Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

The first was to be found in the character of the Dutch population. They were farmers, a few dwelling in villages and cultivating the soil, but the majority stock-farmers, living scattered over a wide expanse of country, for the thinness of the pasture had made and kept the stock-farms very large. They saw little of one another, and nothing of those who dwelt in the few towns which the Colony possessed. They were ignorant, prejudiced, strongly attached to their old habits, impatient of any control. The opportunities for intercourse between them and the British were thus so few that the two races acquired very little knowledge of one another, and the process of social fusion, though easy at Capetown and wherever else the population was tolerably dense, was extremely slow over the country at large. A deplorable incident which befell on the eastern border in 1815 did much to create bad blood. A slight rising, due to the attempted arrest of a farmer on a charge of maltreating his native servant, broke out there. It was soon suppressed, but of the prisoners taken six were condemned to death and five were hanged. This harsh act, which was at the time justified as a piece of "necessary firmness," produced wide-spread and bitter resentment, and the mention of Slagter's Nek continued for many years to awaken an outburst of anti-British feeling among the Boers.

A second cause was the unwisdom of the British authorities in altering (between 1825 and 1828) the old system of local government (with the effect of reducing the share in it which the citizens had enjoyed), and in substituting English for Dutch as the language to be used in official documents and legal proceedings. This was a serious hardship, for probably not more than one-sixth of the people understood English. A third source of trouble arose out of the wars with the Kafirs on the eastern border. Since the first hostilities of 1779 there had been four serious struggles with the tribes who lived beyond the Fish River, and in 1834 a host of savages suddenly burst into the Colony, sweeping off the cattle and killing the farmers. After some hard fighting the Kafirs were reduced to sue for peace, and compelled by the governor to withdraw beyond the Keiskama River. But the British government at home, considering that the natives had been ill-treated by the colonists, and in fact provoked to war, overruled the governor, and allowed them to return to their old seats, where they were, no doubt, a source of danger to the border farmers. Thinking the home authorities either weak or perverse, the farmers bitterly resented this action, and began to look on the British Colonial Office as their enemy.

But the main grievance arose out of those native and colour questions which have ever since continued to trouble South Africa. Slavery had existed in the Colony since 1658, and had produced its usual consequences, the degradation of labour, and the notion that the black man has no rights against the white. In 1737 the first Moravian mission to the Hottentots was frowned upon, and a pastor who had baptized natives found himself obliged to return to Europe. The current of feeling in Europe, and especially in England, which condemned the "domestic institution" and sought to vindicate the human rights of the negro, had not been felt in this remote corner of the world, and from about 1810 onward the English missionaries gave intense offence to the colonists by espousing the cause of the natives and the slaves, and reporting every case of cruel or harsh treatment which came to their knowledge. It is said that they often exaggerated, or made charges on insufficient evidence, and this is likely enough. But it must also be remembered that they were the only protectors the blacks had; and where slavery exists, and a weak race is dominated by a strong one, there are sure to be many abuses of power. When, in 1828, Hottentots and other free coloured people were placed by governmental ordinance on an equal footing with whites as regards private civil rights, the colonists were profoundly disgusted, and their exasperation was increased by the enactment of laws restraining their authority over their slaves, as well as by the charges of ill-treating the natives which continued to be brought against them by the missionaries. Finally, in 1834, the British Parliament passed a statute emancipating the slaves throughout all the British colonies, and awarding a sum of twenty million pounds sterling as compensation to the slave-owners. The part of this sum allotted to Cape Colony (a little more than three millions sterling) was considerably below the value of the slaves (about 39,000) held there, and as the compensation was made payable in London, most slave owners sold their claims at inadequate prices. Many farmers lost the bulk of their property, and labour became in many districts so scarce that agriculture could hardly be carried on. The irritation produced by the loss thus suffered, intensifying the already existing discontent, set up a ferment among the Dutch farmers. Their spirit had always been independent, and the circumstances of their isolated life had enabled them to indulge it. Even under the government of their Dutch kinsfolk they had been restless, and now they received, as they thought, one injustice after another at the hands of alien rulers. To be watched and denounced by the missionaries, to have black people put on a level with them, to lose the fruits of their victory over the Kafirs—all these things had been bad enough. Now, however, when their property itself was taken away and slavery abolished on grounds they could neither understand nor approve, they determined to endure no longer, and sought for some means of deliverance. Rebellion against so strong a power as that of Britain was evidently foredoomed to failure. But to the north and east a great wild country lay open before them, where they could lead that solitary and half-nomadic life which they loved, preserve their old customs, and deal with the natives as they pleased, unvexed by the meddlesome English. Accordingly, many resolved to quit the Colony altogether and go out into the wilderness. They were the more disposed to this course, because they knew that the wars and conquests of Tshaka, the ferocious Zulu king, had exterminated the Kafir population through parts of the interior, which therefore stood open to European settlement. Thus it was that the Great Trek, as the Dutch call it,—the great emigration, or secession, as we should say,—of the Dutch Boers began in 1836, twenty-five years before another question of colour and slavery brought about a still greater secession on the other side of the Atlantic.

