Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

At the end of 1896, when the construction of the Beira railway from Chimoyo to Fort Salisbury began to be energetically prosecuted, it was found that to take the line past Mtali would involve a detour of some miles and a heavy gradient in crossing a ridge at the Christmas Pass. Mr. Rhodes promptly determined, instead of bringing the railway to the town, to bring the town to the railway. Liberal compensation was accordingly paid to all those who had built houses at old Mtali, and new Mtali was in 1897 founded on a carefully selected site seven miles away.

In 1895 there were about one hundred Europeans in the town of Mtali, all, except the Company's officials and the storekeepers, engaged in prospecting for or beginning to work gold-mines; for this is the centre of one of the first-explored gold districts, and sanguine hopes have been entertained of its reefs. We drove out to see some of the most promising in the Penha Longa Valley, six miles to the eastward. Here three sets of galleries have been cut, and the extraction of the metal was said to be ready to begin if the machinery could be brought up from the coast. As to the value and prospects of the reefs, over which I was most courteously shown by the gentlemen directing the operations, I could of course form no opinion. They are quartz-reefs, occurring in talcose and chloritic schistose rocks, and some of them maintain their direction for many miles. There is no better place than this valley[53] for examining the ancient gold-workings, for here they are of great size. Huge masses of alluvial soil in the bottom of the valley had evidently been turned over, and indeed a few labourers were still at work upon these. But there had also been extensive open cuttings all along the principal reefs, the traces of which are visible in the deep trenches following the line of the reefs up and down the slopes of the hills, and in the masses of rubbish thrown out beside them. Some of these cuttings are evidently recent, for the sides are in places steep and even abrupt, which they would not be if during many years the rains had been washing the earth down into the trenches. Moreover, iron implements have been found at the bottom, of modern shapes and very little oxidized. Probably, therefore, while some of these workings may be of great antiquity, others are quite recent—perhaps less than a century old. Such workings occur in many places over Mashonaland and Matabililand. They are always open; that is to say, the reef was worked down from the surface, not along a tunnel—a fact which has made people think that they were carried on by natives only; and they almost always stop when water is reached, as though the miners had known nothing of pumps. Tradition has nothing to say as to the workings; but we know that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a good deal of gold was brought down to the Portuguese coast stations; and when the Mashonaland pioneers came in 1890, there were a few Portuguese trying to get the metal out of the alluvial deposits along the stream banks. The reefs, which are now being followed by level shafts or galleries driven into the sides of the hills, are (in most cases at least) the same as those which the old miners attacked from above.

North of Penha Longa lies an attractive bit of country, near a place called Inyanga, which, unfortunately, we had not time to visit. It is a sort of tableland about thirty miles long by fifteen wide, from 6000 to 7000 feet above sea-level, with the highest summits reaching 8000 feet; and in respect of its height enjoys not only a keen and bracing air, but a copious rainfall, which makes it a specially good grazing country. It will probably one day become not only the choicest ranching-ground of East Central Africa, but also a health resort from the surrounding regions. At present it is quite empty, the land having been, as I was told, bought up by several syndicates, who are holding it in hope of a rise in prices. Here are the remarkable stone-cased pits, referred to in [Chapter IX.]; and here there are also numerous ancient artificial watercourses for irrigating the soil, which were constructed by some race of immigrants accustomed to artificial irrigation in their own country, for it would hardly have occurred to natives to construct such works here, where the rainfall is sufficient for the needs of tillage. Still farther to the north is a less elevated region, remarkable for the traces it bears of having been at one time densely populated. Tillage was so extensive that the very hillsides were built up into terraces to be planted with crops. To-day there are hardly any inhabitants, for a good many years ago Mzila, the father of Gungunhana, chief of a fierce and powerful tribe which lives on the lower course of the Sabi River, raided all this country, and in successive invasions killed off or chased away the whole population. Such wholesale slaughter and devastation is no uncommon thing in the annals of South Africa. Tshaka, the uncle of Cetewayo, annihilated the inhabitants over immense tracts round Zululand. And in comparison with such bloodthirsty methods the Assyrian plan of deporting conquered populations from their homes to some distant land may have seemed, and indeed may have been, a substantial step in human progress. However, just when Tshaka was massacring his Kafir neighbours, the Turks were massacring the Christians of Chios, and at the time of our visit, in October, 1895, Abdul-Hamid II. was beginning his massacres in Asia Minor; so perhaps the less said about progress the better.

