Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

But in its most characteristic form the bush consists of large isolated clumps of vegetation. The kunee, a vast creeper-like tree, whose interlaced branches, touching the ground everywhere, forming beehive-shaped masses, looking like immense Kaffir huts, often, though not always, forms the foundation of these masses; around it spring up elephant's food, namnam, geraniums and plumbago, and perhaps a tall euphorbia tree, with its cactus-like leaves, shoots up into the air through it. These clumps of vegetation, sometimes almost solid, and often forty or fifty feet in circumference, are divided from others by spaces of short, smooth grass, generally brown except after the early rains.

In this bush it is particularly easy to lose yourself. As you pass round clump after clump, there are always others of exactly the same shape before you, and you sometimes find you have gone two or three times round the same mass of vegetation. Oxen once lost in this bush are not easily discovered for days, though hidden behind the next clump, and it is almost hopeless to look for them unless one can gain an eminence and oversee a wide stretch of country. In this bush several Europeans have lost their lives during the last fifteen years.

It is the peculiar home of the great scarlet geranium now common in English hot-houses, and of the delicate, blue, star-like plumbago, and of endless ferns; but the heaths and bulbs of the Western Province are not found here.

Eighty years ago it was alive with elephant, lion, bush-buck, and wild animals of all kinds. Now, the elephant is extinct, except where artificially preserved; bush-buck are scarce; a few large leopards may still be found in sequestered kloofs, and wild cats and monkeys and parrots are yet abundant, but a lion has not been seen for forty years. Thousands of small birds feed on the berries that abound here, and fifty small birds may sometimes be heard chirping in the depths of one kunee tree.

Eighty years ago, the inhabitants of this tract were warlike Kaffir tribes of the Bantu race. They have not been exterminated as the Hottentots and Bushmen in the west have largely been, but are still found as the servants on farms and in towns. The white inhabitants at the present day are mainly English, the descendants largely of a group of emigrants who landed here in 1820, and who proved themselves one of the most entirely successful and satisfactory bodies of emigrants whom England has ever sent forth.

Here and there throughout the entire tract are scattered small English towns and villages; and thriving farms, where sheep and agriculture go together, are hidden away in the bush.

To see this land typically one should outspan one's wagon on the top of a height on a hot summer's day, when not a creature is stirring, and the sun pours down its rays on the flaccid, dust-covered leaves of the bushes. When the leader has gone to take the oxen to water and the driver has gone to lie down behind the bushes, if you stand up on the front chest of the wagon, and look out, as far as your eye can reach, you will see over hills and dales, the bush stretching, silent, motionless, and hot. Not a sound is to be heard; your hand blisters on the tent of the wagon; suddenly a cicada from a clump of bush at your right sets up its keen, shrill cry; it is glorying in the heat and the solitude of the bush. You listen to it in the unbroken silence, till you and it seem to be alone in the world.

Not less characteristic is the bush, when, as a little child, you travel through it at night. The ox-wagon creaks slowly along the sandy road in the dark, the driver walks beside it and calls at intervals to his tired oxen; you look out across the wagon-chest, and, as the wagon moves along, the dark outlines of the bushes on either side seem to move too; now a great clump comes nearer and nearer like a vast animal; then, as you peer into the dark, they seem like great ruined castles coming to topple over you; and you creep closer down behind the wagon-chest. Against the dark night sky to the right, on the ridge of the hill, are the gaunt forms of aloes standing like a row of men keeping watch. You remembered all the stories you had heard of Kaffir wars and men shot down and stabbed, as they passed along hill-sides; and then a will-o'-the-wisp comes out from some dried-up torrent bed, and far before you dances in and out among the bushes, now in sight and now gone. You are not afraid; but you are glad when the people in the wagon begin to sing hymns; and more glad yet when at half-past nine it stops, drawn up beside a great clump of bush at the roadside. The tired oxen are taken from the yoke, and you climb out and light a fire and gather from afar and near stumps of dried elephant's food and euphorbia, and throw them on the fire, and the flame leaps up high. Then you all sit down beside the ruddy blaze; and away off the driver and leader have lighted their fire, and are talking to each other in Kaffir as they boil the coffee and roast the meat. The light from your own fire blazes up and lights the great, dusty body of the wagon, and the tired oxen, as they lie tied to their yokes, chewing the cud; and it glints on the bush with its dark-green leaves behind you, and on the faces round the fire; and you laugh, and talk; and forget the stories of Kaffir wars, and the great wild bush stretching about you.

This tract of coast belt forms part of the Eastern Province of the Cape Colony, and is under English rule. It is on the whole very fertile, though more subject to drought than the South-Western districts of the Colony; none of its rivers are perennial, all being in long droughts completely dry. Fruit and wool, and to a certain extent grain, are produced here. The villages, though far less beautiful than those of the west, show greater signs of commercial activity and civic life.

If we go further north along the coast we come to Kaffirland, a richly wooded, fertile tract; the scenery about the mouth of the St. John's River being supposed to be the finest combination of bush, river and mountain scenery to be found anywhere in South Africa. It is inhabited by Kaffir tribes of the Bantu race, in a half-civilized condition, and who are more or less under British protection.