CHAPTER V
From the Great Lakes to the Cape
The earliest inhabitants of the land around the Great Lakes were apparently of the Bushman or Hottentot type of Negro. These were gradually pushed southward and westward by the intrusion of the Nilotic Negroes. The Nilotic Negroes early became great traders in ivory, gold, leopard skins, gums, beasts, birds, and slaves, and they opened up systematic trade between Egypt and the Great Lakes. From these and Sudanese tribes were gradually formed the Bantu.
The migration of the Bantu is the first clearly defined Negro mass movement of modern times. As we have shown, they began to move southward at least a thousand years before Christ, skirting the Congo forests and wandering along the Great Lakes and down to the Zambesi. Inland among the Bantu arose before the tenth century the line of rulers called the Monomotapa, among the Makalanga, Matabele and Mashona. Their state was very extensive. Map makers of the seventeenth century outlined it as stretching from the Zambesi to the Fish River. Its territory ran seven hundred and fifty miles inland along the south bank of the Zambesi and was approximately the size of Mexico. It was strongly organized, with feudatory allied states, and carried on an extensive commerce by means of the traders on the coast. The kings were converted to nominal Christianity by the Portuguese.
“Monomotapa,” said Professor Frobenius, “was undoubtedly a very great kingdom, and from documents which are now in our possession it is apparent that its rulers wielded great power.... The Kings and Emperors of Monomotapa used to observe very curious customs. The King was very powerful, and conducted courts of justice and sacrifice in the spring and at harvest time. Every seventh year, however, he was killed by the people, and a new King was crowned. This is a very old custom, which was observed on the borders of the Indian Ocean.... The name itself means ‘Prince of the Mine,’ for the area was a great mineral center, from which much gold and many rubies and diamonds were apparently extracted lone before man had learned to use stones and metals.”
The history of the social development here is not known certainly, but from what we do know we may reconstruct the situation in this way: the primitive culture of the Hottentots had been replaced by other stronger Negro stocks like the Makalanga until it reached a highly developed stage. Widespread agriculture and mining of gold, silver, and precious stones started a trade that penetrated to Asia and North Africa. This may have been the source of the gold of the Ophir. Doubtless Asiatic elements from Arabia or India penetrated the land and influenced and quickened the Negroes.
The state that thus arose became in time strongly organized; it employed slave labor in crushing the hard quartz, sinking pits, and carrying underground galleries; it carried out a system of irrigation and built stone buildings and fortifications. There exist today many remains of these building operations in the Kalahari desert and in Northern Rhodesia. Five hundred groups, covering an area of over one hundred and fifty thousand square miles, lie between the Limpopo and Zambesi Rivers. Mining operations have been carried on in these plains for generations, and one estimate is that at least three hundred and seventy-five million dollars’ worth of gold had been extracted. Some have thought that the older workings must date back to one or even three thousand years before the Christian era.
“There are other mines,” writes De Barros1 in the seventeenth century, “in a district called Toroa, which is otherwise known as the kingdom of Batua, whose ruler is a prince, by name Burrow, a vassal of Benomotapa. This land is near the other which we said consisted of extensive plains, and those ruins are the oldest that are known in that region. They are all in a plain, in the middle of which stands a square fortress, all of dressed stones within and without, well wrought and of marvelous size, without any lime showing the joinings, the walls of which are over twenty-five hands thick, but the height is not so great compared to the thickness. And above the gateway of that edifice is an inscription which some Moorish [Arab] traders who were there could not read, nor say what writing it was. All these structures the people of this country call Symbabwe [Zymbabwe], which with them means a court for every place where Benomotapa stays is so called.”
Later investigation has shown that these buildings were in many cases carefully planned and built fortifications. At Niekerk, for instance, nine or ten hills are fortified on concentric walls thirty to fifty feet in number, with a place for the village at the top. The buildings are forts, miniature citadels, and also workshops and cattle kraals. Iron implements and handsome pottery were found here, and close to the Zambesi there are extraordinary fortifications. Farther south at Inyanya there is less strong defense, and at Umtali there are no fortifications, showing that builders feared invasion from the north.
These people worked in gold, silver, tin, copper, and bronze and made beautiful pottery. There is evidence of religious significance in the buildings, and what is called the temple was the royal residence and served as a sort of acropolis. The surrounding residences in the valley were evidently occupied by wealthy traders and were not fortified. Here the gold was received from surrounding districts and bartered with traders.
As usual there have been repeated attempts to find an external and especially an Asiatic origin for this culture. There is no proof of this. How far back this civilization dates it is difficult to say, a great deal depending upon the dating of the Iron Age in South Africa. If it was the same as in the Mediterranean regions, the earliest limit was 1000 B.C.; it might, however, have been earlier, especially if, as seems probable, the use of iron originated in Africa. On the other hand, the culmination of this culture has been placed by some as late as the late Middle Ages.