If the reader will here refer to the map, and measure from Cape Town a distance of about four hundred and fifty miles to the east (to the mouth of the Great Fish River), and about the same distance to the north-north-east (to where the towns of Middelburg and Colesberg now stand), he will obtain a pretty fair idea of the limits of European settlement in 1836. The outer parts of this area toward the north and east were very thinly peopled, and beyond them there was a vast wilderness, into which only a few hunters had penetrated, though some farmers had, during the last decade or two, been accustomed to drive their flocks and herds into the fringe of it after the rains, in search of fresh pastures. The regions still farther to the north and east were almost entirely unexplored. They were full of wild beasts, and occupied here and there by native tribes, some, like the various branches of the Zulu race, eminently fierce and warlike. Large tracts, however, were believed to be empty and desolate, owing to the devastations wrought during his twenty years of reign by Tshaka, who had been murdered eight years before. Of the existence of mineral wealth no one dreamed. But it was believed that there was good grazing land to be found on the upland that lay north of the great Quathlamba Range (where now the map shows the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic). More to the south lay the territory we now call Natal. It was described by those very few persons who had explored it as fertile and well-watered, a country fit both for tillage and for pasture; but wide plains and high mountains had to be crossed to reach it by land from the north-west, and close to it on the north-east was the main body of the Zulu nation, under King Dingaan, the brother and sucessor of Tshaka.

Into this wilderness did the farmers set forth, and though some less laudable motives may have been mingled with the love of independence and the resentment at injustice which mainly prompted their emigration, it is impossible not to admire their strenuous and valiant spirit. They were a religious people, knowing no book but the Bible, and they deemed themselves, like many another religious people at a like crisis of their fortunes, to be under the special protection of Heaven, as was Israel when it went out of Egypt into a wilderness not so vast nor so full of perils as was that which the Boers were entering. Escaping from a sway which they compared to that of the Egyptian king, they probably expected to be stopped or turned back. But Pharaoh, though he had turned a deaf ear to their complaints, was imbued with the British spirit of legality. He consulted his attorney-general, and did not pursue them. The colonial government saw with concern the departure of so many useful subjects. But it was advised that it had no legal right to stop them, so it stood by silently while party after party of emigrants—each householder with his wife and his little ones, his flocks and his herds and all his goods—took its slow way from the eastern or northern parts of the Colony, up the slopes of the coast range, and across the passes that lead into the high plateau behind. Within two years from 6,000 to 10,000 persons set forth. They travelled in large covered wagons drawn by ten or twelve yoke of oxen, and they were obliged to travel in parties of no great size, lest their cattle should exhaust the pasture along the track they followed. There was, however a general concert of plan among them, and most of the smaller groups united at spots previously fixed upon for a rendezvous. All the men were armed, for the needs of defence against the Bushmen, and the passion for killing game, had made the farmers expert in the use of the rifle. As marksmen they were unusually steady and skilful, and in the struggles that followed nothing but their marksmanship saved them. Few to-day survive of those who took part in this Great Trek, but among those few is Paul Kruger, now President of the South African Republic, who followed his father's cattle as they were driven forward across the prairie, being then a boy of ten.

