CHAPTER VITHE BOER AND HIS REPUBLICSSuch is the life and such are the social conditions of the primitive Boer wherever he is found to-day from the Zambesi to the Cape.In our cities and villages, the descendant of the Boer is found in wholly different forms. He is the law-giver, the magistrate, the successful barrister, the able doctor; everywhere children of the Boer fill our schools and bear away the prizes; and in the yearly university lists of successful candidates, the names of the Huguenot-Dutch youths, and more especially the girls, rank high, and often equal or exceed in number those of all other residents in the Colony.[64]We have often been led to speculate on the marked success of the descendants of the African Boer in thepurely intellectual walks of life, not only in South Africa, but also when visiting the universities of Europe. Race, and the healthful and stimulating climate of Africa, may have their share in the result; but it has sometimes appeared to us that, given these, a further explanation of the intellectual virility of the male and female descendants of the Boer may perhaps in part be found in the fact that for several generations the intellect of the race lay to a large extent fallow, and was not overtaxed or strained. Every noted judge or politician, every successful university student, male or female, is the descendant of men and women who for generations lived far from the fretful stir of great cities, where petty ambitions and activities and useless complexity in small concerns tend to wear out and debilitate the intellect and body. Vast cities, as up to the present time they have existed, are the hot houses wherein the human creature, over-stimulated, tends, unless under very exceptional conditions, to emasculate and decay. In the peaceful silences of the veld the Boer's nerve and brain have probably reposed and recuperated; therefore the descendant to-day, thrown suddenly into the hurrying stream of modern life, appears in it with the sound nerves and couched-up energy of generations; though whether he will retain these under modern conditions is to be seen.The Boer has, as we shall see, founded two republics in South Africa. The first, the Orange Free State, has a most unique little history.The earliest white men who crossed the Orange River, and made their homes in the high grass plains, were emigrant Boers who had trekked from the Cape Colony. Later, British Sovereignty over the country was proclaimed; but in the month of February in the year 1854 the British Government, desiring to restrict British possessions and responsibilities in South Africa, determined to relinquish the Free State and its inhabitants. So opposed were the indwellers of the State to this, that they sent home to England a deputation headed by the Rev. Andrew Murray, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, to beg of the English Government not to give up the territory. Butthe English Government refused to entertain their request, regarding the country as a source of expense and responsibility, without any compensatory advantages. Diamonds were then undiscovered, and the mineral wealth of South Africa was unknown. The inhabitants of the territory therefore gathered themselves together, drew up a constitution and formed themselves into a republic, under the title of the Orange Free State. The first sitting of the first Volksraad of the Free State took place on March 28, 1854. From that time the little Boer republic has gone on increasing its property and multiplying its inhabitants, its educational institutions advancing and its agricultural capacities developing, till to-day it is allowed by all who have studied its conditions to be one of the most harmonious and well-governed little nations in existence.In the year 1869, diamonds were discovered in the Free State territory, and England, naturally, immediately desired to obtain possession of that section of the country which contained the Kimberley mines. After much bitter discussion, the Free State authorities were compelled to accept ninety thousand pounds for the strip of land which they were not strong enough for the moment to defend by force of arms.This loss of their richest diamond field (the Free State still contains some smaller ones) appeared a severe blow to the Free State, but by it they were saved from the misfortune which later befell their northern sister republic, when the discovery of vast quantities of gold made it an object of desire and almost unconquerable lust to the speculator and capitalist, Jew and Christian.The history of the northern republic, known as the South African Republic, or Transvaal, while resembling that of the Free State in many points, yet differs from it largely in others.When later we enter into a detailed consideration of the different states and communities into which South Africa is divided, we shall closely examine its history and structure; for the moment it is enough to glance rapidlyat its past record, merely to understand the position of the Boer in South Africa to-day.The story of the foundation of this state is perhaps the most epic and unique of all the pages of human history during the last centuries, but for the present it is enough to note the main facts. In 1795, the British first conquered the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch East India Company. The Stadholder, who had fled from Holland to England when the French Army entered the Dutch provinces, acquiesced in this, but the South African people were not consulted. In accordance with the Treaty of Amiens, Great Britain in 1803 restored the Cape to the Batavian Republic, but a few months later European war broke out afresh. In 1806 Great Britain again conquered it, and held it till 1814, when the King of the Netherlands formally ceded it to her in return for six millions pounds sterling. The King was urgently in need of money, and as Great Britain would not restore the Cape under any circumstances he was glad to get the six million pounds. The people of Africa were not consulted in regard to this cession either. It was made without their knowledge or consent. Since 1814, Great Britain has her possession of the Cape Colony, a period now of above eighty-six years.The conditions under which the English Government took possession of the land were exceedingly propitious. The bulk of the inhabitants, severed already for a century from Europe, cared little if at all which European power it was that victualled its fleets and held official rule at Table Bay, if their rights of free internal action were but left untouched. The Dutch East India Company, though probably not worse than other commercial companies, had the peculiar incapacity inherent in all such bodies for the wise governing of a free people, and had so alienated the hearts of the South Africans that they had already risen against it. There was no prejudice against the English as such, and had a tolerable amount of tact, sympathy and judgment been evinced in dealing with the early inhabitants of the land, there need have been no white race problem in South Africa to-day.The English Government in the early days appears to have been not unfortunate in some of the persons who were sent out to represent it at the Cape. In such individuals as General Dundas, the Earl of Cadogan, and Sir John Cradock, England had not merely well-intentioned servants, but men of tact and judgment. But she was not always to be so fortunate.We English are a peculiar people. More often than most other races, and in this point resembling the Jews, we tend frequently to run to extremes of contradictory vice and virtue. Exactly as the Jewish race tends to incarnate itself on the one hand in a Moses, an Isaiah, or a Spinoza, so far removed from all material and personal ambitions and desires, and on the other hand in the grasping money-lender and millionaire; as it is now manifest in a Christ and then in a Judas Iscariot, so we English appear to manifest among our folk the extremes of self-sacrificing humanity, magnanimity, and heroism, and of sordid all-grasping self-seeking. In South Africa we have had our Livingstones and our George Greys, and our Porters, men, who, across the arid wastes of political and public life, shed the perfume of large and generous individualities; men, the mere consciousness of a national relation with whom is rightly a matter of pride to an English South African's heart; while, on the other hand, our race has here manifested in certain of its representatives as much of low ambition, and merciless greed, as it has been the unfortunate province of any individuals of any race ever to exhibit.But between these extremes has lain the bulk of our ordinary officials and citizens of English descent, with the blended vices and virtues of our people; and generally possessed of the one quality which seems to be the mark of our average Englishman. With a great deal of loyalty toward our own race and a great deal of desire for freedom and independence for ourselves, and a passion for carrying out our own methods, we have also a tendency to understand very little of other races and individuals, as less important and justifiable, and far less virtuous, than our own. This is perhaps more or less characteristic of allTeutonic peoples as compared with Celtic; but it appears certainly more marked in our own English division than in any other. This disposition has its advantages. We are not easily influenced for evil or for good; if we do not learn readily, we do not soon give up that which we have learned; it yields to us a great stability; and as long as, whether as individuals or as a race, we remain on our own soil and among our own native surroundings, though it may make life a little narrow, and somewhat hard, its disadvantages are not serious or vital. But the moment we are placed in close juxtaposition with other races, or enter foreign lands, more especially as rulers or controllers, then that which was an innoxious venial defect becomes a serious, it may be even a deadly, deficiency.In certain of our rulers this quality has manifested itself powerfully, and has led to the most enormous and catastrophic effects. Among such men was Lord Charles Somerset. While he was an energetic man of unusual ability, as far as can be judged across the uncertain historical shadows of seventy years (we are far from accepting as proved all the charges of extortion and corruption made against him); it was yet during his rule that one of the most disastrous mistakes made during England's rule in South Africa took place; and, in truth, his rule in South Africa may be said to have been one long blunder.Gracious and obliging to those who submitted absolutely to his own will, he was a man oppressive and overbearing to all who resisted his own views. Devoid of imagination and wide human sympathies, he, in common with certain later representatives of England in South Africa, failed entirely to understand the nature of the people he came to govern, the land they lived in, or the conditions evoked by the unique combination of land and people; and the results of his rule were evil for South Africa, and yet more disastrous for England.The mental attitude of the brave free-men who had peopled the untrodden land and made themselves a home in our African wilderness was for him, as for some whohave succeeded him, a region he was never able by his mental constitution to penetrate.Many things had produced pain among this free-folk. The mere fact that without their consent or desire their land had been placed in the hands of England; that there were no representative institutions through which the people could make their voice heard; that the Dutch language spoken by all the white inhabitants with the exception of a few English officials was not recognized by the Government; that the Governor received ten thousand pounds a year and four residences out of the small revenue, and that he with a few officials absorbed one-fourth of the entire revenue of the land; that he ruled with the same autocratic absoluteness with which the Czar of all the Russias is supposed to control his subjects—all these were sources of friction. But all these smaller matters might have been removed into the background and made of little account, had more tact and judgment been shown. But this man moved along his own course, apparently as oblivious of the thoughts and affections of the people whom he had to deal with as a dull menagerie keeper is of the thought and dispositions of his lions.One of the things most keenly felt by the colonists was the arming of Hottentots and placing them under English officers as soldiers in control of the country. The Hottentots are an interesting, lively and volatile, brave little race, now nearly extinct. They were, except the Bushmen, the most primitive of African peoples; and anyone who has lived in countries where primitive dark races are found side by side with white men will recognize at once how much bitterness will be evoked by this proceeding, and how cruel is the result in the long run to the primitive races themselves who are so used. Were England to-morrow to conquer the United States, and to organize and drill the American negroes for the purpose of keeping down the white races, not merely would the whole American population rise to a man, but it would be the most cowardly and cruel, though indirect, way of assisting in the destruction of the negro.From a small beginning in 1815 rose an occurrence which has set an uncleansable mark on the history of South Africa, and which, through South Africa, may perhaps ultimately react on other streams of life.In the Baviaans River Valley, on what was then the extreme northern frontier of the Colony, lived a farmer called Frederick Bezuidenhout, a man who had always been opposed