Like those minute creatures, who, at a certain stage of their existence, form about themselves a hard coating, and in that condition may lie embedded in the animal tissues in which they are found for weeks, or years, without undergoing any change or growth; but who, if at any moment their cyst be ruptured, start at once upon a process of rapid evolution, developing new organs and functions, and bearing soon no resemblance to the encysted creature that has been—so the true old Boer has lain, encysted in his Taal, knowing nothing of change or modification; yet from the moment he breaks through it, evolution sets in rapidly; the child of the seventeenth century departs, and the child of the nineteenth century arrives—and the Boer is no more!
If it be asked whether the Taal, in making possible this survival of the seventeenth century in the Boer, has been beneficial or otherwise to South Africa, it must be replied that the question is too complex to admit of dogmatic answer.
If somewhere in Europe a small mediæval town had been miraculously preserved up to the present day, and were suddenly discovered in the nineteenth century, we might find much in it to condemn; its streets narrow; its houses overhanging, shutting out light and air, its drains non-existent; but over the doors of the houses we should find hand-made carving, each line of which was a work of love; we should see in the fretwork of a lamp-post quaint shapings such as no workman of to-day sends out; before the glass-stained window of the church we should stand with awe; and we might be touched to the heart by the quaint little picture above the church-altar; on every side we should see the material conditions of a life narrower and slower than our own, but more peaceful, more at one with itself. Through such a spot the discerning man would walk, not recklessly, but holding the attitude habitual to the wise man—that of the learner, not the scoffer.
CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY
There is yet one point to be noticed in the early condition of the Boer before we pass to his later history.
The forefathers of the Boer were slaveholders.
When the first white men arrived in South Africa it was inhabited by three distinct native peoples.
From the shores of Table Bay to the Orange River on the north, and from the Atlantic to the Maluti Mountains, over thousands of miles, were scattered two of these races, quite unlike and yet more nearly related to each other than to any other branch of the human family. The most important in number and the most widely spread of these people were the Hottentots, a small wiry folk, with yellow faces, black wool in little hard knobs on the head, protruding jaws, low foreheads, and small eyes. They were split up into endless tribelets, dispersed over all the western and central portions of South Africa. More or less loosely organized under chieftains, the same tribes inhabited permanently the same tracts of country; though they moved from point to point to find pasturage for their cattle in the dry and wet seasons, as the Boer did later. Their condition of civilization was not high compared with that of many other African peoples; they had large flocks and herds, on whose flesh and milk they lived, but they had little agriculture. Their round houses, made of slight wooden frames, with mats fastened over them, could at any moment be taken up and removed; and the little clothing they wore was of skins. But they were a versatile, excitable, lively, little folk, as their few remaining descendants are to-day; rather gentle than fierce, and very emotional; and loving dancing and song. They could fight if compelled, but preferred peace. Later they were found to make good fighters under European leaders, but they could not lead or organize themselves. Their senses were preternaturally keen, their perceptions quick, but they were incapable of bearing a long-continued intellectual or emotional strain. They are the eternal children of the human race. Their language, peculiar for the vast number of klicks it contained, formed by striking the tongue in different ways against the palate and teeth, was yet a fairly well organized form of speech, capable of expressing tolerably complex conceptions. It was certain of these Hottentot tribes, under their native chiefs, whom the first white settlers found inhabiting the shores of Table Bay and the slopes of the mountains; and it was these folk with whom they traded, and whom they ultimately fought and drove away.
Scattered among these Hottentot tribes throughout the whole western half of South Africa was found another and yet more interesting human variety, the astonishing little people known as the South African Bushmen. Akin in race and speech to the dwarf races found in Central Africa, they are lighter in colour, being a dirty browny-yellow, perhaps owing to the cooler climate of the south, which they have probably inhabited for countless ages, and in which they may have originally developed. So small in size are they that an adult Bushman is not larger than an ordinary European child of eleven; they have tiny wizened faces, the wool on their heads growing in little balls, with naked spaces between. The sex organs of the female differ materially in structure from those of any other human female; while round the skull is a curious indented line forming what is called by the Boers a double head; and their ears, as looked at from the back, seem to grow out on small pedestals. These people seem to resemble, not so much a race of children as a race caught in the very act of evolving into human form. Their language, full of klicks, while nearer to the Hottentot than to any other, is yet as remote from it as Sanscrit from French; showing merely that there must have been at some distant period a common origin; the language, like the person of the Bushman, seeming to represent a type from which the Hottentot may have developed in the course of countless ages, possibly by crossing with higher African races, such as the Bantu.