War was the natural state of the tribes toward one another, just as it was among the Red Indians and the primitive Celts, and indeed generally everywhere in the early days of Europe. Their weapons were the spear or assagai, and a sort of wooden club, occasionally a crescent-shaped battle-axe, and still less frequently the bow. Horses were unknown, for the ox, sheep, goat and dog were over all South Africa the only domesticated quadrupeds. One tribe, however, the Basutos, now breeds horses extensively, and has turned them to account in fighting. The rapid movement of their mounted warriors was one of the chief difficulties the colonial forces had to deal with in the last Basuto war. The courage in war which distinguished the tribes of Zulu and Kosa race was all the more creditable because it had not, like that of the Mohammedan dervishes of the Sudan, or of Mohammedans anywhere engaged in a jehad, a religious motive and the promise of future bliss behind it. The British army has encountered no more daring or formidable enemies. Nine wars were needed to subjugate the Kafirs of the southern coast, although till recently they had few firearms. But the natives had no idea of the tactics needed in facing a civilized foe. As in their battles with the Boers they were destroyed by the fire of horsemen riding up, delivering a volley, and riding off before an assagai could reach them, so in the great war with Cetewayo in 1879 they fought in the open and were mowed down by British volleys; and in 1893 the Matabili perished in the same way under the fire of riflemen and Maxim guns sheltered behind a laager of wagons.
Religion was a powerful factor in Kafir life; but religion did not mean the worship of any deity, for there was no deity. Still less had it any moral significance. To the Kafirs, as to most savage races, the world was full of spirits—spirits of the rivers, the mountains, and the woods. Most important were the ghosts of the dead, who had power to injure or to help the living, and who were therefore propitiated by offerings at stated periods, as well as on occasions when their aid was specially desired. This kind of worship, the worship once most generally diffused throughout the world, and which held its ground among the Greeks and Italians in the most flourishing period of ancient civilization, as it does in China and Japan to-day, was and is virtually the religion of the Kafirs. It was chiefly rendered to the ghosts of the chiefs, who retained in the spirit world the exceptional importance they had held among the living; and it had much weight in maintaining loyalty to a chief, because revolt against him was an insult to a powerful set of ghosts. The ghost dwelt at the spot where the body was buried, and it was therefore at the grave that the offerings, mostly of cakes and Kafir beer, were made. Occasionally animals were killed, not so much by way of sacrifice as for the sake of providing the ghost with a specially precious kind of food, though the two ideas run close together in most primitive worships.[10] Among the Matabili, for instance, there was once a year a great feast in honour of the king's ancestors, who were supposed to come and join in the mirth. It was also to the grave that those who wished to call up the ghost by spells went to effect their nefarious purpose, and the real place of interment of a great chief was for this reason sometimes concealed, I found at Thaba Bosiyo, the famous stronghold of the Basuto chief Moshesh, that his body had been secretly removed from the place where he was buried to baffle the wizards, who might try to use his ghost against the living. The ghost is, of course, apt to be spiteful, that of an uncle (I was told) particularly so; and if he is neglected he is extremely likely to bring some evil on the family or tribe. Sometimes the spirit of an ancestor passes into an animal, and by preference into that of a snake, not that it lives in the snake, but that it assumes this form when it wishes to visit men. A particular kind of green snake is revered by the Matabili for this reason. And most, if not all, tribes had an animal which they deemed to be of kin to them, and which they called their "siboko," a term apparently corresponding to the totem of the North American Indians. Creatures of this species they never killed, and some tribes took their name from it. Thus the Ba-Taung are the people of the lion; the Ba-Mangwato have the duyker antelope for their totem; and in the Basuto pitso (public meeting) an orator will begin by addressing his audience as "sons of the crocodile." Of human sacrifices there seems to be no trace. Men were killed for all possible reasons, but never as offerings. And, indeed, to have so killed them would have been to treat the ghosts as cannibals, a view foreign to native habits, for though human flesh has been resorted to in times of severe famine, it has never been regularly eaten, and the use of it excites disgust.