to the resignation of the Colony to the British Government, which had now finally supplanted the Government of Holland for nine years. He was summoned to appear before the landdrost of Graaff Reinet for striking a Hottentot, and he refused to obey the summons. A corps of Hottentot soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Rousseau was sent to arrest him. They went up the wild and beautiful valley of the Baviaans River, till they arrived at Bezuidenhout's farm near the banks of the stream. Bezuidenhout and one of his servants stationed themselves behind the stone wall of the sheep-kraal near the house. When ordered to surrender in the name of George the Third, King of England, he refused to do so, and fired his gun, but no one was touched. He then retired to the house and slipped out at the back before the Hottentots could capture him, and climbed into a krantz, or precipice, across the river, accompanied by one of his native servants.We have visited the spot; it is a scene of singular loveliness. The wild rocky African mountains rise on every hand; at the bottom of the valley is a tiny plain which may be cultivated; mimosa and other typical African trees are scattered about, and the krantz, or great precipice of broken rock, into which Bezuidenhout climbed, rises precipitously from the bank of the river, some rocks jutting up like fortified towers. From the lower, the riverside, this krantz is almost if not quite inaccessible; but by going round and climbing the hill you can easily come down upon the top. The place in which Bezuidenhout hid is often called a cave, but in the common acceptation of the term it is not such. The rocks which form a large proportion of our African precipices are of a peculiar formation, apt to split vertically into hugeblocks, between which great chasms are often formed, and many of us remember playing among such chasms in our childhood. It was into such a cavity that Bezuidenhout retired, open to the sky at the top and forming a kind of little room to be readily entered into from the top only, while in the walls are small chinks and holes through which one may look out and see the river and plain below. At the time of the year at which we visited the spot, hundreds of the red African aloe flower on their long spikes were in bloom at the top of the krantz, a large wild bird had built its huge nest on the point of the rocks at the top of the opening, and the trees springing out of the krantz were in leaf. Some state there was one servant with him, others two. The soldiers are said to have discovered the spot by seeing the muzzle of a gun gleam from one of the openings in the side. Finding they could not reach it by climbing up from the river, they went round on to the hill and came upon it from the top of the crags. The soldiers called upon Bezuidenhout to surrender, but he refused, declaring he would never be seized alive by Hottentots. A volley of shots was fired down from the top and Bezuidenhout fell dead. His native servants surrendered, and were afterwards tried, but acquitted as being merely dependents. Towards evening his brother, Jan Bezuidenhout, came, and with the other relatives removed the body, which was buried the next day.Over the grave impassioned speeches were made by friends, especially by Jan Bezuidenhout, who declared that they would never rest till the Hottentot corps was driven out of the country, and their wrongs were redressed. So began the first small uprising against England of 1815. On the 9th of November a little body of farmers met at Diederick Mulder's and resolved to take up arms, but were betrayed by a spy, who hurried away to inform the English officials. Five days later the little commando, under Willem Krugel, numbering fifty men, took the oath to stand by each other till death. "I swear by God Almighty never to rest till I have driven the oppressors of my nation from this land." On November the 18ththey were surrounded by a large body of troops under Colonel Cuyler; eighteen of the men surrendered, while the rest fled. Five men, Jan Bezuidenhout, Cornelius Faber, Andries Meyer, Stefanus and Abraham Bothma, resolved to fly from the country to take refuge in Kaffirland, and with their wagons and families to cross the river. An English major, with one hundred Hottentots and twenty-two white men, followed them. In the Winterberg Mountains, the wagons of two of the men were first overtaken and captured; but Jan Bezuidenhout, Cornelius Faber, his brother-in-law, and Stefanus Bothma were out-spanned near a small stream by a ravine in the mountains. They had lit their fire, and Bothma went to the stream to fetch water; when a band of Hottentot soldiers, under an English lieutenant, who were hidden by the stream, fired on them. Bothma had no arms and was captured, Faber returned the fire, and fell wounded in the shoulder and was also captured. There were now left of the fugitives only Jan Bezuidenhout, his wife, and their son, a boy of twelve years, all of whom were at their wagon. The Hottentots gathered round the wagon and called to them to surrender. Bezuidenhout's only reply was to fire. His wife stepped to his side. "Let us die together," she said. And she stood beside him re-loading his guns. He soon fell mortally wounded. She is said to have seized his gun and fired, but was struck by a bullet, and her son also was wounded. Bezuidenhout died in a few hours, and the wife and son were made prisoners.Thirty-six persons in all were arrested for this rising and were tried on the 16th of December—a day which became celebrated in the later history of South Africa, being observed in the Dutch republics as a public holiday, under the title of Dingaan's Day, because on that day the great Zulu army of Dingaan was conquered by the Boers at Blood River. The same day is also, curiously enough, memorable as the day of the outbreak of the first war of independence.[65]The prisoners all fully admitted having taken theoath. On the 22nd of January, 1816, they were sentenced, six of them to death, to be hanged at Slachter's Nek, where the oath had been sworn by them; while the rest, after witnessing the execution of their fellows, were to undergo various punishments, ranging from banishment for life to imprisonment and fines. Martha Faber, the widow of Jan Bezuidenhout, and the sister of Cornelius Faber, one of the men to be hanged, was sentenced to banishment for life from the eastern part of the colony. Krugel's sentence was afterward changed to banishment for life, because he had taken no part in armed resistance and had done the British Government great service in the Kaffir wars; but Hendrick Prinsloo, Cornelius Faber, Stefanus Bothma, Abraham Bothma, and Theunis de Klerk were sentenced to death by hanging on the 9th of March, 1816.These sentences were within the letter of the law, but no blood had actually been shed by any of the prisoners in their small and abortive rising. It was universally supposed that the Governor would exercise his prerogative of mercy, and commute the sentence to one of banishment. But it was not so. On the 9th of March, 1816, a scaffold was raised on the ridge of stony land uniting two mountains, near which the oath had been sworn, and which has since been known throughout South Africa as Slachter's Nek, or the Butcher's Neck. The train from Port Elizabeth to the Midlands passes this spot daily, with the Rish River flowing to the right and the neck on the left. Here were brought the five men sentenced to be hanged, and the thirty-two who were to witness it; one of them, Frans Marais, had been sentenced to be tied with a rope around his neck to the foot of the gallows, while his companions were being hanged.A great crowd of people stood about, hoping and feeling convinced, even to the last moment, that a reprieve would come. Colonel Cuyler with three hundred soldiers guarded the scaffold from the people. The men asked to be allowed to sing a hymn before they mounted. Their voices were firm and clear. They appeared perfectly resigned. No reprieve came. There was a moment of awful silence in the crowd as the drop fell. But thescaffold was not strong enough to bear the weight of the bodies of the five powerful men; it broke, and the men, half strangled, were thrown to the earth. Then a wild and passionate cry arose from the people; wives, mothers, sisters, and relatives of the condemned men cried, as they rushed toward the gallows, that God Himself had intervened, and the men given back to them. It was not to be. As soon as they had recovered consciousness, the gallows were repaired and the men were forced to remount; the three hundred soldiers guarded the scaffold, and the work was done. A deep, low murmur is said to have risen from the crowd as it was completed.The relations of the dead men asked for the bodies, but were refused; an order having been given that they should be buried under the gallows.[66]So came to an end the day of Slachter's Nek—the worst day's work for England that up to recent times has yet been done in South Africa. Certainly the Governor was within the letter of the law. Technically speaking, nations have recognized that any body of persons strong enough to resist by force the mastership over any strip of the earth's surface and over the individuals inhabiting it, may, if these individuals oppose the will of the stronger, be termed rebels, and if they seek to resist by force be hanged. But there are other modes of regarding life than the technical. England, without the consent of these men, had taken over their land nine years before—a land which they and their fathers, and not the Dutch Government or the East India Company, had won from the wilderness and peopled. They were a small section of the population, and they had taken no single life in all their uprising (it has not even been stated that the shots fired by Bezuidenhout and his wife grazed any of the Hottentots!)Had Lord Charles Somerset exercised his prerogativeand extended mercy to these five men, he would have done more to consolidate the English rule in South Africa than, had he been able to introduce two hundred thousand men, he would have been able to effect. In the lives of English soldiers alone, England has probably paid at the rate of over a thousand a head for each man hanged; and if she could that day have purchased the necks of those five Boers at ten millions each, they would have been cheaply bought.It is a curious property of blood shed on the scaffold for political offences that it does not dry up.Blood falling on the battlefield sinks into the earth; it may take a generation, or it may take two, or more, for it wholly to disappear, but it is marvellous how the memory of even the most bloody conflict, between equally armed foes, does, as generations pass, fade.But blood shed on a scaffold is always fresh. The scaffold may be taken down, the bodies buried, but in the memory of the people it glows redder and redder, and with each generation it is new-shed; it sanctifies, sacrificially, the cause it marked. It may be questioned whether anywhere in the history of nations, blood, judicially shed for political purposes, whether the actual means were rifle-bullet, axe, rope, or the slow anguish of long imprisonment, has ever really aided the cause in which it was shed. It appears even quite possible that if Charles the First had been killed on the battlefield instead of being beheaded, there might have been no Restoration in England.The African people dispersed quietly and went back to their farms; but the picture of Slachter's Nek was engraved in the national heart.After this blunder, Lord Charles Somerset remained in Africa for some years. He was at last recalled, not on the ground of his treatment of the old inhabitants, but in answer to the complaints of a few newly arrived English colonists, by whom he was charged with corruption and oppression.Burke had promised to move for his impeachment, but his wealth and rank protected him (he was an elderbrother of the Lord Raglan afterwards so notorious for his conduct of the Crimean War), and he died at Brighton in the year 1831.But his work lived on, and, in addition to other causes, helped to produce that bitterness in the hearts of South Africans which led to that important movement known in South African history as the Great Trek.In 1828 it was finally enacted that not only was the African Taal, though the only language of almost the entire people, not to be used in law courts and public documents, but even petitions written in that language were no longer to be received by the English Government; and a little later, men speaking their native language, in the land of their birth, were not allowed to sit on juries unless they could speak English, a language they had no facilities for acquiring. Other causes worked in the same direction towards the embitterment of the minds of the people against English rule. Even the most generous act recorded of our English race was a cause of fresh suffering and wrongs. In 1830 the English people, guided by its best element, voted a sum of twenty million pounds for the liberation of the slaves throughout the English colonies and possessions; and a portion of this sum it was determined to expend in buying and setting free the slaves in South Africa.It is a curious exemplification of the absolute impossibility of guiding wisely, justly, or successfully the affairs of a nation six thousand miles distant, which has again and again been exemplified in the history of South Africa, that this plan miscarried. An intention, which leaves Europe a white-garbed bird of peace and justice, too often turns up, after its six thousand miles' passage across the ocean, a black-winged harbinger of war and death.The intention of the English folk who voted the sum was generous; in