The balance of authority today leans toward the Bantu origin of these buildings and mines, although it is probable that trade and contact with Asia brought Mongoloid influences and perhaps an Asiatic migration.
What was it that overthrew this civilization? Undoubtedly the same sort of raids of barbarous warriors that we have known in our day. For instance, in 1570 there came upon the country of Mozambique, farther up the coast, “Such an inundation of pagans that they could not be numbered. They came from that part of Monomotapa where is the great lake from which spring these great rivers. They left no other signs of the towns they passed but the heaps of ruins and the bones of inhabitants.” So, too, it is told how the Wa-Zimba came, “a strange people never seen before there, who, leaving their own country, traversed a great part of this Ethiopia like a scourge of God, destroying every living thing they came across. They were twenty thousand strong and marched without children or women,” just as four hundred years later the Zulu impi marched. Again in 1602 a horde of people came from the interior called the Cabires, or Cannibals. They entered the kingdom of Monomotapa, and the reigning king, being weak, was in great terror. Thus gradually the Monomotapa fell, and its power was scattered until the Kafir-Zulu raids of our day.
The Arab writer, Macoudi, in the tenth century, visited the East African coast somewhere north of the equator. He found the Indian Sea at that time frequented by Arab and Persian vessels, but there were no Asiatic settlements on the African shore. The Bantu, or as he calls them, Zenji, inhabited the country as far south as Sofala, where they bordered upon the Bushmen. These Bantus were under a ruler with the dynastic title of Waklimi. He was paramount over all the other tribes of the north and could put three hundred thousand men in the field. They used oxen as beasts of burden and the country produced gold in abundance, while panther skins were largely used for clothing. Ivory was sold to Asia and the Bantu used iron for personal adornment instead of gold or silver. They rode on their oxen, which ran with great speed, and they ate millet and honey and the flesh of animals.
There are indications of trade between Nupe in West Africa and Sofala on the east coast, and certainly trade between Asia and East Africa is earlier than the beginning of the Christian era. The Asiatic traders settled on the coast and by means of mulatto and Negro merchants brought Central Africa into contact with Arabia, India, China and Malaysia.
The coming of the Asiatics was in this wise: Zaide, great-grandson of Ali, nephew and son-in-law of Mohammed, was banished from Arabia as a heretic. He passed over to Africa and formed temporary settlements. His people mingled with the blacks, and the resulting mulatto traders, known as the Emoxaidi, seem to have wandered as far south as the equator. Soon other Arabian families came over on account of oppression and founded the towns of Magadosho and Brava, both not far north of the equator. The first town became a place of importance and other settlements were made. The Emoxaidi, whom the later immigrants regarded as heretics, were driven inland and became the interpreting traders between the coast and the Bantu. Some wanderers from Magadosho came into the port of Sofala and there learned that gold could be obtained. This led to a small Arab settlement at that place.
Seventy years later, and about fifty years before the Norman conquest of England, certain Persians settled at Kilwa in East Africa, led by Ali, who had been despised in his land because he was the son of a black Abyssinian slave mother. Kilwa, because of this, eventually became the most important commercial station on the East African coast, and in this and all these settlements a very large mulatto population grew up, so that very soon the whole settlement was indistinguishable in color from the Bantu. From 975 until its capture by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, forty sovereigns ruled here.
A Semitic trading empire was thus built up by the fourteenth century, composed mainly of people of mixed Negro and Semitic blood. There was much fighting between Persians, Arabs and Kafir and Bantu. Trade went by sea to Asia and India, usually carried by mulattoes.
In 1330 Ibn Batuta visited Kilwa. He found an abundance of ivory and some gold and heard that the inhabitants of Kilwa had gained victories over the Zenji, or Bantu. Kilwa had at that time three hundred mosques and was “built of handsome houses of stone and lime, and very lofty with their windows like those of the Christians; in the same way it has streets, and these houses have terraces, and the wood worked in with the masonry, with plenty of gardens, in which there are many fruit trees and much water.”2
Kilwa after a time captured Sofala, seizing it from Magadosho. Eventually Kilwa became mistress of the island of Zanzibar, of Mozambique, and of much other territory. The forty-third ruler of Kilwa after Ali was named Abraham, and he was ruling when the Portuguese arrived. The latter reported that these people cultivated rice and cocoa, built ships, and had considerable commerce with Asia. All the people, of whatever color, were Mohammedans, and the richer were clothed in gorgeous robes of silk and velvet. They traded with the inland Bantus and met numerous tribes, receiving gold, ivory, millet, rice, cattle, poultry, and honey. On the islands, the Asiatics were independent, but on the mainland south of Kilwa the sheiks ruled only their own people, under the overlordship of the Bantus, to whom they were compelled to pay large tribute each year.