The track from Mtali to the sea crosses a high ridge at a point called the Christmas Pass, and descends into Portuguese territory through some very noble and varied mountain scenery.[54] It reminded us sometimes of the Italian slopes of the Eastern Alps, sometimes of the best parts of the Perthshire Highlands, though of course it was rather in the forms of hill and valley than in the trees that clothed their slopes that this resemblance lay. The first Portuguese settlement is at a place called Macequece, or Massikessi, where the pioneers of the British South Africa Company conducted in 1891 a little war on their own account with the Portuguese, whose superior forces they routed. The Portuguese claimed all this inland region on the Hinterland principle, in respect of their ownership of the coast, while the British pioneers relied on the fact that their adversaries had never established a really effective occupation. The dispute was carried by the Portuguese Mozambique Company into the English courts of law,[55] and was ultimately adjusted diplomatically by an agreement between the British and Portuguese governments, signed June 11, 1891. The delimitation of the frontiers was not fully completed in this region till 1896, but Massikessi was by the treaty of 1891 left to Portugal. After Massikessi the mountains recede, and wide plains begin to open to the east and south. As the country sinks, the temperature rises and the air grows heavier and less keen. The ground is covered with wood, and in the woods along the streams a few palms and bamboos and other tropical forms of vegetation begin to appear.[56] But we found the woods in many places stripped bare. Terrible swarms of locusts had passed, leaving a track of dismal bareness. It had been a dry year, too, and even what grass the locusts had spared was thin and withered. Thus for want of food the cattle had perished. All along the road from Mtali we saw oxen lying dead, often by some pool in a brook, to which they had staggered to drink, and where they lay down to die. We encountered few waggons, and those few were almost all standing with the team unyoked, some of their beasts dead or sickly, some, too weak to draw the load farther, obliged to stand idly where they had halted till the animals should regain strength, or fresh oxen be procured. This is what a visitation of locusts means, and this is how the progress of a country is retarded by the stoppage of the only means of transport.

We reached the terminus of the railway at Chimoyo after two days' long and fatiguing travel from Mtali, including an upset of our vehicle in descending a steep donga to the bed of a streamlet—an upset which might easily have proved serious, but gave us nothing worse than a few bruises. The custom being to start a train in the afternoon and run it through the night,—all trains were then special,—we had plenty of time to look round the place, and fortunately found a comfortable store and a most genial Scottish landlord from Banffshire. There was, however, nothing to see, not even Portuguese local colour; for though Chimoyo is well within the Portuguese frontier, the village is purely English, and was living by the transport service which then made the end of the railway its starting-point for the territories of the Company. Now that it has become merely a station, the railway being now (1899) open all the way to Fort Salisbury, it may have dwindled away. Having nothing else to do, I climbed through the sultry noon to the top of the nearest kopje, a steep granite hill which, as I was afterwards told, is a favourite "house of call" for lions. No forest monarch, however, presented himself to welcome me, and I was left to enjoy the view alone. It was striking. Guarding the western horizon rose the long chain of mountains from which we had emerged stretching in a huge arc from south-east to north, with some bold outlying peaks flung forward from the main mass, all by their sharp, stern outlines, in which similar forms were constantly repeated, showing that they were built of the same hard crystalline rocks. Beneath, the country spread out in a vast, wooded plain, green or brown, according as the wood was denser in one part and sparser in another. It was still low wood, with no sense of tropical luxuriance about it, and the ground still dry, with not a glimpse of water anywhere. Here and there out of this sea of forest rose isolated heights whose abrupt craggy tops glistened in the sunlight. To the east the plain fell slowly away to an immensely distant horizon, where lay the deadly flats that border the Indian Ocean. Except where the iron roofs of the huts at Chimoyo shone, there was not a sign of human dwelling or human labour through this great wild country, lying still and monotonous under a cloudless sky. It has been a wilderness from the beginning of the world until now, traversed, no doubt, many centuries ago by the gold-seekers whose favourite track went up from the coast past Great Zimbabwye into what is now Matabililand, traversed again occasionally in later times by Portuguese traders, but in no wise altered during these thousands of years from its original aspect. Now at last its turn has come. A new race of gold-seekers have built a railway, and along the railway, wherever there are not swamps to breed fever, the land will be taken for farms, and the woods will be cut down, and the wild beasts will slink away, and trading-posts will grow into villages, and the journey from Beira to Bulawayo will become as easy and familiar as is to-day the journey from Chicago to San Francisco, through a country which a century ago was as little known as this African wilderness.