reality, owing to the blundering of officials and the cunning and rapacity of speculators (already the poisoners of English rule in South Africa), all went wrong. Very little of the money voted ever reached the hands of the people for whom it was intended.Men and women who had been in affluence before were everywhere reduced to absolute beggary; and they had the additional irritation of knowing that, while they were supposed to have been generously dealt with, they had received nothing. When one remembers that the bitterest war of this century was waged, only forty years ago, between the English-speaking folk of America, when one half of the community endeavoured to compel the other to relinquish its slaves, it is a matter of astonishment that the slave-owners of the Cape Colony so quietly gave up their claims, claims which till that time had been recognized by every nation on earth as wholly just and defensible.But that which most embittered the hearts of the colonists was the cold indifference with which they were treated by their rulers, and the consciousness that they were regarded as a subject and inferior race. It is this consciousness which among a high-spirited people forms the bitterest dreg to the cup of sorrow put to the lips of a people governed by aliens, and one for which no material advantage can atone. In the eastern parts of the Cape Colony the feeling of bitterness became so intense that about the year 1836 large numbers of individuals determined to leave for ever the Colony and the homes which they had created, and to move northward to the regions yet untouched by the white man, where they might form for themselves new homes, and raise an independent state. It is this movement that is known in South African history as "The Great Trek."Under such leaders as Carel Johannes Trichard, Andries Potgieter (the man after whom the town of Potchefstroom in the Transvaal is called), Gerrit Maritz, and Piet Mauritz Retief (after whom the town of Pietermaritzburg in Natal is named), the people gathered themselves together in families, men, women, and children, and, selling their farms and movable property for whatever they could get, in-spanned their great ox-wagons, and, taking with them such of their flocks and herds as they could remove, left their birthland for ever, and moved northward, sometimes in large bodies amounting to twohundred souls. Crossing the Orange River, which was then the boundary of the Cape Colony and beyond which the British control did not extend, they entered the country, which is now the Orange Free State, and crossing the Caledon River moved still northward towards what is now the Transvaal. Most of these men came from the eastern and midland districts of the Colony, and were the descendants of the men who had already resisted the rule of the Chartered Dutch East India Company and endeavoured to found their own republic in the midlands; men in whom the self-governing republican instinct, inherited with their Dutch blood and sucked in with their mother's milk, was strong as probably in no other race on earth, unless it be the Swiss. With the exception of PietRetief, few, if any, of them were from the old districts of the Western Province. Among those in Andries Potgieter's trek was one Casper Krüger, from the Colesberg district of the Cape Colony. He took with him all his family, among them a lad, just over ten years of age, later known as Paul Krüger, President of the South African Republic.Fully to describe the sufferings, struggles, and wanderings of these people, before they succeeded in founding their republic in the Transvaal, would far exceed the limit we have set ourselves. But to understand the Boer of to-day and the problems of to-day we must very rapidly glance at the march of the fore-trekkers.At the time of the Boer trek, the great power in central and eastern South Africa was the Zulu nation. Under their renowned chief Tchaka, one of the most remarkable military geniuses of history, possessing to the full the vices and virtues of his type, the small Zulu tribe had become a great nation, dominating over and treading down other native tribes and races. Killing the older men and women and absorbing the youths and maidens into his own people, as he conquered tribe after tribe, he had by his wonderful military discipline produced a vast army of warriors, before whom no native people could stand. In 1828, Tchaka was assassinated by his half-brother Dingaan, who, without sharing his genius,possessed his fault as a ruthless destroyer of men. At the time of the Great Trek, Dingaan ruled over the Zulu nation and its dependencies in Natal and Zululand. In the Transvaal, a division of the Zulus, which had broken from Tchaka under their celebrated warrior-chief Umsiligaas, had, under the name of the Matabele, founded a great warrior nation, moulded after the ideal of Tchaka; they devastated the lands and destroyed the native tribes which resisted their power. When the first party of the fore-trekkers under Potgieter arrived in the northern districts of the Free State, the native tribes there welcomed them as a possible assistance against the inroads of the powerful Matabele. The whole country was in those days filled with game to an almost inconceivable extent, and it was largely on the fruit of the gun that the fore-trekkers lived. In 1836 their first great conflict with the Matabele under Umsiligaas took place. The fore-trekkers had spread themselves out in small parties, camping with their wagons near the Vaal River, and the Matabele attacked them wherever they were found in small numbers.Near what is now known as Erasmus Drift on the Vaal River, a small party in five waggons was suddenly surrounded and several of the Boers were killed. Barend Liebenberg's little party was taken by surprise, and six men, two women, and four children, with twelve native servants were destroyed, and three white children, a boy and two girls, carried away captive. The great Matabele army then rapidly advanced to where the main body of the emigrants had encamped at a spot now known as Vechtkop, about twenty miles from the present village of Heilbron, in the Free State. Paul Krüger, then a child, can still remember the preparations for defence, and relates how the wagons were drawn up in a square, mimosa branches cut down and dragged to the wagons, women and young children helping in the labour; and how these branches were tied together by chains to fill in the spaces between the fore and back wheels of the wagons to prevent the Matabele warriors from crawling up between them.Early in the morning of the 2nd of October the vast army of Umsiligaas was reported as approaching. Commandant Sarel Cilliers, who commanded the laager, found that he had in all, including boys of twelve and fourteen, forty men with whom to meet the vast horde, and the women and girls were busy smelting lead to mould bullets for the old-fashioned guns.Cilliers and thirty-two of his men rode out to meet the enemy upon the open plain, where Matabele were formed into great squares upon Tchaka's system, and sat upon the ground, each man with his shield before him, as was always done preparatory to a great attack.Cilliers sent out a loud-voiced envoy to inquire why they came to fight the white men who had done them no harm. At once the thousands of warriors sprang to their feet with the mighty war cry: "Umsiligaas alone has the right to speak!" Brandishing their shields and assegais, the front ranks deployed to right and left, forming those two horns, so celebrated in Zulu warfare, which were intended to inclose the enemy. The emigrants mounted their horses, reloading their heavy muskets as they went and firing at the points of the horns; and with great difficulty, in an hour and a half, they reached the laager. Here men, women, and children knelt down for a short prayer, while the Matabele indunas were massing the column for the grand assault. Then followed a desperate fight. The Zulus poured forward in thousands with magnificent courage, even seizing hold of the wagons with their hands to tear them apart, and piercing the wagon sails again and again with their assegais. The Boers fought with desperate determination, the women reloading the guns and handing them to the men who stood at the corners of the laager. In the end, with heavy loss on both sides, the Matabele were repulsed, but in their retreat they swept away with them all the sheep and cattle of the emigrants. Hunger and desolation then reigned in the laager, and had it not been for the timely arrival of another party of emigrants all must have perished. Later on, the combined emigrants followed up the Matabele to their strongholds in the Transvaalin the hope of recovering their goods and the lost children. After long and bitter conflict the old flintlock gun conquered, and the Matabele moved northward towards the territory where they are now found, known as Matabeleland.Of this war, it can only be said that South Africa has no reason to be ashamed of the way in which either of her children, black or white, fought. On the one side there was the Zulu with his great theory of imperial expansion, not wholly unpardonable in a savage, resenting the intrusion of any other powers within his sphere of influence, if not into his actual territory, and determined to use his mighty armies to extend his rule. On the other hand, the white emigrant, in his small and feeble numbers, but armed with his old flintlock gun (which, though it took some minutes to load and discharge once, was a formidable weapon when compared with the best Zulu assegai), who was equally determined to make a home for himself and his wife and children in the great South African wilds. It was a fine, free fight, if any conflict between humans can be so termed. One looks back to it with none of that pain with which the generous spirit beholds the conflict of overwhelming strength with weakness. When two equally prepared gladiators enter the arena, repulsive though the sight may be, one may well feel sympathy with both. This was no case of blowing naked savages to fragments with Maxims or Winchester repeating rifles, and, if in the end the old flintlock gun conquered, there were times when it seemed more than probable the victory would be on the other side. The African lion and the African tiger rolled together on the ground in a fair and free fight. If the Boer fell, with him fell wife and children; he fought for life and a home as the Zulu fought. Behind him there was no vast civilized power to whom, when he had provoked war, he could cry for aid, and whose hired soldiers could wipe out and be avenged upon the feebler foe. Alone, unbacked by any extraneous force, dependent on his own right arm, the Boer went forth. South Africa has no reason to be ashamed of the way in which either of her sons, black or white, fought in those old, terrible days.In the highly cultured citizen of the end of the nineteenth century, we rightly demand, as a primal and common virtue, breadth of human sympathy and catholic impartiality of intellectual judgment, unwarped by personal interests, which is the attribute of the developed man; but we are yet able, in regarding more primitive times and men who laid no claim to our transcendent modern virtues, to accept indomitable courage and love of independence, though the most primitive of virtues, as a possible foundation from which later all those higher mental beatitudes, which we have a right to demand from the self-exulting nineteenth-century human, may spring. In these two primitive virtues neither Boer nor Zulu ever showed himself wanting in those old days.While one part of the emigrant body remained in the Transvaal and Northern Free State, another passed over the Drakensberg Mountains into Natal, under a man who stands forth as the most romantic figure among the early fore-trekkers, Piet Retief, a man of some culture, and of a singular generosity of nature.The land of Natal was at that time practically uninhabited. Tchaka and his warriors had swept the country clean of its native tribes; but he considered it within his sphere of imperial influence. When Retief and his companions, who went to examine the land, looked down at it from the top of Spion Kop, they saw that the land was fair and good and almost wholly uninhabited, and they made overtures to Dingaan, Tchaka's successor, who resided at his kraal on the White Umvolosi, a hundred miles distant in Zululand, for the right without let or hindrance from the Zulus to inhabit this country. Dingaan readily consented, on one condition—that the emigrants should obtain from a Basuto tribe some cattle they had taken from his people. This was easily done, and Dingaan expressing complete satisfaction, a thousand wagons containing the Boer families trekked over the Drakensberg into Natal, and scattered over the unpeopled country along the banks of the Upper Tugela and Mooi Rivers. Piet Retief, with sixty-five followers, some of whom were mere lads of fifteen or sixteen, went to visitDingaan at his kraal on the White Umvolosi, in order that their agreement might be finally ratified. Some advised caution in going, but Retief fearlessly laughed their counsels to scorn. Dingaan met his visitors with much apparent joy and kindliness. Great dances were given in their honour, and an agreement of permanent peace and fellowship was drawn up by Mr. Owen, the missionary who was with Dingaan. On the last day, when the party came to bid farewell to the chief, they were directed, as usual, to lay aside their weapons when entering the king's presence, and they did so. They were then offered Kaffir beer to drink. Then, in an instant, at a given signal from Dingaan, his warriors fell on them. "Seize the wizards!" he cried in Kaffir. Some of them defended themselves gallantly