The most striking sight at Kimberley, and one unique in the world, is furnished by the two so-called "compounds" in which the natives who work in the mines are housed and confined. They are huge inclosures, unroofed, but covered with a wire netting to prevent anything from being thrown out of them over the walls, and with a subterranean entrance to the adjoining mine. The mine is worked on the system of three eight-hour shifts, so that the workman is never more than eight hours together underground. Round the interior of the wall there are built sheds or huts, in which the natives live and sleep when not working. A hospital is also provided within the inclosure, as well as a school where the work-people can spend their leisure in learning to read and write. No spirits are sold—an example of removing temptation from the native which it is to be wished that the legislature of Cape Colony would follow. Every entrance is strictly guarded, and no visitors, white or native, are permitted, all supplies being obtained from the store within, kept by the Company. The De Beers mine compound contained at the time of my visit 2600 natives, belonging to a great variety of tribes, so that here one could see specimens of the different native types, from Natal and Pondoland on the south, to the shores of Lake Tanganyika in the far north. They come from every quarter, attracted by the high wages, usually eighteen to thirty shillings a week, and remain for three months or more and occasionally even for long periods, knowing, of course, that they have to submit to the precautions which are absolutely needed to prevent them from appropriating the diamonds they may happen to find in the course of their work. To encourage honesty, ten per cent, of the value of any stone which a workman may find is given to him if he brings it himself to the overseer, and the value of the stones on which this ten per cent, is paid is estimated at £400,000 in each year. Nevertheless, a certain number of thefts occur. I heard from a missionary an anecdote of a Basuto who, after his return from Kimberley, was describing how, on one occasion, his eye fell on a valuable diamond in the clay he was breaking into fragments. While he was endeavouring to pick it up he perceived the overseer approaching, and, having it by this time in his hand, was for a moment terribly frightened, the punishment for theft being very severe. The overseer, however, passed on. "And then," said the Basuto, "I knew that there was indeed a God, for He had preserved me."
When the native has earned the sum he wants—and his earnings accumulate quickly, since he can live upon very little—he takes his wages in English sovereigns, a coin now current through all Africa as far as Tanganyika, goes home to his own tribe, perhaps a month's or six weeks' journey distant, buys two oxen, buys with them a wife, and lives happily, or at least lazily, ever after. Here in the vast oblong compound one sees Zulus from Natal, Fingos, Pondos, Tembus, Basutos, Bechuanas, Gungunhana's subjects from the Portuguese territories, some few Matabili and Makalaka, and plenty of Zambesi boys from the tribes on both sides of that great river—a living ethnological collection such as can be examined nowhere else in South Africa. Even Bushmen, or at least natives with some Bushman blood in them, are not wanting. They live peaceably together, and amuse themselves in their several ways during their leisure hours. Besides games of chance we saw a game resembling "fox and geese," played with pebbles on a board; and music was being discoursed on two rude native instruments, the so-called "Kafir piano," made of pieces of iron of unequal length fastened side by side in a frame, and a still ruder contrivance of hard bits of wood, also of unequal size, which when struck by a stick emit different notes, the first beginnings of a tune. A very few were reading or writing letters, the rest busy with their cooking or talking to one another. Some tribes are incessant talkers, and in this strange mixing-pot of black men one may hear a dozen languages spoken as one passes from group to group.
The climate of Kimberley is healthy, and even bracing, though not pleasant when a north-west wind from the Kalahari Desert fills the air with sand and dust. Its dryness recommends it as a resort for consumptive patients, while the existence of a cultivated, though small, society, makes it a less doleful place of residence than are the sanatoria of the Karroo. The country round is, however, far from attractive. Save on the east, where there rises a line of hills just high enough to catch the lovely lights of evening and give colour and variety to the landscape, the prospect is monotonous in every direction. Like the ocean, this vast plain is so flat that you cannot see how vast it is. Except in the environs of the town, it is unbroken by tree or house, and in a part of those environs the masses of bluish-grey mine refuse that strew the ground give a dismal and even squalid air to the foreground of the view. One is reminded of the deserted coal-pits that surround Wigan, or the burnt-out and waste parts of the Black Country in South Staffordshire, though at Kimberley there is, happily, no coal-smoke or sulphurous fumes in the air, no cinder on the surface, no coal-dust to thicken the mud and blacken the roads. Some squalor one must have with that disturbance of nature which mining involves, but here the enlightened activity of the Company and the settlers has done its best to mitigate these evils by the planting of trees and orchards, by the taste which many of the private houses show, and by the provision here and there of open spaces for games.