The railway from Chimoyo to the sea had in 1895 one of the narrowest gauges in the world (two feet), and its tiny locomotives and cars wore almost a toy air. It has since been widened to the three feet six gauge of the other South African lines. The construction was difficult, for the swampy lands along the coast are largely under water during the rains, but the gain to the country has been enormous. Not only has the railway abridged the toilsome and costly ox transport of goods from Beira to the edge of the high country—a transport whose difficulty lay not merely in the badness of the track through ground almost impassable during and after the rains, but also in the prevalence of the tsetse-fly, whose bite is fatal to cattle. It has enabled travellers to cross in a few hours one of the most unhealthy regions in the world, most of which is infested by fevers in and after the wet season, and the lower parts of which are so malarious that few who spend three nights in them, even in the dry season, escape an attack. The banks of the rivers and other damper spots will continue to breed this curse of maritime Africa, although things will doubtless improve when the country grows more settled, and the marshes have been drained, and the long grass has been eaten down by cattle; for when the tsetse-fly has ceased to be dangerous cattle may come in. It appears that the fly kills cattle not by anything poisonous in its bite, but because it communicates to them a minute parasite which lives in the blood of some kinds of game, and which is more pernicious to cattle than it is to the game. Accordingly, when the game vanishes, the fly either vanishes also or becomes comparatively harmless. Already places once infested by it have by the disappearance of the game become available for ranching. Recent researches seem to have shown that malarial fevers in man are also due to an animal parasite: and this discovery is thought to damp the hope, which I remember to have heard Mr. Darwin express, that the fever-stricken regions of the tropics might become safe by ascertaining what the fever microbe is and securing men against it by inoculation. Those, however, who hold that this parasite is carried into the blood of man by a mosquito seem to entertain some hope that drainage may in some places almost expunge the mosquito. The railway was made entirely by native labour gathered from the surrounding regions, and the contractors told me they had less difficulty with the Kafirs than they expected. It paid, however, a heavy toll in European life. Not one of the engineers and foremen escaped fever, and many died. The risk for those employed on the line is of course now much slighter, because the worst spots are known and there are now houses to sleep in.

Shortly after leaving Chimoyo the train ran through a swarm of locusts miles long. It was a beautiful sight. The creatures flash like red snowflakes in the sun; the air glitters with their gauzy wings. But it is also terrible. An earthquake or a volcanic eruption is hardly more destructive and hardly more irresistible. The swarms may be combated when the insect walks along the ground, for then trenches may be dug into which the advancing host falls. But when it flies nothing can stop it. It is noteworthy that for eighteen years prior to the arrival of the British pioneers in 1890 there had been no great swarms. Since that year there have been several; so the Kafir thinks that it is the white man's coming that has provoked the powers of evil to send this plague as well as the murrain.

We ran down the one hundred and eighteen miles from Chimoyo to Fontesvilla during the afternoon and night, halting for three or four hours for dinner at a clearing where an inn and store have been built. The pace was from ten to fifteen miles an hour. After the first twenty miles, during which one still has glimpses of the strange isolated peaks that spring up here and there from the plain, the scenery becomes rather monotonous, for the line runs most of the way through thick forest, the trees higher than those of the interior, yet not of any remarkable beauty. For the last twenty-five miles the railway traverses a dead and dreary flat. The gentle rise of the ground to the west conceals even the outlying spurs of the great range behind, and to the north and south there is an unbroken level. The soil is said to be generally poor, a very thin layer of vegetable mould lying over sand, and the trees are few and seldom tall. It is a country full of all sorts of game, from buffaloes, elands, and koodoos downward to the small antelopes; and as game abounds, so also do lions abound. The early morning is the time when most of these creatures go out to feed, and we strained our eyes as soon as there was light enough to make them out from the car windows. But beyond some wild pig and hartebeest, and a few of the smaller antelopes, nothing could be discerned upon the pastures or among the tree clumps. Perhaps the creatures have begun to learn that the railroad brings their enemies, and keep far away from it. A year after our visit the murrain, to which I have already referred, appeared in this region, and wrought fearful devastation among the wild animals, especially the buffaloes.