with their pocket knives, but all were at last overpowered and dragged to the official place of execution, a ridge of high rocks on one side of the kraal, where their brains were knocked out. Their bodies were then left exposed. Not one of the men escaped.The manner of their death was recorded by the missionary who, as soon as possible, left the Zulu kraal with all his party, fearing the same fate for himself.On that day a great army of ten thousand Zulu warriors moved forward silently to attack the scattered emigrants in Natal.At a spot near to the present village of Weenen ("Weeping"—so called in remembrance of that terrible day), which lies not very far from the village of Colenso, the Zulu army killed an entire body of emigrants—forty-one men, fifty-six women, one hundred and eighty-five children, and two hundred and fifty coloured servants. The bodies were mutilated, and neither woman nor child were spared; some were found with as many as thirty spear-wounds in them. All the white souls in Natal would have perished had not three young men escaped, who warned the remaining scattered parties of their danger. The wagons were hastily drawn together into little laagers, and after a long and desperate struggle the Zulus were repulsed, women standing beside the men, reloading their guns and aiding almost as greatly in the defence as the men.Then the remnant of the people gathered themselves together to discuss what should be done. A few had given up all hope, and even spoke of retracing their steps across the hundreds of weary miles they had traversed. But the women—then as always, the strength of the South African people, and who resembled more those old Teutonic ancestresses of our northern races, of whom Tacitus tells us that "they dared with their men in war and suffered with them in peace," than we in the drawing-room and the ballroom—the women raised their voices unanimously, and cried that there should be no surrender; there, where their fellows had fallen, they would found their republic or die, and they, who had faced death, beside man, were listened to. In one battle ten Boers fell, among them Piet Uys, the father of a family noted down to the present day for courage, whose young son, a mere lad, seeing his father unhorsed and stabbed by the Zulu soldiers, rushed back and died beside him.[67]But in the end, at the great and terrible battle of Blood River, December 16, 1838, the Zulus were defeated, and Dingaan fled. His brother Panda was made king in his stead. From that time the 16th of December has been always a holiday in the African Republic.When the Boer army arrived at Umgungunhlovo, Dingaan's kraal, they found still the bodies of their sixty-six comrades, which after eighteen months were yet untouched by beasts of prey, though dried and decayed. In Retief's leathern bag was found the paper signed with Dingaan's cross, giving them permission to inhabit the land of Natal, from the Drakensberg to the sea at Durban, from the Tugela River to the Umzimvobu.In this land the Boers now settled down to plant their new Republic. At Pietermaritzburg, named after their dead leader, they built the church, standing to this day, which they had vowed to their God if He enabledthem to conquer Dingaan; and they planted their seat of government there. But it was not long before the English Government at the Cape Colony, many hundred miles away, became uneasy at the success of the Boer in realizing his dream of founding an independent state, and there was issued a proclamation stating that Natal was henceforth to become a British territory; and soldiers were despatched to Natal to support this claim.We know of few pages in the history of our English imperial expansion which fill us with more shame than this. We had already more land in the Colony than we could people, and these folk, at the cost of much life, had travelled far to find freedom from our rule. After a war, the most even and the most justifiable of all those of which South African history has any record between a black race and a white, the fore-trekkers had saved themselves from Dingaan's power; and when they had set about the realization of their dream and the foundation of their little republic, we stepped in. We had the ships, and the men, and the money, and we crushed their dream—for the moment.At Durban, the seaport of the Republic, there was some sharp fighting between the soldiers we sent and the Republicans, but in their infant state the Republicans were wholly unable to compete in numbers or arms with the forces we could put in the field.When the Commissioner sent by the English authorities to annex the land arrived at Pietermaritzburg, there were bitter and stormy scenes. Most of the inhabitants absolutely refused to remain under British rule. There was a mass meeting of women, whose leader, the ancient wife of Erasmus Smit, the old fore-trekkers' preacher, addressed the Commissioner for two hours,[68]painting a picture of all they had suffered in founding their new state and of the injustice done in robbing them of it.At the end of the meeting, the women passed an unanimous resolution that rather than submit to English rule they would leave the land which, with so much blood and anguish, they had won. "We go across these mountainsto freedom or to death," said the old woman, pointing toward the Drakensberg Mountains, which, through the names of Laing's Nek and Amajuba, have since become known to all the world.Over these mountains almost the whole population of Natal passed, leaving only about three hundred families, the ancestors of the present ten thousand Boer inhabitants of Natal.Those who passed over the Drakensberg Mountains joined the bodies of fore-trekkers who had remained on the north side of the mountains, and entered into that great region where no British flag had yet ever waved, which no Englishman had ever dreamed of claiming, and which was left almost desolate and uninhabited as the result of Mosilikatzi's[69]raids. Here they founded their republic, known as theTransvaalorSouth African Republic.By the Sand River Convention, ratified by Sir George Cathcart in 1852, it was agreed that the English Government should not follow them into the territories north of the Vaal River; that their independence should be recognized; and that there should be no attempt on the part of the British Government to interfere with their government or management of their own affairs.The most interesting point with regard to the South African Boer is his astonishing gift for forming new societies, and, as it were, instinctively creating for himself a new social structure, under whatever conditions he may find himself.The South African Boer forms never a mob. With his curious love of liberty and independent action, he combines a yet more curious instinct for cohesion and inter-action. There is no folk on earth which has exemplified, as this little mixed Teutonic people has done, the ancient Teutonic instinct for combining a high standard of personal freedom with a strong social organization.Take at random a handful of African Boers; let them wander away into some desert and be unheard of for a few years. When you find them again, they are a peopleorganized and inter-acting, with the true old Teutonic institutions—the district gatherings, the central government, the force for defence composed of all the burghers, under their local chiefs—always the same outline preserved, and always instinctive re-adaptations and variations according to the varying conditions of the new society. Studying this matter, one is forcibly reminded of the instinct in a swarm of bees, which, however often removed from spot to spot, still seek at once to deposit their old hexagonal cells, yet always varying the shape of the hive as they are compelled to build it between two plates of glass, in a hollow tree, or in a hand-made hive. To the scientific student of the evolution of human societies nothing in the range of modern history is more interesting and curious than the analytical study of the little states which the South African Boer has always tended to deposit in varied yet kindred forms.In the South African Republic, or Transvaal, the Boer has shaped a social organism singularly strong, and at the same time plastic; the external governing power being responsive to the will of the electorate.Of the latter history of this state it must suffice to note a fact, perhaps not unknown to any student of modern affairs, that in the 'seventies of the nineteenth century an attempt was made to wrest their country from this people and to annex it to the British Empire. All the world knows how at Paardekraal, on the 13th of December, 1880, the little nation gathered itself together, each man, taking a stone in his hand, placed it upon a heap beside those of his fellows, swearing as he set it there that he would never lay down his arms till the Republic was freed—a heap which has been carefully preserved as a national monument. How at Ingogo, Laing's Nek, and Amajuba they fought, all the world knows also. How England, dominated at that moment by that wiser and more far-seeing Jekyll, who in the past has never failed to exist somewhere within her bosom, ready for action when not overborne by his fellow, the purblind and all-grasping Hyde, restored to the Republic the recognition of its independence; thereby saving England from theindelible disgrace of a persistent attempt to crush a great and free little people, and from the permanent loss of South Africa, which, had she persisted in her course, would long ere this have yielded her no foothold in the southern seas, this also all the world knows. How, gold being found in vast quantities in the Republic, the eyes of all men of greed and wealth-lust turned towards this little land from all parts; how the Chartered Company incorporated by the Hyde of England while the Jekyll slept, having become needy and greedy, and finding the land given it not filling its pockets as it desired, could wait no longer, and sent in an armed force to take possession of the goldfields; how the Republicans started to their feet to drive out the invaders; and how at Doorn Kop, on the 3rd of January, 1896, was fought the most memorable battle of modern times; for here, for the first time in history, the military force of the international capitalist and speculator, armed, hired, and equipped by him, without even the decent covering of a national cloak to hide from the world the ugly outline of its greedy form, met the simple citizens of a state, farmers and peasants and townsmen, who leaped up from their New Year's feast, and thrusting a slice of bread or New Year's cake into their pockets, and a hunk of meat into their saddle-bags, mounted and were off to meet the foe; met it and defeated it—so opening the long campaign of the twentieth century which began between two little African kopjes and which will end on the earth's mightiest battlefields—this, too, all the world knows.[70]The descendants of the original white inhabitants of the land, entering it a century before we English folks arrived, have, as we have seen, spread themselves out over the whole country, and now form the substratum ofthe white African Nation. In the Cape Colony, which is still politically connected with the Island of Britain, they number at least three out of five of the white inhabitants of the country. In their lovely old homes in the Western Province, buried away among oaks, and surrounded by vineyards and fruit gardens laid out by their ancestors two centuries ago, the farming descendants of the Dutch-Huguenot live with simple plentifulness amid their supremely beautiful surroundings. In the remote Midlands and Northern and Eastern frontier districts of the Cape Colony they still live often, as we have described, in their simple homes, mighty men of the gun, and rulers over flocks and herds. While in our Colonial towns and villages the descendants of these farming folks are found, whom education has transformed, often in one generation, from the Taal-speaking Boer to the foremost rank of the nineteenth-century civilization and intellectual culture; they are, as we have seen, often among our most able lawyers, our best judges, our most skilful magistrates and civil servants; while the lists of our university examinations are filled with the names of both men and women of Boer descent.Such is the Boer and such are his descendants in the Cape Colony to-day.In the two Republics which he has founded he will also be found in both the types, the old and the new; now as the old fore-trekker, with the faiths and virtues and the vices of the seventeenth century strong in him; then as the cultured professional man and the child of the nineteenth century, with all its additions and omissions.In the Colony of Natal, the northern part is still mainly populated by Boers, the descendants of those men who there founded their early Republic of Natal, and remained when the rest of their fellows trekked across the Drakensberg into the Transvaal.Taking South Africa thus as a whole, the descendants of the Dutch-Huguenots outnumber the white men of all other races put together, and immensely those of purely British descent. But everywhere the process of intermarriage has been so vast and rapid during the last thirtyyears that it is no more possible to draw a quite sharp dividing line between the two races. There are probably to-day no large South African families, Dutch or English, which have not during the last thirty years intermarried. And in another generation the word Dutchman and Englishman will have lost all meaning and be heard no more; we shall then be only the blended South African Nation.
Such is the life and such are the social conditions of the primitive Boer wherever he is found to-day from the Zambesi to the Cape.