The sultans of Sofala and Zanzibar became in time independent of Kilwa. These sultans were not governors of states, but heads of Mohammedan colonies with natives living near. Their principal occupation came at last to be trade in slaves with Negro chiefs. They sent the slaves to the Persian Gulf or sold them to the Portuguese. All the Negro tribes scattered along the east coast were known as the Zendi, hence the name Zanzibar. Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and went north on the east coast as far as India. In the next ten years the Portuguese occupied the Coast and both here and on the West Coast widely intermarried with the natives.
Thus civilization waxed and waned in East Africa among prehistoric Negroes, Arab and Persian mulattoes on the coast, in the Zend or Zeng empire of East African Negroes, and in the Negro rule of the Monomotapa. And thus, too, among later throngs of the fiercer, warlike Bantu, the ancient culture of the land largely died. Yet something survived, and in the modern Bantu state, language, and industry can be found links that suggest the identity of the absorbed peoples with the builders of Zymbabwe.
So far we have traced the history of the lands into which the southward stream of invading Bantus turned, and have followed them to the Limpopo River. We turn now to the lands north from Lake Nyasa. The aboriginal Negroes sustained in prehistoric time, invasion from the northeast by Negroids of a type like the ancient Egyptians and like the modern Gallas, Masai, and Somalis. To these migrations were added attacks from the Nile Negroes to the north and the Bantu invaders from the south. This has led to great differences among the groups of the population and their customs. Some are fierce mountaineers, occupying hilly plateaus six thousand feet above the sea level; others, like the Wa-Swahili, are traders on the coast. There are the Masai, chocolate-colored and frizzly-haired, organized for war and cattle lifting; and Negroids like the Gallas, who, blending with the Bantus, have produced the race of modern Uganda.
It was in this region that the kingdom of Kitwara was founded by the Galla chief, Kintu. About the beginning of the nineteenth century the empire was dismembered, the largest share falling to Uganda. The ensuing history of Uganda is of great interest. When King Mutesa came to the throne in 1862, he found Mohammedan influences in his land and was induced to admit Protestants and Catholics. The Protestants, representing British imperialism, tried to convert the King, and the Catholics, representing French imperialism, tried to make him a Catholic. In the midst of this more Mohammedans appeared, seeking also to convert Mutesa. He refused all these faiths and died a rugged pagan.
He was succeeded by his son Mwanga, who distrusted the whites. He ordered the eastern frontier closed against Europeans and when the Protestant Bishop Hannington attempted to cross in 1885, he had him killed. The Protestants organized against Mwanga and he ordered both Protestants and Catholics away, and the Mohammedans became the power behind the throne. The Protestants withdrew from Buganda into Angola and organized a united front of Christians against Mohammedans and Mwanga. They captured Mwanga’s capital and divided it between Protestants and Catholics. The Mohammedans began to fight back and finally the Protestants appealed to the British East Africa Company. In 1889 the company dispatched a military mission to Uganda which was later joined by Lugard. Open civil war ensued between Catholics and Protestants.
“At the head of a considerable military force, Captain Lugard, of the Imperial British East Africa Company (Ibea), penetrated as far as Mengo, the residence of King Mwanga, and forced upon him a treaty of protectorate: then turning against the Catholics, he attacked them on some futile pretext, and drove them into a big island on Lake Victoria. There, around the king and the French missionaries, had gathered for refuge a considerable multitude of men, women, and children. Against this harmless and defenseless population Captain Lugard turned his guns and maxims. He exterminated a large number, and then, continuing his work of destruction, he gave full rein to his troops and adherents, who burnt all the villages and stations of the White Fathers, their churches and their crops.”3
The British Sudanese troops, who under Lugard had carried on the war, afterwards rebelled and had to be disbanded. The Imperial British East Africa Company administered its holdings in Uganda, Kenya and along the East African Coast until 1896, when it withdrew as a governing institution. In 1897 the king, Mwanga, returned from German East Africa with Mohammedan natives and drove out the British garrison from one of their forts. Mwanga was finally defeated in 1899, taken prisoner and deported. Uganda became a British protectorate in 1899.
German East Africa was annexed in 1889 and declared a protectorate. The Germans met revolt after revolt, especially among the southern tribes who resented the hut tax and forced labor. These revolts culminated in a national Maji-Maji in 1905, in which many whites were killed and 12,000 natives were massacred or died of famine.
Primitive man in Africa is found in the interior jungles and down at Land’s End in South Africa. The Pygmy people in the jungles represent today a small survival from the past, but a survival of curious interest, pushed aside by the torrent of conquest. Also, pushed on by these waves of Bantu conquest, moved the ancient Abatwa or Bushmen. They are small in stature, yellow in color, with crisp-curled hair. The traditions of the Bushmen say that they came southward from the regions of the Great Lakes, and indeed the king and queen of Punt, as depicted by the Egyptians, were Bushmen or Hottentots.
