NOTE DOUR WASTE LAND IN MASHONALAND (1891)

NOTE DOUR WASTE LAND IN MASHONALAND (1891)At the present day it is by no means uncommon for men to spend the greater part of their lives and large stores of wealth in a sometimes futile search for the scattered fragments of antiquity. A few broken Greek marbles, or Nineveh mud tablets, or battered leaves of Egyptian papyrus, are considered an ample return for half a lifetime of labour and the expenditure of thousands. We are apt to regard with a scorn not unmixed with malevolence the men of a bygone age who allowed treasure of so priceless a value to humanity to be wantonly destroyed.Yet, at the present day in South Africa, a destruction of materials far more priceless and irrevocable goes on in our midst in the full light of our nineteenth-century humanitarian culture. It is possible that in the course of time a new Phidias may arise in our midst, and produce statues comparable to, if not identical with, those of the old world, and the learning and lore of the old Egyptians and Chaldeans lost in their destroyed mud tablets or papyrus leaves may yet be re-evolved from the human brain; but there is a reckless and callous destruction now going on in our midst of that which can by no conceivable possibility be restored to humanity when once it is destroyed from the surface of the globe. Future generations will probably regard as intelligent and wise benefactors of their race the men who burnt the Library in Alexandria, and destroyed the Parthenon at Athens, when they are compared, in certain aspects, with the inhabitants of Southern Africa and the modern world.For the moment we are so entirely bent on advancing the claims of a material civilization, which we are inclined to regard as the all-in-all of life, that more subtle, if equally practical, and important considerations are apt to be forgotten.This view is forced on us when we consider the reckless and entirely wanton destruction of the one form of production for which the African continent, and more especially its southern portions,stands pre-eminent among the world's divisions—our astonishing fauna.From gorilla and grey parrot on the east coast, and chimpanzee on the west, to the endless varieties of antelope and pachydermatous quadrupeds which at one time overran the south, no part in the globe has been within the memory of man, and even still is, so rich in beautiful and rare forms of sub-human life; no other presents the same vast field for scientific research.How quickly this condition of things is passing away the most rapid glance at the present condition of South Africa will show. Hardly a year passes away without some rare and interesting form of life becoming extinct. The hippopotami, elephants, and antelopes which once grazed on the shores of Table Bay have for a century not been seen there, and the vast herds which covered our up-country plains in the memory of those living have absolutely been extinguished, leaving nothing behind but a few horns and skins, the few last wandering individuals, who in the natural course of things will be exterminated within the next few years. Before the middle of the twentieth century is reached (probably much sooner) the rifle, the railway train and the plough will so entirely have modified the conditions of existence that not only all forms of life indigenous to Southern, but to Central and Tropical Africa will have passed away.From a sentimental and emotional standpoint this is to be regretted, but there are deeper interests than the merely emotional and poetical at stake. In an age when the study of a single small, deep-sea creature of a form intermediate between the vertebrate and invertebrate orders has thrown a flood of light on our biological knowledge, and when the discovery of a few fossilized hoofs has helped to revolutionize our view of vital phenomena; when even the man in the street, perceiving the practical advantages which science has conferred on him, has ceased to jeer, and regards it with a certain vague, if unreasoning, respect, it is not necessary to dwell at length on the fact that the loss of these multitudinous forms of life, by crippling and limiting the field of scientific study, must inflict a direct and serious loss on human knowledge and progress. But perhaps it is only the man more or less interested in the results of scientific research who can fully appreciate the importance of preserving for the future all forms of natural life, from the lion and crocodile to the humblest wood-dove and fly.Some years back, finding it necessary to gain what information was obtainable with regard to the domestic and social habits of the higher apes, we found that all the information to be obtained from the latest works on the subject amounted to little more thannil; and that for a personal inspection of these creatures in their natural state three distinct journeys into separate and most inaccessible parts of the globe would be necessary.We then proceeded to study the few isolated specimens to be found in the Zoological Gardens of Europe. We found a few crestfallen looking animals, transported at an immense cost from tropical Africa or elsewhere, necessarily confined in small, comparatively dark cells, kept alive by a continual expenditure of coal and artificial heat, and then rarely saved from consumption, and requiring the constant care and attention of an able-bodied man; they resembled as little, seated on their heaps of straw and coughing, the creature in its natural and active social condition amidst the sunshine of a tropical forest, as a mummy represents an ancient Egyptian. After a vast expenditure of money, less was to be learnt from them than might be gained with regard to a troop of South African baboons when watched for a few hours from behind the stones of a kopje.Considering these things, the conclusion inevitably forces itself upon us that our position with regard to the study of animal life is yet far from an ideal one. With one-third the expenditure of energy and money which goes to form our half-dozen small zoological collections in Europe, a vast preserve for wild animals immeasurably superior to anything which exists for scientific ends might be formed and maintained in any tropical or sub-tropical country. Our small existing collections may serve to bring curious specimens under the eyes of scientific men, and subserve certain useful purposes; but for many forms of study they are absolutely futile, and as a means of keeping in existence specimens which would otherwise become extinct, they have no claim to consideration. The ideal zoological garden would be a vast tract of country in some tropical or subtropical region, where all creatures but those habituated to extreme cold would freely exist in a state of nature, limited only by mutual struggle; it should be a tract diversified, if possible, by swamp, forest, and hills, and divided as far as might be by natural features from the surrounding country; and where no such barriers existed it should be as far as possible artificially cut off. It should contain not merely the creatures indigenous to the country, but should serve as a receptacle for those which could not elsewhere be preserved from extinction. It should form, so to speak, a vast natural preserve, existing not primarily for the purposes of the sportsman, but