Impressions of South Africa Part 5

It is obviously a wall of defence, for the only erections within are low, rough inclosures of loose stones, and three clay huts, one of which covers the grave of Chipadzi, a chief who died some twenty years ago, and who was doubtless interred here because the place was secluded and already in a fashion consecrated by the presence of the ancient wall.

That the wall is ancient hardly admits of doubt, for it is quite unlike any of the walls--there are not many in the country--which the Kafirs now build, these being always of stones entirely untrimmed and very loosely fitted together, though sometimes plastered with mud to make them hold.[7] There is nothing to see beyond the wall itself, and the only interest of the place is in its showing that the race who built Dhlodhlo and other similar walls in Matibililand were probably here also.

Much larger and more remakable is the group of ruins (situated seventeen miles from Fort Victoria, in southern Mashonaland) which goes by the name of the Great Zimbabwye. This Bantu word is said to denote a stone building, but has often been used to describe the residence of a great chief, whatever the materials of which it is constructed. It is a common noun, and not the name of one particular place. Europeans, however, confine it to this one ruin, or rather to two ruined buildings near each other. One of these is on the top of a rocky and in parts precipitous hill, the other in a valley half a mile from the foot of the hill.

The first, which we may call the Fort, consists of a line of wall, in parts double, defending the more accessible parts of the eastern and south-eastern end of the hill or kopje, which is about 500 feet high, and breaks down on its southern side in a nearly vertical sheet of granite. The walls, which in some places are thirty feet high, are all built of small trimmed blocks of granite such as I have already described, without mortar, but neatly fitted together. They are in excellent preservation, and are skilfully constructed in a sort of labyrinth, so as to cover all the places where an enemy might approach.

From the openings in the wall, where doors were probably placed, pa.s.sages are carried inward, very narrow and winding, so that only one person at a time can pa.s.s, and completely commanded by the high wall on either side. Everything speaks of defence, and everything is very well adapted, considering the rudeness of the materials, for efficient defence. There is no sort of ornament in the walls, except that here and there at the entrances some stones are laid transversely to the others, and that certain long, thin pieces of a slaty stone, rounded so that one might call them stone poles--they are about five to seven feet long--project from the top of the wall. Neither is there any trace of an arch or vaulted roof. None of what look like chambers has a roof. They were doubtless covered with the branches of trees. Very few objects have been found throwing any light on the object of the building or its builders, and these have been now removed, except some small pieces of sandstone, a rock not found in the neighbourhood, which (it has been conjectured) may have been brought for the purposes of mining.

The other building is much more remarkable. It stands on a slight eminence in the level ground between the hill on which the Fort stands and another somewhat lower granite hill, and is about a third of a mile from the Fort. It consists of a wall, rather elliptical than circular in form, from thirty to forty feet high, fourteen feet thick near the ground, and from six to nine thick at the top, where one can walk along a considerable part with little difficulty. This wall is built of the same small, well-trimmed blocks of granite, nicely fitted together, and for more than half the circ.u.mference is in excellent preservation, although shrubs and climbing vines have here and there rooted themselves in it. The rest of it is more or less broken, and in one place quite overthrown. There are two gates, at the west and the north. The wall is quite plain, except for about one-third (or perhaps a little less) of the outer face, where there is such an ornament as I have already described, of two courses of stones set slantingly at an acute angle to the ordinary flat courses above and below. These two courses are the fifth and seventh from the top. In the s.p.a.ce surrounded by the wall, which is about three-quarters of an acre, are some small inclosures of trimmed stone, apparently chambers. There is also a singular wall running parallel to the inner face of the great inclosing wall for some twenty yards, leaving between it and that inner face a very narrow pa.s.sage, which at one point must have been closed by a door (probably of stone), for at that point steps lead up on either side, and hollow s.p.a.ces fit for receiving a door remain. At one end this pa.s.sage opens into a small open s.p.a.ce, where the most curious of all the erections are to be found, namely, two solid towers of trimmed stones. One of these is quite low, rising only some five feet from the ground. The other is more than forty feet high, overtopping the great inclosing wall (from which it is eight feet distant) by about five feet, and has a bluntly conical top. It reminds one a little of an Irish round tower, though not so high, save that the Irish towers are hollow and this solid, or of a Buddhist tope, save that the topes which are solid, are very much thicker. There is nothing whatever to indicate the purpose of this tower, but the fact that the s.p.a.ce in which it and the smaller tower stand is cut off from the rest of the enclosed area by a pretty high wall seems to show that it was meant to be specially protected or was deemed to be specially sacred.

