Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

CHAPTER XI

THE EUROPEANS IN SOUTH AFRICA TILL 1854

It is no less true of South Africa than it is of the old countries of Europe that to understand the temper of the people, the working of their government, the nature of the political problems which they have to solve, one must know something of their history. South Africa has had a great deal of history, especially in the present century, and there are few places in which recollections of the past are more powerful factors in the troubles of the present. In the short sketch I propose to give I shall advert only to the chief events, and particularly to those whose importance is still felt and which have done most to determine the relations of the European races to one another. The constitutional and parliamentary history of the two British colonies and the two Boer republics has been short and not specially interesting. The military history has been on a small scale. The economic and industrial history has been simple and remarkable only so far as the mines are concerned. But the history of the dealings of the white races with one another and with the blacks is both peculiar and instructive, and well deserves a fuller narrative and more elaborate treatment than I have space to give.

Four European races have occupied the country. Of those, however, who came with Vasco da Gama from Lisbon in 1497 we shall have little to say, and of the handful who followed Herr Lüderitz from Bremen in 1883 still less. The interest of the tale lies in the struggles of two branches of the same Low-German stock, the Dutch and the English.

The first to appear on the scene were the men of Portugal, then in the fresh springtime of its power and with what seemed a splendid career of discovery and conquest opening before it.[16] Bartholomew Diaz, whose renown has been unjustly obscured by that of Vasco da Gama, discovered the Cape of Storms, as he called it,—the name of Good Hope was given by King John II.,—in 1486, and explored the coast as far as the mouth of the Great Fish River. In 1497-98 Da Gama, on his famous voyage to India, followed the southern and eastern coast to Melinda; and in 1502, on his second voyage, after touching at Delagoa Bay, he visited Sofala, which was then the port to which most of the gold and ivory came from the interior. Here he found Arabs established in the town, as they were in other maritime trading places all the way north to Mombasa. At what date they first settled there is unknown; probably they had traded along the coast from times long before Mohammed. They were superior to the native blacks, though mixed in blood, but of course far inferior to the Portuguese, who overthrew their power. In 1505 the Portuguese built a fort at Sofala, and from there and several other points along the coast prosecuted their trade with the inland regions, using the conquered Arabs as their agents. For a century they remained the sole masters not only of the South-east African seaboard, but of the Indian Ocean, no vessel of any other European country appearing to dispute their pre-eminence. They might, had they cared, have occupied and appropriated the whole southern half of the continent; but in the sixteenth century it was not of colonization, nor even so much of conquest, that monarchs, governors, and navigators thought, but of gold. Portugal had no surplus population to spare for settling her new territories, and—not to speak of Brazil—she had a far richer trade to develop in western India than anything which Africa could offer. It may now excite surprise that she should have taken no step to claim the long stretch of country whose shores her sailors had explored, from the mouth of the Orange River on the west to that of the Limpopo on the east. But there was no gold to be had there, and a chance skirmish with the Hottentots in Table Bay, in which the viceroy D'Almeida, returning from India, was killed in 1510, gave them a false notion of the danger to be feared from that people, who were in reality one of the weakest and least formidable among African races.

Accordingly, the Portuguese, who might have possessed themselves of the temperate and healthy regions which we now call Cape Colony and Natal, confined their settlements to the malarious country north of the tropic of Capricorn. Here they made two or three attempts, chiefly by moving up the valley of the Zambesi, to conquer the native tribes, or to support against his neighbours some chieftain who was to become their vassal. Their numbers were, however, too small, and they were too feebly supported from home, to enable them to secure success. When they desisted from these attempts, their missionaries, chiefly Dominican friars, though some Jesuits were also engaged in the work, maintained an active propaganda among the tribes, and at one time counted their converts by thousands. Not only missionaries, but small trading parties, penetrated the mysterious interior; and one or two light cannons, as well as articles which must have come to Africa from India, such as fragments of Indian and Chinese pottery, have been found many hundred miles from the sea.[17]