From Kimberley the newly-opened railway runs one hundred and fifty miles farther north to Vryburg, till lately the capital of the Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland, annexed in 1895 to Cape Colony, and thence to Mafeking. After a few miles the line crosses the Vaal River, here a respectable stream for South Africa, since it has, even in the dry season, more water than the Cam at Cambridge, or the Cherwell at Oxford—perhaps as much as the Arno at Florence. It flows in a wide, rocky bed, about thirty feet below the level of the adjoining country. The country becomes more undulating as the line approaches the frontiers, first of the Orange Free State, and then of the Transvaal Republic, which bounds that State on the north. Bushes are seen, and presently trees, nearly all prickly mimosas, small and unattractive, but a pleasant relief from the bare flats of Kimberley, whence all the wood that formerly grew there has been taken for mine props and for fuel. There is more grass, too, and presently patches of cultivated land appear, where Kafirs grow maize, called in South Africa "mealies." Near the village of Taungs[43] a large native reservation is passed, where part of the Batlapin tribe is settled, and here a good deal of ground is tilled, though in September, when no crop is visible, one scarcely notices the fields, since they are entirely unenclosed, mere strips on the veldt, a little browner than the rest, and with fewer shrublets on them. But the landscape remains equally featureless and monotonous, redeemed only, as evening falls, by the tints of purple and violet which glow upon the low ridges or swells of ground that rise in the distance. Vryburg is a cheerful little place of brick walls and corrugated-iron roofs; Mafeking another such, still smaller and, being newer, with a still larger proportion of shanties to houses. At Mafeking the railway ended in 1895. It has since been opened all the way to Bulawayo. Here ends also the territory of Cape Colony, the rest of Bechuanaland to the north and west forming the so-called Bechuanaland Protectorate, which in October, 1895, was handed over by the Colonial Office, subject to certain restrictions and provisions for the benefit of the natives, to the British South Africa Company, within the sphere of whose operations it had, by the charter of 1890, been included. After the invasion of the Transvaal Republic by the expedition led by Dr. Jameson, which started from Pitsani, a few miles north of Mafeking, in December, 1895, this transfer was recalled, and Bechuanaland is now again under the direct control of the High Commissioner for South Africa as representing the British Crown. It is administered by magistrates, who have a force of police at their command, and by native chiefs, the most powerful and famous of whom is Khama.
Close to Mafeking itself there was living a chieftain whose long career is interwoven with many of the wars and raids that went on between the Boers and the natives from 1840 to 1885—Montsioa (pronounced "Montsiwa"), the head of a tribe of Barolongs. We were taken to see him, and found him sitting on a low chair under a tree in the midst of his huge native village, dressed in a red flannel shirt, a pair of corduroy trousers, and a broad grey felt hat with a jackal's tail stuck in it for ornament. His short woolly hair was white, and his chocolate-coloured skin, hard and tough like that of a rhinoceros, was covered with a fretwork of tiny wrinkles, such as one seldom sees on a European face. He was proud of his great age (eighty-five), and recalled the names of several British governors and generals during the last seventy years. But his chief interest was in inquiries (through his interpreter) regarding the Queen and events in England, and he amused his visitors by the diplomatic shrewdness with which, on being told that there had been a change of government in England, and a majority in favour of the new government, he observed "They have made a mistake; they could not have had a better government than the old one." He was a wealthy man, owning an immense number of the oxen which then carried on (for the cattle plague soon after destroyed most of them) the transport service between Mafeking and Bulawayo; and, from all I could learn, he ruled his people well, following the counsels of the British government, which in 1885 delivered him out of the hands of the Boers. He died in the middle of 1896.
