Chapter VIII: The Englishman (4)

It may be that the ideal human creature, for whom the centuries wait, may yet be found a human, half Chinaman, half Aryan, or African-Aryan and Mongolian blend: but the more valuable and rare each human breed is, the more does one shrink from destroying it where all is so dark.

Vandals may in a few hours wreck the Gothic cathedral which it was the work of countless generations to raise; and the rare and multiform human varieties, which it has taken nature countless millenniums to elaborate and fix in her workshop, and which add so greatly to the variety and charm of earth, may in a few generations be destroyed for ever. It is ill destroying the artistic work of man or nature till we know that from its destruction we are able to rear up something more worthy.

The lap-dog who lies upon my knee, the mastiff who guards my house, are both so wholly desirable that I desire to see neither of them extinguished. Shall we value our human varieties less than my dogs?

Yet probably, and I should say more than probably, where nature herself obliterates the distinction of race, and allows a mighty and permanent affection between man and woman to cross its limits of race, then I should be inclined to say nature herself gives a sanction which may set the lesser utilities at defiance and consecrates the union of distinct breeds; but without so mighty a permit it is perhaps well that we who are but children in this matter, and cannot see farther than our hands can reach, should pause and move with caution. For the future of the race on earth is bound up in this matter.

NOTE C

THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF THE BOER (1899)

I have been asked to write an account on the domestic life of the South African Boer. If the term "Boer" be used to signify, as it sometimes is, the entire population of South Africa which is descended from the early Dutch settlers of two or three hundred years ago, and of the French Huguenots, who, driven from their native land in the seventeenth century, landed in South Africa and mingled their blood with that of the earlier settlers, the task would not be an easier one than to write a description of the domestic life of the whole American people. For the Africanders, as the Dutch-French-Huguenots descendants now call themselves, are not at the present day less complex and many-graded than the Americans themselves. In our cities and towns they form a large proportion of our most cultured and brilliant citizens, whose domestic life differs not at all from that of other cultured South Africans, English, French, or Germans in descent. Many of our most brilliant lawyers and able politicians and professional men are of this race: and year by year the names both of men and women of this race increasingly fill our lists of successful university students.

If, however, the term "Boer" be taken, as it should be, to signify only that portion of the race who have remained farmers (the word "Boer" literally means a farmer), and who in the outlying districts of the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, Natal, and the Transvaal, have preserved unchanged the language, manners and ideas of their forefathers of the seventeenth century, then the task is far more easy. For this wonderful and virile folk--driven into the wilds of Africa a couple of centuries ago--are not merely dominated in their domestic and in their public life by old ideals and methods, but a strange uniformity exists everywhere.

Whether we find the primitive Boer on the wide grass plains of the Transvaal and the Free State, the Karoo plains of central and western Cape Colony, or the bush lands nearer the coast, in appearance, ideas, and, above all, in habits and the arrangement of his domestic life, a complete and unique conformity exists.

The typical South African Boer lives on his own land, a farm, covering a stretch of country; it may be six, twelve, eighteen or more miles in length. On the spot where his homestead now stands, it may be that a few generations ago his grandfather or great-grandfather, on his first journey into the wilds in search of a new home, drew up his great ox-wagon beside some slowly oozing fountain, or on the banks of some stream with inexhaustible pools, which had never yet been visited by the foot of white man, and determined here to fix his home. He called the place perhaps "Jakals' Fontein," from the number of jackals which came down to drink or watch for prey the first night; "Wilde Kats Draai," from the wild cat they killed next day; or "Ti'er Kloof," from the huge tiger-leopard killed in the ravine beyond the fountain; and there, after a longer or shorter struggle with wild beasts or poisoned-arrow-shooting Bushmen, he built his house and kraals, and settled himself and his descendants.

Here, as the years passed, and leopard, lion, and wild dog became exterminated, and the wild bucks on whose flesh in early days he lived became more rare, he raised his little square or oblong house of rough stones or unburnt bricks; behind his house, surrounded by walls of rough stone or high-piled branches of the mimosa thorn, he built his kraals (or enclosures for the stock to sleep in at night), which were always placed very close to the house, that they might be more easily protected from wild beasts or savages.

By-and-by he generally built a dam, larger or smaller, as the case might be, for catching the rain-water, which in rainy seasons floods the plains, or which might be fed by his fountain if strong enough. Here his stock came to drink at evening; and if the supply of water were large enough, he often enclosed a small patch of land below the dam with a stone wall, planted a few fig and peach trees, and made a small garden.

Behind the house was built a large brick oven, often whitewashed on the outside, where the good wife (who in earlier days had had to content herself with a hollowed-out antheap as an oven) might bake her bread. Behind the house was raised a large wagon-house, open on the side from which least rain came, where the great ox-wagon and cart, if there were one, might stand sheltered from sun and rain; and then the typical Boer homestead, as we know it, and as it exists to the present day, was complete.