But on the whole the Portuguese exerted very little permanent influence on the country and its inhabitants. The missions died out, most of the forts crumbled away or were abandoned, and all idea of further conquest had been dropped before the end of last century. There were, indeed, two fatal obstacles to conquering or civilising work. One was the extreme unhealthiness both of the flat country which lies between the sea and the edge of the great interior plateau, and of the whole Zambesi Valley, up which most of the attempts at an advance had been made. Fever not only decimated the expeditions and the garrisons of the forts, but enervated the main body of settlers who remained on the coast, soon reducing whatever enterprise or vigour they had brought from Europe. The other was the tendency of the Portuguese to mingle their blood with that of the natives. Very few women were brought out from home, so that a mixed race soon sprang up, calling themselves Portuguese, but much inferior to the natives of Portugal. The Portuguese, even more than the Spaniards, have shown both in Brazil and in Africa comparatively little of that racial contempt for the blacks, and that aversion to intimate social relations with them, which have been so characteristic of the Dutch and the English. There have, of course, been a good many mulattos born of Dutch fathers in Africa, as of Anglo-American fathers in the West Indies and in the former slave States of North America. But the Dutch or English mulatto was almost always treated as belonging to the black race, and entirely below the level of the meanest white, whereas among the Portuguese a strong infusion of black blood did not necessarily carry with it social disparity.[18]

In the beginning of the seventeenth century the Dutch, prosecuting their war against the Spanish monarchy, which had acquired the crown of Portugal in 1581 and held it till 1640, attacked the Portuguese forts on the East African coast, but after a few years abandoned an enterprise in which there was little to gain, and devoted their efforts to the more profitable field of the East Indies. With this exception, no European power troubled the Portuguese in Africa. They had, however, frequent conflicts with the natives, and in 1834 were driven from their fort at Inhambane, between Sofala and Delagoa Bay, and in 1836 from Sofala itself, which, however, they subsequently recovered. It was not till the progress of inland discovery, and especially the establishment of a Boer republic in the Transvaal had made the coast seem valuable, that two new and formidable rivals appeared on the scene.

Under the combined operation of these causes such power as Portugal possessed on this coast declined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Except on the deadly banks of the Zambesi, she never had a permanent settlement more than fifty miles from the sea, and very few so far inland. The population that spoke Portuguese and professed Christianity did not exceed a few thousands, and of these the large majority were at least half Kafir in blood. It became plain that such life and force as the nation once possessed had, at any rate in Africa, died out, and that if ever the continent was to be developed it would not be by the race that had first explored it. Here, therefore, we may leave the eastern coast and the feeble settlers who shivered with ague in its swamps, and turn our eyes to the far south, where a new and more vigorous race began, a century and a half after the time of Vasco da Gama, to lay the foundations of a new dominion.

The first Teutonic people that entered the African continent were the Vandals in the fifth century. They came across the Straits of Gibraltar as conquerors, but they soon established a powerful fleet and acquired a maritime empire in the western Mediterranean. The second band of Teutons to enter were the Dutch. They were already a sea power active in the far East, whither they had been led by their war with Spain. But it was not as conquerors that they came, nor even as settlers intending to build up a colonial community. They came to establish a place of call for their vessels trading to India, where fresh water and vegetables might be obtained for their crews, who suffered terribly from scurvy on the voyage of six months or more from the Netherlands to the ports of Farther India. From the early years of the seventeenth century both Dutch and English vessels had been in the habit of putting in to Table Bay to refit and get fresh water. Indeed, in 1620 two English commanders had landed there and proclaimed the sovereignty of King James I, though their action was not ratified either by the king or by the English East India Company. In 1648 a shipwrecked Dutch crew spent six months in Table Valley, behind the spot where Cape Town now stands, and having some seeds with them, planted vegetables and got a good crop. They represented on their return to Holland the advantages of the spot, and in 1652 three vessels despatched by the Dutch East India Company disembarked a body of settlers, under the command of Jan van Riebeek, who were directed to build a fort and hospital, and, above all, to raise vegetables and obtain from the Hottentots supplies of fresh meat for passing ships. It is from these small beginnings of a kitchen-garden that Dutch and British dominion in South Africa has grown up.