of science, and in which the rifle should be almost unknown. In connection with this might in time spring up large zoological gardens in the narrower sense of the term, where isolated specimens might be immured for the purposes of certain studies; but for many yearsits far more important function would be simply the keeping in existence a large number of forms of animal life which would else become annihilated. Wildly Utopian as this scheme appears at first sight, consideration will show it is not beyond the range of feasibility, though beset with difficulty. The first, and for many years the most insuperable, difficulty has lain in the fact that no such tract as was necessary was obtainable anywhere. The existence of a strong, civilized government would be necessary to guarantee its retention for the desired purpose, and where a civilized government exists, there, as a rule, is a more or less dense population. The individual, as a rule, precedes the government, and apart from the fact that land then becomes too precious to be appropriated for such a purpose, both the land and the fauna have, as a rule, become so much modified and destroyed that it would take half a century to reproduce natural conditions. Such considerations have made in the past the whole scheme appear purely Utopian.At the present moment, however, there exists in South Africa, by a rare and exceptional combination of circumstances, a condition which removes it from the realm of the purely ideal to that of the remotely practical. The sudden and unprecedented movement of the north-east of Southern Africa, where a powerful and well-organized form of civilized government is rapidly establishing itself in a vast territory, sparsely inhabited by natives, and as yet little, or at all, by Europeans, and where certain low-lying tracts are not at the present moment fitted for immediate occupation or for ordinary cultivation, and will certainly not be so used till the immense tracts of salubrious and valuable land about them have been fully utilized, yields a possibility of the realization of this plan, which has not occurred before and will probably not occur again. Were a large tract of this country granted or bought at a nominal price, and freedom from intrusion guaranteed, and were the interests of scientific Europe and America aroused and directed to this matter, and a body of scientific men and practical travellers formed for the direction and management of the scheme, it might pass into the region of the practical and obtainable. Innumerable as the smaller difficulties of detail would be, they would probably not be insurmountable. Such a subsidiary difficulty, for instance, would rise from the fact that such a preserve should not border anywhere upon a densely populated tract of country, and that it would be necessary to leave a belt of country some miles in width around it, to be inhabited on exceptional conditions. Were the interest of scientific Europe and America fully aroused, and the feasibility of the scheme proved, money would not be the thing wanting for its completion.The sum now expended in warming the cell of one anthropoidape in Europe would build a stone wall a mile long in Mashonaland, and did the contributions take the form of donations giving the donors a permanent interest in the scheme and its management they might be largely increased. Apart entirely from the noblest scientific aspect, the undertaking might in the end prove itself successful in the purely commercial sense. Not only would the existence of such a preserve serve in time, as the creatures became extinct elsewhere, to attract scientific visitors to the land; but (curious as such an idea now appears, in a country, where for years our struggle has been to obtain an initial control over the animal and vegetable productions of Nature, and where all artificial productions are naturally valued at something above their real worth) it is possible that the mere animals themselves might, in the course of sixty or eighty years, prove as lucrative a source of wealth to the scientific body to which they belonged as if the original capital had been invested in gold mines or corn fields. It is difficult at the present moment to realize that in a generation and a half, when streams of immigration have swept east and west, north and south, across the continent, the tusks of an elephant, the skin of an antelope, or the body of a giraffe, or a live lion, may possess a purely commercial value, which would cause them to equal in worth a handful of Kimberley diamonds or a claim at Johannesburg. Apart from the always increasing interest which would attach scientifically to such a preserve of primitive forms, the vulgar curiosity which to-day runs after the lion-van and stands gaping at the Zoological Gardens on a Saturday afternoon, would find its gratification in the products of the tract; and it is not impossible that in a future generation, if the crude thirst for destruction remains unslaked in human nature, Nimrods may be found who would gladly expend much of their superfluous wealth in paying for attaining to the blissful consciousness of having destroyed the life of a creature of whose kind only a few score exist in the world. It may be objected that were such a scheme workable, and however remotely a possible success, it would long since in a commercial age have been grasped and carried out. But a scheme whose monetary success cannot be looked for during the limits of a lifetime is not one which presents seductive allurements to the purely commercial investor. It is a scheme peculiarly fitted to be worked out in the interests of science, which are practically indestructible and in the presence of which a thousand years are but as one day.In Central and Southern Africa to-day primitive nature is making its last stand on the surface of the globe. It is here or nowhere that a minute relic of it must be retained for the civilized world of the future. If it be possible for any plan to be maturedand carried out for the preserving of our fauna, it will undoubtedly be regarded by men of the future as action along that obvious, practical, and rational line which it was impossible for us to avoid seeing, and much as we should regard the action of men who had saved for us the treasures of antiquity in sealed chest and buried chambers. If no such plan is maturable and workable during the next fifty years, science will permanently have lost great possibilities, and South Africa that which constitutes its greatest attraction. It is certainly not by persistently following in the steps of other divisions of the globe, but by resolutely grasping our own opportunities and striking out her own paths, that Africa can ever attain to her rightful position among the world's divisions.At the present moment in the low-lying districts of Mashonaland, which till all the vast salubrious and productive tracts about them have been fully peopled and cultivated, will lie waste, we have one of the last, and probably the best, opportunities which will ever occur of finding a field in which we may preserve our rare and wonderful fauna. But to be successfully carried out the scheme should be worked on a colossal scale, and by the international interaction of all interested in science; our preserve should be the World's Zoological Garden.

