The second native race was that which the Dutch called Hottentot, and whom the Portuguese explorers found occupying the maritime region in the south-west corner of the continent, to the east and to the north of the Cape of Good Hope. They are supposed to have come from the north and dispossessed the Bushmen of the grassy coast lands, driving them into the more arid interior. But of this there is no evidence; and some have even fancied that the Hottentot race itself may have been a mixed one, produced by intermarriage between Bushmen and Kafirs. Be this as it may, the Hottentots were superior to the Bushmen both physically and intellectually. They were small men, but not pygmies, of a reddish or yellowish black hue, with no great muscular power in their slender frames. Their hair, very short and woolly, grew, like that of the Bushmen, in small balls or tufts over the skull, just as grass tufts grow separate from one another in the drier parts of the veldt. They possessed sheep and also cattle, lean beasts with huge horns; and they roved hither and thither over the country as they could find pasture for their animals, doing a little hunting, but not attempting to till the soil, and unacquainted with the metals. Living in tribes under their chiefs, they fought a little with one another, and a great deal with the Bushmen, who tried to prey upon their cattle. They were a thoughtless, cheerful, good-natured, merry sort of people, whom it was not difficult to domesticate as servants, and their relations with the Dutch settlers, in spite of two wars, were, on the whole, friendly. Within a century after the foundation of Cape Colony, their numbers, never large, had vastly diminished, partly from the occupation by the colonists of their best grazing-grounds, but still more from the ravages of small-pox and other epidemics, which ships touching on their way from the East Indies brought into the country. In A.D. 1713 whole tribes perished in this way. I speak of the Hottentots in the past tense, for they are now, as a distinct race, almost extinct in the Colony, although a good deal of their blood has passed into the mixed coloured population of Cape Town and its neighbourhood—a population the other elements of which are Malays from the Dutch East Indies, and the descendants of slaves brought from the West Coast of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From unions between Hottentot women and the Dutch sprang the mixed race whom the Dutch call Bastards and the English Griquas, and who, though now dying out, like the French and Indian half-breeds of Western Canada, played at one time a considerable part in colonial politics. Along the south bank of the Orange River and to the north of it, in Great Namaqualand, small tribes, substantially identical with the Hottentots, still wander over the arid wilderness. But in the settled parts of the Colony the Hottentot, of whom we used to hear so much, and whom the Portuguese remembering the death of the viceroy D'Almeida (who was killed in a skirmish in A.D. 1510), at one time feared so much, has vanished more completely than has the Red Indian from the Atlantic States of North America. And the extinction or absorption of the few remaining nomads will probably follow at no distant date.
Very different have been the fortunes, very different are the prospects, of the third and far more numerous South African race, those whom we call Kafirs, and who call themselves Abantu or Bantu ("the people"). The word "Kafir" is Arabic. It has nothing to do with Mount Kaf (the Caucasus), but means an infidel (literally, "one who denies"), and is applied by Mussulmans not merely to these people, but to other heathen also, as, for instance, to the idolaters of Kafiristan, in the Hindu-Kush Mountains. The Portuguese doubtless took the name from the Arabs, whom they found established at several points on the East African coast northward from Sofala, and the Dutch took it from the Portuguese, together with such words as "kraal" (corral), and "assagai." The Bantu tribes, if one may include under that name all the blacks who speak languages of the same general type, occupy the whole of East Africa southward from the Upper Nile, where that river issues from the great Nyanza lakes, together with the Congo basin and most of South-west Africa. They include various groups, such as the Ama-Kosa tribes (to which belong the Tembus and Pondos), who dwell on the coast of Cape Colony eastward from the Great Fish River; the Ama-Zulu group, consisting of the Zulus proper (in Natal and Zululand), the Swazis, the Matabili, farther to the north, and the Angoni, in Nyassaland, beyond the Zambesi River; the Amatonga group, between Zululand and Delagoa Bay; the Bechuana group, including the Bamangwato, the Basuto and the Barolongs, as well as the Barotse, far off on the middle course of the Zambesi; the Makalaka or Maholi, and cognate tribes, inhabiting Mashonaland and Manicaland. The linguistic and ethnical affinities of these groups and tribes are still very imperfectly known, but their speech and their habits are sufficiently similar to enable us to refer them to one type, just as we do the Finnic or the Slavonic peoples in Europe. And they are even more markedly unlike the Hottentots or the Bushmen than the Slavs are to the Finns, or both of these to those interesting aborigines of northern Europe, the Lapps.
