After the wars, when this Kafraria had become British, a body of German emigrants were induced to come here who have thriven wonderfully upon the land,—as Germans generally do. The German colonist is a humble hard working parsimonious man, who is content as long as he can eat and drink in security and put by a modicum of money. He cares but little for the form of government to which he is subjected, but is very anxious as to a market for his produce. He is unwilling to pay any wages, but is always ready to work himself and to make his children work. He lives at first in some small hovel which he constructs for himself, and will content himself with maize instead of meat till he has put by money enough for the building of a neat cottage. And so he progresses till he becomes known in the neighbourhood as a man who has money at the bank. Nothing probably has done more to make Kafraria prosperous than this emigration of Germans.
But British Kafraria did not exist long as a separate possession of the Crown, having been annexed to the Cape Colony in 1864. From that time it has formed part of the Eastern Province. It has three thriving English towns, King-Williamstown, the capital, East London the port, and Queenstown, further up the country than King-Williamstown;—towns which are peculiarly English though the country around is either cultivated by German farmers or held by Kafir tenants. The district is still called British Kafraria. I myself have some very dim remembrance of British Kafraria as a Colony, but like other places in the British empire it has been absorbed by degrees without much notice at home.
Starting from Grahamstown on a hired Cape cart I entered British Kafraria somewhere between that town and Fort Beaufort. A “Cape cart” is essentially a South African vehicle, and is admirably adapted for the somewhat rough roads of the country. Its great merit is that it travels on only two wheels;—but then so does our English gig. But the English gig carries only two passengers while the Cape cart has room for four,—or even six. The Irish car no doubt has both these merits,—carries four and runs on two wheels; but the wheels are necessarily so low that they are ill adapted for passing serious obstructions. And the Cape cart can be used with two horses, or four as the need may be. A one-horse vehicle is a thing hardly spoken of in South Africa, and would meet with more scorn than it does even in the States. But the chief peculiarity of the Cape cart is the yoke of the horses, which is somewhat similar in its nature to that of the curricle which used to be very dangerous and very fashionable in the days of George IV. With us a pair of horses is now always connected with four wheels, and with the idea of security which four wheels give. Though the horse may tumble down the vehicle stands. It was not so with the curricle. When a horse fell, he would generally bring down his comrade horse with him, and then the vehicle would go,—to the almost certain destruction of the pole and the imminent danger of the passengers. But with the Cape cart the bar, instead of passing over the horse’s back—the bar on which the vehicle must rest when for a moment it loses its balance on the two wheels with a propulsion forwards—passes under the horses’ necks, with straps appended to the collars. I have never seen a horse fall with one of them;—but I can understand that when such an accident happens the falling horse should not bring the other animal down with him. The advantage of having two high wheels,—and only two,—need not be explained to any traveller.
On the way to Fort Beaufort I passed by Fort Brown,—a desolate barrack which was heretofore employed for the protection of the frontier when Grahamstown was the frontier city. I arrived there by a fine pass, excellently well engineered, through the mountains, called the Queen’s Road,—very picturesque from the shape of the hills, though desolate from the absence of trees. But at Fort Brown the beauty was gone and nothing but the desolation remained. The Fort stands just off the road, on a plain, and would hold perhaps 40 or 50 men. I walked up to it and found one lonely woman who told me that she was the wife of a policeman stationed at some distant place. It had become the fate of her life to live here in solitude, and a more lonely creature I never saw. She was clean and pleasant and talked well;—but she declared that unless she was soon liberated from Fort Brown she must go mad. She was eloquent in favour of hard work, declaring that there was nothing else which could give a real charm to life;—but perhaps she had been roused to that feeling by knowing that there was not a job to be done upon the earth to which in her present circumstances she could turn her hand. Optat arare caballus. She told me of a son who was employed in one of the distant provinces, and bade me find him if I could and tell him of his mother. “Tell him to think of me here all alone,” she said. I tried to execute my commission but failed to find the man.
