Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

First, a few words about the voyage. You can go to South Africa either by one of the great British lines across the Atlantic to the ports of Cape Colony and Natal, or by the German line through the Red Sea and along the East African coast to Beira or Delagoa Bay. The steamers of the German line take thirty days from Port Said to Beira, and two days more to Delagoa Bay. They are good boats, though much smaller than those of the two chief English lines to the Cape (the Castle and the Union), and the voyage from Port Said has the advantage of being, at most times of the year, a smooth one pretty nearly the whole way. They touch at Aden, Zanzibar, Dar-es-Salaam, and Quilimane, and give an opportunity of seeing those places. But all along the East African coast the heat is excessive—a damp, depressing heat. And the whole time required to reach Beira from England, even if one travels by rail from Calais to Marseilles, Brindisi, or Naples, and takes a British steamer thence to Port Said, joining the German boat at the latter port, is more than five weeks. Nearly everybody, therefore, chooses the Atlantic route from Southampton or London to the Cape. The Atlantic voyage, which lasts from sixteen to twenty days, is, on the whole, a pleasant and healthful one. The steamers, both those of the Castle Line and those of the Union Line—and the same may be said for the New Zealand Line and the Aberdeen Line which plies to Australia, both of these touching at the Cape—are comfortable and well appointed, and I cannot imagine any navigation more scrupulously careful than that which I saw on board the Hawarden Castle, by which I went out and returned. During the winter and spring months there is often pretty rough weather from England as far as Madeira. But from that island onward, or at any rate from the Canaries onward, one has usually a fairly smooth sea with moderate breezes till within two or three days of Cape Town, when head winds are frequently encountered. Nor is the heat excessive. Except during the two days between Cape Verde and the equator, it is never more than what one can enjoy during the day and tolerate during the night. One sees land only at Madeira, where the steamer coals for a few hours; at the picturesque Canary Islands, between which she passes, gaining, if the weather be clear, a superb view of the magnificent Peak of Teneriffe; and at Cape Verde, where she runs (in the daytime) within a few miles of the African coast. Those who enjoy the colours of the sea and of the sea skies, and to whom the absence of letters, telegrams, and newspapers is welcome, will find few more agreeable ways of passing a fortnight. After Cape Finisterre very few vessels are seen. After Madeira every night reveals new stars rising from the ocean as our own begin to vanish.

Tutte le stolle già dell' altro polo
Vedea la notte, e il nostro tanto basso
Che non sorgeva fuor del marin suolo,[40]

as Ulysses says, in Dante's poem, of his voyage to the southern hemisphere. The pleasure of watching unfamiliar constellations rise from the east and sweep across the sky, is a keen one, which often kept us late from sleep.

