Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

Less than a mile from the peak on which we sat, we could descry, in the precipice which surrounds the great corrie, the black mouth of a cave. It was the den of the cannibal chief Machacha, whose name has clung to the mountain, and who established himself there seventy years ago, when the ravages of Tshaka, the Zulu king, had driven the Kafir tribes of Natal to seek safety in flight, and reduced some among them, for want of other food, to take to human flesh. Before that time this mountain-land had been inhabited only by wandering Bushmen, who have left marks of their presence in pictures on the rocks. Here and there among the crags jabbering baboons darted about, and great hawks sailed in circles above us. Otherwise we had seen no living wild creature since we left the pastures of the valley.

The summit of Machacha is composed of a dark igneous rock, apparently a sort of amygdaloidal trap, with white and greenish calcareous crystals scattered through it. The height is given on the maps as 11,000 feet; but so far as one could judge by frequent observations from below and by calculations made during the ascent, I should think it not more than 10,500. It seems to be the culminating point of the Maluti range, but may be exceeded in height by Mont aux Sources, eighty miles off to the north-east, where Basutoland touches Natal on the one side and the Free State on the other.

Descending by a somewhat more direct route, which we struck out for ourselves, we rejoined our horses at the pass where we had left them three hours before, and from there plunged down the kloof, or ravine, between the precipices which led to the foot of the mountain. It was here too steep to ride; indeed, it was about as steep a slope as one can descend on foot with comfort, the angle being in some places fully 40° A grand piece of scenery, for the dark rock walls rose menacing on either hand; and also a beautiful one, for the flowers, especially two brilliant shrubby geraniums, were profuse and gorgeous in hue. At the bottom, after a very rough scramble, we mounted our horses, and hastened along to escape the thunderstorm which was now nearly upon us, and which presently drove us for shelter into a native hut, where a Basuto woman, with her infant hanging in a cloth on her back, was grinding corn between two stones. She went on with her work, and presently addressed my wife, asking (as was explained to us) for a piece of soap wherewith to smear her face, presumably as a more fragrant substitute for the clay or ochre with which the Basuto ladies cover their bodies. The hut was clean and sweet, and, indeed, all through Basutoland we were struck by the neat finish of the dwellings and of the reed fences which inclosed them. When the storm had passed away over the mountains, "growling and muttering into other lands," and the vast horizon was again flooded with evening sunshine, we rode swiftly away, first over the rolling plateau we had traversed in the forenoon, then turning to the north along the top of the sandstone cliffs that inclose the valley of the Kaloe River, where Bushman pictures adorn the caves. At last as night fell, we dropped into the valley of the Kaloe itself, and so slowly through the darkness, for the horses were tired, and the track (which crosses the river four times) was rough and stony, came at last to the mission station of Thaba Bosiyo. Here we were welcomed by the Swiss pastor in charge of the mission, Mr. E. Jacottet, whose collection of Basuto and Barotse popular tales have made him well known to the students of folk-lore. No man knows the Basutos better than he and his colleague, Mr. Dyke of Morija; and what they told us was of the highest interest. Next day was Sunday, and gave us the opportunity of seeing a large congregation of Basuto converts and of hearing their singing, the excellence of which reminded us of the singing of negro congregations in the Southern States of America. We had also two interesting visits. One was from an elderly Basuto magnate of the neighbourhood, who was extremely anxious to know if Queen Victoria really existed, or was a mere figment of the British Government. He had met many white men, he told us, but none of them had ever set eyes on the Queen, and he could not imagine how it was possible that a great chieftainess should not be seen by her people. We satisfied his curiosity by giving full details of the times, places, and manner in which the British sovereign receives her subjects, and he went away, declaring himself convinced and more loyal than ever. The second visitor was a lady who had come to attend church. She is the senior wife of a chief named Thekho, a son of Moshesh. She impressed us as a person of great force of character and great conversational gifts, was dressed in a fashionable hat and an enormous black velvet mantle, and plied us with numerous questions regarding the Queen, her family, and her government. She lives on the hill among her dependents, exerts great influence, and has done good service in resisting the reactionary tendencies of her brother-in-law Masupha, a dogged and turbulent old pagan.