In our cities and villages, the descendant of the Boer is found in wholly different forms. He is the law-giver, the magistrate, the successful barrister, the able doctor; everywhere children of the Boer fill our schools and bear away the prizes; and in the yearly university lists of successful candidates, the names of the Huguenot-Dutch youths, and more especially the girls, rank high, and often equal or exceed in number those of all other residents in the Colony.[64]
We have often been led to speculate on the marked success of the descendants of the African Boer in thepurely intellectual walks of life, not only in South Africa, but also when visiting the universities of Europe. Race, and the healthful and stimulating climate of Africa, may have their share in the result; but it has sometimes appeared to us that, given these, a further explanation of the intellectual virility of the male and female descendants of the Boer may perhaps in part be found in the fact that for several generations the intellect of the race lay to a large extent fallow, and was not overtaxed or strained. Every noted judge or politician, every successful university student, male or female, is the descendant of men and women who for generations lived far from the fretful stir of great cities, where petty ambitions and activities and useless complexity in small concerns tend to wear out and debilitate the intellect and body. Vast cities, as up to the present time they have existed, are the hot houses wherein the human creature, over-stimulated, tends, unless under very exceptional conditions, to emasculate and decay. In the peaceful silences of the veld the Boer's nerve and brain have probably reposed and recuperated; therefore the descendant to-day, thrown suddenly into the hurrying stream of modern life, appears in it with the sound nerves and couched-up energy of generations; though whether he will retain these under modern conditions is to be seen.
The Boer has, as we shall see, founded two republics in South Africa. The first, the Orange Free State, has a most unique little history.
The earliest white men who crossed the Orange River, and made their homes in the high grass plains, were emigrant Boers who had trekked from the Cape Colony. Later, British Sovereignty over the country was proclaimed; but in the month of February in the year 1854 the British Government, desiring to restrict British possessions and responsibilities in South Africa, determined to relinquish the Free State and its inhabitants. So opposed were the indwellers of the State to this, that they sent home to England a deputation headed by the Rev. Andrew Murray, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, to beg of the English Government not to give up the territory. Butthe English Government refused to entertain their request, regarding the country as a source of expense and responsibility, without any compensatory advantages. Diamonds were then undiscovered, and the mineral wealth of South Africa was unknown. The inhabitants of the territory therefore gathered themselves together, drew up a constitution and formed themselves into a republic, under the title of the Orange Free State. The first sitting of the first Volksraad of the Free State took place on March 28, 1854. From that time the little Boer republic has gone on increasing its property and multiplying its inhabitants, its educational institutions advancing and its agricultural capacities developing, till to-day it is allowed by all who have studied its conditions to be one of the most harmonious and well-governed little nations in existence.
In the year 1869, diamonds were discovered in the Free State territory, and England, naturally, immediately desired to obtain possession of that section of the country which contained the Kimberley mines. After much bitter discussion, the Free State authorities were compelled to accept ninety thousand pounds for the strip of land which they were not strong enough for the moment to defend by force of arms.
This loss of their richest diamond field (the Free State still contains some smaller ones) appeared a severe blow to the Free State, but by it they were saved from the misfortune which later befell their northern sister republic, when the discovery of vast quantities of gold made it an object of desire and almost unconquerable lust to the speculator and capitalist, Jew and Christian.
The history of the northern republic, known as the South African Republic, or Transvaal, while resembling that of the Free State in many points, yet differs from it largely in others.
When later we enter into a detailed consideration of the different states and communities into which South Africa is divided, we shall closely examine its history and structure; for the moment it is enough to glance rapidlyat its past record, merely to understand the position of the Boer in South Africa to-day.
The story of the foundation of this state is perhaps the most epic and unique of all the pages of human history during the last centuries, but for the present it is enough to note the main facts. In 1795, the British first conquered the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch East India Company. The Stadholder, who had fled from Holland to England when the French Army entered the Dutch provinces, acquiesced in this, but the South African people were not consulted. In accordance with the Treaty of Amiens, Great Britain in 1803 restored the Cape to the Batavian Republic, but a few months later European war broke out afresh. In 1806 Great Britain again conquered it, and held it till 1814, when the King of the Netherlands formally ceded it to her in return for six millions pounds sterling. The King was urgently in need of money, and as Great Britain would not restore the Cape under any circumstances he was glad to get the six million pounds. The people of Africa were not consulted in regard to this cession either. It was made without their knowledge or consent. Since 1814, Great Britain has her possession of the Cape Colony, a period now of above eighty-six years.
The conditions under which the English Government took possession of the land were exceedingly propitious. The bulk of the inhabitants, severed already for a century from Europe, cared little if at all which European power it was that victualled its fleets and held official rule at Table Bay, if their rights of free internal action were but left untouched. The Dutch East India Company, though probably not worse than other commercial companies, had the peculiar incapacity inherent in all such bodies for the wise governing of a free people, and had so alienated the hearts of the South Africans that they had already risen against it. There was no prejudice against the English as such, and had a tolerable amount of tact, sympathy and judgment been evinced in dealing with the early inhabitants of the land, there need have been no white race problem in South Africa to-day.
The English Government in the early days appears to have been not unfortunate in some of the persons who were sent out to represent it at the Cape. In such individuals as General Dundas, the Earl of Cadogan, and Sir John Cradock, England had not merely well-intentioned servants, but men of tact and judgment. But she was not always to be so fortunate.
We English are a peculiar people. More often than most other races, and in this point resembling the Jews, we tend frequently to run to extremes of contradictory vice and virtue. Exactly as the Jewish race tends to incarnate itself on the one hand in a Moses, an Isaiah, or a Spinoza, so far removed from all material and personal ambitions and desires, and on the other hand in the grasping money-lender and millionaire; as it is now manifest in a Christ and then in a Judas Iscariot, so we English appear to manifest among our folk the extremes of self-sacrificing humanity, magnanimity, and heroism, and of sordid all-grasping self-seeking. In South Africa we have had our Livingstones and our George Greys, and our Porters, men, who, across the arid wastes of political and public life, shed the perfume of large and generous individualities; men, the mere consciousness of a national relation with whom is rightly a matter of pride to an English South African's heart; while, on the other hand, our race has here manifested in certain of its representatives as much of low ambition, and merciless greed, as it has been the unfortunate province of any individuals of any race ever to exhibit.
But between these extremes has lain the bulk of our ordinary officials and citizens of English descent, with the blended vices and virtues of our people; and generally possessed of the one quality which seems to be the mark of our average Englishman. With a great deal of loyalty toward our own race and a great deal of desire for freedom and independence for ourselves, and a passion for carrying out our own methods, we have also a tendency to understand very little of other races and individuals, as less important and justifiable, and far less virtuous, than our own. This is perhaps more or less characteristic of allTeutonic peoples as compared with Celtic; but it appears certainly more marked in our own English division than in any other. This disposition has its advantages. We are not easily influenced for evil or for good; if we do not learn readily, we do not soon give up that which we have learned; it yields to us a great stability; and as long as, whether as individuals or as a race, we remain on our own soil and among our own native surroundings, though it may make life a little narrow, and somewhat hard, its disadvantages are not serious or vital. But the moment we are placed in close juxtaposition with other races, or enter foreign lands, more especially as rulers or controllers, then that which was an innoxious venial defect becomes a serious, it may be even a deadly, deficiency.
In certain of our rulers this quality has manifested itself powerfully, and has led to the most enormous and catastrophic effects. Among such men was Lord Charles Somerset. While he was an energetic man of unusual ability, as far as can be judged across the uncertain historical shadows of seventy years (we are far from accepting as proved all the charges of extortion and corruption made against him); it was yet during his rule that one of the most disastrous mistakes made during England's rule in South Africa took place; and, in truth, his rule in South Africa may be said to have been one long blunder.
Gracious and obliging to those who submitted absolutely to his own will, he was a man oppressive and overbearing to all who resisted his own views. Devoid of imagination and wide human sympathies, he, in common with certain later representatives of England in South Africa, failed entirely to understand the nature of the people he came to govern, the land they lived in, or the conditions evoked by the unique combination of land and people; and the results of his rule were evil for South Africa, and yet more disastrous for England.
The mental attitude of the brave free-men who had peopled the untrodden land and made themselves a home in our African wilderness was for him, as for some whohave succeeded him, a region he was never able by his mental constitution to penetrate.
Many things had produced pain among this free-folk. The mere fact that without their consent or desire their land had been placed in the hands of England; that there were no representative institutions through which the people could make their voice heard; that the Dutch language spoken by all the white inhabitants with the exception of a few English officials was not recognized by the Government; that the Governor received ten thousand pounds a year and four residences out of the small revenue, and that he with a few officials absorbed one-fourth of the entire revenue of the land; that he ruled with the same autocratic absoluteness with which the Czar of all the Russias is supposed to control his subjects—all these were sources of friction. But all these smaller matters might have been removed into the background and made of little account, had more tact and judgment been shown. But this man moved along his own course, apparently as oblivious of the thoughts and affections of the people whom he had to deal with as a dull menagerie keeper is of the thought and dispositions of his lions.
One of the things most keenly felt by the colonists was the arming of Hottentots and placing them under English officers as soldiers in control of the country. The Hottentots are an interesting, lively and volatile, brave little race, now nearly extinct. They were, except the Bushmen, the most primitive of African peoples; and anyone who has lived in countries where primitive dark races are found side by side with white men will recognize at once how much bitterness will be evoked by this proceeding, and how cruel is the result in the long run to the primitive races themselves who are so used. Were England to-morrow to conquer the United States, and to organize and drill the American negroes for the purpose of keeping down the white races, not merely would the whole American population rise to a man, but it would be the most cowardly and cruel, though indirect, way of assisting in the destruction of the negro.
From a small beginning in 1815 rose an occurrence which has set an uncleansable mark on the history of South Africa, and which, through South Africa, may perhaps ultimately react on other streams of life.
In the Baviaans River Valley, on what was then the extreme northern frontier of the Colony, lived a farmer called Frederick Bezuidenhout, a man who had always been opposed to the resignation of the Colony to the British Government, which had now finally supplanted the Government of Holland for nine years. He was summoned to appear before the landdrost of Graaff Reinet for striking a Hottentot, and he refused to obey the summons. A corps of Hottentot soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Rousseau was sent to arrest him. They went up the wild and beautiful valley of the Baviaans River, till they arrived at Bezuidenhout's farm near the banks of the stream. Bezuidenhout and one of his servants stationed themselves behind the stone wall of the sheep-kraal near the house. When ordered to surrender in the name of George the Third, King of England, he refused to do so, and fired his gun, but no one was touched. He then retired to the house and slipped out at the back before the Hottentots could capture him, and climbed into a krantz, or precipice, across the river, accompanied by one of his native servants.