Outside the main inclosing wall are several small inclosures of irregular shape, surrounded by similar walls of trimmed stones, but all low and broken and with nothing inside. One of these joins on to the main wall of the great inclosure.

This is all that there is to see at Zimbabwye. What I have described seems little, and that little is simple, even rude. The interest lies in guessing what the walls were built for, and by whom. Comparatively little has been discovered by digging. No inscriptions whatever have been found. Some figures of birds rudely carved in a sort of soapstone were fixed along the top of the walls of the Fort, and have been removed to the Cape Town museum. It is thought that they represent vultures, and the vulture was a bird of religious significance among some of the Semitic nations. Fragments of soapstone bowls were discovered, some with figures of animals carved on them, some with geometrical patterns, while on one were marks which might possibly belong to some primitive alphabet. There were also whorls somewhat resembling those which occur so profusely in the ruins of Troy, and stone objects which may be phalli, though some at least of them are deemed by the authorities of the British Museum (to whom I have shown them) to be probably pieces used for playing a game like that of fox-and-geese. The iron and bronze weapons which were found may have been comparatively modern, but the small crucibles for smelting gold, with tools and a curious ingot-mould (said to resemble ancient moulds used at tin workings) were apparently ancient.

What purpose were these buildings meant to serve? That on the hill was evidently a stronghold, and a stronghold of a somewhat elaborate kind, erected against an enemy deemed formidable. The large building below can hardly have been a place of defence, because it stands on level ground with a high, rocky hill just above it, which would have afforded a much stronger situation. Neither was it a mining station, for the nearest place where any trace of gold has been found is seven miles away, and in a mining station, even if meant to hold slave workers, there would have been no use for a wall so lofty as this. Two hypotheses remain: that this was the residence of a chief, or that it was erected for the purposes of religious worship. It may have been both--a palace, so to speak, with a temple attached. The presence of the inner inclosure, guarded by its separate wall, and with its curious tower, is most plausibly explained by supposing a religious purpose; for as religion is the strangest of all human things, and that in which men most vary, so it is naturally called in to explain what is otherwise inexplicable.

What, then, was the religion of those who built this shrine, if shrine it was? The ornamentation of that part of the outer wall which faces the rising sun suggests sun-worship. The phalli (if they are phalli) point to one of the Oriental forms of the worship of the forces of nature. The birds' heads may have a religious significance, and possibly the significance which it is said that vultures had in the Syrian nature-worship. These data give some slight presumptions, yet the field for conjecture remains a very wide one, and there is nothing in the buildings to indicate the particular race who erected the Fort and the Temple (if it was a temple). However, the tower bears some resemblance to a tower which appears within a town wall on an ancient coin of the Phoenician city of Byblus; and this coincidence, slight enough, has, in the dearth of other light, been used to support the view that the builders belonged to some Semitic race.

Had we nothing but the ruined walls of Zimbabwye, Dhlodhlo, and the other spots where similar ruins have been observed, the problem would be insoluble. We could only say that the existing native races had at some apparently distant time been more civilized than they are now and capable of building walls they do not now build, or else we should suppose that some now extinct race had built these. But there are other facts known to us which suggest, though they do not establish, an hypothesis regarding the early history of the country.