Whether the Kafirs had any idea of a supreme being is a question which has been much discussed. In several tribes the word, differently spelled "Umlimo" or "Mlimo" or "Molimo" (said to mean "hidden" or "unseen"), is used to denote either a power apparently different from that of the nature sprites or ghosts of the dead, or else the prophet or soothsayer who delivers messages or oracles supposed to emanate from this power. The missionaries have in their native versions of the Bible used the term to translate the word "God." Sometimes, among the Tongas at least, the word tilo (sky) is used to describe a mysterious force; as, for instance, when a man dies without any apparent malady, he is said to be killed by the tilo.[11] On the whole, after many inquiries from missionaries and others who know the natives well, I was led to the conclusion that the Kafirs have a vague notion of some power transcending that of common ghosts, and able to affect the operations of nature (as, for instance, to send rain), but far too dimly conceived to be properly describable as a divine being.[12] Or to put the thing in other words, the ordinary and familiar nature-sprites and ghosts of the departed do not exhaust the possibilities of super-human agency; for there remains, as among the Athenians whose altar St. Paul found (Acts xvii. 23), an "Unknown God," or rather unknown power, probably associated with the heavens above, whose interference may produce results not attainable through inferior spiritual agencies. One of the difficulties in reaching any knowledge of the real belief of the people is that they are usually examined by leading questions, and are apt to reply affirmatively to whatever the querist puts to them. Their thoughts on these dark subjects are either extremely vague and misty or extremely material; the world of abstract thought, in which European minds have learned to move with an ease and confidence produced by the possession of a whole arsenal of theological and metaphysical phrases, being to them an undiscovered country.
Since there were no deities and no idols, there were no priests; but the want of a priesthood was fully compensated by the presence of wizards; for among the Kafirs, as among other primitive peoples, there was and is an absolute belief in the power of spells, and of sorcery generally. These wizards, like the medicine men among the Red Indians, were an important class, second only to the chiefs. They were not a caste, though very often the son of a wizard would be brought up to the profession. The practitioners were on the lookout for promising boys, and would take and train one to witchcraft, imparting their secrets, which included a remarkable knowledge of the properties of various plants available for poison or healing. Sometimes the wizard acted as a physician; sometimes he would attempt to make rain; sometimes he would profess to deliver messages from the unseen world, and in these cases he might become a terrible power for mischief. Such a revelation made to the Kosa clans on the south coast in 1856-57, directing them to kill their cattle and destroy their grain, because the ghosts of their ancestors were coming to drive out the whites, led to the death by famine of more than 30,000 people. Such a revelation proceeding from a soothsayer, occasionally called the Mlimo, who dwelt in a cavern among granite rocks in the Matoppo Hills at a place called Matojeni, south-east of Bulawayo[13] (oracles have always tended to come from caves), had much to do with the rising of the Matabili in 1896. But the most frequent and most formidable work done by the wizard was that of "smelling out" persons who were bewitching others so as to cause sickness or misfortune. In this branch of his profession the wizard often became the engine of the jealousy or rapacity of the chief, who would secretly prompt him to denounce a prominent or a wealthy man. Suspicion being once roused, the victim had little chance: he was despatched, and his property seized by the chief. Witchcraft, and the murders it gave rise to, have been the darkest side of native life. The sorcerer has usually been the enemy of the missionary, who threatens his gains; but his power is now generally declining, and the British Government forbids the practice of smelling out witches, as well as many other shocking and disgusting rites which used to accompany the admission of boys and girls to the status of adults, or were practised at sundry festivals. Of the faith in minor and harmless spells one finds instances everywhere. In Matabililand, for instance, a boy was pointed out to me who had just been occupied in putting a charm into the footprint of a lion, in order to prevent the unwelcome visitor from returning; and nearly every native wears some kind of amulet.[14] These beliefs will take a long time to die, but the missionaries have now usually the good sense to see that they do little harm.