We have visited the spot; it is a scene of singular loveliness. The wild rocky African mountains rise on every hand; at the bottom of the valley is a tiny plain which may be cultivated; mimosa and other typical African trees are scattered about, and the krantz, or great precipice of broken rock, into which Bezuidenhout climbed, rises precipitously from the bank of the river, some rocks jutting up like fortified towers. From the lower, the riverside, this krantz is almost if not quite inaccessible; but by going round and climbing the hill you can easily come down upon the top. The place in which Bezuidenhout hid is often called a cave, but in the common acceptation of the term it is not such. The rocks which form a large proportion of our African precipices are of a peculiar formation, apt to split vertically into hugeblocks, between which great chasms are often formed, and many of us remember playing among such chasms in our childhood. It was into such a cavity that Bezuidenhout retired, open to the sky at the top and forming a kind of little room to be readily entered into from the top only, while in the walls are small chinks and holes through which one may look out and see the river and plain below. At the time of the year at which we visited the spot, hundreds of the red African aloe flower on their long spikes were in bloom at the top of the krantz, a large wild bird had built its huge nest on the point of the rocks at the top of the opening, and the trees springing out of the krantz were in leaf. Some state there was one servant with him, others two. The soldiers are said to have discovered the spot by seeing the muzzle of a gun gleam from one of the openings in the side. Finding they could not reach it by climbing up from the river, they went round on to the hill and came upon it from the top of the crags. The soldiers called upon Bezuidenhout to surrender, but he refused, declaring he would never be seized alive by Hottentots. A volley of shots was fired down from the top and Bezuidenhout fell dead. His native servants surrendered, and were afterwards tried, but acquitted as being merely dependents. Towards evening his brother, Jan Bezuidenhout, came, and with the other relatives removed the body, which was buried the next day.
Over the grave impassioned speeches were made by friends, especially by Jan Bezuidenhout, who declared that they would never rest till the Hottentot corps was driven out of the country, and their wrongs were redressed. So began the first small uprising against England of 1815. On the 9th of November a little body of farmers met at Diederick Mulder's and resolved to take up arms, but were betrayed by a spy, who hurried away to inform the English officials. Five days later the little commando, under Willem Krugel, numbering fifty men, took the oath to stand by each other till death. "I swear by God Almighty never to rest till I have driven the oppressors of my nation from this land." On November the 18ththey were surrounded by a large body of troops under Colonel Cuyler; eighteen of the men surrendered, while the rest fled. Five men, Jan Bezuidenhout, Cornelius Faber, Andries Meyer, Stefanus and Abraham Bothma, resolved to fly from the country to take refuge in Kaffirland, and with their wagons and families to cross the river. An English major, with one hundred Hottentots and twenty-two white men, followed them. In the Winterberg Mountains, the wagons of two of the men were first overtaken and captured; but Jan Bezuidenhout, Cornelius Faber, his brother-in-law, and Stefanus Bothma were out-spanned near a small stream by a ravine in the mountains. They had lit their fire, and Bothma went to the stream to fetch water; when a band of Hottentot soldiers, under an English lieutenant, who were hidden by the stream, fired on them. Bothma had no arms and was captured, Faber returned the fire, and fell wounded in the shoulder and was also captured. There were now left of the fugitives only Jan Bezuidenhout, his wife, and their son, a boy of twelve years, all of whom were at their wagon. The Hottentots gathered round the wagon and called to them to surrender. Bezuidenhout's only reply was to fire. His wife stepped to his side. "Let us die together," she said. And she stood beside him re-loading his guns. He soon fell mortally wounded. She is said to have seized his gun and fired, but was struck by a bullet, and her son also was wounded. Bezuidenhout died in a few hours, and the wife and son were made prisoners.
Thirty-six persons in all were arrested for this rising and were tried on the 16th of December—a day which became celebrated in the later history of South Africa, being observed in the Dutch republics as a public holiday, under the title of Dingaan's Day, because on that day the great Zulu army of Dingaan was conquered by the Boers at Blood River. The same day is also, curiously enough, memorable as the day of the outbreak of the first war of independence.[65]
The prisoners all fully admitted having taken theoath. On the 22nd of January, 1816, they were sentenced, six of them to death, to be hanged at Slachter's Nek, where the oath had been sworn by them; while the rest, after witnessing the execution of their fellows, were to undergo various punishments, ranging from banishment for life to imprisonment and fines. Martha Faber, the widow of Jan Bezuidenhout, and the sister of Cornelius Faber, one of the men to be hanged, was sentenced to banishment for life from the eastern part of the colony. Krugel's sentence was afterward changed to banishment for life, because he had taken no part in armed resistance and had done the British Government great service in the Kaffir wars; but Hendrick Prinsloo, Cornelius Faber, Stefanus Bothma, Abraham Bothma, and Theunis de Klerk were sentenced to death by hanging on the 9th of March, 1816.
These sentences were within the letter of the law, but no blood had actually been shed by any of the prisoners in their small and abortive rising. It was universally supposed that the Governor would exercise his prerogative of mercy, and commute the sentence to one of banishment. But it was not so. On the 9th of March, 1816, a scaffold was raised on the ridge of stony land uniting two mountains, near which the oath had been sworn, and which has since been known throughout South Africa as Slachter's Nek, or the Butcher's Neck. The train from Port Elizabeth to the Midlands passes this spot daily, with the Rish River flowing to the right and the neck on the left. Here were brought the five men sentenced to be hanged, and the thirty-two who were to witness it; one of them, Frans Marais, had been sentenced to be tied with a rope around his neck to the foot of the gallows, while his companions were being hanged.
A great crowd of people stood about, hoping and feeling convinced, even to the last moment, that a reprieve would come. Colonel Cuyler with three hundred soldiers guarded the scaffold from the people. The men asked to be allowed to sing a hymn before they mounted. Their voices were firm and clear. They appeared perfectly resigned. No reprieve came. There was a moment of awful silence in the crowd as the drop fell. But thescaffold was not strong enough to bear the weight of the bodies of the five powerful men; it broke, and the men, half strangled, were thrown to the earth. Then a wild and passionate cry arose from the people; wives, mothers, sisters, and relatives of the condemned men cried, as they rushed toward the gallows, that God Himself had intervened, and the men given back to them. It was not to be. As soon as they had recovered consciousness, the gallows were repaired and the men were forced to remount; the three hundred soldiers guarded the scaffold, and the work was done. A deep, low murmur is said to have risen from the crowd as it was completed.
The relations of the dead men asked for the bodies, but were refused; an order having been given that they should be buried under the gallows.[66]So came to an end the day of Slachter's Nek—the worst day's work for England that up to recent times has yet been done in South Africa. Certainly the Governor was within the letter of the law. Technically speaking, nations have recognized that any body of persons strong enough to resist by force the mastership over any strip of the earth's surface and over the individuals inhabiting it, may, if these individuals oppose the will of the stronger, be termed rebels, and if they seek to resist by force be hanged. But there are other modes of regarding life than the technical. England, without the consent of these men, had taken over their land nine years before—a land which they and their fathers, and not the Dutch Government or the East India Company, had won from the wilderness and peopled. They were a small section of the population, and they had taken no single life in all their uprising (it has not even been stated that the shots fired by Bezuidenhout and his wife grazed any of the Hottentots!)
Had Lord Charles Somerset exercised his prerogativeand extended mercy to these five men, he would have done more to consolidate the English rule in South Africa than, had he been able to introduce two hundred thousand men, he would have been able to effect. In the lives of English soldiers alone, England has probably paid at the rate of over a thousand a head for each man hanged; and if she could that day have purchased the necks of those five Boers at ten millions each, they would have been cheaply bought.
It is a curious property of blood shed on the scaffold for political offences that it does not dry up.
Blood falling on the battlefield sinks into the earth; it may take a generation, or it may take two, or more, for it wholly to disappear, but it is marvellous how the memory of even the most bloody conflict, between equally armed foes, does, as generations pass, fade.
But blood shed on a scaffold is always fresh. The scaffold may be taken down, the bodies buried, but in the memory of the people it glows redder and redder, and with each generation it is new-shed; it sanctifies, sacrificially, the cause it marked. It may be questioned whether anywhere in the history of nations, blood, judicially shed for political purposes, whether the actual means were rifle-bullet, axe, rope, or the slow anguish of long imprisonment, has ever really aided the cause in which it was shed. It appears even quite possible that if Charles the First had been killed on the battlefield instead of being beheaded, there might have been no Restoration in England.
The African people dispersed quietly and went back to their farms; but the picture of Slachter's Nek was engraved in the national heart.
After this blunder, Lord Charles Somerset remained in Africa for some years. He was at last recalled, not on the ground of his treatment of the old inhabitants, but in answer to the complaints of a few newly arrived English colonists, by whom he was charged with corruption and oppression.
Burke had promised to move for his impeachment, but his wealth and rank protected him (he was an elderbrother of the Lord Raglan afterwards so notorious for his conduct of the Crimean War), and he died at Brighton in the year 1831.
But his work lived on, and, in addition to other causes, helped to produce that bitterness in the hearts of South Africans which led to that important movement known in South African history as the Great Trek.
In 1828 it was finally enacted that not only was the African Taal, though the only language of almost the entire people, not to be used in law courts and public documents, but even petitions written in that language were no longer to be received by the English Government; and a little later, men speaking their native language, in the land of their birth, were not allowed to sit on juries unless they could speak English, a language they had no facilities for acquiring. Other causes worked in the same direction towards the embitterment of the minds of the people against English rule. Even the most generous act recorded of our English race was a cause of fresh suffering and wrongs. In 1830 the English people, guided by its best element, voted a sum of twenty million pounds for the liberation of the slaves throughout the English colonies and possessions; and a portion of this sum it was determined to expend in buying and setting free the slaves in South Africa.
It is a curious exemplification of the absolute impossibility of guiding wisely, justly, or successfully the affairs of a nation six thousand miles distant, which has again and again been exemplified in the history of South Africa, that this plan miscarried. An intention, which leaves Europe a white-garbed bird of peace and justice, too often turns up, after its six thousand miles' passage across the ocean, a black-winged harbinger of war and death.