In very remote times there existed, as is known from the Egyptian monuments, a trade from South-east Africa into the Red Sea. The remarkable sculptures at Deir el Bahari, near Luxor, dating from the time of Queen Hatasu, sister of the great conqueror Thothmes III. (B.C.

1600?), represent the return of an expedition from a country called Punt, which would appear, from the objects brought back, to have been somewhere on the East African coast.[8] Much later the Book of Kings (1 Kings ix. 26-28; x. 11, 15, 22) tells us that Solomon and Hiram of Tyre entered into a sort of joint adventure trade from the Red Sea port of Ezion-geber to a country named Ophir, which produced gold. There are other indications that gold used to come from East Africa, but so far as we know it has never been obtained in quant.i.ty from any part of the coast between Mozambique and Cape Guardafui. Thus there are grounds for believing that a traffic between the Red Sea and the coast south of the Zambesi may have existed from very remote times. Of its later existence there is of course no doubt. We know from Arabian sources that in the eighth century an Arab tribe defeated in war established itself on the African coast south of Cape Guardafui, and that from the ninth century onward there was a considerable trade between South-east Africa and the Red Sea ports--a trade which may well have existed long before. And when the Portuguese began to explore the coast in 1496 they found Arab chieftains established at various points along it as far south as Sofala, and found them getting gold from the interior. Three things, therefore, are certain--a trade between South-east Africa and the Red Sea, a certain number of Arabs settled along the edge of the ocean, and an export of gold. Now all over Mashonaland and Matabililand ancient gold-workings have been observed. Some are quite modern,--one can see the wooden supports and the iron tools not yet destroyed by rust,--and it would seem from the accounts of the natives that the mining went on to some small extent down to sixty years ago, when the Matabili conquered the country. Others, however, are, from the appearance of the ground, obviously much more ancient. I have seen some that must have been centuries old, and have been told of others apparently far older, possibly as old as the buildings at Zimbabwye. I was, moreover, informed by Mr. Cecil Rhodes (who is keenly interested in African archaeology) that he had seen on the high plateau of Inyanga, in eastern Mashonaland, some remarkable circular pits lined with stone, and approached in each case by a narrow subterranean pa.s.sage, which can best be explained by supposing them to have been receptacles for the confinement of slaves occupied in tilling the soil, as the surrounding country bears mark, in the remains of ancient irrigation channels, of an extensive system of tillage where none now exists. The way in which the stones are laid in these pit-walls is quite unlike any modern Kafir work, and points to the presence of a more advanced race. Putting all these facts together, it has been plausibly argued that at some very distant period men more civilized than the Kafirs came in search of gold into Mashonaland, opened these mines, and obtained from them the gold which found its way to the Red Sea ports, and that the buildings whose ruins we see were their work. How long ago this happened we cannot tell, but if the strangers came from Arabia they must have done so earlier than the time of Mohammed, for there is nothing of an Islamic character about the ruins or the remains found, and it is just as easy to suppose that they came in the days of Solomon, fifteen centuries before Mohammed. Nor can we guess how they disappeared: whether they were overpowered and exterminated by the Kafirs, or whether, as Mr. Selous conjectures, they were gradually absorbed by the latter, their civilization and religion perishing, although the practice of mining for gold remained. The occasional occurrence among the Kafirs of faces with a cast of features approaching the Semitic has been thought to confirm this notion, though n.o.body has as yet suggested that we are to look here for the lost Ten Tribes. Whoever these people were, they have long since vanished. The natives seem to have no traditions about the builders of Zimbabwye and the other ancient walls, though they regard the ruins with a certain awe, and fear to approach them at twilight.

It is this mystery which makes these buildings, the solitary archaeological curiosities of South Africa, so impressive. The ruins are not grand, nor are they beautiful; they are simple even to rudeness. It is the loneliness of the landscape in which they stand, and still more the complete darkness which surrounds their origin, their object, and their history, that gives to them their unique interest. Whence came the builders? What tongue did they speak? What religion did they practise?