As their religious customs were rather less sanguinary than those of the Guinea Coast negroes, so the Kafirs themselves were, when the whites first saw them, somewhat more advanced in civilization. Compared with the Red Indians of America, they stood at a point lower than that of the Iroquois or Cherokees, but superior to the Utes or to the Diggers of the Pacific coast. They could work in iron and copper, and had some notions of ornament. Their music is rude, but not wholly devoid of melody, and they use instruments of stone, wood, and iron, by striking which a kind of tune can be played. Some tribes, such as the Tongas, have good voices, and a marked taste for music. They have some simple games, and a folk-lore which consists chiefly in animal tales, resembling those collected by Mr. Harris in his Uncle Remus, save that the hare plays among the Bantu peoples the part of Br'er Rabbit.[15] To poetry, even in its most rudimentary forms, they do not seem to have attained. Yet they are by no means wanting in intelligence, and have, with less gaiety, more sense of dignity and more persistence in their purposes than the Guinea negro.
When the Portuguese and Dutch first knew the Kafirs, they did not appear to be making any progress toward a higher culture. Human life was held very cheap; women were in a degraded state, and sexual morality at a low ebb. Courage, loyalty to chief and tribe, and hospitality were the three prominent virtues. War was the only pursuit in which chieftains sought distinction, and war was mere slaughter and devastation, unaccompanied by any views of policy or plans of administration. The people were—and indeed still are—passionately attached to their old customs, which even a king rarely ventured to disturb (though Tshaka is said to have abolished among his subjects the rite of circumcision, which is generally practised by the Kafirs); and it was probably as much the unwillingness to have their customs disturbed as the apprehension for their land that made many of the tribes oppose to the advance of the Europeans so obstinate a resistance. Though they feared the firearms of the whites, whom they called wizards, it was a long time before they realized their hopeless inferiority, and the impossibility of prevailing in war. Their minds were mostly too childish to recollect and draw the necessary inferences from previous defeats, and they never realized that the whites possessed beyond the sea an inexhaustible reservoir of men and weapons. Even the visit of Lo Bengula's envoys to England in 1891, when they were shown all the wonders of London, in order that through them the Matabili nation might be deterred from an attack on the whites, failed to produce any effect upon the minds of the young warriors, who were fully persuaded that they could destroy the few strangers in their country as easily as they had overthrown the Mashonas. The only chiefs who seem to have fully grasped the relative strength of the Europeans, and thus to have formed schemes of policy suitable to their inferior position, were Moshesh, who profited by the advice of the French missionaries, and Khama, who was himself a Christian and the pupil of missionaries. Nor did any chief ever rise to the conception of forming a league of blacks against whites.
The natives, as we shall see, have had harsh treatment from the Europeans. Many unjust things, many cruel things, many things which would excite horror if practised in European warfare, have been done against them. But whoever tries to strike the balance of good and evil due to the coming of the whites must remember what the condition of the country was before the whites came. As between the different tribes there was neither justice nor pity, but simply the rule of the strongest, unmitigated by any feeling of religion or morality. In war non-combatants as well as combatants were ruthlessly slaughtered, or reserved only for slavery; and war was the normal state of things. Within each tribe a measure of peace and order was maintained. But the weak had a hard time, and those who were rich, or had roused the enmity of some powerful man, were at any moment liable to perish on the charge of witchcraft. In some tribes, such as the Matabili, incessant slaughter went on by the orders of the king. Nothing less than the prolific quality of the race could have kept South Africa well peopled in the teeth of such a waste of life as war and murder caused.
Of the character of the individual native as it affects his present relations with the whites and the probable future of the race, I shall have to speak in a later chapter ([Chapter XXI]), as also of the condition and prospects of the Christian missions which exist among them, and which form the main civilizing influence now at work.