At the present day it is by no means uncommon for men to spend the greater part of their lives and large stores of wealth in a sometimes futile search for the scattered fragments of antiquity. A few broken Greek marbles, or Nineveh mud tablets, or battered leaves of Egyptian papyrus, are considered an ample return for half a lifetime of labour and the expenditure of thousands. We are apt to regard with a scorn not unmixed with malevolence the men of a bygone age who allowed treasure of so priceless a value to humanity to be wantonly destroyed.

Yet, at the present day in South Africa, a destruction of materials far more priceless and irrevocable goes on in our midst in the full light of our nineteenth-century humanitarian culture. It is possible that in the course of time a new Phidias may arise in our midst, and produce statues comparable to, if not identical with, those of the old world, and the learning and lore of the old Egyptians and Chaldeans lost in their destroyed mud tablets or papyrus leaves may yet be re-evolved from the human brain; but there is a reckless and callous destruction now going on in our midst of that which can by no conceivable possibility be restored to humanity when once it is destroyed from the surface of the globe. Future generations will probably regard as intelligent and wise benefactors of their race the men who burnt the Library in Alexandria, and destroyed the Parthenon at Athens, when they are compared, in certain aspects, with the inhabitants of Southern Africa and the modern world.

For the moment we are so entirely bent on advancing the claims of a material civilization, which we are inclined to regard as the all-in-all of life, that more subtle, if equally practical, and important considerations are apt to be forgotten.

This view is forced on us when we consider the reckless and entirely wanton destruction of the one form of production for which the African continent, and more especially its southern portions,stands pre-eminent among the world's divisions—our astonishing fauna.

From gorilla and grey parrot on the east coast, and chimpanzee on the west, to the endless varieties of antelope and pachydermatous quadrupeds which at one time overran the south, no part in the globe has been within the memory of man, and even still is, so rich in beautiful and rare forms of sub-human life; no other presents the same vast field for scientific research.

How quickly this condition of things is passing away the most rapid glance at the present condition of South Africa will show. Hardly a year passes away without some rare and interesting form of life becoming extinct. The hippopotami, elephants, and antelopes which once grazed on the shores of Table Bay have for a century not been seen there, and the vast herds which covered our up-country plains in the memory of those living have absolutely been extinguished, leaving nothing behind but a few horns and skins, the few last wandering individuals, who in the natural course of things will be exterminated within the next few years. Before the middle of the twentieth century is reached (probably much sooner) the rifle, the railway train and the plough will so entirely have modified the conditions of existence that not only all forms of life indigenous to Southern, but to Central and Tropical Africa will have passed away.

From a sentimental and emotional standpoint this is to be regretted, but there are deeper interests than the merely emotional and poetical at stake. In an age when the study of a single small, deep-sea creature of a form intermediate between the vertebrate and invertebrate orders has thrown a flood of light on our biological knowledge, and when the discovery of a few fossilized hoofs has helped to revolutionize our view of vital phenomena; when even the man in the street, perceiving the practical advantages which science has conferred on him, has ceased to jeer, and regards it with a certain vague, if unreasoning, respect, it is not necessary to dwell at length on the fact that the loss of these multitudinous forms of life, by crippling and limiting the field of scientific study, must inflict a direct and serious loss on human knowledge and progress. But perhaps it is only the man more or less interested in the results of scientific research who can fully appreciate the importance of preserving for the future all forms of natural life, from the lion and crocodile to the humblest wood-dove and fly.

Some years back, finding it necessary to gain what information was obtainable with regard to the domestic and social habits of the higher apes, we found that all the information to be obtained from the latest works on the subject amounted to little more thannil; and that for a personal inspection of these creatures in their natural state three distinct journeys into separate and most inaccessible parts of the globe would be necessary.

