For Centuries These Pioneers Of South African Colonisation
Strove To Obtain Some Further Footing, But Save Along The Courses
Of The Rivers They Made Little Progress.
Fierce natives and an
enervating climate barred their way.
But it was different with the Dutch. That very rudeness of climate
which had so impressed the Portuguese adventurer was the source of
their success. Cold and poverty and storm are the nurses of the
qualities which make for empire. It is the men from the bleak and
barren lands who master the children of the light and the heat. And
so the Dutchmen at the Cape prospered and grew stronger in that
robust climate. They did not penetrate far inland, for they were
few in number and all they wanted was to be found close at hand.
But they built themselves houses, and they supplied the Dutch East
India Company with food and water, gradually budding off little
townlets, Wynberg, Stellenbosch, and pushing their settlements up
the long slopes which lead to that great central plateau which
extends for fifteen hundred miles from the edge of the Karoo to the
Valley of the Zambesi. Then came the additional Huguenot
emigrants - the best blood of France three hundred of them, a
handful of the choicest seed thrown in to give a touch of grace and
soul to the solid Teutonic strain. Again and again in the course of
history, with the Normans, the Huguenots, the Emigres, one can see
the great hand dipping into that storehouse and sprinkling the
nations with the same splendid seed. France has not founded other
countries, like her great rival, but she has made every other
country the richer by the mixture with her choicest and best. The
Rouxs, Du Toits, Jouberts, Du Plessis, Villiers, and a score of
other French names are among the most familiar in South Africa.
For a hundred more years the history of the colony was a record of
the gradual spreading of the Afrikaners over the huge expanse of
veld which lay to the north of them. Cattle raising became an
industry, but in a country where six acres can hardly support a
sheep, large farms are necessary for even small herds. Six thousand
acres was the usual size, and five pounds a year the rent payable
to Government. The diseases which follow the white man had in
Africa, as in America and Australia, been fatal to the natives, and
an epidemic of smallpox cleared the country for the newcomers.
Further and further north they pushed, founding little towns here
and there, such as Graaf-Reinet and Swellendam, where a Dutch
Reformed Church and a store for the sale of the bare necessaries of
life formed a nucleus for a few scattered dwellings. Already the
settlers were showing that independence of control and that
detachment from Europe which has been their most prominent
characteristic. Even the sway of the Dutch Company (an older but
weaker brother of John Company in India) had caused them to revolt.
The local rising, however, was hardly noticed in the universal
cataclysm which followed the French Revolution. After twenty years,
during which the world was shaken by the Titanic struggle between
England and France in the final counting up of the game and paying
of the stakes, the Cape Colony was added in 1814 to the British
Empire.
In all our vast collection of States there is probably not one the
title-deeds to which are more incontestable than to this one. We
had it by two rights, the right of conquest and the right of
purchase. In 1806 our troops landed, defeated the local forces, and
took possession of Cape Town. In 1814 we paid the large sum of six
million pounds to the Stadholder for the transference of this and
some South American land. It was a bargain which was probably made
rapidly and carelessly in that general redistribution which was
going on. As a house of call upon the way to India the place was
seen to be of value, but the country itself was looked upon as
unprofitable and desert. What would Castlereagh or Liverpool have
thought could they have seen the items which we were buying for our
six million pounds? The inventory would have been a mixed one of
good and of evil; nine fierce Kaffir wars, the greatest diamond
mines in the world, the wealthiest gold mines, two costly and
humiliating campaigns with men whom we respected even when we
fought with them, and now at last, we hope, a South Africa of peace
and prosperity, with equal rights and equal duties for all men. The
future should hold something very good for us in that land, for if
we merely count the past we should be compelled to say that we
should have been stronger, richer, and higher in the world's esteem
had our possessions there never passed beyond the range of the guns
of our men-of-war. But surely the most arduous is the most
honourable, and, looking back from the end of their journey, our
descendants may see that our long record of struggle, with its
mixture of disaster and success, its outpouring of blood and of
treasure, has always tended to some great and enduring goal.
The title-deeds to the estate are, as I have said, good ones, but
there is one singular and ominous flaw in their provisions. The
ocean has marked three boundaries to it, but the fourth is
undefined. There is no word of the 'Hinterland;' for neither the
term nor the idea had then been thought of. Had Great Britain
bought those vast regions which extended beyond the settlements? Or
were the discontented Dutch at liberty to pass onwards and found
fresh nations to bar the path of the Anglo-Celtic colonists? In
that question lay the germ of all the trouble to come. An American
would realise the point at issue if he could conceive that after
the founding of the United States the Dutch inhabitants of the
State of New York had trekked to the westward and established fresh
communities under a new flag.
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