Did they vanish imperceptibly away, or did they fly to the coast, or were they ma.s.sacred in a rising of their slaves? We do not know; probably we shall never know. We can only say, in the words of the Eastern poet:

"They came like water, and like wind they went."

[Footnote 6: Mr. Neal, managing director of the Company, has been good enough to inform me that since my visit he satisfied himself that there had been occupations by different races and probably at widely distant dates. Many skeletons have been found, with a good deal of gold jewelry, and some bronze implements.]

[Footnote 7: This place is described by Mr. Selous in his interesting book, _A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa_, pp. 339-341. He thinks the wall as well built as those at the Great Zimbabwye. To me it seemed not so good, and a little rougher even than the work at Dhlodhlo. Hard by is a modern Kafir fort, Chitikete, with a plastered and loop-holed rough stone wall, quite unlike this wall at Chipadzi's grave. This place is further described in Chapter XVI.]

[Footnote 8: Maspero (_Histoire ancienne des Peuples d'Orient_, p. 169) conjectures Somaliland]

CHAPTER X

THE KAFIRS: THEIR HISTORY AND INSt.i.tUTIONS

The curtain rises upon the Kafir peoples when the Portuguese landed on the east coast of Africa in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Arab sheiks then held a few of the coast villages, ruling over a mixed race, nominally Mohammedan, and trading with the Bantu tribes of the interior.

The vessels of these Arabs crossed the Indian Ocean with the monsoon to Calicut and the Malabar coast, and the Indian goods they carried back were exchanged for the gold and ivory which the natives brought down.

The princ.i.p.al race that held the country between the Limpopo and the Zambesi was that which the Portuguese called Makalanga or Makaranga, and which we call Makalaka. They are the progenitors of the tribes who, now greatly reduced in numbers and divided into small villages and clans, occupy Mashonaland. Their head chief was called the Monomotapa, a name interpreted to mean "Lord of the Mountain" or "Lord of the Mines." This personage was turned by Portuguese grandiloquence into an emperor, and by some European geographers into the name of an empire; so Monomotapa came to figure on old maps as the designation of a vast territory.

When, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch at the Cape began to learn something of the Kafirs who dwelt to the eastward, they found that there was no large dominion, but a great number of petty tribes, mostly engaged in war with one another. Some were half nomad, none was firmly rooted in the soil; and the fact that tribes who spoke similar dialects were often far away from one another, with a tribe of a different dialect living between, indicated that there had been many displacements of population of which no historical record existed. Early in the present century events occurred which showed how such displacements might have been brought about. In the last years of the eighteenth century Dingiswayo, the exiled son of the chief of the Abatetwa tribe, which lived in what is now Zululand, found his way to the Cape, and learned to admire the military organization of the British troops who were then holding the Colony. Returning home and regaining his throne, he began to organise and drill his warriors, who before that time had fought without order or discipline, like other savages. His favourite officer was Tshaka, a young chief, also exiled, who belonged to the then small tribe of Zulus. On the death of Dingiswayo, Tshaka was chosen its chief by the army, and the tribes that had obeyed Dingiswayo were thenceforward known under the name of Zulus. Tshaka, who united to his intellectual gifts a boundless ambition and a ruthless will, further improved the military system of his master, and armed his soldiers with a new weapon, a short, broad-bladed spear, fit for stabbing at close quarters, instead of the old light javelin which had been theretofore used. He formed them into regiments, and drilled them to such a perfection of courage that no enemy could withstand their rush, and the defeated force, except such as could escape by fleetness of foot, was slaughtered on the spot. Quarter had never been given in native wars, but the trained valour of the Zulus, and their habit of immediately engaging the enemy hand to hand, not only gave them an advantage like that which suddenly made the Spartan infantry superior to all their neighbours, but rendered their victories far more sanguinary than native battles had previously been Tshaka rapidly subjected or blotted out the clans that lived near, except the Swazis, a kindred tribe whose difficult country gave them some protection. He devastated all the region round that of his own subjects, while the flight before his warriors of the weaker tribes, each of which fell upon its neighbours with the a.s.sagai, caused widespread slaughter and ruin all over South-east Africa. Natal became almost a desert, and of the survivors who escaped into the mountains, many took to human flesh for want of other food. To the north of the Vaal River a section of the Zulu army, which had revolted under its general, Mosilikatze, carried slaughter and destruction through the surrounding country for hundreds of miles, till it was itself chased away beyond the Limpopo by the emigrant Boers, as will be related in the following chapter.