We then proceeded to study the few isolated specimens to be found in the Zoological Gardens of Europe. We found a few crestfallen looking animals, transported at an immense cost from tropical Africa or elsewhere, necessarily confined in small, comparatively dark cells, kept alive by a continual expenditure of coal and artificial heat, and then rarely saved from consumption, and requiring the constant care and attention of an able-bodied man; they resembled as little, seated on their heaps of straw and coughing, the creature in its natural and active social condition amidst the sunshine of a tropical forest, as a mummy represents an ancient Egyptian. After a vast expenditure of money, less was to be learnt from them than might be gained with regard to a troop of South African baboons when watched for a few hours from behind the stones of a kopje.

Considering these things, the conclusion inevitably forces itself upon us that our position with regard to the study of animal life is yet far from an ideal one. With one-third the expenditure of energy and money which goes to form our half-dozen small zoological collections in Europe, a vast preserve for wild animals immeasurably superior to anything which exists for scientific ends might be formed and maintained in any tropical or sub-tropical country. Our small existing collections may serve to bring curious specimens under the eyes of scientific men, and subserve certain useful purposes; but for many forms of study they are absolutely futile, and as a means of keeping in existence specimens which would otherwise become extinct, they have no claim to consideration. The ideal zoological garden would be a vast tract of country in some tropical or subtropical region, where all creatures but those habituated to extreme cold would freely exist in a state of nature, limited only by mutual struggle; it should be a tract diversified, if possible, by swamp, forest, and hills, and divided as far as might be by natural features from the surrounding country; and where no such barriers existed it should be as far as possible artificially cut off. It should contain not merely the creatures indigenous to the country, but should serve as a receptacle for those which could not elsewhere be preserved from extinction. It should form, so to speak, a vast natural preserve, existing not primarily for the purposes of the sportsman, but of science, and in which the rifle should be almost unknown. In connection with this might in time spring up large zoological gardens in the narrower sense of the term, where isolated specimens might be immured for the purposes of certain studies; but for many yearsits far more important function would be simply the keeping in existence a large number of forms of animal life which would else become annihilated. Wildly Utopian as this scheme appears at first sight, consideration will show it is not beyond the range of feasibility, though beset with difficulty. The first, and for many years the most insuperable, difficulty has lain in the fact that no such tract as was necessary was obtainable anywhere. The existence of a strong, civilized government would be necessary to guarantee its retention for the desired purpose, and where a civilized government exists, there, as a rule, is a more or less dense population. The individual, as a rule, precedes the government, and apart from the fact that land then becomes too precious to be appropriated for such a purpose, both the land and the fauna have, as a rule, become so much modified and destroyed that it would take half a century to reproduce natural conditions. Such considerations have made in the past the whole scheme appear purely Utopian.

At the present moment, however, there exists in South Africa, by a rare and exceptional combination of circumstances, a condition which removes it from the realm of the purely ideal to that of the remotely practical. The sudden and unprecedented movement of the north-east of Southern Africa, where a powerful and well-organized form of civilized government is rapidly establishing itself in a vast territory, sparsely inhabited by natives, and as yet little, or at all, by Europeans, and where certain low-lying tracts are not at the present moment fitted for immediate occupation or for ordinary cultivation, and will certainly not be so used till the immense tracts of salubrious and valuable land about them have been fully utilized, yields a possibility of the realization of this plan, which has not occurred before and will probably not occur again. Were a large tract of this country granted or bought at a nominal price, and freedom from intrusion guaranteed, and were the interests of scientific Europe and America aroused and directed to this matter, and a body of scientific men and practical travellers formed for the direction and management of the scheme, it might pass into the region of the practical and obtainable. Innumerable as the smaller difficulties of detail would be, they would probably not be insurmountable. Such a subsidiary difficulty, for instance, would rise from the fact that such a preserve should not border anywhere upon a densely populated tract of country, and that it would be necessary to leave a belt of country some miles in width around it, to be inhabited on exceptional conditions. Were the interest of scientific Europe and America fully aroused, and the feasibility of the scheme proved, money would not be the thing wanting for its completion.

The sum now expended in warming the cell of one anthropoidape in Europe would build a stone wall a mile long in Mashonaland, and did the contributions take the form of donations giving the donors a permanent interest in the scheme and its management they might be largely increased. Apart entirely from the noblest scientific aspect, the undertaking might in the end prove itself successful in the purely commercial sense. Not only would the existence of such a preserve serve in time, as the creatures became extinct elsewhere, to attract scientific visitors to the land; but (curious as such an idea now appears, in a country, where for years our struggle has been to obtain an initial control over the animal and vegetable productions of Nature, and where all artificial productions are naturally valued at something above their real worth) it is possible that the mere animals themselves might, in the course of sixty or eighty years, prove as lucrative a source of wealth to the scientific body to which they belonged as if the original capital had been invested in gold mines or corn fields. It is difficult at the present moment to realize that in a generation and a half, when streams of immigration have swept east and west, north and south, across the continent, the tusks of an elephant, the skin of an antelope, or the body of a giraffe, or a live lion, may possess a purely commercial value, which would cause them to equal in worth a handful of Kimberley diamonds or a claim at Johannesburg. Apart from the always increasing interest which would attach scientifically to such a preserve of primitive forms, the vulgar curiosity which to-day runs after the lion-van and stands gaping at the Zoological Gardens on a Saturday afternoon, would find its gratification in the products of the tract; and it is not impossible that in a future generation, if the crude thirst for destruction remains unslaked in human nature, Nimrods may be found who would gladly expend much of their superfluous wealth in paying for attaining to the blissful consciousness of having destroyed the life of a creature of whose kind only a few score exist in the world. It may be objected that were such a scheme workable, and however remotely a possible success, it would long since in a commercial age have been grasped and carried out. But a scheme whose monetary success cannot be looked for during the limits of a lifetime is not one which presents seductive allurements to the purely commercial investor. It is a scheme peculiarly fitted to be worked out in the interests of science, which are practically indestructible and in the presence of which a thousand years are but as one day.