The mission station lies at the foot of the hill of Thaba Bosiyo, in a singular region where crags of white or grey sandstone, detached from the main mass of the tabular hills, stand up in solitary shafts and pinnacles, and give a weird, uncanny look to the landscape. The soil is fertile and well cultivated, but being alluvial, it is intersected in all directions by the channels of streams, which have dug so deep into it that much good land is every year lost by the mischief the streams work when in flood. The sides of these channels are usually vertical, and often eight, ten, or even twelve feet high, so that they offer a serious obstacle to travellers either by waggon or on horseback. The hill itself is so peculiar in structure, and has played such a part in history, as to deserve some words of description. It is nearly two miles long and less than a mile across, elliptical in form, rising about five hundred feet above its base, and breaking down on every side in a line of cliffs, which, on the north-west and north side (toward the mission station), are from twenty to forty feet high. On the other side, which I could not so carefully examine, they are apparently higher. These cliffs are so continuous all round as to leave—so one is told—only three spots in the circumference where they can be climbed; and although I noticed one or two other places where a nimble cragsman might make his way up, it is at those three points only that an attack by a number of men could possibly be made. The easiest point is where a dyke of igneous rock, thirty feet wide, strikes up the face of the hill from the north-north-west, cutting through the sandstone precipice. The decomposition of this dyke has opened a practicable path, from fifteen to twenty-five feet in width, to the top. The top is a large grassy flat, with springs of water and plenty of good pasture.

It was this natural fortress that the Basuto chief Mosheshwe, or, as he is usually called, Moshesh, chose for his dwelling and the stronghold of his tribe, in A.D. 1824. The conquests of the ferocious Tshaka had driven thousands of Kafirs from their homes in Natal and on both sides of the Vaal River. Clans had been scattered, and the old dynasties rooted out or bereft of their influence and power. In the midst of this confusion, a young man, the younger son of a chief of no high lineage, and belonging to a small tribe, gathered around him a number of minor clans and fugitives from various quarters, and by his policy—astute, firm and tenacious—built them up into what soon became a powerful nation. Moving hither and hither along the foot of the great Maluti range, his skilful eye fixed on Thaba Bosiyo as a place fit to be the headquarters of the nation. There was good land all round, the approaches could be easily watched, and the hill itself, made almost impregnable by nature, supplied pasture for the cattle as well as perennial water. By tactfully conciliating the formidable tribes and boldly raiding the weaker ones, Moshesh rapidly acquired wealth (that is to say, cattle), strength and reputation, so that in 1836, when the emigrant Boers moved up into what is now the Free State, he was already the second power north of the mountains, inferior only to the terrible Mosilikatze. The latter on one occasion (in 1831) had sent a strong force of Matabili against him. Moshesh retired into his hill, which he defended by rolling down stones on the assailants; and when the invaders were presently obliged to retreat for want of food, he sent supplies to them on their way back, declaring his desire to be at peace with all men. The Matabili never attacked him again. In 1833 he intimated to the missionaries of the Paris Evangelical Society his willingness to receive them, planted them at Morija, and gave them afterwards their present station at the foot of Thaba Bosiyo, his own village being, of course, on the top. Their counsels were of infinite value to him in the troublous times that followed, and he repaid them by constant protection and encouragement. But though he listened, like so many Kafir chiefs, to sermons, enjoyed the society of his French friends, and was himself fond of quoting Scripture, he never became a Christian and was even thought to have, like Solomon, fallen in his old age somewhat more under heathen influences. Many were the wars he had to sustain with the native tribes who lived round him, as well as with the white settlers in the Orange River territory to the north, and many the escapes from danger which his crafty and versatile policy secured. Two of these wars deserve special mention, for both are connected with the place I am describing. In December, 1852, Sir George Cathcart, then Governor of Cape Colony, crossed the Caledon River a little above Maseru and led a force of two thousand British infantry and five hundred cavalry, besides artillery, against the Basutos. One of the three divisions in which the army moved was led into an ambush, severely handled by the nimble Basuto horsemen, and obliged to retreat. The division which Sir George himself led found itself confronted, when it reached the foot of Thaba Bosiyo, by a body of Basutos so numerous and active that it had great difficulty in holding its ground, and might have been destroyed but for the timely arrival of the third division just before sunset. The British general intrenched himself for the night in a strong position; and next morning, realizing at length the difficulties of his enterprise, set out to retire to the Caledon River. Before he reached it, however, a message from Moshesh overtook him. That wary chief, who knew the real strength of the British better than did his people, had been driven into the war by their over-confidence and their reluctance to pay the cattle fine which the Governor had demanded. Now that there was a chance of getting out of it he resolved to seize that chance, and after a consultation with one of the French missionaries, begged Sir George Cathcart for peace, acknowledging himself to be the weaker party, and declaring that he would do his best to keep his tribesmen in order. The Governor, glad to be thus relieved of what might have proved a long and troublesome war, accepted these overtures. The British army was marched back to Cape Colony, and Moshesh thereafter enjoyed the fame of being the only native potentate who had come out of a struggle with Great Britain virtually if not formally the victor.