To trace the history of these various native wars would occupy far more s.p.a.ce than I can spare. I will sum up their general results.

A new and powerful kingdom, far stronger than any other native monarchy we know to have existed before or since, was formed by the Zulus. It remained powerful under Dingaan (who murdered his half brother Tshaka in 1828), Panda (brother of Tshaka and Dingaan), and Cetewayo (son of Panda), till 1879, when it was overthrown by the British.

Various offshoots from the Zulu nation were scattered out in different directions. The Matabili occupied Matabililand in 1838. The Angoni had before that year crossed the Zambesi and settled in Nya.s.saland, where they are still formidable to their native neighbours and troublesome to the whites.

Kafir tribes from the north-east were chased southward into the mountain country now called Basutoland, most of which had been previously inhabited only by Bushmen, and here the Basuto kingdom was built up out of fugitive clans, by the famous chief Moshesh, between 1820 and 1840.

Some of the Bechuana tribes were driven from the east into their present seats in Bechua.n.a.land, some few far north-west to the banks of the Zambesi, where Livingstone found them.

Not only what is now Natal, but most of what is now the Orange Free State, with a part of the Transvaal, was almost denuded of inhabitants.

This had the important consequence of inducing the emigrants from Cape Colony, whose fortunes I shall trace in the following chapter, to move toward these regions and establish themselves there.

The Gaza tribe, of Zulu race, but revolters from Tshaka, broke away from that tyrant, and carried fire and sword among the Tongas and other tribes living to the west and north-west of Delagoa Bay. In 1833 they destroyed the Portuguese garrison there. In 1862 a chief called Mzila became their king, and established his dominion over all the tribes that dwell on the eastern slope of the Quathlamba Mountains, between the Limpopo and the Zambesi. He and his son Gungunhana, who in 1896 was seized and carried off by the Portuguese, were for a time at the head of the third great native power in South Africa, the other two being that of Cetewayo, which perished in 1879, and that of Lo Bengula, overthrown in 1893. All three chiefs were Zulus in blood. Originally small in number, this race has played by far the greatest part in the annals of the native peoples.

The career of Tshaka has deserved some description, because it changed the face of South Africa in a somewhat similar way, allowing for the difference of scale, to that in which the career of Tshaka's contemporary, Napoleon Bonaparte, changed the face of Europe. But in 1836, eight years after Tshaka's death, the white man, who had hitherto come in contact with the Kafirs only on the Zambesi and at a few points on the south-eastern and southern coast, began that march into the interior which has now brought him to the sh.o.r.es of Lake Tanganyika.

Thenceforward the wars of the natives among themselves cease to be important. It is their strife with the European conqueror that is of consequence, and the narrative of that strife belongs to the history of the European colonies and republics, which will be given in the two succeeding chapters. This, however, seems the right place for some remarks on the government and customs of the Kafir tribes, intended to explain the conditions under which these tribes have met and attempted to resist the white strangers who have now become their rulers.

The Kafirs were savages, yet not of a low type, for they tilled the soil, could work in metals, spoke a highly developed language, and had a sort of customary law. The south-east coast tribes, Zulus, Pondos, Tembus, Kosas, inhabiting a fairly well-watered and fertile country, were, as a rule, the strongest men and the fiercest fighters; but the tribes of the interior were not inferior in intellect, and sometimes superior in the arts. Lower in every respect were the west-coast tribes.