In Central and Southern Africa to-day primitive nature is making its last stand on the surface of the globe. It is here or nowhere that a minute relic of it must be retained for the civilized world of the future. If it be possible for any plan to be maturedand carried out for the preserving of our fauna, it will undoubtedly be regarded by men of the future as action along that obvious, practical, and rational line which it was impossible for us to avoid seeing, and much as we should regard the action of men who had saved for us the treasures of antiquity in sealed chest and buried chambers. If no such plan is maturable and workable during the next fifty years, science will permanently have lost great possibilities, and South Africa that which constitutes its greatest attraction. It is certainly not by persistently following in the steps of other divisions of the globe, but by resolutely grasping our own opportunities and striking out her own paths, that Africa can ever attain to her rightful position among the world's divisions.

At the present moment in the low-lying districts of Mashonaland, which till all the vast salubrious and productive tracts about them have been fully peopled and cultivated, will lie waste, we have one of the last, and probably the best, opportunities which will ever occur of finding a field in which we may preserve our rare and wonderful fauna. But to be successfully carried out the scheme should be worked on a colossal scale, and by the international interaction of all interested in science; our preserve should be the World's Zoological Garden.

Printed in Great Britain byUNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESSLONDON AND WOKING

[1]It was at the end of 1838.—S.C.C.S.

[2]Reimpje = raw leather strips.

[3]Krantzes = precipices.

[4]If I were compelled to name the most poetical and completely ideal human creature I have met in the course of somewhat complex travels, I should name a Swede whom I once met in Italy.

[5]Stoep = veranda.

[6]Fig = Mesembryanthemum.

[7]She visited the Falls in 1911.

[8]Written 1892.

[9]See Theal's invaluable works on South Africa, more especially his artistic and finished volume,Cape Commanders; also Noble'sHistory of South Africa, etc.

[10]Lammervanger (lamb-catcher) = an eagle.

[11]Roads now scar the mountain side; and within the last months the Block House has been turned into a convict station; so the strange shadow of the nineteenth century civilized man casts itself month by month further across our land.

[12](Footnote added in 1906.) This I wrote in 1892. I could not write it now.

[13]The permanent and fixed type of the Jewish variety of the human race, which enables it to transmit its physical and mental characteristics with perfect truth even when crossed with another race, was probably created by the fact that the Jews were all descended from one or a very small body of ancestors, and bred rigorously in and in. Their own very suggestive legend states that the original founder mated with his own sister, which would make it almost impossible for the true Jews to revert to any but one type. So it is possible to understand how the Boer, in the course of a few generations, has formed a type fixed and marked, both mentally and physically, only when we consider how small was the number of individuals from which he originally sprung, and how he must of necessity have bred in and in, cousin marrying cousin again and yet again. There probably often land in a large American and Australian port, on a single day, more European emigrants than the number which composed the whole original stock of the Boer, including all French additions; there is therefore no possibility of the average colonist forming so quickly an equally marked type. Even to-day it is not uncommon to find a Boer three times related to his own wife; she may be his first cousin on his father's side, his second cousin on his mother's side, a fourth cousin through a maternal grandmother, and there may have been antecedent intermarriages of which there is no record. The children of such a marriage inheriting an almost homogeneous blood from both sides, can hardly fail to be some fixed type. On the other hand, the Boer race has probably been preserved from the dangers of interbreeding by the fact that the small original stock were of such very distinct national types.

[14]Yes, we once all believed that.

[15](Footnote added in 1900.) Yet England killed it in America a century ago, and she is killing it in South Africa to-day.

[16]Springbok-Fountain, Cattle Pen, Jackal's-Fountain, Cat's Head.

[17]Let it be remarked that this passage was written in 1892, and printed in England in 1894.

[18]Though the Scotch of Burns's best poems comes nearer to it.

[19]It must of course be understood that a great deal of real Dutch of Holland is used in South Africa. The Bible is written in it, the services of the church are more or less conducted in it, and students learn to speak it almost correctly.