Their tribes may be divided, in accordance with their noticeable artistic talents, into the painters and sculptors. The sculptors entered South Africa by moving southward through the more central portions of the country, crossing the Zambesi, and coming down to the Cape. The painters, on the other hand, came through Damaraland on the west coast; when they came to the great mountain regions, they turned eastward and can be traced as far as the mountain regions, they turned eastward and can be traced as far as the mountains opposite Delagoa Bay. The mass of them settled down in the lower part of the Cape and in the Kalahari Desert. The painters were true cave dwellers, but the sculptors lived in large communities on the stony hills, which they marked with their carvings.
These Bushmen believed in an ancient race of people who preceded them in South Africa. They attributed magic power to these unknown folk, and said that some of them had been translated as stars to the sky. Before their groups were dispersed, the Bushmen had regular government. Tribes with their chiefs occupied well-defined tracts of country and were subdivided into branch tribes under subsidiary chiefs. The great cave represented the dignity and glory of the entire nation.
The Bushmen suffered most cruelly in the succeeding migrations and conquest of South Africa. They fought desperately in self-defense; they saw their women and children carried into bondage and they themselves hunted like wild beasts. Both savage and civilized men appropriated their land. Still they were brave people. “In this struggle for existence, their bitterest enemies, of whatever shade of color they might be, were forced to make an unqualified acknowledgement of the courage and daring they so invariably exhibited.”4
Here, to a remote corner of the world, where, as one of their number said, they had supposed that the only beings in the world were Bushmen and lions, came a series of invaders. It was the outer ripples of civilization starting far away, the indigenous and external civilizations of Africa beating with great impulse among the Ethiopians, the Egyptian mulattoes, the Sudanese Negroes and West Africans; and driving many tribes southward, the migrants absorbed the settlers of Zymbabwe and later were in turn pushed down upon the primitive Bushmen; possibly an earlier mingling of the Bushmen and the Nilotic Negroes gave rise to the Hottentots.
The Hottentots, or as they called themselves, Khoi Khoin (Men of Men), were physically a stronger race than the Abatwa and gave many evidences of degeneration from a high culture, especially in the “phenomenal perfection” of a language which “is so highly developed, both in its rich phonetic system, as represented by a very delicate graduated series of vowels and diphthongs, and in its varied grammatical structure, that Lepsius sought for its affinities in the Egyptian at the other end of the continent.”
When South Africa was first discovered there were two distinct types of Hottentots. The more savage Hottentots were simply large, strong Bushmen, using weapons superior to the Bushmen, without domestic cattle or sheep. Other tribes, nearer the center of South Africa, were handsomer in appearance and raised an Egyptian breed of cattle which they rode.
In general the Hottentots were yellow, with close-curled hair, high cheekbones, and somewhat oblique eyes. Their migration commenced about the end of the fourteenth century and was, as is usual in such cases, a scattered, straggling movement. The traditions of the Hottentots point to the lake country of Central Africa as their place of origin, whence they were driven by the Bechuana tribes of the Bantu. They fled westward to the ocean, skirting the realm of the Monomotapa, and then turned south and came upon the Bushmen, whom they had only partially subdued when the Dutch arrived.
The Dutch were fighting Spain in the sixteenth century and began to trade with the East even before they were independent. The East India Company received a charter in 1602 and established themselves at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. They found there, toward the west, Bushmen still hunters in the Stone Age; the Hottentots toward the east and Bantu toward the north; but with them they did not come in contact for some time. There was raiding and fighting between the Bushmen and Dutch and the Dutch and the Hottentots. In 1658 came the first of the Hottentot Wars, arising from runaway slaves and cattle raiding. Some West African slaves had been introduced. By 1664 there was much racial intermingling, with resulting mulatto children. Slavery was well established by 1770.
The Bantu5 gradually moved into South Africa by way of the Great Lakes. The Makalanga began to press upon the coastland behind Sofala as early as the ninth century and later established the empire of the Monomotapa, mingling possibly with earlier settlers. Late in the sixteenth the Abambo and the Amazimba rushed down upon the Monomotapa and poured into what is now Natal. They were followed by the Barotse and in the first half of the eighteenth century by the Bavenda and Bakwena, who conquered what is now the Transvaal and the Free State and as far south as the Caledon River. The Batlapin and the Barolong drove the Leghoia into the northeastern Free State and before that the Leghoia had driven other tribes into the Kalihara Desert. Then about 1775 the Ovaherero and the Damaras came into southeast Africa. South of the empire of the Congo and along the ocean arose the state of Mataman, composed of the Herero, Damaras and the Hottentots.