The railway now runs all the way to the port of Beira, but in October, 1895, came to an end at a place called Fontesvilla, on the Pungwe River, near the highest point to which the tide rises. We had therefore to take to the water in order to reach Beira, where a German steamer was timed to call two days later; and our friends in Mashonaland had prepared us to expect some disagreeable experiences on the river, warning us not to assume that twelve or fourteen hours would be enough, even in a steamer, to accomplish the fifty miles of navigation that lie between Fontesvilla and the sea. They had been specially insistent that we should remain in Fontesvilla itself no longer than was absolutely necessary; for Fontesvilla has the reputation of being the most unhealthy spot in all this unhealthy country. We were told that the preceding year had been a salubrious one, for only forty-two per cent. of the European residents had died. There may have been in these figures, when closely scrutinized, some element of exaggeration, but the truth they were intended to convey is beyond dispute; and the bright young assistant superintendent of the railroad was mentioned, with evident wonder, as the only person who had been more than three months in the place without a bad attack of fever. Fontesvilla has not the externals of a charnel-house. It consists of seven or eight scattered frame houses, with roofs of corrugated iron, set in a dull, featureless flat on the banks of a muddy river. The air is sultry and depressing, but has not that foul swamp smell with which Poti, on the Black Sea, reeks, the most malarious spot I had ever before visited. Nor was there much stagnant water visible; indeed, the ground seemed dry, though there are marshes hidden among the woods on the other side of the river. As neither of the steamers that ply on the Pungwe could come up at neap tides, and with the stream low,—for the rains had not yet set in,—the young superintendent (to whose friendly help we were much beholden) had bespoken a rowboat to come up for us from the lower part of the river. After waiting from eight till half-past ten o'clock for this boat, we began to fear it had failed us, and, hastily engaging a small two-oared one that lay by the bank, set off in it down the stream. Fortunately after two and a half miles the other boat, a heavy old tub, was seen slowly making her way upward, having on board the captain of the little steam-launch, the launch herself being obliged to remain much lower down the river. We transferred ourselves and our effects to this boat, and floated gaily down, thinking our troubles over.

The Pungwe is here about one hundred yards wide, but very shallow, and with its water so turbid that we could not see the bottom where the depth exceeded two feet. It was noon; the breeze had dropped, and the sun was so strong that we gladly took refuge in the little cabin or rather covered box—a sort of hen coop—at the stern. The stream and the tide were with us, and we had four native rowers, but our craft was so heavy that we accomplished less than two miles an hour. As the channel grew wider and the current spread itself hither and thither over sand banks, the bed became more shallow, and from time to time we grounded. When this happened, the native rowers jumped into the water and pushed or pulled the boat along. The farther down we went, and the more the river widened, so much the more often did we take the bottom, and the harder did we find it to get afloat again. Twelve miles below Fontesvilla, a river called the Bigimiti comes in on the right, and at its mouth we took on board a bold young English sportsman with the skin of a huge lion. Below the confluence, where a maze of sand banks encumbers the channel, we encountered a strong easterly breeze. The big clumsy boat made scarcely any way against it, and stuck upon the sand so often that the Kafirs, who certainly worked with a will, were more than half the time in the water up to their knees, tugging and shoving to get her off. Meanwhile the tide, what there was of it, was ebbing fast, and the captain admitted that if we did not get across these shoals within half an hour we should certainly lie fast upon them till next morning at least, and how much longer no one could tell. It was not a pleasant prospect, for we had no food except some biscuits and a tin of cocoa, and a night on the Pungwe, with pestiferous swamps all round, meant almost certainly an attack of fever. Nothing, however, could be done beyond what the captain and the Kafirs were doing, so that suspense was weighted by no sense of personal responsibility. We moved alternately from stern to bow, and back from bow to stern, to lighten the boat at one end or the other, and looked to windward to see from the sharp curl of the waves whether the gusts which stopped our progress were freshening further. Fortunately they abated. Just as the captain seemed to be giving up hope—the only fault we had with him was that his face revealed too plainly his anxieties—we felt ourselves glide off into a deeper channel; the Kafirs jumped in and smote the dark-brown current with their oars, and the prospect of a restful night at Beira rose once more before us. But our difficulties were not quite over, for we grounded several times afterwards, and progress was so slow that it seemed very doubtful whether we should find and reach before dark the little steam-launch that had come up to meet us.