They dwelt in a poor and almost waterless land, and their blood was mixed with that of Hottentots and Bushmen. In every race the organization was by families, clans, and tribes, the tribe consisting of a number of clans or smaller groups, having at its head one supreme chief, belonging to a family whose lineage was respected. The power of the chief was, however, not everywhere the same. Among the Zulus, whose organization was entirely military, he was a despot whose word was law.

Among the Bechuana tribes, and their kinsfolk the Basutos, he was obliged to defer to the sentiment of the people, which (in some tribes) found expression in a public meeting where every freeman had a right to speak and might differ from the chief.[9] Even such able men as the Basuto Moshesh and the Bechuana Khama had often to bend to the wish of their subjects, and a further check existed in the tendency to move away from a harsh and unpopular chief and place one's self under the protection of some more tactful ruler. Everywhere, of course, the old customs had great power, and the influence of the old men who were most conversant with them was considerable. The chief of the whole tribe did not interfere much with affairs outside his own particular clan, and was a more important figure in war-time than during peace. Aided by a council of his leading men, each chief administered justice and settled disputes; and it was his function to allot land to those who asked for a field to till, the land itself belonging to the tribe as a whole. The chiefs act gave a t.i.tle to the piece allotted so long as it was cultivated, for public opinion resented any arbitrary eviction; but pasture-land was open to all the cattle of the clansmen. It was in cattle that the wealth of a chief or a rich man lay, and cattle, being the common measure of value, served as currency, as they serve still among the more remote tribes which have not learned to use British coin.

Polygamy was practised by all who could afford it, the wife being purchased from her father with cattle, more or fewer according to her rank. This practice, called _lobola_, still prevails universally, and has caused much perplexity to the missionaries. Its evil effects are obvious, but it is closely intertwined with the whole system of native society. A chief had usually a head wife, belonging to some important house, and her sons were preferred in succession to those of the inferior wives. In some tribes the chief, like a Turkish sultan, had no regular wife, but only concubines. Among the coast tribes no one, except a chief, was suffered to marry any one of kin to him. There was great pride of birth among the head chiefs, and their genealogies have in not a few cases been carefully kept for seven or eight generations.

Slavery existed among some of the tribes of the interior, and the ordinary wife was everywhere little better than a slave, being required to do nearly all the tillage and most of the other work, except that about the cattle, which, being more honourable, was performed by men.

The male Kafir is a lazy fellow who likes talking and sleeping better than continuous physical exertion, and the difficulty of inducing him to work is the chief difficulty which European mine-owners in South Africa complain of. Like most men in his state of civilization, he is fond of hunting, even in its lowest forms, and of fighting. Both of these pleasures are being withdrawn from him, the former by the extinction of the game, the latter by the British Government; but it will be long before he acquires the habits of steady and patient industry which have become part of the character of the inhabitants of India.

War was the natural state of the tribes toward one another, just as it was among the Red Indians and the primitive Celts, and indeed generally everywhere in the early days of Europe. Their weapons were the spear or a.s.sagai, and a sort of wooden club, occasionally a crescent-shaped battle-axe, and still less frequently the bow. Horses were unknown, for the ox, sheep, goat and dog were over all South Africa the only domesticated quadrupeds. One tribe, however, the Basutos, now breeds horses extensively, and has turned them to account in fighting. The rapid movement of their mounted warriors was one of the chief difficulties the colonial forces had to deal with in the last Basuto war. The courage in war which distinguished the tribes of Zulu and Kosa race was all the more creditable because it had not, like that of the Mohammedan dervishes of the Sudan, or of Mohammedans anywhere engaged in a _jehad_, a religious motive and the promise of future bliss behind it.

The British army has encountered no more daring or formidable enemies.

