Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

So much for the four maritime countries. There remain the two Dutch republics and the British territories which have not yet been formed into colonies.

THE ORANGE FREE STATE

The Orange Free State (48,000 square miles) lies entirely on the great plateau, between 4000 and 5000 feet above sea-level. It is in the main a level country, though hills are scattered over it, sometimes reaching a height of nearly 6000 feet. A remarkable feature of most of these hills, as of many all over the plateau, is that they are flat-topped, and have often steep, even craggy escarpments. This seems due to the fact that the strata (chiefly sandstone) are horizontal; and very often a bed of hard igneous rock, some, kind of trap or greenstone, or porphyry, protects the summit of the hill from the disintegrating influences of the weather. It is a bare land, with very little wood, and that small and scrubby, but is well covered with herbage, affording excellent pasture during two-thirds of the year. After the first rains, when these wide stretches of gently undulating land are dressed in their new vesture of brilliant green, nothing can be imagined more exhilarating than a ride across the wide expanse; for the air is pure, keen, and bracing, much like that of the high prairies of Colorado or Wyoming. There are fortunately no blizzards, but violent thunderstorms are not uncommon, and the hailstones—I have seen them as big as bantams' eggs—which fall during such storms sometimes kill the smaller animals, and even men. Dry as the land appears to the eye during the winter, the larger streams do not wholly fail, and water can generally be got. The south-eastern part of the Free State, especially along the Caledon River, is extremely fertile, one of the best corn-growing parts of Africa. The rest is fitter for pasture than for tillage, except, of course, on the alluvial banks of the rivers, and nearly the whole region is in fact occupied by huge grazing farms. As such a farm needs and supports only a few men, the population grows but slowly. The Free State is nearly as big as England and just as big as the State of New York; but it has only 77,000 white inhabitants and about 130,000 natives.

THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC

Somewhat larger,—about as large as Great Britain and nearly two-thirds the size of France—is the South African Republic, which we commonly talk of as the Transvaal. Of its white population, which numbers some 170,000, two-thirds are in the small mining district of the Witwatersrand. All the Transvaal, except a strip on the eastern and another strip on the northern border along the river Limpopo, also belongs to the great plateau and exhibits the characteristic features of the plateau. The hills are, however, higher than in the Free State, and along the east, where the Quathlamba Range forms the outer edge of the plateau, they deserve to be called mountains, for some of them reach 7000 feet. These high regions are healthy, for the summer heats are tempered by easterly breezes and copious summer rains. The lower parts lying toward the Indian Ocean and the Limpopo River are feverish, though drainage and cultivation may be expected to reduce the malaria and improve the conditions of health. Like the Free State, the Transvaal is primarily a pasture land, but in many parts the herbage is less juicy and wholesome than in the smaller republic, and belongs to what the Dutch Boers call "sour veldt." There are trees in the more sheltered parts, but except in the lower valleys, they are small, and of no economic value. The winter cold is severe, and the fierce sun dries up the soil, and makes the grass sear and brown for the greater part of the year. Strong winds sweep over the vast stretches of open upland, checked by no belts of forest. It is a country whose aspect has little to attract the settler. No one would think it worth fighting for so far as the surface goes; and until sixteen years ago nobody knew that there was enormous wealth lying below the surface.

BRITISH TERRITORIES—BECHUANALAND

Of one British territory outside the two colonies, viz., Basutoland, I shall have to speak fully hereafter. A second, Bechuanaland, including the Kalahari Desert, is of vast extent, but slender value. It is a level land lying entirely on the plateau between 3,000 and 4000 feet above the sea, and while some of its streamlets drain into the Limpopo, and so to the Indian Ocean, others flow westward and northward into marshes and shallow lakes, in which they disappear. One or two, however, succeed, in wet seasons, in getting as far as the Orange River, and find through it an outlet to the sea. It is only in the wet season that the streamlets flow, for Bechuanaland is intensely dry. I travelled four hundred miles through it without once crossing running water, though here and there in traversing the dry bed of a brook one was told that there was water underneath, deep in the sand. Notwithstanding this superficial aridity, eastern Bechuanaland is deemed one of the best ranching tracts in South Africa, for the grass is sweet, and the water can usually be obtained by digging, though it is often brackish. There is also plenty of wood—thin and thorny, but sufficiently abundant to diversify the aspect of what would otherwise be a most dreary and monotonous region.