At Mafeking we bade farewell to the railway, and prepared to plunge into the wilderness. We travelled in a light American waggon, having a Cape Dutchman as driver and a coloured "Cape boy" to help him, but no other attendants. The waggon had a small iron tank, which we filled with water that had been boiled to kill noxious germs, and with this we made our soup and tea. For provisions we carried biscuits, a little tinned soup and meat, and a few bottles of soda-water. These last proved to be the most useful part of our stores, for we found the stream-or well-water along the route undrinkable, and our mouths were often so parched that it was only by the help of sips of soda-water that we could manage to swallow the dry food. At the European stores which occur along the road, usually at intervals of thirty or forty miles, though sometimes there is none for sixty miles or more, we could often procure eggs and sometimes a lean chicken; so there was enough to support life, though seldom did we get what is called in America "a square meal."
Northward from Mafeking the country grows pretty. At first there are trees scattered picturesquely over the undulating pastures and sometimes forming woods—dry and open woods, yet welcome after the bareness which one has left behind. Here we passed the tiny group of houses called Pitsani, little dreaming that three months later it would become famous as the place where the Matabililand police were marshalled, and from which they started on their ill-starred march into the Transvaal, whose bare and forbidding hills we saw a few miles away to the east. Presently the ground becomes rougher, and the track winds among and under a succession of abrupt kopjes (pronounced "koppies"), mostly of granitic or gneissose rock. One is surprised that a heavy coach, and still heavier waggons, can so easily traverse such a country, for the road is only a track, for which art has done nothing save in cutting a way through the trees. It is one of the curious features of South Africa that the rocky hills have an unusual faculty for standing detached enough from one another to allow wheeled vehicles to pass between them, and the country is so dry that morasses, the obstacle which a driver chiefly fears in most countries, are here, for three-fourths of the year, not feared at all. This region of bold, craggy hills, sparsely wooded, usually rising only some few hundred feet out of the plateau itself, which is about 4000 feet above the sea, continues for about thirty miles. To it there succeeds a long stretch of flat land along the banks of the sluggish Notwani, the only perennial river of these parts; for the stream which on the map bears the name of Molopo, and runs away west into the desert to lose nearly all of its water in the sands, is in September dry, and one crosses its channel without noticing it. This Notwani, whose course is marked by a line of trees taller and greener than the rest, is at this season no better than a feeble brook, flowing slowly, with more mud than water. But it contains not only good-sized fish, the catching of which is the chief holiday diversion of these parts, but also crocodiles, which, generally dormant during the season of low water, are apt to obtrude themselves when they are least expected, and would make bathing dangerous, were there any temptation to bathe in such a thick green fluid. That men as well as cattle should drink it seems surprising, yet they do,—Europeans as well as natives,—and apparently with no bad effects. Below Palla, one hundred and ninety-five miles north of Mafeking, the Notwani joins the Limpopo, or Crocodile River, a much larger stream, which has come down from the Transvaal hills, and winds for nearly a thousand miles to the north and east before it falls into the Indian Ocean. It is here nearly as wide as the Thames at Henley, fordable in some places, and flowing very gently. The country all along this part of the road is perfectly flat, and just after the wet season very feverish, but it may be traversed with impunity from the end of May till December. It is a dull region—everywhere the same thin wood, through which one can see for about a quarter of a mile in every direction, consisting of two or three kinds of mimosa, all thorny, and all so spare and starved in their leafage that one gets little shade beneath them when at the midday halt shelter has to be sought from the formidable sun. On the parched ground there is an undergrowth of prickly shrubs, among which it is necessary to move with as much care as is needed in climbing a barbed-wire fence. When at night, camping out on the veldt, one gathers brushwood to light the cooking-fire, both the clothes and the hands of the novice come badly off. Huge ant-hills begin to appear, sometimes fifteen to twenty feet high and as many yards