Durban's wide-awake business men, together with Capetown's high charges to shippers, have taken from Table Bay the maritime prestige she once enjoyed. The majority of ships going to India and Australia do not come into Table Bay for coal, but keep steaming until they have reached Port Natal.
Smokestacks about the shore of the bay are not numerous enough to class the place as a manufacturing center. One often wonders what people do to earn a living in some of the cities of South Africa, in view of blacks doing so much of the work. Wages in Capetown, the lowest paid in South Africa, are not enough for comfortable living. Clerks, bookkeepers and clerical help generally are offered $7 to $10 a week. House rent is very cheap, however.
The blacks and colored of the Cape Province participate in the franchise, and a native of Tembuland was a member of the provincial Parliament. Strict laws in the old Boer provinces prohibit selling liquor to natives. While all natives here cannot vote, all voters have a right to drink liquor. So, if a native has money to buy whisky, he need merely say he is a voter and the saloonkeeper will take his word for it. When a black man can drink all the whisky he can pay for, and has a vote, that means insults and danger to life for the white of both sexes. This is the deplorable stage reached, to a noticeable degree, in Capetown. The white population is decreasing and blacks are becoming more insolent. The native of Capetown is not like the Zulu, nor the Barotse. He is copper colored, lower intellectually, of uninviting features and meanly inclined. Instances are frequent when the black of Capetown will not share the sidewalk—the white man must step off or get into a fight with half a dozen of these drunken natives.
To be allowed to land in Capetown one must have a hundred dollars. Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotchmen, foreigners—no one can land if he has not that sum. The tariff charged on foreign goods is from 50 to 125 per cent. The latter figure applies to tobacco. On a pound of American tobacco, which sells in the United States for 40 cents, there is a tax of $1.20.
Sixteen days is the shortest time in which mail can be transported from Capetown to England. The distance separating these two points is 6,000 miles.
Groote Schuur, the home of the late Cecil Rhodes, of very striking design and richly furnished, is located here in one of the finest estates in the world. Having a splendidly wooded park, with good paths built at convenient sections, it is shaded by the towering clefts of Table Mountain. The entrances to the Rhodes estate were never locked, and one had only to push open a gate to come in touch with nature in a superior form. Passing away in 1902, eight years before the consolidation, but far-seeing enough to know what the future policy of the country would be, Rhodes bequeathed Groote Schuur to the first Premier of a United South Africa. Louis Botha, elected to that high office, thereby came into possession of this attractive home.
"Your Hinterland Is There" is one of the inscriptions carved on the granite base on which the bronze figure of Cecil Rhodes rests in the Public Gardens of Capetown. The front of the figure is facing north, and a hand is pointed in the same direction—to Rhodesia. "So little done and so much to do" were the plaintive words of a man who had added 750,000 square miles to his country's already large possessions.
The wine industry is prominent in this province. Some years ago the grapevines were ravaged by a disease. Grape stocks were imported from the United States, and the native vine engrafted to the American plant, when the industry again thrived.
Snook, a fish three feet in length, numerous about the Cape Peninsula, seemed the principal food of a great number of poor colored people of Capetown.
In a place that has been an English possession so long one would expect to find a general use of the English language, but, on the contrary, natives and a majority of Europeans speak Dutch.