For a few hours only before reaching Cape Town does one discern on the eastern horizon the stern grey mountains that rise along the barren coast. A nobler site for a city and a naval stronghold than that of the capital of South Africa can hardly be imagined. It rivals Gibraltar and Constantinople, Bombay and San Francisco. Immediately behind the town, which lies along the sea, the majestic mass of Table Mountain rises to a height of 3600 feet, a steep and partly wooded slope capped by a long line of sheer sandstone precipices more than 1000 feet high, and flanked to right and left by bold, isolated peaks. The beautiful sweep of the bay in front, the towering crags behind, and the romantic pinnacles which rise on either side, make a landscape that no one who has seen it can forget. The town itself is disappointing. It has preserved very little of its old Dutch character. The miniature canals which once traversed it are gone. The streets, except two, are rather narrow, and bordered by low houses; nor is there much to admire in the buildings, except the handsome Parliament House, the new post office, and the offices of the Standard Bank. The immediate suburbs, inhabited chiefly by Malays and other coloured people, are mean. But the neighbourhood is extremely attractive. To the north-west Table Mountain and its spurs descend steeply to the sea, and the road which runs along the beach past the village of Sea Point offers a long series of striking views of shore and crag. It is on the east, however, that the most beautiful spots lie. Five miles from Cape Town and connected with it by railway, the village of Rondebosch nestles under the angle of Table Mountain, and a mile farther along the line is the little town of Wynberg. Round these places, or between them and Cape Town, nearly all the richer, and a great many even of the poorer, white people of Cape Town live. The roads are bordered by pretty villas, whose grounds, concealed by no walls, are filled with magnolias and other flowering trees and shrubs. Avenues of tall pines or of superb oaks, planted by the Dutch in the last century, run here and there along the by-roads. Immediately above, the grey precipices of Table Mountain tower into the air, while in the opposite direction a break in the woods shows in the far distance the sharp summits, snow-tipped during the winter months, of the lofty range of the Hottentots Holland Mountains. It would be hard to find anywhere, even in Italy or the Pyrenees, more exquisite combinations of soft and cultivated landscape with grand mountain forms than this part of the Cape peninsula presents. Perhaps the most charming nook of all is where the quaint old Dutch farmhouse of Groot Constantia[41] stands among its vineyards, about ten miles from Cape Town. Behind it is the range which connects the hills of Simon's Bay with Table Mountain; its declivities are at this point covered with the graceful silver-tree, whose glistening foliage shines brighter than that of the European olive. Beneath the farmhouse are the vineyards which produce the famous sweet wine that bears the name of Constantia, sloping gently towards the waters of False Bay, whose farther side is guarded by a wall of frowning peaks, while the deep blue misty ocean opens in the distance. It is a landscape unlike anything one can see in Europe, and though the light in sea and sky is brilliant, the brilliance is on this coast soft and mellow, unlike the clear sharp radiance of the arid interior.

No one who cares for natural scenery quits Cape Town without ascending Table Mountain, whose summit affords not only a very beautiful and extensive prospect over the surrounding country, but a striking ocean view. Looking down the narrow gullies that descend from the top, one sees the intensely blue sea closing them below, framed between their jutting crags, while on the other side the busy streets and wharves of Cape Town lie directly under the eye, and one can discover the vehicles in the streets and the trees in the Governor's garden. The heaths and other flowers and shrubs that grow profusely over the wide top, which is not flat, as he who looks at it from the sea fancies, but cut up by glens, with here and there lake reservoirs in the hollows, are very lovely, and give a novel and peculiar charm to this ascent.[42] Nor is the excursion to Cape Point, the real Cape of Storms of Bartholomew Diaz, and the Cape of Good Hope of Vasco da Gama, less beautiful. An hour in the railway brings one to Simon's Bay, the station of the British naval squadron, a small but fairly well sheltered inlet under high hills. From this one drives for four hours over a very rough track through a lonely and silent country, sometimes sandy, sometimes thick with brushwood, but everywhere decked with brilliant flowers, to the Cape, a magnificent headland rising almost vertically from the ocean to a height of 800 feet. Long, heavy surges are always foaming on the rocks below and nowhere, even on this troubled coast, where the hot Mozambique current meets a stream of cold Antarctic water, do gales more often howl and shriek than round these rocky pinnacles. One can well understand the terror with which the Portuguese sailors five centuries ago used to see the grim headland loom up through the clouds driven by the strong south-easters, that kept them struggling for days or weeks to round the cape that marked their way to India. But Sir Francis Drake, who passed it coming home westward from his ever-famous voyage round the world, had a more auspicious experience: "We ran hard aboard the Cape, finding the report of the Portuguese to be most false, who affirm that it is the most dangerous cape of the world, never without intolerable storms and present danger to travellers who come near the same. This cape is a most stately thing, and the finest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth."