Nine wars were needed to subjugate the Kafirs of the southern coast, although till recently they had few firearms. But the natives had no idea of the tactics needed in facing a civilized foe. As in their battles with the Boers they were destroyed by the fire of hors.e.m.e.n riding up, delivering a volley, and riding off before an a.s.sagai could reach them, so in the great war with Cetewayo in 1879 they fought in the open and were mowed down by British volleys; and in 1893 the Matabili perished in the same way under the fire of riflemen and Maxim guns sheltered behind a laager of wagons.

Religion was a powerful factor in Kafir life; but religion did not mean the worship of any deity, for there was no deity. Still less had it any moral significance. To the Kafirs, as to most savage races, the world was full of spirits--spirits of the rivers, the mountains, and the woods. Most important were the ghosts of the dead, who had power to injure or to help the living, and who were therefore propitiated by offerings at stated periods, as well as on occasions when their aid was specially desired. This kind of worship, the worship once most generally diffused throughout the world, and which held its ground among the Greeks and Italians in the most flourishing period of ancient civilization, as it does in China and j.a.pan to-day, was and is virtually the religion of the Kafirs. It was chiefly rendered to the ghosts of the chiefs, who retained in the spirit world the exceptional importance they had held among the living; and it had much weight in maintaining loyalty to a chief, because revolt against him was an insult to a powerful set of ghosts. The ghost dwelt at the spot where the body was buried, and it was therefore at the grave that the offerings, mostly of cakes and Kafir beer, were made. Occasionally animals were killed, not so much by way of sacrifice as for the sake of providing the ghost with a specially precious kind of food, though the two ideas run close together in most primitive worships.[10] Among the Matabili, for instance, there was once a year a great feast in honour of the king's ancestors, who were supposed to come and join in the mirth. It was also to the grave that those who wished to call up the ghost by spells went to effect their nefarious purpose, and the real place of interment of a great chief was for this reason sometimes concealed, I found at Thaba Bosiyo, the famous stronghold of the Basuto chief Moshesh, that his body had been secretly removed from the place where he was buried to baffle the wizards, who might try to use his ghost against the living. The ghost is, of course, apt to be spiteful, that of an uncle (I was told) particularly so; and if he is neglected he is extremely likely to bring some evil on the family or tribe. Sometimes the spirit of an ancestor pa.s.ses into an animal, and by preference into that of a snake, not that it lives in the snake, but that it a.s.sumes this form when it wishes to visit men. A particular kind of green snake is revered by the Matabili for this reason. And most, if not all, tribes had an animal which they deemed to be of kin to them, and which they called their "_siboko_," a term apparently corresponding to the totem of the North American Indians.

Creatures of this species they never killed, and some tribes took their name from it. Thus the Ba-Taung are the people of the lion; the Ba-Mangwato have the duyker antelope for their totem; and in the Basuto _pitso_ (public meeting) an orator will begin by addressing his audience as "sons of the crocodile." Of human sacrifices there seems to be no trace. Men were killed for all possible reasons, but never as offerings.

And, indeed, to have so killed them would have been to treat the ghosts as cannibals, a view foreign to native habits, for though human flesh has been resorted to in times of severe famine, it has never been regularly eaten, and the use of it excites disgust.

Whether the Kafirs had any idea of a supreme being is a question which has been much discussed. In several tribes the word, differently spelled "Umlimo" or "Mlimo" or "Molimo" (said to mean "hidden" or "unseen"), is used to denote either a power apparently different from that of the nature sprites or ghosts of the dead, or else the prophet or soothsayer who delivers messages or oracles supposed to emanate from this power.