I have not space to tell, save in the briefest outline, the striking and romantic story of the wanderings of the emigrant Boers and their conflicts with the native tribes. The first party, like the first host of Crusaders that started for the East in the end of the eleventh century, perished miserably. It consisted of ninety-eight persons travelling with thirty wagons. They penetrated far to the north-east, into what is now the territory of the Transvaal Republic. Some were cut off by the natives; some, reduced to a mere handful by fever and by the loss of their cattle,—for they had ventured into the unhealthy lower country to the south-east of the mountains, where the tsetse-fly abounds,—made their way to the coast at Delagoa Bay. Another party, formed by the union of a number of smaller bodies at Thaba 'Ntshu, a rocky peak in the Orange Free State, visible on the eastern horizon from the present town of Bloemfontein, advanced thence to the north, and presently came in contact with a redoubtable branch of the Zulu race, famous in later history under the name of Matabili. This tribe was then ruled by the chief Umzilikazi, or Mosilikatze, a warrior of great energy and talent. He had been one of Tshaka's favourite generals, but, having incurred that king's displeasure, had fled, about A.D. 1817, with his regiment to the north-west, and established his headquarters near a place called Mosega (between Pretoria and Mafeking), in what is now the Transvaal Republic. Thence he raided and massacred the Bechuanas and other tribes of this region, though himself unable to withstand the main Zulu nation, which, under Dingaan, was living farther to the south. The Matabili provoked war by falling upon and destroying a detachment of the emigrants. Intruders the latter doubtless were, but, as the Matabili themselves had slaughtered without mercy the weaker Kafir tribes, the Boers might think they need not feel any compunction in dealing out the like measure to their antagonists. And, in point of fact, the emigrants seem all through to have treated the natives much as Israel treated the natives of Canaan, and to have conceived themselves to have Old Testament authority for occupying the territories of the heathen, and reducing them by the sternest methods to serfdom or submission. Here they had an unprovoked massacre to avenge, and they showed equal promptitude and courage. Pouncing upon Mosilikatze, they defeated his vastly superior force with so great a slaughter that he fled north-westward far away beyond the Limpopo River, and fell like a thunderbolt upon the tribes who dwelt between that stream and the Zambesi, killing many and making slaves of the rest. Here, with the king's kraal of Buluwayo for its capital, was established the kingdom of the Matabili, which remained as a terror to its neighbours till, in its turn, destroyed by Dr. Jameson and the British South Africa Company in 1893. It was a curious chain of events that brought fire and slaughter so suddenly, in 1837, upon the peoples of the Zambesi Valley. As the conflicts of nomad warriors along the great wall of China in the fourth century of our era set a-going a movement which, propagated from tribe to tribe, ended by precipitating the Goths upon the Mediterranean countries, and brought Alaric to the Salarian Gate of Rome, so the collapse of the French monarchy, inducing the Revolution and the consequent war with England, carried the English to the Cape, brought the Boers into collision with the Matabili, and at last hurled the savage host of Mosilikatze on the helpless Makalakas.