[20]This view with regard to the possible origin of the Taal (whether it be of any or of no value) was first suggested to us by a somewhat curious case which came under our own observation. A young man from one of the German-speaking Swiss cantons arrived in South Africa, and immediately married a Dutch girl. Both parents could speak a little English. They went immediately to live in a remote and out of the world spot among the mountains, where they seldom came into contact with other Europeans. Here their children were born. Neither of the parents were educated people. When I came into contact with them a most curious phenomenon had developed itself; the whole family spoke a language which was not Dutch nor German nor English, but a most curious blending of all three, and the words, from whichever language taken, had exactly the same clipt form we find in the Taal. There was not one member of the family who could speak a single sentence correctly in any of the three languages. They had, in fact, developed a new language for themselves. No doubt their children learnt English and Dutch later when they went into the world; but, had the descendants of that family been preserved distinct for a couple of generations, a new and astounding variety of human speech would have been formed. One of the most remarkable points was that each member of the family spoke in exactly the same manner.

[21]This view was propounded and backed by the votes of a majority in the Transvaal Parliament recently.

[22]It may be truly remarked that among the uncultured in Europe the same faith in ghosts and witches and even more appalling superstitions are rife; and this is certainly the case. But what is peculiar is that this unscientific attitude is formed in men often of unusual ability and high practical gifts.

[23]"I can read," said an intelligent woman in our presence, "but only the first of John and the fifth of Matthew." Who shall say how much she lost and how much she gained!

[24]This is a view we have heard seriously expressed by some Kaffirs.

[25]Kaffir: A loose term, derived from the Arabic, and sometimes employed to signify all dark-skinned Africans, but generally used in the Colony to designate this particular branch of the Bantu people.

[26]So considerable is the aptitude for abstract study displayed by the Bantu, that there are cases in which even Bantu females, preparing for the matriculation examination of the Cape University, are found not to be inferior to the average male Europeans sharing the same course of study.

[27]"I cannot understand you," said a thoughtful Bantu to us once; "a man can have his own cow and his own knife, but land is for all."

[28]There are a few Half-castes now in South Africa who are results of the union of Englishmen with the Boer Half-castes who are the result of slavery; and even a few who are the result of the union of Englishmen, principally soldiers, with the aboriginal natives. But the mass of Half-castes were in existence seventy years ago when the English first began to people the country. It need hardly be said that the preponderance of Half-castes who owe their origin to the Boer in no way indicates any superiority in the matter of sexual self-respect on the part of the English. There exists at the present day in our seaport towns, under the ægis of the English flag, and legislated for by the English Government, a traffic between English soldiers and sailors and the lowest class of Half-caste women, more anti-social, and, if it be possible, more degrading than any relation between the ancient slave-holders and their female slaves. Yet, as the women concerned in this traffic belong very largely to that unhappy class, not one in fifty of whom is fruitful, and whose children, when such are born, generally die in infancy, there is no very great effect produced on the population of the country; the thousands of Half-castes born every year being mainly the result of unions between Half-castes. It should be well borne in mind, in dealing with this subject, that so rapid is the rate of human increase under even tolerably favourable conditions, that four Half-castes born two hundred years ago, might easily be the progenitors of at least two hundred Half-castes at the present day, without any further admixture of European blood.

[29]Except in Johannesburg.

[30](Added in 1896.) We are not referring to that which takes place when Englishmen, untrammelled by any public opinion, are absolutely dominant over a crushed native race, as in the territories north of the Limpopo to-day. We shall deal with this, to an Englishman most sorrowful matter, at some future date.

[31]We must, of course, be understood to speak generally. There are to be found, among the lowest class of our Half-castes, women of the most spotless sexual integrity and of irreproachable sexual pride. But one is undoubtedly justified in stating, that, generally speaking, the Half-caste is less sexually self-respecting than the white woman, or even than the black woman is till she has been totally severed from her own social surroundings and therefore practically reduced to much the same condition as the Half-caste. In her native state the Bantu woman is in many respects in a higher sexual position than large numbers of civilized females. Of the price paid for her at her marriage she receives nothing, it passes to her family. She not only supports herself by her own labour, but is the mainstay of the society in which she exists, largely feeding and clothing it by her exertions. Her position is probably much farther from that of the female who lives idly and parasitically on society through the sale of her sex functions than is that of most European women, married or single.

[32]Of course the same law of reversion might, under certain conditions, produce development and not retrogression. If, as is sometimes held (though we ourselves are very strongly of the opposite opinion), the Hottentots and Bushmen of South Africa are not human creatures caught in the very act of developing from lower forms, but are the result of degeneration from some higher type; then the creature resulting from a cross between the two might revert to that higher type, and be of higher social feeling and loftier intellectual power than either. We have ourselves in only one instance met an individual who was a cross between the English and Kaffir races, though we are aware that several such exist in South Africa. This man was certainly merely a composite of the two races, without any tendency to revert to a lower type. He was the son of an English gentleman, his mother was a wild Kaffir woman who had not been draggled under the feet of civilization. The man was proud, determined, resolute. Self-educated, he raised himself to a post of high trust under the English Government; he combined the dash and courage of the Kaffir with the pride and intelligence of the Englishman. He had the fault which is common to both his parent races, of being cruel and indomitable when opposed; but of the vices supposed to be inseparable from Half-castism, servility, and insincerity, he had not a trace. He was a man and a gentleman. But, whether if such crosses were common such men would generally arise, is quite another question.