The Dutch “Boers” began by purchasing land from the Hottentots and then, as they grew more powerful, they dispossessed the dark men and tried to enslave them. There grew up a large Dutch-Hottentot class. Indeed infiltration of Negro blood noticeable in modern Boers accounts for much curious history. Soon after the advent of the Dutch, some of the Hottentots, of whom there were not more than thirty or forty thousand, led by the Korana clans, began slowly to retreat northward, followed by the invading Dutch, and fighting the Dutch, each other, and the wretched Bushmen. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the Hottentots had reached the great interior plain and met the oncoming outposts of the Bantu nations.
The Bechuana, whom the Hottentots first met, were the most advanced of the Negro tribes of Central Africa. They had crossed the Zambesi in the fourteenth or fifteenth century; their government was a sort of feudal system with hereditary chiefs and vassals; they were careful agriculturists, laid out large towns with great regularity, and were the most skilled smiths. They used stone in building, carved on wood, and many of them, too, were keen traders. They seemed to echo the builders of Zymbabwe. These tribes, coming southward, occupied the east central part of South Africa, comprising modern Bechuanaland. Apparently they had started from the central lake country somewhere late in the fifteenth century, and by the middle of the eighteenth one of their great chiefs, Tao, met the oncoming Hottentots.
The Hottentots compelled Tao to retreat, but the mulatto Gricquas arrived from the south, and, allying themselves with the Bechuana, stopped the rout. The Gricquas sprang from and took their name from an old Hottentot tribe. They were led by Kok and Barends, and by adding other elements they became, partly through their own efforts and partly through the efforts of the missionaries, a community of fairly well-civilized people. In Gricqualand West, the mulatto Gricquas, under their chiefs Kok and Waterboer, lived until the discovery of diamonds on their land.
The Gricquas and Bechuana tribes were thus gradually checking the Hottentots when, in the nineteenth century, there came two new developments: first, the English took possession of Cape Colony, and the Dutch began to move in larger numbers toward the interior; secondly, a newer and fiercer element of the Bantu tribes, the Xosa, appeared. The “Kafirs,” or as they called themselves, the Ama Xosas, claimed descent from Zuide, a great chief of the fifteenth century in the lake country. They are among the tallest people in the world, averaging five feet ten inches, and are slim, well proportioned, and muscular. The more warlike tribes were usually clothed in leopard or ox skins. Cattle formed their chief wealth, stock-breeding, hunting and fighting their main pursuits. Mentally they were men of tact and intelligence, with a national religion based upon ancestor worship, while their government was a patriarchal monarchy limited by an aristocracy and almost feudal in character. The common law which had grown up from the decisions of the chiefs made the head of the family responsible for the conduct of its branches, a village for all its residents, and the clan for all its villages. Finally there was a paramount chief, who was the civil and military father of his people. These people laid waste to the coast regions and in 1779 came in contact with the Dutch. A series of Dutch-Kafir wars ensued between 1779 and 1795 in which the Dutch were hard pressed.
Thus in the latter part of the eighteenth century there were three main groups of Bantu in the hinterland of Cape Colony. To the north were the plateau tribes: Ovaherero and Damaras, blacker and smaller than the rest; and behind them the Ovambo, Batlapin mixed with Bakalahari and Balala and also with Hottentots and Bushmen; Bechuana and Bataung. To the northeast were the highlanders, Barotse, Bavenda and Bakwena, copper-colored to black, with crisp hair and beards, some with flat noses, others with aquiline noses. To the east were the coast tribes who came in contact with the Europeans at the Fish River.6
The Abambo, and perhaps other tribes, came to be known after their chiefs, Ama-Xosa, Ama-Tembu, Ama-Pondo, Ama-Swazi, etc. They began to push down the coast toward the colony. They chased away the Bushmen and mixed with the Hottentots. The Xosa crossed the Kei River in 1702 and came in contact with the Dutch in cattle barter. About 1775 the Xosa crossed the Fish River. The Bantu were organized into tribes with paramount chiefs and much depended upon the chief and his counselors. There soon rose the inevitable conflict of ideas concerning the ownership of land; the Kafirs had no conception of individual landowning, but simply of crop raising; the Dutch wished individual holding of the land. The land became a problem of frontiers between white and black cattle farmers. A Bantu or “Kafir” war broke out on the eastern frontier in 1779, arising from charges of cattle stealing, shooting, etc. The colonists won in this first war and drove the Xosas back across the Fish River, seizing over 5,000 cattle.