The defeat and expulsion of the Matabili left the vast territories between the Orange River and the Limpopo in the hands of the Boer immigrants. Within these territories, after much moving hither and thither, those small and rude communities began to grow up which have ripened, as we shall presently see, into the two Dutch republics of our own time. But, meanwhile, a larger and better organized body of Boers, led by a capable and much-respected man named Pieter Retief, marched first eastward and then southward across the Quathlamba watershed, and descended from the plateau into the richer and warmer country between those mountains and the Indian Ocean. This region had been in 1820 almost depopulated by the invasions of Tshaka, and now contained scarce any native inhabitants. A few Englishmen had since 1824 been settled on the inlet then called Port Natal, where now the prosperous town of Durban lies beneath the villas and orchards of Berea, and (having obtained a cession of the maritime slip from King Tshaka) were maintaining there a sort of provisional republic. In 1835 they had asked to be recognised as a colony under the name of Victoria, in honour of the young princess who two years afterwards mounted the throne, and to have a legislature granted them. The British government, however, was still hesitating whether it should occupy the port, so the emigrants did not trouble themselves about its rights or wishes. Thinking it well to propitiate the Zulu king, Dingaan, whose power over-shadowed the country, the Boer leaders proceeded to his kraal to obtain from him a formal grant of land. The grant was made, but next day the treacherous tyrant, offering them some native beer as a sort of stirrup-cup before their departure, suddenly bade his men fall upon and "kill the wizards." The excellent Retief perished with his whole party, and a body of emigrants not far distant was similarly surprised and massacred by a Zulu army of overwhelming strength. These cruelties roused the rest of the emigrants to reprisals, and in a fierce battle, fought on December 16, 1838, the anniversary of which is still celebrated by the people of the Transvaal, a handful of Boers overthrew Dingaan's host. Like the soldiers of Cortes in Mexico, they owed this, as other victories, not merely to their steady valour, but to their horses. Riding up to the line of savage warriors, they delivered a volley, and rode back before an assagai could reach them, repeating this manœuvre over and over again till the hostile ranks broke and fled. Ultimately their forces, united with those of a brother of Dingaan, who had rebelled against him and had detached a large part of the Zulu warriors, drove Dingaan out of Zululand in 1840. Panda, the rebel brother, was installed king in his stead, as a sort of vassal to the Boer government, which was now entitled the republic of Natalia, and the Boers founded a city, Pietermaritzburg, and began to portion out the land. They deemed the British authorities to have abandoned any claim to the country by the withdrawal of a detachment of troops which had been landed at Port Natal in 1838. But their action, and in particular their ejection from the country of a mass of Kafirs whom they proposed to place in a district already occupied by another tribe, had meanwhile excited the displeasure of the government of Cape Colony. That government, though it had not followed them into the deserts of the interior, had never renounced, and indeed had now and then reasserted its right to consider them British subjects. They, however, repudiated all idea of subjection, holding British sovereignty to be purely territorial, so that when they had passed out of the region which the British crown claimed they had become a free and independent people, standing alone in the world. Their attempt to establish a new white state on the coast was a matter of serious concern, because it might affect trade with the interior, and plant in a region which Britain deemed her own the germ of what might become a new maritime power. And as the colonial government considered itself the general protector of the natives, and interested in maintaining the Kafirs between the Boer state and Cape Colony, the attacks of the Boers on the Kafirs who lived to the west of them toward the Colony, could not be permitted to pass unchecked. The British government, though still unwilling to assume fresh responsibilities, for in those days it was generally believed that the colonial possessions of Britain were already too extensive, nevertheless ultimately concluded, for the reasons given above, to assert its authority over Port Natal and the country behind as far as the crest of the mountains. A small force was accordingly sent to Port Natal in 1842. It was there besieged by the Boer levies, and would have been forced to surrender but for the daring ten days' ride through the whole breadth of Kaffraria of a young Englishman, Richard King, who brought the news to Graham's Town, six hundred miles distant. A force sent by sea relieved the starving garrison after a siege of twenty-six days. The Boer forces dispersed, but it was not till a year later that the territory of Natal was formally declared a British colony. Lord Stanley, then colonial secretary, was reluctant to take over the