[33]This somewhat surprising result has been arrived at by Havelock Ellis in the course of his scientific studies on the nature and causes of genius. He has drawn up tables of interest showing the relations of genius to race.

[34]It is interesting to note that two of America's most celebrated literary men, Bret Harte and Walt Whitman, are both of mingled Dutch and English descent.

[35]We are far from implying that there are no pure sub-varieties of Europeans even at the present day. In sequestered valleys and villages there undoubtedly are still folk who have not mingled their blood for at least two thousand years, and the inhabitants of certain Welsh valleys, Cornish hamlets, and villages in Brittany and Spain, though now divided from each other by speech, and nationality, may be absolutely of one blood and one descent. That even the artificial national lines which were drawn in the middle ages, and which form the basis of our national divisions at the present day, do coincide in some ways with more or less organic distinctions, we fully allow. In that great medley of Teutonic peoples who inhabit the German Empire to-day, there does really appear one mental characteristic which might almost mark them off from the rest of Europeans as a distinct variety; this is the musical talent. All the greatest composers have been Germans, almost every peasant and burgher you meet finds music an important element in his existence. Yet is this peculiarity wholly organic? The English are the least musical of all European nations, yet it is notorious that a family of English children reared in Germany exhibit often the same serious passion for music, the same knowledge of it, and even the same power of producing it. No two European nations are more unlike than the French and English, yet perhaps the most typical Frenchman we ever met was an Englishman born in Paris. And there can be little doubt that a French boy reared from birth in English surroundings would share the true Anglican worship for rough outdoor games, and if fed plentifully from youth upward on large quantities of beef, pudding, and ale, and leading an outdoor life, would at least as much resemble the typical John Bull of big belly, double chin, and red face, as do the Englishmen of America and the Colonies! The fact is that nine-tenths of what are popularly known as national peculiarities are not even skin-deep. This is proved when men of different nationalities are thrown into the crucible of Colonial life; after two generations spent there, if exposed to the same conditions and using the same speech, the nationality is almost undiscoverable. We in the Colonies, who stand at a vantage for perceiving how real up to a certain point are the European national peculiarities, and yet how essentially superficial, know that even the Irishman, whose peculiarities are more marked than those of any other purely European race, cannot with any certainty be distinguished from his fellows of other blood after a couple of generations, if born in a Colony. Even in the case of the Semitic Jew whodoesform a distinct variety, breeding more or less true, national characteristics are vulgarly attributed to blood which are undoubtedly the result of circumstance. A Jew severed from his social atmosphere and brought up in a society in which wealth was at a discount and scientific and literary attainment at a premium, would no doubt turn that intellectual fertility which is the gift of his blood into those directions; and though his descendants would undoubtedly inherit his nose, they would probably show no inherent tendency to lend money at sixty per cent.

[36]Thus supposing, for example, a cross between English and Japanese. Both these have now attained to the same high point of intellectual and social developments, the Japanese being probably more artistic and refined, the Englishman possibly more dominant. If these varieties developed from ancestors lower in the scale of growth than either are at present, then their offspring might revert to that type and be lower than either parent form; but it is also quite possible that other factors may come into play, and the extreme refinement and artistic instinct of the Japanese, combining with the coarser virility of the Englishman, might produce a creature higher in the scale of life and more desirable than either parent species. All that we are qualified to assert in the present infantile stage of our knowledge is, that there is a danger, and we are inclined to believe a very great danger, of reversion to the lower primitive type where two widely severed varieties cross, that humanity may by that process lose the results of hundreds of years of slow evolution.

[37]Such as the case of Eva the Hottentot, who married in the early days Van Meerhof, and one of whose daughters married a well-to-do Cape farmer.

[38]There may be, as we before said, rare cases in which the crossing of black and white races in the first instance was not the result of primitive lust, but of profound self-abnegating affection and sympathy; in which the man or woman has deliberately selected one of the darker race for life-long companionship, and has been willing to endure all that scorn and social contumely could conflict for the sake of that companionship. Where honour and affection and life-long marriage bind a man and woman of diverse breeds, it is difficult to speak. Perhaps so mighty a love has laws of its own; and the children of such a union might be far better born and better trained than the children of average pure-breed marriages. It can only be said that such cases are so rare that practically they need hardly be considered in studying the Half-caste problems of our day.

[39]We are well aware of the argument that, by bridging the cavity which yawns between race and race, the Half-caste serves to make possible a more kindly sense of union between the two. We see the weight of this argument, and allow something for it, even much; but, so enormous is the amount of suffering inflicted by the intermingling of the dark and light races in South Africa to-day, that no hypothetical gain seems to justify it.

[40]This was written in the April of 1891, when large treks were being organized in the Free State and Transvaal.

[41]Sloot = watercourse.

[42]Wildebeest = the gnu.

[43]Vley = depression with water.

[44]Hartebeest = an antelope.

[45]There seems some tendency in South African climate and conditions of life to produce this physical type, as it is often closely approximated to by the descendants of British settlers. The South Africans as a whole appear to be larger, and not quite so closely knit as the European folk.

