The Last Frontier: The White Man's War for Civilisation in Africa

by E. Alexander Powell

That the attitude of Great Britain toward the colour question in South Africa is similar to that of the Northern States toward the same problem in the South, while the attitude of the European settlers is almost identical with that of the Southerners, is strikingly illustrated by a case which recently occurred in South Africa, in which a European jury found a native guilty of attempting to assault a white woman, a crime as unknown under the old régime in South Africa as it was in our own South before the Civil War. Though the judge sentenced the man to death, the Governor-General promptly commuted the sentence on the ground that the “fact of crime” had not been established. Immediately a storm of protest and indignation arose among the white population which swept the country from the Zambezi to the Cape, the settlers asserting that if the decree of commutation were to form a precedent, no white woman would be safe in South Africa. The echoes of this controversy had not yet died away before two other cases occurred which intensely aggravated the situation. One was the case of a settler named Lewis, who shot a native for an insult to his daughters, while the other was that of the Honourable Galbraith Cole, a son of the Earl of Enniskillen, who killed a native on the alleged charge of theft. Both men were tried by white juries on charges of murder, and both were promptly acquitted, though Mr. Cole, in spite of his acquittal, was deported from South Africa by the government. As though to emphasise their colour prejudice, the lawyers of the Union about this time took concerted action to prevent native attorneys from practising among them. How, then, can the natives, who form three fourths of the population of the new Union, and who are far more children of the soil than the Europeans, be said to have protection of their most elementary rights if they are to be debarred from having men of their own colour and race to defend them, and if no white jury can be trusted to do justice where a native is concerned?

The imperial government deserves the greatest credit, however, for the steps it has taken to preserve his lands to the native. In the native protectorates and reservations of Basutoland, Swaziland, Bechuanaland, Griqualand, Tembuland, and Pondoland the government has reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of the natives territories considerably larger than the combined area of our three Pacific-coast States. Though these territories are under the control of British resident commissioners, the native chiefs are allowed to exercise jurisdiction according to tribal laws and customs in all civil matters between natives, special courts having been established to deal with serious civil or criminal matters in which Europeans are concerned. Though certain small areas of land in these rich territories are held by whites, the bulk of the country is reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of the natives, and it is not at all likely that any more land will be alienated for purposes of settlement by Europeans. (Could anything be in more striking contrast to our disgraceful treatment of the Indian?) Though South Africa has much in common with Canada, and with Australia, and with our own Southwest, it is, when all is said and done, a black man's country ruled by the white man, and it is upon the justice, liberality, and intelligence of this rule that the peace and prosperity of the young nation must eventually depend.

Two great obstacles will always stand in the way of the white man having an easy row to hoe in South Africa: the climate and the lack of water. Though the climate of the uplands is pleasant and makes men want to lead an outdoor life, I am not at all certain that it tends to develop or maintain the keenness and energy characteristic of dwellers in the north temperate zone. The climate of the coastal regions is, moreover, distinctly bad, the sharply cold nights and the misty, steaming days producing the coast fever, which is a combination of rheumatism, influenza, dysentery, and malaria, and is very debilitating indeed. The white man who intends to make his permanent home in South Africa has, therefore, two alternatives: he can submit to the exactions of the climate, take life easily, leave the black bottle severely alone, and live a long but unprogressive life, or he can exhaust his energies and undermine his health in fighting the climate and die of old age at sixty. If the climate is not all that is desirable for men, it is infinitely worse for animals, for every disease known to the veterinarian abounds. Time and again the herds of the country have been almost exterminated by the hoof-and-mouth disease, or by the rinderpest, a highly contagious cattle distemper which is probably identical with that “murrain” with which Moses smote the herds of ancient Egypt and which helped to bring Pharaoh to terms. In the low-lying regions along the East Coast, and in the country north of the Limpopo it is necessary to keep horses shut up every night until the poisonous mists and dew have disappeared before the sun lest they contract the “blue-tongue,” a disease characterised by a swollen, purplish-hued tongue which kills them in a few hours by choking; while in certain other districts, especially in the vicinity of the Zambezi and of the Portuguese territories, the deadly tsetse-fly makes it impossible to keep domestic animals at all.