THE TERRITORIES OF THE BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA COMPANY

North of Bechuanaland and the Transvaal, and stretching all the way to the Zambesi, are those immense territories which have been assigned to the British South Africa Company as the sphere of its operations, and to which the name of Rhodesia has been given. Matabililand and Mashonaland, the only parts that have been at all settled, are higher, more undulating, and altogether more attractive than Bechuanaland, with great swelling downs somewhat resembling the Steppes of Southern Russia or the prairies of Kansas. Except in the east and south-east, the land is undulating rather than hilly, but in the south-west, towards the Upper Limpopo, there lies a high region, full of small rocky heights often clothed with thick bush—a country difficult to traverse, as has been found during the recent native outbreak; for it was there that most of the Kafirs took shelter and were found difficult to dislodge. Towards the south-east, along the middle course of the Limpopo, the country is lower and less healthy. On the northern side of the central highlands, the ground sinks towards the Zambesi, and the soil, which among the hills is thin or sandy, becomes deeper. In that part and along the river banks there are great possibilities of agricultural development, while the uplands, where the subjacent rock is granite or gneiss, with occasional beds of slate or schist, are generally barer and more dry, fit rather for pasture than for tillage. More rain falls than in Bechuanaland, so it is only at the end of the dry season, in October, that the grass begins to fail on the pastures. The climate, though very warm,—for here we are well within the tropics,—is pleasant and invigorating, for nowhere do brighter and fresher breezes blow, and the heat of the afternoons is forgotten in the cool evenings. It is healthy, too, except along the swampy river banks and where one descends to the levels of the Zambesi, or into the Limpopo Valley.

The reader will have gathered from this general sketch that there are no natural boundaries severing from one another the various political divisions of South Africa. The north-eastern part of Cape Colony is substantially the same kind of country as the Orange Free State and Eastern Bechuanaland; the Transvaal, or at least three-fourths of its area, is physically similar to the Free State; the boundary between Cape Colony and Natal is an artificial one; while Matabililand and Mashonaland present features resembling those of the Northern Transvaal, differing only in being rather hotter and rather better watered. So far as nature is concerned, the conditions she prescribes for the life of man, the resources she opens to his energies, are very similar over these wide areas, save, of course, that some parts are much richer than others in mineral deposits. It is only along the frontier line which divides Natal and the Portuguese dominions from the Transvaal and the territories of the British South Africa Company that a political coincides with a physical line of demarcation. Even German South-west Africa differs scarcely at all from the Kalahari Desert, which adjoins it and which forms the western part of Bechuanaland, and differs little also from the north-western regions of Cape Colony. If the reader will compare the two physical maps contained in this volume with the map which shows the political divisions of the country he will notice that these political divisions do not correspond with the areas where more or less rain falls, or where the ground is more or less raised above the sea or traversed by mountain chains. The only exception is to be found in the fact that the boundary of Natal towards Basutoland and the Orange Free State has been drawn along the watershed between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, and that the boundary line between the Portuguese territories and those of the Transvaal Republic and of the British South Africa Company, is in many places the line of division between the mountains and the low country. The Orange River and the Limpopo have, in parts of their courses, been taken as convenient political frontiers. But rivers, though convenient for this purpose to the statesman and the geographer, are not natural boundaries in the true sense of the term. And thus we may say that the causes which have cut up South Africa into its present Colonies and States have been (except as aforesaid) historical causes, rather than differences due to the hand of nature.