As sons and daughters grew up and married, additional rooms were often built on for them, to the old farm-house, or small houses were built near, or at a few miles' distance on the same farm, where at some other fountain the stock was watered. But in each case the new homestead repeated the features of the old.

If one travel across some great African plain to-day, the hoofs of one's horse sinking step by step into the red sand, or crunching the gravel on some rocky ridge, far off across the plain one may mark some distant flat-topped table mountains rising up against the sky on the horizon; but for the rest, a vast, silent, undulating plain, broken, it may be, by small hillocks, or "kopjes," of iron-stones, stretches about one everywhere. After travelling five or six miles further, one may discern, at the foot of some distant kopje, a small white or dark speck; as one approaches nearer the practised eye perceives it is a homestead.

As one approaches yet nearer along the sandy wagon-track, slowly all the details of the place become clear--the house, the dam, almost or quite dry, if it be the end of a long, thirsty season, the little patch of dark green contrasting with the miles of red-brown veld about it, the wagon-house, and the great dark square patches, which are the kraals. And yet, so clear is the air, making objects distinctly visible at a long distance, one may ride on for an hour before the road, which has led straight as an arrow across the plain, takes a little turn, and the farmhouse is reached.

If it be the middle of a hot summer's afternoon a great stillness will reign about the place; not a soul will be seen stirring; the doors and the wooden shutters of the windows will be closed; a few hens may be scratching about in the red sand on the shady side of the house, and a couple of large Boer dogs will rise slowly from the shadow of the wagon house, and come toward you silently, with their heads down. If a coloured servant should appear from the back of the house, or a little face peep from behind the oven, it will be well to call to them to call off the dogs, for the African Boer dog is a peculiar species of mastiff, with a touch of the bull-dog, celebrated for his silent savageness.

After the dogs have been called off, the servant or child will go into the house to rouse the master of the house, who, with the rest of the family, is still taking his afternoon siesta, made necessary to all by the intense heat of summer and by the early rising, which is the invariable rule on an African farm. Presently the upper half of the door opens, and then the lower, and the master of the house appears, his eyes a little blinded by the glare of the afternoon sun after the cool darkness of the house.

He will step down from the low, raised stone platform before the door, and come to meet you--a tall, powerful man of over six feet in height, large-boned and massive, with large hands and feet, a long brown beard, and keen, steady, somewhat deep-set eyes. He will extend his hand to you with the greatest courtesy, inquire your name, and whether you do not wish to off-saddle, and will call a servant to take your horse.

When you have entered the house with him, you will find yourself in a square room, large as compared with the whole size of the house. The floor is generally earth--soil forming the huge antheaps which cover the plains being generally taken for this purpose, which, damped with water, and well pounded down, forms an exceedingly hard floor. In the centre of the room is a bare square table, neatly finished off, but often of home construction, having been made by the father or grandfather of the present owner. Round the sides of the room are arranged some chairs and a long wooden sofa of the same make, the seats of which are formed, not of cane, but of thin thongs of leather interlaced.

At one side of the room against the wall stands a small square table. On it stands the great coffee-urn, and the work of the house-mother. Beside it, in her elbow-chair, in which she has hastily seated herself to welcome the stranger, she herself sits, dressed in black, often with a little black shawl across her shoulders, and a white handkerchief round her throat.

At her feet is a little square wooden stove, with a hollow inside, in which may be put a small brazier of live coals in cold weather, the heat arising through small ornamental holes cut in the wood of the top. Exactly such wooden stoves may be seen in the paintings of Flemish interiors by the old Dutch artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The good wife politely extends her hand to you, asks you to be seated, and you take your place on the wooden sofa. Except the tables and chairs, the room contains little or nothing. On the wall may be a rough gun-rack, containing half a dozen guns, from the old clumsy flint-lock gun of a century ago--which may have brought down many an elephant and lion in the old days and defended the lives of wives and children--to the most elegant modern Mauser or Martini-Henry. But the guns are more often kept in the bedroom, on the wall near the head of the bed.

One thing, however, is never missing. Either in a little closed window with a crochet cloth thrown over it, on the housemother's little table, on the centre table, or in a little cupboard in the wall, is always to be found the great family Bible. It holds a place altogether unique in the economy of the Boer life. It is not alone that on its front pages are to be found solemnly inscribed the names of the ancestors, the births, deaths, or marriages of his children, and often a brief record of the date of the most momentous events in his own or his family's history; it is not alone that for generations this book has represented the sole tie between his solitary and often nomadic family and the intellectual life of culture of mankind; it is not alone that any culture or knowledge he possesses, other than that gained from the material world about him, has been all spelled out of its pages, but the visible external volume forms the Lares and Penates of his household, the sacred central point.