The other great obstacle to the prosperity of South Africa is the lack of water, for less than one-tenth of the country is suitable for raising any kind of a crop without water being led onto it—and irrigation by private enterprise is out of the question, as even the indomitable Rhodes was forced to admit. The government is fully alive to the crying need for water, however, and a scheme for a national system of irrigation is filling a large part of the Ministry of Agriculture's programme. If carried out, this scheme will enormously enlarge the area of tillage, for some of the regions now hopelessly arid, such as the Karroo, have a soil of amazing fertility and need only water to make them produce luxuriant crops. Were the rains of the wet season conserved by means of the great tanks so common in India, or were artesian wells sunk like those which have transformed the desert regions of Algeria and Arizona, the vast stretch of the Karroo, instead of being yellow with sand, might be yellow with waving corn.

Though agriculture is, and probably always will be, the least important of the country's great natural sources of wealth, the development of rural industries is, thanks to governmental assistance, steadily progressing. Roads and bridges are being built, experimental farms organised on a large scale, the services of scientific experts engaged, blooded live-stock imported, agricultural banks established, and literature dealing with agricultural problems is being distributed broadcast over the country. The exports of fruit are steadily increasing; sugar is being grown on the hot lands of Natal and might be grown all the way to the Zambezi; tea has lately been introduced in the coastal regions and would probably also flourish in the north; the tobacco of the Transvaal is as good a pipe tobacco as any grown, and those who have become accustomed to it will use no other; with the exception of the olive, which does not thrive, and of the vine, which succeeds only in a limited area around Cape Town, nearly all of the products of the temperate zone and of subtropical regions can be grown successfully. Though South Africa unquestionably presents many promising openings in farming, in fruit-growing, and in truck gardening, it is folly for a man to attempt any one of them unless he possesses practical experience, a modest capital, and a willingness to work hard and put up with many inconveniences, for in no other English-speaking country are the necessities of life so dear and so poor in quality, nowhere is labour so unsatisfactory, and nowhere is lack of comfort so general.

South Africa's chief source of wealth is, and always will be, its minerals. It was, strangely enough, the latest source to become known, for nobody suspected it until, in 1867, a Boer hunter, his eye caught by a sparkle among the pebbles on the Orange River, picked up the first diamond. The diamonds found in that region since then have amounted in value to nearly a billion dollars. Fifteen years after the great diamond finds which sent the adventurers and fortune-seekers of the world thronging to South Africa, came the still greater gold discoveries on the Witwatersrand, or “The Rand,” as the reef of gold-bearing quartz in the Transvaal is commonly called. The total value of the gold production of the Rand for the twenty-five years ending in June, 1910, was nearly one and a half billion dollars. But though the Rand produces more gold than America and Australia put together; though Kimberley has a virtual monopoly of the world's supply of diamonds; though seams of silver, iron, coal, copper, and tin are only waiting for capital and skill to unlock their treasures, South Africa is, in the midst of this stupendous wealth, poor, for she is as dependent on foreign sources for her food supply as England. In other words, a region as large as all the States west of the Rocky Mountains, in which flourish nearly all the products of every zone from the Equator to the Pole, is unable to supply the wants of a white population which is less than that of Connecticut. In California, on the other hand, which is strikingly similar to South Africa in many respects, the cultivation of the land kept pace with the production of gold and eventually outstripped it. Until the mining industry of South Africa is likewise put upon a solid agricultural foundation, the country can never hope to be self-supporting.