Another Kafir war broke out in 1791, arising again over cattle; the Hottentots fought beside the whites. In 1795, at the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, nine British warships with troops landed in South Africa and after some fighting took possession. By this time the Hottentots were regarded as free men. Their tribal system had been broken up and most of them had been deprived of their lands. Others together with half breeds were leaving the colony and settling in various localities to the north. The Koks were on the middle Orange Valley and the Namaquas moving south. Thus the Orange Valley swarmed with mulattoes, Hottentots, run-away slaves and white outlaws.
Northeast of them were the oncoming Bantu. There was continual bickering and rebellion among these various groups. In 1795 there were in the colony 16,000 Europeans, 17,000 slaves and an unknown number of Hottentots and Bushmen. The Dutch East Indian Company came to an end in 1798 and the Cape Colony was handed back to the new Batavian Republic in 1802 by the English, according to the Treaty of Amiens. The new governor pacified the Hottentots and made them allies against the Xosas.
In 1805 the British came again with sixty-one ships and seized the Cape. At that time there were twenty-five thousand Boers, twenty-five thousand pure and mixed Hottentots, and twenty-five thousand slaves. British settlers began to come. The Xosas were now across the Fish and claiming land. The English began to push them back and establish block houses.
Between 1811 and 1877 there were six Kafir-English wars. One of these in 1818 grew out of the ignorant interference of the English with the Kafir tribal system; then there came a terrible war between 1834 and 1835, followed by the annexation of all the country as far as the Kei River. Intra-tribal fighting began among the Xosa concerning the paramount chieftainship. The English began to offer land for new settlers and Parliament voted money. Some 5,000 British came between 1820 and 1821. From 1823 to 1837 Great Britain took more interest in the colony. The Reform Bill became the law in England in 1832 and slave emancipation was decreed in 1833 by Parliament. The Hottentots and colored persons had been given civil rights in 1828 and the freeing of the slaves was now imminent. Hottentots, Bushmen and other colored persons were given rights to own land in 1828. Rules for the care and education of slaves had been passed in 1823 and there was much negotiation from 1826 to 1834 as to methods of emancipation. Some of the Dutch farmers threatened rebellion. It was arranged that the ex-slaves were to be apprenticed to their former masters for four years after 1834 and compensation was paid, although it was less than had been expected.
Meantime between 1824 and 1834 trouble continued among the Bantu. Chaka had succeeded Dingiswayo. This great Zulu chieftain armed his unmarried warriors with great ox-hide shields and assagais, and arranged them in formation; discipline was stiffened and captains of the regiments chosen arbitrarily. McDonald says, “There has probably never been a more perfect system of discipline than that by which Chaka ruled his army and kingdom. At a review, an order might be given in the most unexpected manner, which meant death to hundreds. If the regiment hesitated or dared to remonstrate, so perfect was the discipline and so great the jealousy that another was ready to cut them down. A warrior returning unsuccessful in the main purpose of his expedition shared the same fate. Whoever displeased the king was immediately executed. The traditional courts practically ceased to exist so far as the will and the action of the tyrant was concerned.”
With this army Chaka fell on tribe after tribe. He drove some tribes northward through the eastern coastland as far as Lake Nyasa and then rushed down through Natal. Umsilikazi, leader of one of Chaka’s regiments, laid waste to the southwestern Transvaal. The Bechuanas fled to the Kalihara Desert, having already suffered under other tribes flying from Chaka. By the time the English came to Port Natal, Chaka was ruling over the whole southeastern seaboard, from the Limpopo River to Cape Colony, including the Orange and Transvaal States and the whole of Natal. Chaka was killed in 1828 and was eventually succeeded by his brother, Dingaan, who reigned twelve years.
The Portuguese in East Africa began to lose power in the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century and were indulging in the slave trade with the English and American slavers. There were raids and counter raids with the Bantu between 1823 and 1834. The Xosa became restless because of the pressure of the Zulu and of the tribes that were pushing before them. The Tembus moved into Cape Colony and were driven back. There was trouble over cattle in 1834 and the Xosa warriors poured into the colony and ravaged the country for two weeks from Algoa Bay to Somerset East. War ensued, leaving 7,000 white farmers destitute; 455 farms were burnt and many people both white and Hottentots had been killed. Colonial losses were put at 300,000 pounds sterling.
There was a great deal of dissatisfaction and finally, in 1837, numbers of Boer farmers sold their farms and some 2,000 of them crossed the Orange River on the Great Trek. This was a quickening of a steady drift of Europeans and mulattoes beyond the frontiers which the colony had tried to proclaim. The Kafirs had stopped migration across the Fish River in 1779 but in 1832 new generations of Boers were demanding land. The Boers regarded the colony as too small and were seeking expansion. The Kafir war cut across the projected trek and when the fighting was finished, the first two organized parties of Boers crossed the Orange in 1835. Then came a severe drought and the Great Trek got into full movement in 1836. The trek was a demand for land and the control of labor.