in circumference; but these large ones are all dead and may be of considerable age. In some places they are so high and steep, and stand so close together, that by joining them with an earthen rampart a strong fort might be made. When people begin to till the ground more largely than the natives now do, the soil heaped up in these great mounds will be found most serviceable. It consists of good mould, very friable, and when spread out over the service ought to prove fertile. In pulverizing the soil, the ants render here much the same kind of service which the earthworms do in Europe. There are no flowers at this season (end of September), and very little grass; yet men say that there is no better ranching country in all South Africa, and the oxen which one meets all the way, feeding round the spots where the transport-waggons have halted, evidently manage to pick up enough herbage to support them. The number of ox-waggons is surprising in so lonely a country, till one remembers that most of the food and drink, as well as of the furniture, agricultural and mining tools, and wood for building,—indeed, most of the necessaries and all the luxuries of life needed in Matabililand,—have to be sent up along this road, which is more used than the alternative route through the Transvaal from Pretoria via Pietersburg. No wonder all sorts of articles are costly in Bulawayo, when it has taken eight or ten weeks to bring them from the nearest railway terminus. The waggons do most of their journeying by night, allowing the oxen to rest during the heat of the day. One of the minor troubles of travel is the delay which ensues when one's vehicle meets a string of waggons, sometimes nearly a quarter of a mile long, for each has eight, nine, or even ten, span of oxen. They move very slowly, and at night, when the track happens to be a narrow one among trees, it is not easy to get past. Except for these waggons the road is lonely. One sees few natives, though the narrow footpaths crossing the wheel-track show that the country is inhabited. Here and there one passes a large native village, such as Ramoutsie and Machudi, but small hamlets are rare, and solitary huts still rarer. The country is of course very thinly peopled in proportion to its resources, for, what with the good pasture nearly everywhere and the fertile land in many places, it could support eight or ten times the number of Barolongs, Bamangwato, and other Bechuanas who now live scattered over its vast area. It is not the beasts of prey that are to blame for this, for, with the disappearance of game, lions have become extremely scarce, and leopards and lynxes are no longer common. Few quadrupeds are seen, and not many kinds of birds. Vultures, hawks, and a species something like a magpie, with four pretty white patches upon the wings and a long tail, are the commonest, together with bluish-grey guinea-fowl, pigeons and sometimes a small partridge. In some parts there are plenty of bustards, prized as dainties, but we saw very few. Away from the track some buck of the commoner kinds may still be found, and farther to the west there is still plenty of big game in the Kalahari Desert. But the region which we traversed is almost as unattractive to the sportsman as it is to the lover of beauty. It is, indeed, one of the dullest parts of South Africa.
The next stage in the journey is marked by Palapshwye, Khama's capital. This is the largest native town south of the Zambesi, for it has a population estimated at over 20,000. It came into being only a few years ago, when Khama, having returned from the exile to which his father had consigned him on account of his steadfast adherence to Christianity, and having succeeded to the chieftainship of the Bamangwato, moved the tribe from its previous dwelling-place at Shoshong, some seventy miles to the south-west, and fixed it here. Such migrations and foundations of new towns are not uncommon in South Africa, as they were not uncommon in India in the days of the Pathan and Mogul sovereigns, when each new occupant of the throne generally chose a new residence to fortify or adorn. Why this particular site was chosen I do not know. It stands high, and is free from malaria, and there are springs of water in the craggy hill behind; but the country all round is poor, rocky in some places, sandy in others, and less attractive than some other parts of Bechuanaland. We entered the town late at night, delayed by the deep sand on the track, and wandered about in the dark for a long while before, after knocking at one hut after another, we could persuade any native to come out and show us the way to the little cluster of European dwellings. The Kafirs are terribly afraid of the night, and fear the ghosts, which are to them the powers of darkness, more than they care for offers of money.