responsibilities of a new dominion with a disaffected white population and a mass of savage inhabitants, and only yielded to the urgent arguments of Sir George Napier, then governor of the Cape. In 1843, after long and angry debates (sometimes interrupted by the women, who passionately denounced the British government), the Volksraad, or popular assembly of the tiny republic, submitted to the British crown, having delivered a warm but ineffectual protest against the principle of equal civil rights for whites and blacks laid down by the British government. The colony of Natal was then constituted, first (1845) as a dependency of Cape Colony, afterward (1856) as a separate colony. A part of the Boers, estimated at five hundred families, remained in it; but the majority, including all the fiercer spirits, recrossed the mountains (some forthwith, some five years later), with their cattle, and joined the mass of their fellow-emigrants who had remained on the plateaus of the interior. Meanwhile an immense influx of Kafirs, mostly from Zululand, although many belonged to other tribes whom the Zulus had conquered, repopulated the country, and in it the blacks have since been about ten times as numerous as the whites. Thus ended the Dutch republic of Natalia, after six years of troubled life. While it was fighting with the Zulus on the east, and other Kafirs on the west, it was torn by incessant intestine quarrels, and unable either to levy taxes, or to compel for any other purpose the obedience of its own citizens. But its victories over Dingaan's armies were feats of arms as remarkable as any South Africa has seen. The English are not generally slow to recognize the fine qualities of their adversaries, but they have done less than justice to the resolution and the daring which the Boers displayed in these early campaigns against the natives.[20]

With the British annexation of Natal ended the first of the attempts which the emigrant Boers have made to obtain access to the sea. It was a turning-point in the history of South Africa, for it secured to Great Britain that command of the coast which has ever since been seen to be more and more vital to her predominance, and it established a new centre of English settlement in a region till then neglected, from whence large territories, including Zululand and, recently, Southern Tongaland, have been acquired. Although Britain purported to act, and, indeed, in a certain sense did act, in self-defence, one cannot repress a feeling that the Boer settlers, who had occupied a territory they found vacant and had broken the power of the savage Zulu king, were hardly used. They ought, at any rate, to have had earlier notice of British intentions. But against this may be set the fact that the internal dissensions which rent the infant republic would have sooner or later brought it to the ground, compelling British intervention, and that the native races have fared better under British control than they seemed likely to do under that of the Boers, whose behaviour towards them, though little more harsh than that of the English colonists, has been much less considerate than that of the Imperial Government.

Hardly less troubled was the lot of the emigrants who had scattered themselves over the wide uplands that lie between the Orange River and the Limpopo. They, too, were engaged in incessant wars with the native tribes, who were, however, less formidable than the Zulus, and much cattle lifting went on upon both sides. Only one native tribe and one native chief stand out from the confused tangle of petty raids and forays which makes up (after the expulsion of the Matabili) the earlier annals of the Boer communities. This chief was the famous Moshesh, to speak of whose career I may digress for a moment from the thread of this narrative. The Kafir races have produced within this century three really remarkable men—men who, like Toussaint l'Ouverture in Hayti, and Kamehameha I. in Hawaii, will go down in history as instances of the gifts that sometimes show themselves even among the most backward races. Tshaka, the Zulu, was a warrior of extraordinary energy and ambition, whose power of organization enabled him to raise the Zulu army within a few years to a perfection of drill and discipline and a swiftness of movement which made them irresistible, except by Europeans. Khama, the chief who still reigns among the Bechuanas, has been a social reformer and administrator of judgment, tact, and firmness, who has kept his people in domestic peace and protected them from the dangerous influences which white civilization brings with it, while at the same time helping them onward toward such improvements as their character admits. Moshesh, chief of the Basutos, was born in the end of the eighteenth century. He belonged to a small clan which had suffered severely in the wars caused by the conquest of Tshaka, whose attacks upon the tribes nearest him had driven them upon other tribes, and brought slaughter and confusion upon the whole of South-eastern Africa. Though only a younger son, his enterprise and courage soon made him a leader. The progress of his power was aided by the skill he showed in selecting for his residence and stronghold a flat topped hill called Thaba Bosiyo, fenced round by cliffs, with pasture