A third excursion, which well repays the traveller, is to the quaint little town of Stellenbosch, founded by Adrian van der Stel (Governor of the Colony) in 1680, and called after himself and his wife, whose name was Bosch. It is built in genuine Dutch style, with straight streets of two-storied white houses, the windows nearly flush with the walls as in Holland, the wood-work and the green shutters those of Holland, and long lines of dark-green oaks shading the foot-walks on each side the street. Soft, rich pastures all round—for there is plenty of water brought down from the hills—complete the resemblance to a Hobbema landscape; and it is only when one looks up and sees rocky mountains soaring behind into the sky that the illusion is broken. It is here, and in the town of Swellendam, farther east, and in some of the villages that lie northward of Stellenbosch in the western province, that the Dutch element has remained strongest and has best retained its ancient ways and customs.

We have, however, delayed long enough round the capital, and it is time to plunge into the interior by the railway. Sixty miles to the north of Cape Town, the trunk-line, which has threaded its way through the valleys of an outlying range of mountains, reaches the foot of the great inner table-land at a place called Hex River, and in an hour climbs by zigzags up an incline which is in some places as steep as one in thirty-five, mounting 1600 feet into a desert land. Rugged brown mountains, sometimes craggy, sometimes covered with masses of loose stone, rise above the lower ground, now a valley, now an open plain, through which the railway takes its eastward way. The bushes, which had been tall and covered with blossoms on the ascent, are now stunted, bearing small and usually withered flowers. Hardly an herb, and not a blade of grass, is to be seen on the ground, which is sometimes of clay, baked hard by the sun, sometimes of sand, without a drop of water anywhere. Yet water flows when, now and then in the summer, a storm breaks, or a few showers come; and then nature revives, and for a week or two flowers spring from the soil and a fresher green comes upon the bushes. In a landscape so arid one hears with surprise that the land is worth ten shillings an acre for one or two of the smallest shrubs give feed for sheep, and there are wells scattered about sufficient for the flocks. The farms are large, usually of at least six thousand acres, so one seldom sees a farmhouse. The farmers are all of Boer stock. They lead a lonely life in a silent and melancholy nature, but their habitual gravity has not made them unsocial, for they are fond of riding or driving in their waggons to visit one another on all occasions of festivity or mourning. Every ten or fifteen miles there is a station, and here the British element in the population appears, chiefly occupied in store-keeping. At Matjesfontein one finds an hotel and a number of small villas built to serve as a health resort. Wells surrounded by Australian gums planted for shade, make a little oasis in the desert. Farther east the village of Beaufort West, the only place along the line that aspires to be called a town, boasts a church with a spire, and has one or two streets, though most of its houses are stuck down irregularly over a surface covered with broken bottles and empty sardine and preserved meat tins. Here, too, there is a large, shallow pond of water, and here people with weak lungs come to breathe the keen, dry, invigorating air. Of its efficacy there is no doubt, but one would think that the want of society and of variety would be almost as depressing as the air is stimulating. The prospects have a certain beauty, for beyond the wide, bare, greyish-brown plain to the south sharp mountains stand up, which take at sunrise and sunset delightful tints of blue and purple, and the sense of a vast expanse on earth beneath and in heaven above has something strange and solemn. But the monotony of perpetual sunlight upon a landscape which has no foregrounds and never changes, save in colour, must be trying to those who have no occupation except that of getting well.

This Karroo scenery continues, with little variation, for hundreds of miles. To the north of the railway, which runs mostly from west to east, the aspect of the country is much the same, dry, stony, and forbidding, for full three hundred miles to the Orange River, and beyond that into Namaqualand. Except for the few houses at some of the stations, it seems a wilderness; yet here and there stand tiny villages, connected by lines of coach with the railway, whither the neighbouring farmers come to supply their household needs. But as the train moves farther and farther eastward the features of nature grow less austere. The mountains by degrees recede or sink; the country becomes more of an open plain, though with isolated hills visible here and there over its expanse. It is also slightly greener, and after the rains some little grass springs up, besides the low, succulent shrub which the sheep eat. At De Aar Junction, five hundred miles from Cape Town, the line to Bloemfontein and the Transvaal branches off to the right. We follow the western branch over a vast slightly undulating plain to the Orange River, here a perennial stream, and at six hundred and forty-six miles from Cape Town find ourselves once more in the haunts of men at Kimberley.