Khama was absent in England, pressing upon the Colonial Office his objections to the demand made by the British South Africa Company that his kingdom should be brought within the scope of their administration and a railway constructed through it from Mafeking to Bulawayo. Besides the natural wish of a monarch to retain his authority undiminished, he was moved by the desire to keep his subjects from the use of intoxicating spirits, a practice which the establishment of white men among them would make it difficult, if not impossible, to prevent. The main object of Khama's life and rule has been to keep his people from intoxicants. His feelings were expressed in a letter to a British Commissioner, in which he said: "I fear Lo Bengula less than I fear brandy. I fought against Lo Bengula and drove him back. He never gives me a sleepless night. But to fight against drink is to fight against demons and not men. I fear the white man's drink more than the assagais of the Matabili, which kill men's bodies. Drink puts devils into men and destroys their souls and bodies." Though a Christian himself, and giving the missionaries in his dominions every facility for their work, he has never attempted to make converts by force. A prohibition of the use of alcohol, however, has seemed to him to lie "within the sphere of governmental action," and he has, indeed, imperilled his throne by efforts to prevent the Bamangwato from making and drinking the stronger kind of Kafir beer, to which, like all natives, they were much addicted.[44] This beer is made from the so-called "Kafir-corn" (a grain resembling millet, commonly cultivated by the natives), and, though less strong than European-made spirits, is more intoxicating than German or even English ale. Khama's prohibition of it had, shortly before my visit, led to a revolt and threatened secession of a part of the tribe under his younger brother, Radiclani, and the royal reformer, (himself a strict total abstainer), had been compelled to give way, lamenting, in a pathetic speech, that his subjects would not suffer him to do what was best for them. Just about the same time, in England, the proposal of a measure to check the use of intoxicating liquors led to the overthrow of a great party and clouded the prospects of any temperance legislation. Alike in Britain and in Bechuanaland it is no light matter to interfere with a people's favourite indulgences. European spirits are, however, so much more deleterious than Kafir beer that Khama still fought hard against their introduction. The British South Africa Company forbids the sale of intoxicants to natives in its territory, but Khama naturally felt that when at railway stations and stores spirits were being freely consumed by whites, the difficulty of keeping them from natives would be largely increased. The Colonial Office gave leave for the construction of the railway, and brought Khama into closer relations with the Company, while securing to him a large reserve and establishing certain provisions for his benefit and that of his people. However, a few months later (in the beginning of 1896) the extension of the Company's powers as to Bechuanaland was recalled, and Khama is now under the direct protection of the Imperial Government.
His kingdom covers on the map a vast but ill-defined area, stretching on the west into the Kalahari Desert, and on the north-west into the thinly peopled country round Lake Ngami, where various small tribes live in practical independence. Sovereignty among African natives is tribal rather than territorial. Khama is the chief of the Bamangwato, rather than ruler of a country, and where the Bamangwato dwell there Khama reigns. A large proportion of them dwell in or near Palapshwye. Born about 1830, he is by far the most remarkable Kafir now living in South Africa, for he has shown a tact, prudence, and tenacity of purpose which would have done credit to a European statesman. He was converted to Christianity while still a boy, and had much persecution to endure at the hands of his heathen father, who at last banished him for refusing to take a second wife. What is not less remarkable, he has carried his Christianity into practice, evincing both a sense of honour as well as a humanity which has made him the special protector of the old and the weak, and even of the Bushmen who serve the Bamangwato. Regarded as fighters, his people are far inferior to the Matabili, and he was often in danger of being overpowered by the fierce and rapacious Lo Bengula. As early as 1862 he crossed assagais with and defeated a Matabili impi (war-band), earning the praise of the grim Mosilikatze, who said, "Khama is a man. There is no other man among the Bamangwato." Though frequently thereafter threatened and sometimes attacked, he succeeded, by his skilful policy, in avoiding any serious war until the fall of Lo Bengula in 1893. Seeing the tide of white conquest rising all round him, he has had a difficult problem to face, and it is not surprising that he has been less eager to welcome the Company and its railway than those who considered him the white man's friend had expected. The coming of the whites means not only the coming of liquor, but the gradual occupation of the large open tracts where the natives have hunted and pastured their cattle, with a consequent change in their mode of life, which, inevitable as it may be, a patriotic chief must naturally wish to delay.