Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

CHAPTER VIII

THE NATIVES: HOTTENTOTS, BUSHMEN, AND KAFIRS

By far the most interesting features in the history of South Africa have been the relations to one another of the various races that inhabit it. There are seven of these races, three native and four European. The European races, two of them, especially the Dutch and the English, are, of course, far stronger, and far more important as political factors, than are the natives. Nevertheless, the natives have an importance too, and one so great that their position deserves to be fully set forth and carefully weighed. For, though they are inferior in every point but one, they are in that point strong. They are prolific. They already greatly outnumber the whites, and they increase faster.

The cases of conflict or contact between civilized European man and savage or semi-civilized aboriginal peoples, which have been very numerous since the tide of discovery began to rise in the end of the fifteenth century, may be reduced to three classes.

The first of these classes includes the cases where the native race, though perhaps numerous, is comparatively weak, and unable to assimilate European civilization, or to thrive under European rule (a rule which has often been harsh), or even to survive in the presence of a European population occupying its country. To this class belong such cases as the extinction of the natives of the Antilles by the Spaniards, the disappearance of the natives of Southern Australia and Tasmania before British settlement, the dying out, or retirement to a few reserved tracts, of the aborigines who once occupied all North America east of the Rocky Mountains. The Russian advance in Siberia, the advance of Spanish and Italian and German colonists in the territories of La Plata in South America, may be added to this class, for though the phenomena are rather those of absorption than of extinction, the result is practically the same. The country becomes European and the native races vanish.

An opposite class of cases arises where Europeans have conquered a country already filled by a more or less civilized population, which is so numerous and so prolific as to maintain itself with ease in their presence. Such a case is the British conquest of India. The Europeans in India are, and must remain, a mere handful among the many millions of industrious natives, who already constitute, in many districts, a population almost too numerous for the resources of the country to support. Moreover, the climate is one in which a pure European race speedily dwindles away. The position of the Dutch in Java, and of the French in Indo-China, is similar; and the French in Madagascar will doubtless present another instance.

Between these two extremes lies a third group of cases—those in which the native race is, on the one hand, numerous and strong enough to maintain itself in the face of Europeans, while, on the other hand, there is plenty of room left for a considerable European population to press in, climatic conditions not forbidding it to spread and multiply. To this group belong such colonizations as those of the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru, of the Russians in parts of Central Asia, of the French in Algeria and Tunis, of the Spaniards in the Canary Isles, and of the English and Americans in Hawaii. In all these countries the new race and the old race can both live and thrive, neither of them killing off or crowding out the other, though in some, as in Hawaii, the natives tend to disappear, while in others, as in Algeria, the immigrants do not much increase. Sometimes, as in the Canary Isles and Mexico, the two elements blend, the native element being usually more numerous, though less advanced; and a mixed race is formed by intermarriage. Sometimes they remain, and seem likely to remain, as distinct as oil is from water.

South Africa belongs to this third class of cases. The Dutch and the English find the country a good one and become fond of it. There is plenty of land for them. They enjoy the climate. They thrive and multiply. But they do not oust the natives, except sometimes from the best lands, and the contact does not reduce the number of the latter. The native—that is to say, the native of the Kafir race—not merely holds his ground, but increases far more rapidly than he did before Europeans came, because the Europeans have checked intertribal wars and the slaughter of the tribesmen by the chiefs and their wizards, and also because the Europeans have opened up new kinds of employment. As, therefore, the native will certainly remain, and will, indeed, probably continue to be in a vast majority, it is vital to a comprehension of South African problems to know what he has been and may be expected to become.

The native races are three, and the differences between them are marked, being differences not only of physical appearance and of language, but also of character, habits, and grade of civilization. These three are the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and those Bantu tribes whom we call Kafirs.

The Bushmen were, to all appearance, the first on the ground, the real aborigines of South Africa. They are one of the lowest races to be found anywhere, as low as the Fuegians or the "black fellows" of Australia, though perhaps not quite so low as the Veddahs of Ceylon or the now extinct natives of Tasmania. They seem to have been originally scattered over all South Africa, from the Zambesi to the Cape, and so late as eighty years ago were almost the only inhabitants of Basutoland, where now none of them are left. They were nomads of the most primitive type, neither tilling the soil nor owning cattle, but living on such wild creatures as they could catch or smite with their poisoned arrows, and, when these failed, upon wild fruits and the roots of plants. For the tracking and trapping of game they had a marvellous faculty, such as neither the other races nor any European could equal. But they had no organization, not even a tribal one, for they wandered about in small groups; and no religion beyond some vague notion of ghosts, and of spirits inhabiting or connected with natural objects; while their language was a succession of clicks interrupted by grunts. Very low in stature, and possibly cognate to the pygmies whom Mr. H.M. Stanley found in Central Africa, they were capable of enduring great fatigue and of travelling very swiftly. Untamably fierce unless caught in childhood, and incapable of accustoming themselves to civilized life, driven out of some districts by the European settlers, who were often forced to shoot them down in self-defence, and in other regions no longer able to find support owing to the disappearance of the game, they are now almost extinct, though a few remain in the Kalahari Desert and the adjoining parts of northern Bechuanaland and western Matabililand, toward Lake Ngami. I saw at the Kimberley mines two or three dwarf natives who were said to have Bushmen blood in them, but it is no longer easy to find in the Colony a pure specimen. Before many years the only trace of their existence will be in the remarkable drawings of wild animals with which they delighted to cover the smooth surfaces of sheltered rocks. These drawings, which are found all the way from the Zambesi to the Cape, and from Manicaland westward, are executed in red, yellow, and black pigments, and are often full of spirit. Rude, of course, they are, but they often convey the aspect, and especially the characteristic attitude, of the animal with great fidelity.