Kimberley, the city of diamonds, has had a curious history. In 1869-70 the precious crystals, first found in 1867 near the Orange River, were discovered here in considerable quantity. A sudden rush of adventurers from all parts of South Africa, as well as from Europe, gave it in three or four years a population of many thousands. The mining claims were then and for some years afterwards in the hands of a large number of persons and companies who had opened them or purchased them. The competition of these independent miner-workers was bringing down the price of the stones, and the waste or leakage arising from the theft of stones by the native work-people, who sold them to European I.D.B. (illicit diamond-buyers), seriously reduced the profits of mining. It was soon seen that the consolidation of the various concerns would effect enormous savings and form the only means of keeping up the price of diamonds. The process of amalgamating the claims and interests and merging them in one huge corporation was completed in 1885, chiefly by the skill and boldness of Mr. Cecil J. Rhodes, who had gone to Natal for his health shortly before 1870, and came up to Kimberley in the first months of the rush. Since the amalgamation, the great corporation called the De Beers Consolidated Mining Company (which now owns nearly all the mines), has reduced the output of diamonds to just such an annual amount as experience has proved that Europe and America—the United States is the chief market—are able to take at a price high enough to leave a large profit. By this means the price has been well maintained. This policy, however, has incidentally reduced the population of Kimberley. One powerful corporation, with its comparatively small staff of employees, has taken the place of the crowd of independent adventurers of the old days, and some of the mines have been closed because the rest are sufficient to produce as many diamonds as it is deemed prudent to put upon the market. Thus there are now only about 10,000 people in the town, and some of the poorer quarters are almost deserted, the stores and taverns, as well as the shanty dwellings, empty and falling to pieces. In the better quarters, however, the old roughness has been replaced by order and comfort. Many of the best villas are embowered in groves of tall Australian gum-trees, while the streets and roads are bordered either by gum-trees or by hedges of prickly-pear or agave. The streets are wide, and most of the houses are detached and of one story, built like Indian bungalows; so the town covers an area quite disproportionate to its population, and gives the impression of an extensive city. For the residence of the Europeans employed in the two great mines which the Company works, a suburb called Kenilworth has been built by Mr. Rhodes, where neat houses of four, five, or six rooms each stand in handsome avenues planted with Australian trees, the so-called "beefwood" and the red gum. They are not beautiful trees, but they have the merit of growing very fast, and any shade is welcome.

The diamonds are found in beds of clay, of which there are two: a yellow and softish clay, lying on or near the surface, and a hard blue clay, lying deeper. These clays, which are usually covered by a thin layer of calcareous rock, are supposed to be the remains of mud-pits due to volcanic action, such as the so-called mud-volcanoes of Iceland, near Námaskard, on the banks of Lake Myvatn, or such as the similar boiling mud-pits of the Yellowstone Park country, called from their brilliant colours the "Paint-pots." It is, at any rate, from circular clay basins, inclosed within a harder rock (basalt, black shale, and quartzite) that the stones are obtained. Some of the mines are worked even to a depth of 1200 feet by shafts and subterranean galleries. Some are open, and these, particularly that called the Wesselton Mine, are an interesting sight. This deep hollow, one-third of a mile in circumference and 100 feet deep, inclosed by a strong fence of barbed wire, is filled by a swarm of active Kafir workmen, cleaving the "hard blue" with pickaxes, piling it up on barrows, and carrying it off to the wide fields; where it is left exposed to the sun, and, during three months, to the rain. Having been thus subjected to a natural decomposition, it is the more readily brought by the pickaxe into smaller fragments before being sent to the mills, where it is crushed, pulverized, and finally washed to get at the stones. Nowhere in the world does the hidden wealth of the soil and the element of chance in its discovery strike one so forcibly as here, where you are shown a piece of ground a few acres in extent, and are told, "Out of this pit diamonds of the value of £12,000,000 have been taken." Twenty-six years ago the ground might have been bought for £50.