Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

The most noticeable feature in first looking at it, is the strip of lowland country running along the entire south and east coast, and bordered everywhere inland by high mountain ranges.

In the Western Province the coast belt consists of chains of huge mountains forming a network over a tract of country some hundreds of miles in extent, the mountains having at their feet level valleys or small plains. They are composed of igneous though stratified rock, covered by little soil, and showing signs of titanic subterranean action; many of them seem to have been hurled up by one convulsive act; bare strata of rock thousands of feet in extent are raised on end, their jagged edges forming the summits of vast mountain ranges. In the still, peaceful valleys at the feet of these mountains are running streams; in the spring the African heath covers them with red, pink and white bells, and the small wine-farms dot the sides of the valleys with their white houses and green fields, dwarfed under the high, bare mountains. Here and there are little towns and villages, built as only the old Dutch-Huguenots knew how to build, the long, straight streets lined with trees on either hand, and streams of water running down them; and the old thatch-roofed, gabled, white-washed, green-shuttered houses standing back, with their stone stoeps,[5] under the deep shade of the trees, and with their vineyards and orchards behind them. No one can build such towns now. They are as unique as their mountains.

Perhaps one sees the Western Province to best advantage in the Hex River Valley, with its mountains of solid rock rising up thousands of feet on either hand, the vast strata contorted into fantastic shapes, and below them the smiling valley with its sprinkling of wine-farms. Hardly less characteristic is Cape Town itself, the capital of the Province and of the whole Colony, which lies on its promontory at the extreme end of the continent. In a valley between two mountains, one high, flat and of pure rock, its stupendous front overhanging the town, the other lower and rounded, its cliff worn away everywhere but on one mighty head which it rears into the blue, the town lies, with its flat-roofed houses and long straight streets, on a bay as blue and delicately curved as that of Naples.

Here it was that the wandering Hottentots on the shore saw the first sails creep across the waters of their blue bay. Here it was that in 1652 Jan Anthony van Riebeek, the servant of the Dutch East Indian Company, landed with his dependents and built the first houses and made the first gardens. The fort which they built in those early days may still be seen near the sea shore; the small block-houses which you may still see on the spurs of the mountain, a disputed tradition says, were used in those days as outlook towers against the incursions of possible foes.

Here the Dutch East Indian Company imported its slaves, often from Madagascar, English slave-ships bringing them. Here, Peter Kolben tells us that, about the year 1712, he saw a slave burnt to death. They are, says he, speaking of the slaves, "most detestable and wicked wretches," and "'tis now and then a most difficult thing to keep them in order." This slave had tried to burn down his master's house; they tied him to an upright post by a chain which allowed him to make one turn about it. "Then," said Peter Kolben, "was kindled a fire round about him, just beyond the stretch of the chain; the flames rose high; the heat was vehement; he ran for some time to-and-again about the post, but gave not one cry. Being half roasted he sank down, and said (speaking in Portuguese), Dios mio Pays (O God, my Father), and then expired."

These things have passed away now, as the elephant and hippopotami have passed from the slopes of Table Mountain, and the thumb-screw and the rack and stake from Europe, and as other things will pass away yet.

For ten miles along the foot of the mountains stretch the suburbs of Cape Town, villa and garden, and pine and oak avenue mingling themselves in endless succession. Here it seems a man might dream away his life, buried in roses and plumbago, and forget that pain and care existed.

Perhaps one of the finest views in the world is that from the top of the Kloof behind Cape Town. To your right is Table Mountain, one of the sublimest masses of solid matter in the world; below are the pine woods and the town, with its white, flat houses, and, beyond the blue curved bay and Blue-Berg Strand, the mountains of Hottentot's Holland, with a canopy of clouds appearing and receding again into the blue sky. As you turn, behind you is the blue South Atlantic as far as the eye can reach, and the terrible serrated peaks of the Twelve Apostles stand facing it, peak beyond peak, as they have stood for endless ages, with the sea breaking in the little bays at their feet.

The population of the Western Province is partly English and partly Boer or Dutch-Huguenot, the descendants of the Dutch East Indian Company's servants and settlers, and of a large number of French Huguenots who arrived in the Colony about 1687, driven from France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who, winnowed by the unerring flail of religious persecution, form, perhaps, the finest element that has ever been added to the population of South Africa. The labouring classes are, as elsewhere in South Africa, coloured, and here largely half-castes, the descendants of the first Dutch residents and their slaves, or much more rarely of blended Dutch and Hottentot blood. In Cape Town itself are found also Malays, Chinamen, Hindus, and the representatives of all European nations.

If leaving Cape Town we go a few hundred miles eastward, along the coast, we shall find the lowland belt assume new characteristics. The hills, though high, are softer and more rounded, covered completely with soil and grass; or their sides, and even summits, are clothed in bush, stretching for ten or twenty or forty miles. This bush is neither forest nor scrub. In the valleys of high mountains, or along the beds of watercourses, it becomes true forest, of vast, thick-stemmed, timber-producing trees; monkey-ropes thicker than a man's arm hang down from the branches, and there is forest shade. But, in the main, South Africa bush is composed of creeper-like bushes, sometimes attaining forty feet in height, and of many hollow-skinned succulent plants, aloe, elephant's food, euphorbia, which often attain the height of tall trees, but are of so light a structure that cut down a child may drag them. Sometimes the bush grows more or less continuously, the clumps and bushes being merely intersected everywhere by what seem like little dry paths.