[46](Footnote added in 1901.) This passage was written ten years ago, and printed as it stands five years ago. It possibly throws some light on the success of the Republicans in the conflict with the British Empire to-day.

[47]We are, of course, speaking generally.

[48]That this, and more especially the absence of excitement and change, and not anything racial, is the cause of the large size and great weight, sometimes running to over 300 pounds, of Boer women, is certain, as their descendants, when leading the ordinary modern life, are in no way remarkable for size or weight.

[49]Dag = "Day."

[50]Dassie = coney.

[51]Travelling in the north of the Colony along the banks of the Orange in our childhood, we were once compelled to pass the night in the house of a very wealthy farmer. At bedtime we were shown into a room with three bedsteads. In one slept the father, mother, and the young infant, in another the grandmother and two of the younger children; in a large four-poster in the other corner were two girls of fourteen and sixteen and a youth of nineteen. On this bed we were asked to lie down, and about one o'clock our company was added to by a huge Boer bull-dog, which lay at the foot, and successfully, even for a child, prevented sleep.

[52]See Note D,The Domestic Life of the Boer.

[53]The spoons being generally of very soft metal, are easily destroyed by rough usage.

[54]Smous = hawker.

[55]Hart-kwaal = heart-complaint.

[56]Nachtmaal = Holy Communion.

[57]It is perhaps hardly necessary to repeat that by the term "Boer" it is not intended to signify all the Dutch-descended inhabitants of South Africa, but only such as have retained the old seventeenth century habits and ideas of their forefathers, and who speak only the "Taal." Probably almost half the inhabitants of South Africa of Dutch or French descent now speak English, and are often entirely indistinguishable from the other inhabitants of the country; the interest therefore which attaches itself to the Boer who has preserved until to-day the manners and ideas of two centuries ago does not attach to them. We shall deal with such persons later among the other nineteenth century folk of South Africa.

[58]That on the higher planes of development, where the individuality becomes complex and varied, the unions of Socrateses with their Xanthippes, or fruitless celibacies, are not universal, can only be accounted for by the fact that, unlike the artificial blocks which the carver may shape as he will, the men and women of any society or age are part of one organic body and, except where unhealthy social conditions prevent their being exposed to the action of the same forces, will tend to develop in the same direction, and again to meet on the higher planes of growth as they did in the lower. Therefore the most highly developed and individualized men and women of any society, if they have been exposed to the action of the same cultivating forces, may often be compared to those delicate and intricate puzzles carved from one ball of ivory by the Chinese, which only need to be brought into juxtaposition to show how admirably they harmonize and how essentially they form but one whole.

[59]Speaking of the Boer insurrection of 1815, Sir Andries Stockenstrom in hisAutobiographysays of two families of Boers, who were surrounded by British soldiers: "They placed themselves in a position of defence under their wagons. One of the soldiers by whom they were surrounded having ventured within range, entreating them to surrender, was shot dead on the spot. The fire was, of course, returned. Bezuidenhout's wife, reloading the guns as they were discharged, kept encouraging her husband and brother Fabre not to surrender; until at last Bezuidenhout fell dead, riddled with bullets, and she and Fabre were seized dangerously wounded, as well as her son, a boy of twelve, slightly."

[60]This was written in 1890, nine years before the War of the Republics began.

[61]It is hardly necessary to state that we are not referring to the labouring classes in modern societies, in which, when the male and female are both exposed to the same conditions of labour, the same intellectual homogeneity is to be observed. The position of these women differs, however, from that of the Boer woman in the less social consideration they enjoy, this depending on causes too complex to be here entered on.

[62]We glance at this matter briefly here as we have dealt with it in detail inWomen and Labour.

[63]Tante = Auntie.

[64]To prevent misunderstanding, it is necessary to state that the term Boer, like the term Highland clansman, is more than a mere designation of race. Had Scott been asked to describe a typical Highland clansman, he would at once have described him with certain manners, ideas, virtues and wants, forming an absolutely true picture of the ancient clansman, which yet might not in any way apply to the Duke of Argyle or other cultured descendant of the Highlander, who, though being the Chief of a Highland clan, and possessing possibly no drop of foreign blood, would yet belong to a wholly different type of civilization. Probably not one half of the descendants of the Boers are Boers to-day, in the sense of speaking only the Taal and abiding by seventeenth-century manners and customs; and in twenty-five years there will not, we regret to think, be a Boer born in South Africa, though there will be more than half a million South Africans of Dutch-Huguenot descent. Serious political miscalculation is the result of the misconception that all Dutch-Huguenot South Africans are primitive Boers. In childhood we remember having heard that a Scotch Highlander was coming on a visit; and our disappointment when, instead of a clansman, speaking Gaelic, wearing a kilt, and playing the bagpipes, a delicate young man, much addicted to reading Tennyson and playing Beethoven, appeared, was probably much like that which awaits the foreigner who still in all South African Dutchmen expects to see the Boer.

Back to Index Next