But a still severer ordeal was in store for the virgin fortress and its lord. After much indecisive strife, the whites and the Basutos were, in 1865, again engaged in a serious war. The people of what had then become (see [Chapter XI]) the Orange Free State had found the Basutos troublesome neighbours, and a dispute had arisen regarding the frontier line. The Free State militia, well practised in native warfare, invaded Basutoland, reduced many of the native strongholds and besieged Thaba Bosiyo. A storming party advanced to carry the hill by assault, mounting the steep open acclivity to the passage which is opened (as already mentioned) by the greenstone dyke as it cuts its way through the line of sandstone cliff. They had driven the Basutos before them, and had reached a point where the path leads up a narrow cleft formed by the decomposition of the dyke, between walls of rock some twenty feet high. Thirty yards more would have brought them to the open top of the hill, and Moshesh would have been at their mercy. But at this moment a bullet from one of the few muskets which the defenders possessed, fired by a good marksman from the rock above the cleft, pierced Wepener, the leader of the assailants. The storming party halted, hesitated, fell back to the bottom of the hill, and the place was once more saved. Not long after, Moshesh, finding himself likely to be overmastered, besought the Imperial Government, which had always regarded him with favour since the conclusion of Sir George Cathcart's war, to receive him and his people "and let them live under the large folds of the flag of England." The High Commissioner intervened, declaring the Basutos to be thenceforward British subjects, and in 1869 a peace was concluded with the Free State, by which the latter obtained a fertile strip of territory along the north-west branch of the Caledon which had previously been held by Moshesh, while the Basutos came (in 1871) under the administrative control of Cape Colony. Moshesh died soon afterwards, full of years and honour, and leaving a name which has become famous in South Africa. He was one of the remarkable instances, like Toussaint l'Ouverture and the Hawaiian king Kamehameha the First, of a man, sprung from a savage race, who effected great things by a display of wholly exceptional gifts. His sayings have become proverbs in native mouths. One of them is worth noting, as a piece of grim humour, a quality rare among the Kafirs. Some of his chief men had been urging him, after he had become powerful, to take vengeance upon certain cannibals who were believed to have killed and eaten his grandparents. Moshesh replied: "I must consider well before I disturb the sepulchres of my ancestors."

Basutoland remained quiet till 1879, when the Cape Government, urged, it would appear, by the restless spirit of Sir Bartle Frere (then Governor), conceived the unhappy project of disarming the Basutos. It was no doubt a pity that so many of them possessed firearms; but it would have been better to let them keep their weapons than to provoke a war; and the Cape Prime Minister, who met the nation in its great popular assembly, the Pitso, had ample notice through the speeches delivered there by important chiefs of the resistance with which any attempt to enforce disarmament would be met. However, rash counsels prevailed. The attempt was made in 1880; war followed, and the Basutos gave the colonial troops so much trouble that in 1883 the Colony proposed to abandon the territory altogether. Ultimately, in 1884, the Imperial Government took it over, and has ever since administered it by a Resident Commissioner.

The Basuto nation, which had been brought very low at the time when Moshesh threw himself upon the British Government for protection, has latterly grown rapidly, and now numbers over 220,000 souls. This increase is partly due to an influx of Kafirs from other tribes, each chief encouraging the influx, since the new retainers, who surround him, increase his importance. But it has now reached a point when it ought to be stopped, because all the agricultural land is taken up for tillage, and the pastures begin scarcely to suffice for the cattle. The area is 10,263 square miles, about two-thirds that of Switzerland, but by far the larger part of it is wild mountain. No Europeans are allowed to hold land, and a licence is needed even for the keeping of a store. Neither are any mines worked. European prospectors are not permitted to come in and search for minerals, for the policy of the authorities has been to keep the country for the natives; and nothing alarms the chiefs so much as the occasional appearance of these speculative gentry, who, if allowed a foothold, would soon dispossess them. Thus it remains doubtful whether either gold or silver or diamonds exist in "payable quantities."