In many respects Johannesburg, the “golden city,” is the most interesting place I have ever seen. In 1886 it was nothing but a collection of miserable shanties. To-day “Joburg,” as it is commonly called, is a city of a quarter of a million people, with asphalted streets, imposing office buildings, one of the best street-railway systems that I know, the finest hotel south of the Equator, and one of the most beautiful country clubs in the world. It is a city of contrasts, however, for you can stand under the porte-cochère of the palatial Carlton Hotel and hear the click of roulette balls, the raucous scrape of fiddles, and the shouts of drunken miners issuing from a row of gambling-hells, dance-halls, and gin palaces still housed in one-story buildings of corrugated iron; a beplumed and bepainted Zulu will pull you in a 'rickshaw, over pavements as smooth and clean as those of Fifth Avenue, to a theatre where you will have the privilege of paying Metropolitan Opera House prices to witness much the same sort of a performance that you would find in a Bowery music-hall; in the Rand Club you can see bronzed and booted prospectors, fresh from the mining districts of Rhodesia or the Congo, leaning over the bar, cheek-by-jowl with sleek, immaculately groomed financiers from London and Berlin and New York. Johannesburg is a spendthrift city, a place of easy-come and easy-go, for the mine-workers are paid big wages, the mine-managers receive big salaries, and the mine-owners make big profits, and they all spend their money as readily as they make it. The English miner averages five dollars a day, which he spends between Saturday night and Monday morning in a drunken spree, while a native labourer will save enough in a few months to keep him in idleness and his conception of comfort for the rest of his life.

There is pleasant society in Johannesburg and much hospitality to a stranger. I took nearly a score of letters of introduction with me to the Rand, but one would have done as well, for you present one letter, and at the dinner which the man to whom it is addressed promptly gives for you at the Rand Club or at the Carlton you will meet several of the other people to whom you bear introductions. Through their club life and their business relations the English and Americans in South Africa are linked together in acquaintance like rings in a shirt of chain-mail, so that if a man in Bulawayo or Kimberley or Johannesburg gets to living beyond his income, or loses heavily at cards, or pays undue attention to another man's wife, they will be discussing his affairs in the club bars or on the hotel verandas of Cape Town and Durban within a fortnight. I found that nearly all of the mines on the Rand are managed by Americans, and that the mine-owners, who are nearly all English or German, preferred them to any other nationality, which struck me as being very complimentary to the administrative and mechanical abilities of our people. One of these American mine-managers drove forty miles in his motor-car so as to shake hands with me, merely because he had learned in a roundabout way that I came from the same part of New York State as himself, while another fellow-countryman, who had made a great fortune during the Boer War by contracting to wash the clothes of the British army, and received war-time prices for his work, kidnapped me from the hotel where I was staying, and landed me, baggage and all, in his home, and actually felt affronted when I tried to leave after a week.

Few places could be more unlike Johannesburg than Pretoria, the new capital of the Union, only thirty miles away. It is as different from the “golden city” as sleepy Bruges is from bustling Antwerp; as Tarrytown, New York, is from Paterson, New Jersey. At first sight I was surprised to find so English a town, but after I had strolled in the shade of the wooden arcades formed by the broad verandas of the shops I decided that the atmosphere of the city was Indian; the rows of mud-bespattered saddle-horses tied to hitching-posts along the main streets and the rural produce being sold from wagons in the central market-place recalled our own West; but the substantial, white-plastered houses, with their old-fashioned stoeps, their red-brick sidewalks, and their prim and formal gardens, finally convinced me that the town was, after all, Dutch. Every visitor to Pretoria goes to see Krüger's house, the low, whitewashed dwelling with the white lions on the stoep, where the stubborn old President used to sit, smoking his long pipe and drinking his black coffee and giving parental advice to his people. Across the way is the old Dutch church where he used to hold forth on Sundays, with the gold hands still missing from the clock-face on its steeple, for in the last days of the South African Republic they were melted down and went to swell the slender war-chest of the Boer army. In the cemetery hard by the crafty, indomitable old man lies buried, while the hated flag against which he fought so long flies over the capital where he collected his guns and hatched his schemes of conquest, and within sight of his black-marble tomb there are rising in brick and stone the great new buildings which mark Pretoria as the capital of a united South Africa.