Dingaan was alarmed at this invasion and killed the main Dutch leader, Retief, and his companions, including his Hottentot retainers, in February, 1838. He allowed the English missionaries to get away but attacked the Boer settlement; but was attacked in turn in December, 1838, and defeated. The river where 3,000 dead were left on the field has since been known as Blood River, and Dingaan’s Day is the great Boer holiday. The Boers were now established in Natal and began to push northward into Zululand. They set the Zulus fighting against each other and this ended in the flight and death of Dingaan in 1840. On the border of the colony and between them and the new settlement were two native powers: the Griquas, mulattoes under the Koks, and the Basutos.
In 1846 the War of the Ax broke out on the eastern frontier between the English and the Kafirs, which lasted two or three months but cost a million pounds. In December, 1856, despairing of resistance to the whites, a black prophet arose among the Ama Xosa who advised the wholesale destruction of all Kafir property except weapons, in order that this faith might bring back their dead heroes. The result was that almost a third of the nation perished from hunger. In British Kaffraria alone the Bantu decreased from 105,000 to 37,000 souls.
A demand arose in 1856 for labor in Natal. The Bantu refused to leave their reserves in spite of the hut tax, and imported labor was demanded. England refused to send out convicts or destitute children and finally arrangements were made for East Indians, and at the same time the hut tax for natives was increased and forced Iabor on the roads required. By 1865, 6,500 Indians were at work in Natal.
There were continued hostilities between the Basutos and the Boers. The Basutos fought with the Zulus, but before Chaka died Moshesh founded the Basuto nation high up in his mountain fastness. He was hard beset by both Boers and English and by other Bantu at various times and his own warriors often made forays for cattle. Frequently he appealed to the English authorities at the Cape. Sometimes they aided him, sometimes they did not. At one time the Boers accused his people of stealing cattle, and the English demanded as penalty 10,000 head of cattle and 1,000 horses within three days. Moshesh surrendered only about one-third of this number, which was probably as much as he could do. The English troops started against him and were repulsed at Berea in 1852. The Basuto’s chances for thoroughly thrashing the English were good, but at midnight, December 20, 1852, Moshesh wrote to the English governor, “As the object for which you have come is to have a compensation for the Boers, I beg that you will be satisfied with what you have taken. I entreat peace from you.” The governor was wise. He marched back home and did not renew the attack. After the British withdrew, the Basutos defended themselves against the Boers, and in 1854 the Boer States and Basutoland were given up by the British.
However, the Indian Mutiny of 1857 began to influence Great Britain’s colonial policy. The Boers declared war on the Basutos in 1858 and annexed much of their territory and live stock. In 1859 the British interfered and the boundaries of Basutoland were defined. British aggression led to the Gun War in 1880 and again the British withdrew. Again the Boers and the Basutos fought, but the British drove the Boers away and declared Basutoland a protectorate in 1884. Gold and diamonds began to be discovered in 1886. The famous diamond, the Star of Ethiopia, was found in Griqualand in 1869 and changed hands first for 11,000 pounds sterling and then for 25,000. The English arranged to have Griqualand declared part of Cape Colony.
Dingaan was succeeded by Panda. Under this chief there was something like repose for sixteen years, but in 1856 civil war broke out between his sons, one of whom, Cetewayo, succeeded his father in 1862. He fell into border disputes with the English, and the result was one of the fiercest clashes of Europe and Africa in modern days. The Zulus fought desperately, annihilating at one time a whole detachment and killing the young prince Napoleon. But after all, it was assagais against guns, and the Zulus were finally defeated at Ulundi, July 4, 1879. Thereupon Zululand was divided among thirteen semi-independent chiefs and became a British protectorate. Meantime in Portuguese territory south of the Zambesi there arose Gaza, a contemporary and rival of Chaka. His son, Manikus, was deputed by Dingaan, Chaka’s successor, to drive out the Portuguese. This Manikus failed to do, and to escape vengeance he migrated north of the Limpopo. Here he established his military kraal in a district thirty-six hundred and fifty feet above the sea and one hundred and twenty miles irland from Sofala. From this place his soldiery nearly succeeded in driving the Portuguese out of East Africa.
North of the Zambesi, in British territory, the chief role in recent times was played by the Bechuana, the first of the Bantu to return northward after the South African migration. Livingstone found there the Makololo, who with other tribes had moved northward on account of the pressure of the Dutch and Zulus below, and by conquering various tribes in the Zambesi region, had established a strong power. This kingdom was nearly overthrown by the rebellion of the Barotse, and in 1875, the Barotse kingdom comprised a large territory. Today their king rules directly and indirectly fifty thousand square miles, with a population between one and two and a half million. They form a reserve area in Northern Rhodesia.
