O'NEILL'S HOUSE.
The room in which the Convention of 1881 was signed.
VIEW ON THE ORANGE RIVER, FROM THE RAILWAY BRIDGE.
The Orange River divides Cape Colony from the Orange Free State. This view is taken from a railway bridge connecting the two, and looking up stream. The Orange River is one of the few South African rivers that rarely, if ever, dries up.
[1652-1709
The conflict of races in South Africa was complicated by the presence of the Bantu peoples, who gradually overcame the original inhabitants of South Africa, the Hottentots and Bushmen, and are themselves a conquering race, who increase in numbers with the peace which civilisation brings, and who do not suffer, as do many dark-skinned peoples, from the white man's vices and diseases.[1]
[1] Bantu is the generic name for the native tribe, of which the Zulus, Swazies, Amatongas, and Matabele are the off-shoots. There are no pure Bantus left in South Africa, but it is the root-race from which all the more warlike tribes have sprung.
Common Interests of the White Peoples.
Though accurate statistics of the proportion of English and Dutch-speaking inhabitants in the various South African states cannot be obtained, it is probable that in British and Dutch South Africa there were, in 1899, 400,000 Englishmen or men of English descent, 500,000 Dutch, and 3,500,000 Indians, Malays, Hottentots, and natives of the various Kaffir tribes. In Cape Colony and the Orange Free State of the white races the Dutch preponderated; in the Transvaal, Natal, and Rhodesia, the British. Instinct should have united the white peoples, for, dwelling amidst a vast number of Bantus, warlike by nature and intelligent above the common run of negro, both white peoples were face to face with a common danger—a danger which the many fierce struggles with the great tribes of the Zulus, Matabele, and Basutos, had in the past proved to be a very real and ever-present one.