It is treated with respect; no other book is ever laid upon it; it is opened reverentially; it is carried wherever he wanders; it is consulted not merely as a moral, but also a material guide. The pages are solemnly opened and the finger brought down upon a passage, which is spelled out, and recovery or death of a child, and even such matters as the whereabouts of lost cattle, are believed to be indicated by its contents; as Enoch Arden's wife believed, when she brought her finger down on the passage about the palm-tree, that it indicated Enoch's death.

After we have been seated for a few moments the other members of the family will troop in, one by one, and shake hands, and seat themselves on the chairs round the room; nine or ten children between the ages of eighteen and two years, and perhaps a married son and daughter-in-law, and an old grandmother, who has her own elbow-chair near the window. For the Boer ideal of family life is patriarchal, and two or three generations are often housed under one roof. Presently the eldest daughter makes coffee in the urn, a little Kaffir maid bringing in a small, brazier of live coals to place under it. Then coffee is poured out in cups, or basins, and handed round to each person.

By the time the coffee has been drunk, the afternoon is beginning to grow old; the heat is rapidly lessening, and the soft evening breeze beginning to stir the air. The farmer lights his pipe, and invites you to fill yours from his large tobacco-bag, made of cony's skin or little kid's. Then he invites you to accompany him to the kraals, towards which from different points on the plain the flocks may already be seen tending. Then comes the busy and delightful hour--sunset on an African farm. Everywhere there is bustle and stir; in the cow-kraals the calves are bleating and putting their noses through the gate to get through to their mothers as they are being milked; and one by one, the sheep and the goats are being counted in at the gates of the great kraals.

The Kaffir maids are busy preparing the churn for the fresh milk, and lighting the kitchen fire for supper. The children are romping outside, inspired by the cool evening wind; even the old grandmother seats herself on the back doorstep to watch the stir, and to see the pink sunset slowly deepen into grey as the night comes down. The dark gathers quickly, and soon the whole family are again gathered in the great front room.

On really old-fashioned farms a little Kaffir maid then comes in with a small tub of hot water and a cloth, and washes the feet of old and young, after which the family sit down to the evening meal, generally composed of boiled mutton, bread, and coffee. After supper, it is not long before the whole family retire for the night into the small bedrooms opening to the right and left of the sitting-room, and by eight o'clock often the whole household is in bed and asleep, the old Boer dog, stealing softly round the house, being the only creature moving, and the occasional bleating of sheep and goats being the only sounds that break the stillness.

At half-past three or four the next morning, however, you will be early aroused by the sound of bustling and movement. Every one is getting up. The Kaffir maid has already made the fire, and by the time you enter the sitting-room the eldest daughter is already pouring out coffee at the little table, by the light of a candle, although the grey dawn-light is already creeping in at the door.

As soon as he has had his coffee, the Boer with his sons goes out to the kraals to let out the stock. Long before the sun rises the flocks are already wending their way across the plain to their different pastures, with their Kaffir herdsmen behind them.

Then if you be the typical African traveller, anxious to get on his way before the heat of the day rises, you will have another cup of coffee, and bidding good-bye to your hosts, by the time the sun rises you will be already on your way across the plain, and the farm-house with its kraals and dam be already but a small speck behind you.

NOTE D

OUR 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 than _nil_; 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 years its 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 anthropoid ape 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 matured and 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 by_

UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS

LONDON AND WOKING

* * * * * *

Transcriber's note:

Inconsistencies in hyphenation and punctuation have not been corrected.

TRANSCRIBER'S CORRECTIONS

page original text correction
33 is neither forest nor scrubb. is neither forest nor scrub.
54 into an incohate trading firm into an inchoate trading firm
56 nations should co-exist. nations should not co-exist.
92 the inacessible height the inaccessible height
121 the Spaniard or Enligshman, the Spaniard or Englishman,
126 the asthetic and intellectual the æsthetic and intellectual
152 the story of the fightng the story of the fighting
157 wherein out attitude differs wherein our attitude differs
192 a close intellectual fellowhip. a close intellectual fellowship.
201 and ill-important share and all-important share
236 the exception of Piet Retieff, the exception of Piet Retief,
267 than years have ever been, than yours have ever been,
268 tea which Talmi women tea which Tamil women
280 hopelessly cripple the arm; hopelessly cripple the army;
290 at midday in a vast plane at midday in a vast plain
321 the modern ninetenth-century the modern nineteenth-century
350 a part which follow after a part which follows after
362 and the bust of Skakespeare and the bust of Shakespeare
382 the English nation has chosem, the English nation has chosen,