I had intended sleeping at Fort Beaufort and on going from thence up the Catsberg Mountain. But I was prevented by the coming of a gentleman, a Wesleyan minister, who was very anxious that I should see the Kafir school at Healdtown over which he presided. From first to last through my tour I was subject to the privileges and inconveniences of being known as a man who was going to write a book. I never said as much to any one in South Africa,—or even admitted it when interrogated. I could not deny that I possibly might do so, but I always protested that my examiner had no right to assume the fact. All this, however, was quite vain as coming from one who had written so much about other Colonies, and was known to be so inveterate a scribbler as myself. Then the argument, though never expressed in plain words, would take, in suggested ideas, the following form. “Here you are in South Africa, and you are going to write about us. If so I,—or we, or my or our Institution, have an absolute claim to a certain portion of your attention. You have no right to pass our town by, and then to talk of the next town merely because such an arrangement will suit your individual comfort!” Then I would allege the shortness of my time. “Time indeed! Then take more time. Here am I,—or here are we, doing our very best; and we don’t intend to be passed by because you don’t allow yourself enough of time for your work.” When all this was said on behalf of some very big store, or perhaps in favour of a pretty view, or—as has been the case,—in pride at the possession of a little cabbage garden, I have been apt to wax wroth and to swear that I was my own master;—but a Kafir missionary school, to which some earnest Christian man, with probably an earnest Christian wife, devotes a life in the hope of making fresh water flow through the dry wilderness, has claims, however painful they may be at the moment. This gentleman had come into Fort Beaufort on purpose to catch me. And as he was very eloquent, and as I did feel a certain duty, I allowed myself to be led away by him. I fear that I went ungraciously, and I know that I went unwillingly. It was just four o’clock and, having had no luncheon, I wanted my dinner. I had already established myself in a very neat little sitting-room in the Inn, and had taken off my boots. I was tired and dusty, and was about to wash myself. I had been on the road all day, and the bedroom offered to me looked sweet and clean;—and there was a pretty young lady at the Inn who had given me a cup of tea to support me till dinner should be ready. I was anxious also about the Catsberg Mountain, which under the minister’s guidance I should lose, at any rate for the present. I spoke to the minister of my dinner;—but he assured me that an hour would take me out to his place at Healdtown. He clearly thought,—and clearly said,—that it was my duty to go, and I acceded. He promised to convey me to the establishment in an hour,—but it was two hours and a half before we were there. He allured me by speaking of the beauty of the road,—but it was pitch dark all the way. It was eight o’clock before my wants were supplied, and by that time I hated Kafir children thoroughly.
Of Healdtown and Lovedale,—a much larger Kafir school,—I will speak in the next chapter, which shall be exclusively educational. Near to Lovedale is the little town of Alice in which I stayed two days with the hospitable doctor. He took me out for a day’s hunting as it is called, which in that benighted country means shooting. I must own here to have made a little blunder. When I was asked some days previously whether I would like to have a day’s hunting got up for me in the neighbourhood of Alice, I answered with alacrity in the affirmative. Hunting, which is the easiest of all sports, has ever been an allurement to me. To hunt, as we hunt at home, it is only necessary that a man should stick on to the back of a horse,—or, failing that, that he should fall off. When hunting was offered to me I thought that I could at any rate go out and see. But on my arrival at Alice I found that hunting meant—shooting, an exercise of skill in which I had never even tried to prevail. “I haven’t fired off a gun,” I said, “for forty years.” But I had agreed to go out hunting, and word had passed about the country, and a hundred naked Kafirs were to be congregated to drive the game. I tried hard to escape. “Might I not be allowed to go and see the naked Kafirs, without a gun,—especially as it was so probable that I might shoot one of them if I were armed?” But this would not do. I was told that the Kafirs would despise me. So I took the gun and carried it ever so many miles, on horseback, to my very great annoyance.