The result of all these movements was to break the inhabitants of Bechuanaland into numerous fragments. There were small numbers of mulatto Gricquas in the southwest and similar Bastaards in the northwest. The Hottentots and Bushmen were dispersed into groups and seemed doomed to extinction, the last Hottentot chief being deposed in 1810 and replaced by an English magistrate. Partially civilized Hottentots still live grouped together in their kraals and are members of Christian churches. The Bechuana hold their own in several centers; one is in Basutoland, west of Natal, where a number of tribes were welded together under the far-sighted Moshesh into a modern and fairly civilized nation. In the north part of Bechuanaland are the self-governing Bamangwato and the Batwana, the former long ruled by Khama, one of the canniest of modern rulers in Africa.
The Boers helped by the Swazi were fighting Bantu tribes again in 1879, when the Ama-Xosa confederacy was finally broken up, and gradually these tribes passed from independence to vassalage to the British. Toward the north, Umsilikatsi, who had been driven into Matabeleland by the terrible Chaka in 1828 and defeated by the Dutch in 1837, had finally re-established his headquarters in Rhodesia in 1838. Here he introduced the Zulu military system and terrorized the peaceful and industrious Bechuana populations. Lobengula succeeded Umsilikatsi in 1870 and, realizing that his power was waning, began to retreat northward toward the Zambesi. Warren seized Bechuanaland in time for the Conference at Berlin. Boers and natives fighting together took up arms in 1880 and compelled the British to withdraw after the defeat at Majuba in 1881.
The independence of the Transvaal was guaranteed at the Pretoria Convention, but the British entered the Transvaal again in 1884 on account of gold. In 1889 a charter was issued to the British South Africa Company. The Boer War broke out in September, 1899. The natives gave the English their sympathy and co-operation during the war, but in 1906 there was a revolt against the poll tax on the part of the natives in Natal and a serious rebellion in Zululand under Dinizulu, son of Cetewayo.
In Southwest Africa, Hottentot mulattoes crossing from the Cape caused widespread change. They were strong men and daring fighters and soon became dominant in what is now German Southwest Africa, where they fought fiercely with the Bantu Ova-Hereros. Armed with firearms, these Namakwa Hottentots threatened Portuguese West Africa; but Germany intervened, ostensibly to protect missionaries. By spending millions of dollars Germany exterminated thousands of natives. Berlin made an annual grant of five million dollars to the colony of Southwest Africa and equipped it with railways, roads and arms. There were 12,000 white inhabitants and among them three thousand soldiers and police.
After the South African war Botha became Prime Minister of the Transvaal and, with Smuts, was prominent in the Convention of 1909 which formed the Union of South Africa. The native was practically unmentioned in the constitution of the new state. Imperial safeguards as to his treatment were not reaffirmed, his right to hold office was denied, and his disfranchisement in all provinces except the Cape was confirmed.
Botha became Prime Minister of the Union in 1910 and 1913. His first duty was to seek to unite the Dutch and English into one nation, and the next to attack the difficult native problem. However, the World War intervened and Botha found himself facing a rebellion among the Dutch, who favored the Germans. Some 12,000 rebels were in arms, when finally the revolt was quelled. The last leader to surrender was Martiz, who declared that he did not want South Africa ruled “by Englishmen, Niggers and Jews.”
In 1915 a diversion was created by the conquest of German Southwest Africa, which was accomplished under Botha’s leadership. Nevertheless in the fall, his majority in Parliament was seriously reduced and the Dutch threatened a further uprising. Botha died in 1919. His colleague Hertzog, who had been in Botha’s first cabinet in 1910 but was left out of the cabinet in 1913, had formed the National Party. The National Party sent a delegation to the peace conference asking independence for South Africa. Smuts tried to incorporate Southern Rhodesia so as to increase his political power against Boer nationalism and labor demands, but the Rhodesians feared the trends in the Union: the possible influx of poor whites, and the drawing off of their native labor; in 1922, Southern Rhodesia refused to enter the union. Smuts was overthrown in the election of 1924, and Hertzog came to power.
Thus we have, between the years 1400 and 1900, successive waves when Bushmen, Hottentot, Bantu, Dutch and English appear in succession at Land’s End. In the latter part of the eighteenth century we have the clash of the Hottentots and Bechuana, followed in the nineteenth century by the terrible wars of Chaka, the Kafirs, and Matabele. All of this history is complicated and obscured by lack of exact knowledge of tribal relations and movements. Finally, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the gradual subjection of the Kafir-Zulus and the Bechuana under the English and the subjugation of the Dutch. Later the Dutch became the paramount element in the English colony and achieved political independence under the economic overlordship of English investors. The resulting racial and social problems in South Africa are of great intricacy. With significant symbolism, the ship of the Flying Dutchman still beats back and forth about the Cape on its endless quest.