for his cattle, and several springs of water. In this impregnable stronghold, from which he drew his title of "chief of the mountain," he resisted repeated sieges by his native enemies and by the emigrant Boers. The exploits of Moshesh against his native foes soon brought adherents round him, and he became the head of that powerful tribe, largely formed out of the fragments of other tribes scattered and shattered by war, which is now called the Basuto. Unlike most Kafir warriors, he was singularly free from cruelty, and ruled his own people with a mildness which made him liked as well as respected. In 1832 he had the foresight to invite missionaries to come and settle among his people, and the following year saw the establishment of the mission of the Evangelical Society of Paris, whose members, some of them French, some Swiss, a few Scotch, have been the most potent factors in the subsequent history of the Basuto nation. When the inevitable collision between the Basutos and the white men arrived, Moshesh, partly through counsels of the missionaries, partly from his own prudence, did his best to avoid any fatal breach with the British Government. Nevertheless, he was several times engaged in war with the Orange River Boers, and once had to withstand the attack of a strong British force led by the governor of Cape Colony. But his tactful diplomacy made him a match for any European opponent, and carried him through every political danger. Moshesh died, full of years and honour, about twenty-eight years ago, having built up, out of the dispersed remnants of broken tribes, a nation which has now, under the guiding hand of the missionaries, and latterly of the British Government also, made greater progress in civilization and Christianity than any other Kafir race. Of its present condition I shall speak in a later chapter.

We may now turn back to pursue the story of the fortunes of the emigrant Boers who had remained on the landward or northerly side of the Quathlamba Range, or had returned thither from Natal. In 1843 they numbered not more than 15,000 persons all told, possibly less; for, though after 1838 fresh emigrants from the Colony had joined them, many had perished in the native wars. Subsequently, down to the end of 1847, these numbers were increased by others, who returned from Natal, displeased at the land settlement made there; and while these Natalians settled, some to the south-west, round Winburg, others farther north, in the region between Pretoria and the Vaal River, the earlier Boer occupants of the latter region moved off still farther north, some to Lydenburg, some to the Zoutpansberg and the country sloping to the Limpopo River. Thus the emigrant Dutch were now scattered over an area seven hundred miles long and three hundred miles wide, an area bounded on the south-east by the Quathlamba mountain-chain, but on the north and west divided by no natural limit from the great plain which stretches west to the Atlantic and north to the Zambesi. They were practically independent, for the colonial government did not attempt to interfere with their internal affairs. But Britain still claimed that they were, in strict intendment of law, British subjects,[21] and she gave no recognition to the governments they set up. To have established any kind of administration over so wide a territory would have been in any case difficult for so small a body of people, probably about four thousand adult males; but the characteristics which had enabled them to carry out their exodus from Cape Colony and their campaigns of conquest against the natives with so much success made the task of organization still more difficult. They had in an eminent degree "the defects of their qualities." They were self-reliant and individualistic to excess; they loved not only independence, but isolation; they were resolved to make their government absolutely popular, and little disposed to brook the control even of the authorities they had themselves created. They had, in fact, a genius for disobedience; their ideal, if one can attribute any ideals to them, was that of Israel in the days when every man did that which was right in his own eyes. It was only for warlike expeditions, which they had come to enjoy not only for the sake of the excitement, but also because they were able to enrich themselves by the capture of cattle, that they could be brought together, and only to their leaders in war that they would yield obedience. Very few had taken to agriculture, for which, indeed, the dry soil was seldom fitted, and the half-nomadic life of stock-farmers, each pasturing his cattle over great tracts of country, confirmed their dissociative instincts. However, the necessities of defence against the natives, and a common spirit of hostility to the claims of sovereignty which the British government had never renounced, kept them loosely together. Thus several small republican communities grew up. Each would have preferred to manage its affairs by a general meeting of the citizens, and sometimes tried to do so. But as the citizens dispersed themselves over the country, this became impossible, so authority, such slight authority as they could be induced to grant, was in each vested in a small elective assembly called the Volksraad or Council of the People.