The Bantu or Kafirs—I use the term as synonymous—who dwell south of the Zambesi are usually strong and well-made men, not below the average height of a European. In colour they vary a good deal; some are as black as the Gulf of Guinea negro, some rather brown than black. All have the thick lips, the woolly hair, and the scanty beard of the negro, and nearly all the broad, low nose; yet in some the nose is fairly high, and the cast of features suggests an admixture of Semitic blood—an admixture which could be easily explained by the presence, from a pretty remote time, of Arab settlers, as well as traders, along the coast of the Indian Ocean. As the Bantu vary in aspect, so do they also in intelligence. No tribe is in this respect conspicuously superior to any other, though the Zulus show more courage in fight than most of the others, the Fingos more aptitude for trade, the Basutos more disposition to steady industry. But, while the general level of intellect is below that of the Red Indians or the Maoris or the Hawaiians (if rather above that of the Guinea negroes), individuals are now and then found of considerable talents and great force of character. Three such men as the Zulu Tshka, the Basuto Moshesh, and the Bechuana Khama, not to speak of those who, like the eloquent missionary Tiyo Soga, have received a regular European education, are sufficient to show the capacity of the race for occasionally reaching a standard which white men must respect. And in one regard the Bantu race shows a kind of strength which the Red Indians and Polynesians lack. They are a very prolific people, and under the conditions of peace which European rule secures they multiply with a rapidity which some deem alarming.
How long the various Bantu tribes have been in South Africa is a question on which no light has yet been thrown, or can, indeed, be expected. Some of them have a vague tradition that they came from the north; but the recollections of savages seldom go back more than five or six generations, and retain little except the exploits or the genealogy of some conspicuous chief. When the Portuguese arrived in the end of the fifteenth century, they found Kafirs already inhabiting the country from Natal northward. But apparently they did not then extend as far to the west of Natal as they do now; and there is no reason to think that considerable parts of the interior, such as the region which is now the Orange Free State and Basutoland, were not yet occupied, but left to the wandering Bushmen. The Kafirs were then, and continued down to our own time, in a state of incessant tribal warfare; and from time to time one martial tribe, under a forceful chief, would exterminate or chase away some weaker clan and reduce wide areas to a wilderness. Of any large conquests, or of any steady progress in the arts either of war or of peace, there is no record, and indeed, in the general darkness, no trace. The history of the native races, so far as ascertainable, begins with the advent of the whites, and even after their advent remains extremely shadowy until, early in this century, the onward march of settlement gave the Dutch and English settlers the means of becoming better acquainted with their black neighbours.
Across this darkness there strikes one ray of light. It is a very faint ray, but in the absence of all other light it is precious. It is that which is supplied by the prehistoric ruins and the abandoned gold-workings of Mashonaland.
CHAPTER IX
OUT OF THE DARKNESS—ZIMBABWYE
The ruined buildings of Mashonaland and Matabililand have excited in recent years an amount of interest and curiosity which is disproportionate to their number, size, and beauty, but by no means disproportionate to their value as being the only record, scant as it is, we possess of what has been deemed an early South African civilization. I will describe in the fewest words such of these buildings as I saw, leaving the reader of archæological tastes to find fuller details in the well-known book of that enterprising explorer, the late Mr. Theodore Bent. Some short account of them seems all the more needed, because the first descriptions published gave the impression that they were far more considerable than they really are.