The intention of the English folk who voted the sum was generous; in reality, owing to the blundering of officials and the cunning and rapacity of speculators (already the poisoners of English rule in South Africa), all went wrong. Very little of the money voted ever reached the hands of the people for whom it was intended.Men and women who had been in affluence before were everywhere reduced to absolute beggary; and they had the additional irritation of knowing that, while they were supposed to have been generously dealt with, they had received nothing. When one remembers that the bitterest war of this century was waged, only forty years ago, between the English-speaking folk of America, when one half of the community endeavoured to compel the other to relinquish its slaves, it is a matter of astonishment that the slave-owners of the Cape Colony so quietly gave up their claims, claims which till that time had been recognized by every nation on earth as wholly just and defensible.
But that which most embittered the hearts of the colonists was the cold indifference with which they were treated by their rulers, and the consciousness that they were regarded as a subject and inferior race. It is this consciousness which among a high-spirited people forms the bitterest dreg to the cup of sorrow put to the lips of a people governed by aliens, and one for which no material advantage can atone. In the eastern parts of the Cape Colony the feeling of bitterness became so intense that about the year 1836 large numbers of individuals determined to leave for ever the Colony and the homes which they had created, and to move northward to the regions yet untouched by the white man, where they might form for themselves new homes, and raise an independent state. It is this movement that is known in South African history as "The Great Trek."
Under such leaders as Carel Johannes Trichard, Andries Potgieter (the man after whom the town of Potchefstroom in the Transvaal is called), Gerrit Maritz, and Piet Mauritz Retief (after whom the town of Pietermaritzburg in Natal is named), the people gathered themselves together in families, men, women, and children, and, selling their farms and movable property for whatever they could get, in-spanned their great ox-wagons, and, taking with them such of their flocks and herds as they could remove, left their birthland for ever, and moved northward, sometimes in large bodies amounting to twohundred souls. Crossing the Orange River, which was then the boundary of the Cape Colony and beyond which the British control did not extend, they entered the country, which is now the Orange Free State, and crossing the Caledon River moved still northward towards what is now the Transvaal. Most of these men came from the eastern and midland districts of the Colony, and were the descendants of the men who had already resisted the rule of the Chartered Dutch East India Company and endeavoured to found their own republic in the midlands; men in whom the self-governing republican instinct, inherited with their Dutch blood and sucked in with their mother's milk, was strong as probably in no other race on earth, unless it be the Swiss. With the exception of PietRetief, few, if any, of them were from the old districts of the Western Province. Among those in Andries Potgieter's trek was one Casper Krüger, from the Colesberg district of the Cape Colony. He took with him all his family, among them a lad, just over ten years of age, later known as Paul Krüger, President of the South African Republic.
Fully to describe the sufferings, struggles, and wanderings of these people, before they succeeded in founding their republic in the Transvaal, would far exceed the limit we have set ourselves. But to understand the Boer of to-day and the problems of to-day we must very rapidly glance at the march of the fore-trekkers.
At the time of the Boer trek, the great power in central and eastern South Africa was the Zulu nation. Under their renowned chief Tchaka, one of the most remarkable military geniuses of history, possessing to the full the vices and virtues of his type, the small Zulu tribe had become a great nation, dominating over and treading down other native tribes and races. Killing the older men and women and absorbing the youths and maidens into his own people, as he conquered tribe after tribe, he had by his wonderful military discipline produced a vast army of warriors, before whom no native people could stand. In 1828, Tchaka was assassinated by his half-brother Dingaan, who, without sharing his genius,possessed his fault as a ruthless destroyer of men. At the time of the Great Trek, Dingaan ruled over the Zulu nation and its dependencies in Natal and Zululand. In the Transvaal, a division of the Zulus, which had broken from Tchaka under their celebrated warrior-chief Umsiligaas, had, under the name of the Matabele, founded a great warrior nation, moulded after the ideal of Tchaka; they devastated the lands and destroyed the native tribes which resisted their power. When the first party of the fore-trekkers under Potgieter arrived in the northern districts of the Free State, the native tribes there welcomed them as a possible assistance against the inroads of the powerful Matabele. The whole country was in those days filled with game to an almost inconceivable extent, and it was largely on the fruit of the gun that the fore-trekkers lived. In 1836 their first great conflict with the Matabele under Umsiligaas took place. The fore-trekkers had spread themselves out in small parties, camping with their wagons near the Vaal River, and the Matabele attacked them wherever they were found in small numbers.
Near what is now known as Erasmus Drift on the Vaal River, a small party in five waggons was suddenly surrounded and several of the Boers were killed. Barend Liebenberg's little party was taken by surprise, and six men, two women, and four children, with twelve native servants were destroyed, and three white children, a boy and two girls, carried away captive. The great Matabele army then rapidly advanced to where the main body of the emigrants had encamped at a spot now known as Vechtkop, about twenty miles from the present village of Heilbron, in the Free State. Paul Krüger, then a child, can still remember the preparations for defence, and relates how the wagons were drawn up in a square, mimosa branches cut down and dragged to the wagons, women and young children helping in the labour; and how these branches were tied together by chains to fill in the spaces between the fore and back wheels of the wagons to prevent the Matabele warriors from crawling up between them.
Early in the morning of the 2nd of October the vast army of Umsiligaas was reported as approaching. Commandant Sarel Cilliers, who commanded the laager, found that he had in all, including boys of twelve and fourteen, forty men with whom to meet the vast horde, and the women and girls were busy smelting lead to mould bullets for the old-fashioned guns.
Cilliers and thirty-two of his men rode out to meet the enemy upon the open plain, where Matabele were formed into great squares upon Tchaka's system, and sat upon the ground, each man with his shield before him, as was always done preparatory to a great attack.
Cilliers sent out a loud-voiced envoy to inquire why they came to fight the white men who had done them no harm. At once the thousands of warriors sprang to their feet with the mighty war cry: "Umsiligaas alone has the right to speak!" Brandishing their shields and assegais, the front ranks deployed to right and left, forming those two horns, so celebrated in Zulu warfare, which were intended to inclose the enemy. The emigrants mounted their horses, reloading their heavy muskets as they went and firing at the points of the horns; and with great difficulty, in an hour and a half, they reached the laager. Here men, women, and children knelt down for a short prayer, while the Matabele indunas were massing the column for the grand assault. Then followed a desperate fight. The Zulus poured forward in thousands with magnificent courage, even seizing hold of the wagons with their hands to tear them apart, and piercing the wagon sails again and again with their assegais. The Boers fought with desperate determination, the women reloading the guns and handing them to the men who stood at the corners of the laager. In the end, with heavy loss on both sides, the Matabele were repulsed, but in their retreat they swept away with them all the sheep and cattle of the emigrants. Hunger and desolation then reigned in the laager, and had it not been for the timely arrival of another party of emigrants all must have perished. Later on, the combined emigrants followed up the Matabele to their strongholds in the Transvaalin the hope of recovering their goods and the lost children. After long and bitter conflict the old flintlock gun conquered, and the Matabele moved northward towards the territory where they are now found, known as Matabeleland.
Of this war, it can only be said that South Africa has no reason to be ashamed of the way in which either of her children, black or white, fought. On the one side there was the Zulu with his great theory of imperial expansion, not wholly unpardonable in a savage, resenting the intrusion of any other powers within his sphere of influence, if not into his actual territory, and determined to use his mighty armies to extend his rule. On the other hand, the white emigrant, in his small and feeble numbers, but armed with his old flintlock gun (which, though it took some minutes to load and discharge once, was a formidable weapon when compared with the best Zulu assegai), who was equally determined to make a home for himself and his wife and children in the great South African wilds. It was a fine, free fight, if any conflict between humans can be so termed. One looks back to it with none of that pain with which the generous spirit beholds the conflict of overwhelming strength with weakness. When two equally prepared gladiators enter the arena, repulsive though the sight may be, one may well feel sympathy with both. This was no case of blowing naked savages to fragments with Maxims or Winchester repeating rifles, and, if in the end the old flintlock gun conquered, there were times when it seemed more than probable the victory would be on the other side. The African lion and the African tiger rolled together on the ground in a fair and free fight. If the Boer fell, with him fell wife and children; he fought for life and a home as the Zulu fought. Behind him there was no vast civilized power to whom, when he had provoked war, he could cry for aid, and whose hired soldiers could wipe out and be avenged upon the feebler foe. Alone, unbacked by any extraneous force, dependent on his own right arm, the Boer went forth. South Africa has no reason to be ashamed of the way in which either of her sons, black or white, fought in those old, terrible days.
In the highly cultured citizen of the end of the nineteenth century, we rightly demand, as a primal and common virtue, breadth of human sympathy and catholic impartiality of intellectual judgment, unwarped by personal interests, which is the attribute of the developed man; but we are yet able, in regarding more primitive times and men who laid no claim to our transcendent modern virtues, to accept indomitable courage and love of independence, though the most primitive of virtues, as a possible foundation from which later all those higher mental beatitudes, which we have a right to demand from the self-exulting nineteenth-century human, may spring. In these two primitive virtues neither Boer nor Zulu ever showed himself wanting in those old days.
While one part of the emigrant body remained in the Transvaal and Northern Free State, another passed over the Drakensberg Mountains into Natal, under a man who stands forth as the most romantic figure among the early fore-trekkers, Piet Retief, a man of some culture, and of a singular generosity of nature.
The land of Natal was at that time practically uninhabited. Tchaka and his warriors had swept the country clean of its native tribes; but he considered it within his sphere of imperial influence. When Retief and his companions, who went to examine the land, looked down at it from the top of Spion Kop, they saw that the land was fair and good and almost wholly uninhabited, and they made overtures to Dingaan, Tchaka's successor, who resided at his kraal on the White Umvolosi, a hundred miles distant in Zululand, for the right without let or hindrance from the Zulus to inhabit this country. Dingaan readily consented, on one condition—that the emigrants should obtain from a Basuto tribe some cattle they had taken from his people. This was easily done, and Dingaan expressing complete satisfaction, a thousand wagons containing the Boer families trekked over the Drakensberg into Natal, and scattered over the unpeopled country along the banks of the Upper Tugela and Mooi Rivers. Piet Retief, with sixty-five followers, some of whom were mere lads of fifteen or sixteen, went to visitDingaan at his kraal on the White Umvolosi, in order that their agreement might be finally ratified. Some advised caution in going, but Retief fearlessly laughed their counsels to scorn. Dingaan met his visitors with much apparent joy and kindliness. Great dances were given in their honour, and an agreement of permanent peace and fellowship was drawn up by Mr. Owen, the missionary who was with Dingaan. On the last day, when the party came to bid farewell to the chief, they were directed, as usual, to lay aside their weapons when entering the king's presence, and they did so. They were then offered Kaffir beer to drink. Then, in an instant, at a given signal from Dingaan, his warriors fell on them. "Seize the wizards!" he cried in Kaffir. Some of them defended themselves gallantly with their pocket knives, but all were at last overpowered and dragged to the official place of execution, a ridge of high rocks on one side of the kraal, where their brains were knocked out. Their bodies were then left exposed. Not one of the men escaped.
