These small people had no fixed social organization; wandering about in hordes or as solitary individuals, without any settled habitations, they slept at night under the rocks or in wild-dog holes, or they made themselves a curious little wall of loose bushes raised up on the side from which the wind blew, and strangely like an animal's lair; and this they left again when the morning broke. They had no flocks or herds, and lived on the wild game, or, when that failed them, ate snakes, scorpions, insects, or offal, or visited the flocks of the Hottentots. They wore no clothing of any kind, and their weapons were bows and arrows, the strings of the bows being made from the sinews of wild animals, and the arrows tipped with sharpened bones or flint stones, poisoned with the juice of a bulb or dipped in the body of a poisonous caterpillar; and these formed their only property. They had no marriage ceremony, and no permanent sex relations, any man and woman cohabiting during pleasure; maternal feeling was at its lowest ebb, mothers readily forsaking their young or disposing of them for a trifle; and paternal feeling was naturally non-existent. Their language is said by those who have closely studied it to be so imperfect that the clear expression of even the very simplest ideas is difficult. They have no word for wife, for marriage, for nation; and their minds appear to be in the same simple condition as their language. The complex mental operations necessary for the maintenance of life under civilized conditions they have apparently no power of performing; no member of the race has in any known instance been taught to read or write, nor to grasp religious conceptions clearly, though great efforts have been made to instruct them.
At the same time they possess a curious imitative skill, and under shelving rocks and in caves all over South Africa their rude etchings and paintings of men and animals are found, animated by a crude life and vigour. Their powers of mimicry are enormous. We have known an old Bushman, living in a place where there were a dozen Europeans; the old man could by a few contortions of the face and figure represent each one, bringing out even their subtle peculiarities of appearance and of character, without uttering a word. When he had finished his performance he would generally burst into a wild dance of artistic joy, and ask for tobacco or brandy!
In no instance has a member of this people been truly civilized. When confined in European houses and compelled to wear European clothing, they contract consumption and die. By the early settlers and the Hottentots they were supposed to be absolutely incapable of feeling, and the Boers, and even the Kaffirs, still regard them as only half-human, and probably descended from baboons.[24] They will bear resentment for long years with the persistency of many wild animals, but have also a curiously strong sense of gratitude, and are not incapable of powerful affection of a dog-like kind.
Some years ago we came into contact with a Bushboy, who had been procured from his mother for a bottle of brandy, and who was carefully tended in the hope of civilizing and rearing him. He, however, contracted consumption. On the day of his death, his mistress seeing what his state was, bade him lie down in the little box which was the only bed he could be induced to use. Half an hour after we discovered him in the yard cleaning the knives, with the struggle of death already in his face and the rattle in his throat. Asked why he had come, he shook his head and said he could not allow his mistress to have her dinner with an unpolished knife. We took him back to his box, and gave him a sugar-stick. He curled himself up; gave a look of unutterable gratitude and affection to his mistress, gave one suck at his sugar-stick, and died—like a small wild animal—but one capable of profound gratitude and affection.
These people have now almost disappeared; a few hordes in the North-West, and solitary individuals hanging about the pale of civilization, are all that is now left of them: but at the time of the arrival of the early settlers they formed a most important element in the population.
Wholly distinct from both these peoples, and yet more widely divided from them in appearance and social institutions than from the Indo-Europeans, is the third order of people whom the early settlers found in South Africa.
They filled the whole of the eastern side along the shores of the Indian Ocean, and are still to be found there in undiminished or even increasing numbers. Divided into two great branches, and these again being split up into endless tribes, they yet all belong to the great Bantu family. Unlike the little Hottentot, and the yet smaller Bushman, the Bantu is tall and dark, sometimes approaching in colour to the black of the Negro. Physically, he is finely proportioned and of unusual strength; his appearance suggesting a Negroid people with a cross of Arab blood; his traditions, customs, and certain words in his language, seeming to bear out this suggestion. Branches of this people are found as far north as Zanzibar. They differ from the West-coast Negro; and, in place of his child-like abandon, have a proud reserve, and an intensely self-conscious and reflective mental attitude. The language they speak is of a perfect construction, lending itself largely to figurative and poetical forms, yet capable of giving great precision to exact thought.
The two great branches into which they are divided are about as distinct from one another as are the Celtic and Teutonic branches of our own Indo-European family; the language of one half being as intelligible to the other as French is to the German. When analysed, the derivation of their speech from some common source is clear. Of the one branch, popularly known in the Colony as the "Kaffir,"[25] the Zulu and Matabele nations may perhaps be taken as the best examples at the present day.
Of the other, or Chuana family, one of the best examples to be found is the Basuto, or Ma' Katees nation (so called from Ma' Katees, a warlike chieftainess who ninety years ago gathered a number of broken tribes under her rule and settled them among the Maluti Mountains in what is now Basutoland); or another, in the Bamangwato under their noteworthy chieftain Kama; a man whose persistent endeavour at the present day to enable his people to grasp the incoming tide of civilization, and to rise on its waves instead of being submerged by them, is unique in the history of savage peoples; his endeavour to preserve his tribe from the evils of civilization, till they are strong enough to grasp its benefits, constituting one of the most interesting social experiments which is being carried on anywhere on the earth's surface at the latter end of the nineteenth century. To this Chuana family belong also the Mashonas and other kindred tribes.
Closely as these branches of the Bantu family resemble each other in the eyes of a stranger, one who has lived among them and studied them will tell a Chuana from a Kaffir with as much ease as a keen observer will tell an Italian from an Englishman. Their difference in intellectual tendencies and social customs is as great as in language and appearance. The Chuana is more devoted to agriculture, more skilled in handicrafts, having been a skilful smelter of iron and builder of dams and walls long before the first arrival of the white man. He builds his house square, has a great love of property, is acquisitive and economical. He takes to modern civilization with an ease that is astonishing, and his desire for learning is intense. A white-headed Basuto man of seventy came to us once with a cow and a calf, the most prized of his earthly possessions, offering to give both if he could be taught to read, and went away in tears when told it was impossible. "Ah! it is because you do not wish me to be wise like the white man," he murmured bitterly.