Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

If we leave the Karoo and go north and east, we find ourselves still on table-lands as high or higher, but the character has changed. The earth is more completely covered with soil, the hills are smaller and more rounded, the plains are softer, wider, more rolling, and grass has taken the place of the Karoo bush. At first, one who has lived long in the Karoo experiences a sense almost of relief at the changed nature of the scene; the soft, rolling outlines give one a sense of repose, and tension is relaxed; it is as when, long accustomed to live with some strongly marked individual nature, one comes for the first time into contact with one more negative and weak: for the first moment there is a sense of relief; then one wearies, and hungers again for the more positive and active.

The wide rolling grass plains, with their little hills, have their charm, but one tires of it. Throughout the Orange Free State, Griqualand West and Bechuanaland, with slight modifications, these grass plains extend; here they are more rolling, there more hilly; here dotted with a few beautiful mimosa trees, there level as a table; but there is always the same succession of level grassy plains, and generally of low, flat-topped hills, and ant-heaps. These plains are perhaps seen most typically in the west of the Free State. Here you may start in your wagon in the morning, and creep all day along the level earth, by a straight road, with the grasses on either hand; and in the evening when you stop, you will not yet have reached the low hill you saw before you on the horizon at starting. At great intervals you may come upon a farm, the white or brown mud-coloured house standing at the foot of a little hill, with its dam of rain-water and its garden and kraals, but you may travel in an ox-wagon more than a day without sighting one. In the spring the grass is short and green, in the autumn long and waving, and cattle flourish on it. It is still within memory of those who have not yet reached middle life when these plains were alive with game. Some of us can recall, as small children, travelling across them in the north of the Free State and Bechuanaland when the wagon seemed to divide herds of antelope and zebra with ostriches among them, the animals feeding on either side of the road within gunshot. Now they have been almost exterminated, and game is only to be found much further north.

The Free State is a small independent Republic, once under English rule, but rashly given up by England in 1854 as not worth keeping; it is inhabited by Boers and English, the Boers living mainly on the farms, the English in the towns. The labouring classes here, as elsewhere, are black.

British Bechuanaland, which comprises the larger part of this grass-plain region, is a tract as large as several European countries combined, inhabited mainly and sparsely by native tribes subject to England, by a few European settlers, and the inhabitants of a few embryo villages. Its soil is rich, and, like that of the rest of the grass plains, if vast dams were built, it might become a great grain-producing country. Its climate is perfect, rivalling that of the Karoo.

Griqualand West, one of the most interesting and varied divisions of the grass plains, is part of the Cape Colony. In it are situated the great Kimberley diamond-mines, the richest in the world. Within the space of a few miles lie those marvellous beds of once boiling but now petrified mud, which have for twenty years modified, and are still modifying, the history of South Africa.

It is through these grass plains that the Vaal and the Orange Rivers run; the last the most typical of South African rivers. In nothing perhaps is the difference between Europe and South Africa more emphasized than in their rivers. The South African in Europe hardly knows whether to admire or to scorn the smooth, gentle-flowing streams between their green banks. The South African river alternates between being a stupendous body of water, tearing with irresistible force to the sea between its high banks, or being merely a vast empty bed of dry sand with gigantic walls, the floor lined by boulders and débris, or with a silver line of water creeping through it, and a few large pools gathered here and there. Rising at an immense height above the sea in the central table-lands, fed by no melting snows, dependent entirely on the thunderstorms or the heavy rains of the wet seasons, the South African river rises with a rapidity and sweeps onward with a force that is almost inconceivable. A mighty body of red or dark-brown water, it rushes with a greasy, treacherous movement between its banks, the water being higher in the centre of the stream than at the sides and breaking here and there into bubbles and foam; on its dark surface it bears uprooted trees, drowned bodies of animals or men, the stupendous rapidity of its movement being only noticeable when you mark how a floating object now at your feet is out of sight round the bend of the river in a few seconds. Perhaps no object in inanimate nature conveys the same impression of conscious cruelty, and fierce, untamed strength, as a full African river.

Every year during the rainy season large numbers of persons are drowned in the full rivers; the numbers recorded in the papers during the last rainy season exceeded one hundred and fifty, and a large number of deaths of Kaffirs and others remains unchronicled. The nature of her rivers has powerfully affected the history of South Africa.

Crossing the Vaal River, we shall find to the north the Transvaal Republic. This is a tract of country of great extent and diversity. In part of it we have bush, in part high grass tablelands; on the east a low lying, moist, fever-haunted district. On the whole it is of great fertility. On the ridges of the high tablelands, lie the great Johannesburg gold-mines, which have drawn men from all parts of the earth. There are probably about eight black men to each white, the white population being probably divided between those of Boer, and English or other European extraction in the proportion of one to one; but no accurate census has yet been taken. The largest city, Johannesburg, is mainly English, the farming population Dutch-Huguenot.

If, leaving the Transvaal Republic, we cross the Limpopo, we shall find ourselves in the country known as Matabele and Mashonaland.

Bounded on the north by the Zambesi, the largest and only truly navigable river in South Africa, whose falls are the largest in the world, and further by Lake N'Gami and its low-lying territory, and on the West by the Kalahari, and on the east by the strip of low country claimed by Portugal. To the extreme left it is largely flat and arid, like the greater part of South Africa; the central position has mountain and bush, while along the low-lying river-beds it is fever-haunted, to the east is a high healthy tableland, well watered and wooded.