The manner of their death was recorded by the missionary who, as soon as possible, left the Zulu kraal with all his party, fearing the same fate for himself.
On that day a great army of ten thousand Zulu warriors moved forward silently to attack the scattered emigrants in Natal.
At a spot near to the present village of Weenen ("Weeping"—so called in remembrance of that terrible day), which lies not very far from the village of Colenso, the Zulu army killed an entire body of emigrants—forty-one men, fifty-six women, one hundred and eighty-five children, and two hundred and fifty coloured servants. The bodies were mutilated, and neither woman nor child were spared; some were found with as many as thirty spear-wounds in them. All the white souls in Natal would have perished had not three young men escaped, who warned the remaining scattered parties of their danger. The wagons were hastily drawn together into little laagers, and after a long and desperate struggle the Zulus were repulsed, women standing beside the men, reloading their guns and aiding almost as greatly in the defence as the men.
Then the remnant of the people gathered themselves together to discuss what should be done. A few had given up all hope, and even spoke of retracing their steps across the hundreds of weary miles they had traversed. But the women—then as always, the strength of the South African people, and who resembled more those old Teutonic ancestresses of our northern races, of whom Tacitus tells us that "they dared with their men in war and suffered with them in peace," than we in the drawing-room and the ballroom—the women raised their voices unanimously, and cried that there should be no surrender; there, where their fellows had fallen, they would found their republic or die, and they, who had faced death, beside man, were listened to. In one battle ten Boers fell, among them Piet Uys, the father of a family noted down to the present day for courage, whose young son, a mere lad, seeing his father unhorsed and stabbed by the Zulu soldiers, rushed back and died beside him.[67]
But in the end, at the great and terrible battle of Blood River, December 16, 1838, the Zulus were defeated, and Dingaan fled. His brother Panda was made king in his stead. From that time the 16th of December has been always a holiday in the African Republic.
When the Boer army arrived at Umgungunhlovo, Dingaan's kraal, they found still the bodies of their sixty-six comrades, which after eighteen months were yet untouched by beasts of prey, though dried and decayed. In Retief's leathern bag was found the paper signed with Dingaan's cross, giving them permission to inhabit the land of Natal, from the Drakensberg to the sea at Durban, from the Tugela River to the Umzimvobu.
In this land the Boers now settled down to plant their new Republic. At Pietermaritzburg, named after their dead leader, they built the church, standing to this day, which they had vowed to their God if He enabledthem to conquer Dingaan; and they planted their seat of government there. But it was not long before the English Government at the Cape Colony, many hundred miles away, became uneasy at the success of the Boer in realizing his dream of founding an independent state, and there was issued a proclamation stating that Natal was henceforth to become a British territory; and soldiers were despatched to Natal to support this claim.
We know of few pages in the history of our English imperial expansion which fill us with more shame than this. We had already more land in the Colony than we could people, and these folk, at the cost of much life, had travelled far to find freedom from our rule. After a war, the most even and the most justifiable of all those of which South African history has any record between a black race and a white, the fore-trekkers had saved themselves from Dingaan's power; and when they had set about the realization of their dream and the foundation of their little republic, we stepped in. We had the ships, and the men, and the money, and we crushed their dream—for the moment.
At Durban, the seaport of the Republic, there was some sharp fighting between the soldiers we sent and the Republicans, but in their infant state the Republicans were wholly unable to compete in numbers or arms with the forces we could put in the field.
When the Commissioner sent by the English authorities to annex the land arrived at Pietermaritzburg, there were bitter and stormy scenes. Most of the inhabitants absolutely refused to remain under British rule. There was a mass meeting of women, whose leader, the ancient wife of Erasmus Smit, the old fore-trekkers' preacher, addressed the Commissioner for two hours,[68]painting a picture of all they had suffered in founding their new state and of the injustice done in robbing them of it.
At the end of the meeting, the women passed an unanimous resolution that rather than submit to English rule they would leave the land which, with so much blood and anguish, they had won. "We go across these mountainsto freedom or to death," said the old woman, pointing toward the Drakensberg Mountains, which, through the names of Laing's Nek and Amajuba, have since become known to all the world.
Over these mountains almost the whole population of Natal passed, leaving only about three hundred families, the ancestors of the present ten thousand Boer inhabitants of Natal.
Those who passed over the Drakensberg Mountains joined the bodies of fore-trekkers who had remained on the north side of the mountains, and entered into that great region where no British flag had yet ever waved, which no Englishman had ever dreamed of claiming, and which was left almost desolate and uninhabited as the result of Mosilikatzi's[69]raids. Here they founded their republic, known as theTransvaalorSouth African Republic.
By the Sand River Convention, ratified by Sir George Cathcart in 1852, it was agreed that the English Government should not follow them into the territories north of the Vaal River; that their independence should be recognized; and that there should be no attempt on the part of the British Government to interfere with their government or management of their own affairs.
The most interesting point with regard to the South African Boer is his astonishing gift for forming new societies, and, as it were, instinctively creating for himself a new social structure, under whatever conditions he may find himself.
The South African Boer forms never a mob. With his curious love of liberty and independent action, he combines a yet more curious instinct for cohesion and inter-action. There is no folk on earth which has exemplified, as this little mixed Teutonic people has done, the ancient Teutonic instinct for combining a high standard of personal freedom with a strong social organization.
Take at random a handful of African Boers; let them wander away into some desert and be unheard of for a few years. When you find them again, they are a peopleorganized and inter-acting, with the true old Teutonic institutions—the district gatherings, the central government, the force for defence composed of all the burghers, under their local chiefs—always the same outline preserved, and always instinctive re-adaptations and variations according to the varying conditions of the new society. Studying this matter, one is forcibly reminded of the instinct in a swarm of bees, which, however often removed from spot to spot, still seek at once to deposit their old hexagonal cells, yet always varying the shape of the hive as they are compelled to build it between two plates of glass, in a hollow tree, or in a hand-made hive. To the scientific student of the evolution of human societies nothing in the range of modern history is more interesting and curious than the analytical study of the little states which the South African Boer has always tended to deposit in varied yet kindred forms.
In the South African Republic, or Transvaal, the Boer has shaped a social organism singularly strong, and at the same time plastic; the external governing power being responsive to the will of the electorate.
Of the latter history of this state it must suffice to note a fact, perhaps not unknown to any student of modern affairs, that in the 'seventies of the nineteenth century an attempt was made to wrest their country from this people and to annex it to the British Empire. All the world knows how at Paardekraal, on the 13th of December, 1880, the little nation gathered itself together, each man, taking a stone in his hand, placed it upon a heap beside those of his fellows, swearing as he set it there that he would never lay down his arms till the Republic was freed—a heap which has been carefully preserved as a national monument. How at Ingogo, Laing's Nek, and Amajuba they fought, all the world knows also. How England, dominated at that moment by that wiser and more far-seeing Jekyll, who in the past has never failed to exist somewhere within her bosom, ready for action when not overborne by his fellow, the purblind and all-grasping Hyde, restored to the Republic the recognition of its independence; thereby saving England from theindelible disgrace of a persistent attempt to crush a great and free little people, and from the permanent loss of South Africa, which, had she persisted in her course, would long ere this have yielded her no foothold in the southern seas, this also all the world knows. How, gold being found in vast quantities in the Republic, the eyes of all men of greed and wealth-lust turned towards this little land from all parts; how the Chartered Company incorporated by the Hyde of England while the Jekyll slept, having become needy and greedy, and finding the land given it not filling its pockets as it desired, could wait no longer, and sent in an armed force to take possession of the goldfields; how the Republicans started to their feet to drive out the invaders; and how at Doorn Kop, on the 3rd of January, 1896, was fought the most memorable battle of modern times; for here, for the first time in history, the military force of the international capitalist and speculator, armed, hired, and equipped by him, without even the decent covering of a national cloak to hide from the world the ugly outline of its greedy form, met the simple citizens of a state, farmers and peasants and townsmen, who leaped up from their New Year's feast, and thrusting a slice of bread or New Year's cake into their pockets, and a hunk of meat into their saddle-bags, mounted and were off to meet the foe; met it and defeated it—so opening the long campaign of the twentieth century which began between two little African kopjes and which will end on the earth's mightiest battlefields—this, too, all the world knows.[70]
The descendants of the original white inhabitants of the land, entering it a century before we English folks arrived, have, as we have seen, spread themselves out over the whole country, and now form the substratum ofthe white African Nation. In the Cape Colony, which is still politically connected with the Island of Britain, they number at least three out of five of the white inhabitants of the country. In their lovely old homes in the Western Province, buried away among oaks, and surrounded by vineyards and fruit gardens laid out by their ancestors two centuries ago, the farming descendants of the Dutch-Huguenot live with simple plentifulness amid their supremely beautiful surroundings. In the remote Midlands and Northern and Eastern frontier districts of the Cape Colony they still live often, as we have described, in their simple homes, mighty men of the gun, and rulers over flocks and herds. While in our Colonial towns and villages the descendants of these farming folks are found, whom education has transformed, often in one generation, from the Taal-speaking Boer to the foremost rank of the nineteenth-century civilization and intellectual culture; they are, as we have seen, often among our most able lawyers, our best judges, our most skilful magistrates and civil servants; while the lists of our university examinations are filled with the names of both men and women of Boer descent.
Such is the Boer and such are his descendants in the Cape Colony to-day.
In the two Republics which he has founded he will also be found in both the types, the old and the new; now as the old fore-trekker, with the faiths and virtues and the vices of the seventeenth century strong in him; then as the cultured professional man and the child of the nineteenth century, with all its additions and omissions.
In the Colony of Natal, the northern part is still mainly populated by Boers, the descendants of those men who there founded their early Republic of Natal, and remained when the rest of their fellows trekked across the Drakensberg into the Transvaal.
Taking South Africa thus as a whole, the descendants of the Dutch-Huguenots outnumber the white men of all other races put together, and immensely those of purely British descent. But everywhere the process of intermarriage has been so vast and rapid during the last thirtyyears that it is no more possible to draw a quite sharp dividing line between the two races. There are probably to-day no large South African families, Dutch or English, which have not during the last thirty years intermarried. And in another generation the word Dutchman and Englishman will have lost all meaning and be heard no more; we shall then be only the blended South African Nation.