At a certain spot on a hill side,—where the hill downwards was covered with bush and shrubs, we met the naked Kafirs. There were a hundred of them, I was told, more or less, and they were as naked as my heart could desire,—but each carrying some fragment of a blanket wound round on his arm, and many of them were decorated with bracelets and earrings. There were some preliminary ceremonies, such as the lying down of a young Kafir and the pretence of all the men around him,—and of all the dogs, of which there was a large muster,—that the prostrate figure was a dead buck over whom it was necessary to lick their lips and shake their weapons;—and after this the Kafirs went down into the bush. Then I was led away by my white friend, carrying my gun and leading my horse, and after a while was told that the very spot had been found. If I would remain there with my gun cocked and ready, a buck would surely come by almost at once so that I might shoot him. I did as I was bid, and sat alert for thirty minutes holding my gun as though something to be shot would surely come every second. But nothing came and I gradually went to sleep.
Then of a sudden I heard the Kafirs approaching. They had beaten the woods for a mile along the valley; and then a gun was fired and then another, and gradually my white friends reappeared among the Kafirs. One had shot a bird, and another a hare; and the most triumphant of the number had slaughtered a very fat monkey of a peculiarly blue colour about his hinder quarters. This was the great battue of the day. There were two or three other resting places at which I was instructed to stand and wait; and then we would be separated again, and again after a while would come the noise of the Kafirs. But no one shot anything further, and during the whole day nothing appeared before my eyes at which I was even able to aim my gun. But the native Kafirs with their red paint and their blankets wound round their arms, passing here and there through the bush and beating for game, were real enough and very interesting. I was told that to them it was a day of absolute delight, and that they were quite satisfied with having been allowed to be there.
I have spoken before of the Kafir scare of 1876 during which it was certainly the general opinion at Grahamstown that there was about to be a general rising among the natives, and that it would behove all Europeans in the Eastern Province to look well to their wives and children and homesteads. I have described the manner in which my friend at the ostrich farm fortified his place with turrets, and I had heard of some settlers further east who had left their homes in the conviction that they were no longer safe. Gentlemen at Grahamstown had assured me that the danger had been as though men were going about a powder magazine with lighted candles. Here, where was our hunting party, we were in the centre of the Kafirs. A farmer who was with us owned the land down to the Chumie river which was at our feet, and on the other side there was a wide district which had been left by Government to the Kafirs when we annexed the land,—a district in which the Kafirs live after their old fashion. This man had his wife and children within a mile or two of hordes of untamed savages. When I asked him about the scare of last year, he laughed at it. Some among his neighbours had fled;—and had sold their cattle for what they would fetch. But he, when he saw that Kafirs were buying the cattle thus sold, was very sure that they would not buy that which they could take without price if war should come. But the Kafirs around him, he said, had no idea of war; and, when they heard of all that the Europeans were doing, they had thought that some attack was to be made on them.[13] The Kafirs as a body no doubt hate their invaders; but they would be well content to be allowed to hold what they still possess without further struggles with the white man, if they were sure of being undisturbed in their holdings. But they will be disturbed. Gradually, for this and the other reason, from causes which the white man of the day will be sure to be able to justify at any rate to himself, more and more will be annexed, till there will not be a hill side which the Kafir can call his own dominion. As a tenant he will be admitted, and as a farmer, if he will farm the land, he will be welcomed. But the Kafir hill sides with the Kafir Kraals,—or homesteads,—and the Kafir flocks will all gradually be annexed and made subject to British taxation.
From Alice I went on to King Williamstown,—at first through a cold but grandly mountainous country, but coming, when half way, to a spot smiling with agriculture, called Debe Nek, where too there were forest trees and green slopes. At Debe Nek I met a young farmer who was full of the hardships to which he was subjected by the unjust courses taken by the Government. I could not understand his grievance, but he seemed to me to have a very pleasant spot of ground on which to sow his seed and reap his corn. His mother kept an hotel, and was racy with a fine Irish brogue which many years in the Colony had failed in the least to tarnish. She had come from Armagh and was delighted to talk of the beauty and bounty and great glory of the old primate, Beresford. She sighed for her native land and shook her head incredulously when I reminded her of the insufficiency of potatoes for the needs of man or woman. I never met an Irishman out of his own country, who, from some perversity of memory, did not think that he had always been accustomed to eat meat three times a day, and wear broad cloth when he was at home.