The natives, however, go in large numbers—in 1895-6 as many as 28,000 went out—to work in the mines at Kimberley and on the Witwatersrand, and they bring back savings, which have done much to increase the prosperity of the tribe. At present they seem fairly contented and peaceable. The land belongs to the nation, and all may freely turn their cattle on the untilled parts. Fields, however, are allotted to each householder by the chief, to be tilled, and the tenant, protected by public opinion, retains them so long as he tills them. He cannot sell them, but they will pass to his children. Ordinary administration, which consists mainly in the allotment and management of land, is left to the chief; as also ordinary jurisdiction, both civil and criminal. The present tendency is for the disposing power of the chief over the land to increase; and it is possible that British law may ultimately turn him, as it turned the head of an Irish sept, into an owner. The chief holds his court at his kraal, in the open air, settles disputes and awards punishments. There are several British magistrates to deal with grave offences, and a force of 220 native police, under British officers. Lerothodi, as the successor of Moshesh, is Paramount Chief of the nation; and all the greater chieftainships under him are held by his uncles and cousins,—sons and grandsons of the founder of the dynasty,—while there are also a few chiefs of the second rank belonging to other families. Some of the uncles, especially Masupha, who lives at the foot of Thaba Bosiyo, and is an obstinately conservative heathen, give trouble both to Lerothodi and to the British Commissioner, their quarrels turning mainly on questions of land and frontier. But on the whole, things go on as well as can be expected in such a world as the present: disturbances tend to diminish; and the horses or cattle that are occasionally stolen from the Free State farmers are always recovered for their owners, unless they have been got away out of Basutoland into the colonial territories to the south and west. As far back as 1855, Moshesh forbade the "smelling out" of witches, and now the British authorities have suppressed the more noxious or offensive kinds of ceremonies practised by the Kafirs. Otherwise they interfere as little as may be with native ways, trusting to time, peace, and the missionaries to secure the gradual civilization of the people. Once a year the Commissioner meets the whole people, in their national assembly called the Pitso,—the name is derived from their verb "to call" (cf. ἐκκλησία)—which in several points recalls the agora, or assembly of freemen described in the Homeric poems. The Paramount Chief presides, and debate is mainly conducted by the chiefs; but all freemen, gentle and simple, have a right to speak in it. There is no voting, only a declaration, by shouts, of the general feeling. Though the head of the nation has been usually the person who convokes it, a magnate lower in rank might always, like Achilles in the Iliad, have it summoned when a fitting occasion arose. And it was generally preceded by a consultation among the leading men, though I could not discover that there was any regular council of chiefs.[68] In all these points the resemblance to the primary assemblies of the early peoples of Europe is close enough to add another to the arguments, already strong, which discredit the theory that there is any such thing as an "Aryan type" of institutions, and which suggest the view that in studying the polities of primitive nations we must not take affinities of language as the basis of a classification.

To-day the Pitso has lost much of its old importance, and tends to become a formal meeting, in which the British Commissioner causes new regulations to be read aloud, inviting discussion on points which any one present may desire to raise, and addresses the people, awarding praise or blame, and adding such exhortations as he thinks seasonable. The missionaries (like the Bishops in a Witenagemot) and the chief British officials are usually present. In perusing the shorthand report of the great Pitso held in 1879, at which the question of disarmament was brought forward by the Cape Prime Minister, I was struck by the freedom and intelligence with which the speakers delivered their views. One observed: "This is our parliament, though it is a very disorderly parliament, because we are all mixed up, young and old; and we cannot accept any measure without discussion." Another commented severely upon an unhappy phrase that had been used at Cape Town by a member of the Cape Government: "Mr. U. said the Basutos were the natural enemies of the white man, because we were black. Is that language which should be used by a high officer of the Government? Let sentiments like these pass away—we are being educated to believe that all people are equal, and feel that sentiments like these are utterly wrong." A third claimed that the people must keep their guns, because "at our circumcision we were given a shield and an assagai, and told never to part with them; and that if ever we came back from an expedition and our shield and assagai were not found before our house, we should die the death." And a fourth, wishing to excuse any vehement expression he might use, observed: "We have a proverb which says that a man who makes a mistake in a public assembly cannot be killed." In this proverb there is the germ of the English "privilege of Parliament." It is easy to gather from the whole proceedings of these Pitsos how much more popular government has been among the Basutos than it was among the Zulus or Matabili. Tshaka or Lo Bengula would in a moment have had the neck twisted of any one who ventured to differ publicly from his opinion. In this respect the Basutos resemble their kinsfolk the Bamangwato, among whom Khama rules as a chief amenable to public opinion, which, in that instance, is unfortunately far behind the enlightened purposes of the sovereign.