It is the land of Livingstone. Some of us remember on hot Sunday afternoons, as little children, when no more worldly book than missionary travels was allowed us, how we sat on our stools and looked out into the sunshine and dreamed of that land. Of the Garden Island, where the smoke of the mighty falls goes up, whose roar is heard twenty-five miles off; of hippopotami playing in the water, and of elephants and lions, and white rhinoceroses. We had heard of a man on the north of the Limpopo, who once saw three lions lying under the trees on the grass like calves, and he walked straight past them, and they looked at him and did nothing. We had heard of great ruins—ruins which lay there overgrown with weeds and trees. From there we believed the Queen of Sheba brought the peacocks and the gold for King Solomon. We meditated over it deeply. Yes, we should go and see it.[7] Up a valley, a great white rhinoceros would wade with its feet in the water; on each side under the trees zebras and antelopes would stand quietly feeding on the green grass. We would creep up quietly and look at them. No one but we would ever have seen them before. We would not disturb them. We would see the giraffes pick the top leaves from the trees, and elephant-cows walk along with their little calves at their sides. At night round the fire we would hear the lions roar, and the wild dogs howl, and sleep with our feet to the fire, and the stars above us; we would plant seeds on the Garden Island; we would pass lions and they should not eat us; we would climb over the ruins where the Queen of Sheba stood! We almost dropped the book from our knees and rose to go. In that land there were no Sunday afternoons and no boredom; you could do as you liked. The very names Zambesi and Limpopo drew us, with the lure of the unknown.
Even to-day there is still much to be learnt with regard to these lands. To the west it is inhabited by the Bamangwato, under their chief Kame; in the centre by the brave warlike Matabele, under the chief Lobengula; in the east by the mild, industrious Mashonas, on whom the Matabele raid; and there are to-day the men of the British South Africa Company looking for gold.
It is more than possible that if we went there now we should not find all we have dreamed of. Elephants are scarce; Selous says he has killed the last white rhinoceros; if we met a lion he might eat us; the hippopotami will soon be driven away from the Victoria Falls; the ruins may not be three thousand years old; boredom and Sunday afternoons may exist there as elsewhere, and the gold may need much washing from the sand; but it is certain that in these auriferous regions will ultimately spring up dense populations. It is from the territories north of the Vaal and south of the Zambesi, in this moister climate, with its more navigable rivers, that civilization in its coarser proportions will first unroll itself. More Southern Africa may produce better men; our greatest poet may yet be born in the Karoo; our great artist in the valley of the Paarl; our great thinker among the keen airs of Basutoland; neither wealth nor dense population have a tendency to produce the finest individuals; but it is in the north-east of Southern Africa that mineral wealth and vast populations with all that they signify for good and evil will probably first arise.
To understand the view taken in South Africa of the opening up of these lands, it is necessary to turn back from the present day to the Europe of the sixteenth century, when the hearts and eyes of men were turned to the new world, and each man who crossed the seas carried with him the hearts and thoughts of the thousands who remained. There is no explanation to be given of these sudden movements of entire peoples in a given direction. Their scientific causes are as subtle as those which govern the migrations of the lemmings. Some lead and the rest follow.
If we leave these territories we shall find to the south-east a territory known as the Kalahari Desert; a vast tract where little rain falls and springs are rare, and there are no running streams; but it is less accurately called a desert than many parts of South Africa that are never so called. There are trees and low shrubs in many places; such antelopes as can exist without much water are found, and a few wandering natives, who know by long experience where water may be had, by sucking through the sand. In forty years there will probably be a railway across it; now it is practically uninhabited.
West of the Kalahari and bordering the Atlantic, up and down the coast runs a vast territory rich in copper and other metals, but in parts drier than the Kalahari itself. Instead of karoo it is covered over a large extent by a coarse, thick tuft grass, which has the curious power of resisting drought for two or even three years; it still stands upright and affords food for the cattle and wild antelopes. Such wandering Bushman and Hottentot tribes as still exist are found mainly in this part, and, except a few missionaries and traders, the country is not inhabited largely by white men.
To the east of the Free State lies Basutoland, the Switzerland of South Africa, rich in its mountains and with a climate of superb quality. Here is to be found the Basuto nation, a people whose history since their foundation under their valiant chieftainess Ma' Katees is probably more epic than that of any other people in South Africa, save that of the old fore-trekkers who founded the Transvaal Republic.
Again, north of Natal lie Zululand and the adjoining native territories where the virile Bantu tribe of Zulus, along with other Bantu peoples, may be found inhabiting an almost tropical and luxuriantly fertile country: while further north and east yet along the coast stretch the Portuguese territories, the remnants of Portugal's once large empire, naturally rich and productive, but in many parts low-lying and fever-smitten.
This, then, is South Africa; the country which the South African regards as his native land. To the superficial observer nothing would be more unlike than its differing parts; between the falls of the Zambesi with their spray-drenched forest and their banks, unchanged by civilization as when the eye of Livingstone first beheld them more than thirty years ago, and a little Eastern Province town, with its narrow, conventional life; between the wilds of Namaqualand, where the little Bushman still sits down behind his bush to cook his supper of animal entrails and lies down with the stars over him, and the white house and tree-lined streets of the Paarl; between the Kalahari, where under a thorn tree groups of antelopes are gathered in the moonlight, and the gambling saloons and music-halls of Johannesburg and Kimberley; between the kraals of Kaffirland, where the Kaffir boys are holding their "abakweta" dances in the moonlight with whitened faces, and the drawing-rooms of Cape Town, where women in low dresses sit aimlessly talking, there seems little in common.
Nevertheless, through the whole of South Africa there runs a certain unity. It is not only that geraniums and plumbago, flat-topped mountains, aloes and euphorbia are peculiar to our land, and that sand and rocks abound everywhere; nor is it even that the land is everywhere young, and full of promise; but there is a certain colossal plenitude, a certain large freedom in all its natural proportions, which is truly characteristic of South Africa. If Nature here wishes to make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain, she levels eighty; if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves larger than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa.