Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

Behind the house was built a large brick oven, often whitewashed on the outside, where the good wife (who in earlier days had had to content herself with a hollowed-out antheap as an oven) might bake her bread. Behind the house was raised a large wagon-house, open on the side from which least rain came, where the great ox-wagon and cart, if there were one, might stand sheltered from sun and rain; and then the typical Boer homestead, as we know it, and as it exists to the present day, was complete.

As sons and daughters grew up and married, additional rooms were often built on for them, to the old farm-house, or small houses were built near, or at a few miles' distance on the same farm, where at some other fountain the stock was watered. But in each case the new homestead repeated the features of the old.

If one travel across some great African plain to-day, the hoofs of one's horse sinking step by step into the red sand, or crunching the gravel on some rocky ridge, far off across the plain one may mark some distant flat-topped table mountains rising up against the sky on the horizon; but for the rest, a vast, silent, undulating plain, broken, it may be, by small hillocks, or "kopjes," of iron-stones, stretches about one everywhere. After travelling five or six miles further, one may discern, at the foot of some distant kopje, a small white or dark speck; as one approaches nearer the practised eye perceives it is a homestead.

As one approaches yet nearer along the sandy wagon-track, slowly all the details of the place become clear—the house, the dam, almost or quite dry, if it be the end of a long, thirsty season, the little patch of dark green contrasting with the miles of red-brown veld about it, the wagon-house, and the great dark square patches, which are the kraals. And yet, so clear is the air, making objects distinctly visible at a long distance, one may ride on for an hour before the road, which has led straight as an arrow across the plain, takes a little turn, and the farmhouse is reached.

If it be the middle of a hot summer's afternoon a great stillness will reign about the place; not a soul will be seen stirring; the doors and the wooden shutters of the windows will be closed; a few hens may be scratching about in the red sand on the shady side of the house, and a couple of large Boer dogs will rise slowly from the shadow of the wagon house, and come toward you silently, with their heads down. If a coloured servant should appear from the back of the house, or a little face peep from behind the oven, it will be well to call to them to call off the dogs, for the African Boer dog is a peculiar species of mastiff, with a touch of the bull-dog, celebrated for his silent savageness.

After the dogs have been called off, the servant or child will go into the house to rouse the master of the house, who, with the rest of the family, is still taking his afternoon siesta, made necessary to all by the intense heat of summer and by the early rising, which is the invariable rule on an African farm. Presently the upper half of the door opens, and then the lower, and the master of the house appears, his eyes a little blinded by the glare of the afternoon sun after the cool darkness of the house.

He will step down from the low, raised stone platform before the door, and come to meet you—a tall, powerful man of over six feet in height, large-boned and massive, with large hands and feet, a long brown beard, and keen, steady, somewhat deep-set eyes. He will extend his hand to you with the greatest courtesy, inquire your name, and whether you do not wish to off-saddle, and will call a servant to take your horse.

When you have entered the house with him, you will find yourself in a square room, large as compared with the whole size of the house. The floor is generally earth—soil forming the huge antheaps which cover the plains being generally taken for this purpose, which, damped with water, and well pounded down, forms an exceedingly hard floor. In the centre of the room is a bare square table, neatly finished off, but often of home construction, having been made by the father or grandfather of the present owner. Round the sides of the room are arranged some chairs and a long wooden sofa of the same make, the seats of which are formed, not of cane, but of thin thongs of leather interlaced.

At one side of the room against the wall stands a small square table. On it stands the great coffee-urn, and the work of the house-mother. Beside it, in her elbow-chair, in which she has hastily seated herself to welcome the stranger, she herself sits, dressed in black, often with a little black shawl across her shoulders, and a white handkerchief round her throat.

At her feet is a little square wooden stove, with a hollow inside, in which may be put a small brazier of live coals in cold weather, the heat arising through small ornamental holes cut in the wood of the top. Exactly such wooden stoves may be seen in the paintings of Flemish interiors by the old Dutch artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.