggar condition in twenty years is very much, and the custom is certainly spreading itself. The Kafir who has assiduously worn breeches for a year does feel, not a moral but a social shame, at going without them. As I have no doubt whatever that the condition of these people has been improved by our coming, and that British rule has been on the whole beneficent to them, I cannot but approve of the annexation of British Kafraria. But I doubt whether when it was done the justification was as complete as in those former days, twenty years before, when Lord Glenelg reprimanded Sir Benjamin D’Urban for the extension he made in the same territory, and drew back the borders of British sovereignty, and restored their lands and their prestige and their customs to the natives, and declared himself willing to be responsible for all results that might follow,—results which at last cost so much British blood and so much British money!
The difficult question meets one at every corner in South Africa. What is the duty of the white man in reference to the original inhabitant? The Kafir Chief will say that it is the white man’s duty to stay away and not to touch what does not belong to him. The Dutch Colonist will say that it is the white man’s duty to make the best he can of the good things God has provided for his use,—and that as the Kafir in his natural state is a bad thing he should either be got rid of, or made a slave. In either assertion there is an intelligible purpose capable of a logical argument. But the Briton has to go between the two, wavering much between the extremes of philanthropy and expansive energy. He knows that he has to get possession of the land and use it, and is determined that he will do so;—but he knows also that it is wrong to take what does not belong to him and wrong also to treat another human being with harshness. And therefore with one hand he waves his humanitarian principles over Exeter Hall while with the other he annexes Province after Province. As I am myself a Briton I am not a fair critic of the proceeding;—but it does seem to me that he is upon the whole beneficent, though occasionally very unjust.