The missionaries have in their native versions of the Bible used the term to translate the word "G.o.d." Sometimes, among the Tongas at least, the word _tilo_ (sky) is used to describe a mysterious force; as, for instance, when a man dies without any apparent malady, he is said to be killed by the _tilo_.[11] On the whole, after many inquiries from missionaries and others who know the natives well, I was led to the conclusion that the Kafirs have a vague notion of some power transcending that of common ghosts, and able to affect the operations of nature (as, for instance, to send rain), but far too dimly conceived to be properly describable as a divine being.[12] Or to put the thing in other words, the ordinary and familiar nature-sprites and ghosts of the departed do not exhaust the possibilities of super-human agency; for there remains, as among the Athenians whose altar St. Paul found (Acts xvii. 23), an "Unknown G.o.d," or rather unknown power, probably a.s.sociated with the heavens above, whose interference may produce results not attainable through inferior spiritual agencies. One of the difficulties in reaching any knowledge of the real belief of the people is that they are usually examined by leading questions, and are apt to reply affirmatively to whatever the querist puts to them. Their thoughts on these dark subjects are either extremely vague and misty or extremely material; the world of abstract thought, in which European minds have learned to move with an ease and confidence produced by the possession of a whole a.r.s.enal of theological and metaphysical phrases, being to them an undiscovered country.

Since there were no deities and no idols, there were no priests; but the want of a priesthood was fully compensated by the presence of wizards; for among the Kafirs, as among other primitive peoples, there was and is an absolute belief in the power of spells, and of sorcery generally.

These wizards, like the medicine men among the Red Indians, were an important cla.s.s, second only to the chiefs. They were not a caste, though very often the son of a wizard would be brought up to the profession. The pract.i.tioners were on the lookout for promising boys, and would take and train one to witchcraft, imparting their secrets, which included a remarkable knowledge of the properties of various plants available for poison or healing. Sometimes the wizard acted as a physician; sometimes he would attempt to make rain; sometimes he would profess to deliver messages from the unseen world, and in these cases he might become a terrible power for mischief. Such a revelation made to the Kosa clans on the south coast in 1856-57, directing them to kill their cattle and destroy their grain, because the ghosts of their ancestors were coming to drive out the whites, led to the death by famine of more than 30,000 people. Such a revelation proceeding from a soothsayer, occasionally called the Mlimo, who dwelt in a cavern among granite rocks in the Matoppo Hills at a place called Matojeni, south-east of Bulawayo[13] (oracles have always tended to come from caves), had much to do with the rising of the Matabili in 1896. But the most frequent and most formidable work done by the wizard was that of "smelling out" persons who were bewitching others so as to cause sickness or misfortune. In this branch of his profession the wizard often became the engine of the jealousy or rapacity of the chief, who would secretly prompt him to denounce a prominent or a wealthy man.

Suspicion being once roused, the victim had little chance: he was despatched, and his property seized by the chief. Witchcraft, and the murders it gave rise to, have been the darkest side of native life. The sorcerer has usually been the enemy of the missionary, who threatens his gains; but his power is now generally declining, and the British Government forbids the practice of smelling out witches, as well as many other shocking and disgusting rites which used to accompany the admission of boys and girls to the status of adults, or were practised at sundry festivals. Of the faith in minor and harmless spells one finds instances everywhere. In Matabililand, for instance, a boy was pointed out to me who had just been occupied in putting a charm into the footprint of a lion, in order to prevent the unwelcome visitor from returning; and nearly every native wears some kind of amulet.[14] These beliefs will take a long time to die, but the missionaries have now usually the good sense to see that they do little harm.

As their religious customs were rather less sanguinary than those of the Guinea Coast negroes, so the Kafirs themselves were, when the whites first saw them, somewhat more advanced in civilization. Compared with the Red Indians of America, they stood at a point lower than that of the Iroquois or Cherokees, but superior to the Utes or to the Diggers of the Pacific coast. They could work in iron and copper, and had some notions of ornament. Their music is rude, but not wholly devoid of melody, and they use instruments of stone, wood, and iron, by striking which a kind of tune can be played. Some tribes, such as the Tongas, have good voices, and a marked taste for music. They have some simple games, and a folk-lore which consists chiefly in animal tales, resembling those collected by Mr. Harris in his _Uncle Remus_, save that the hare plays among the Bantu peoples the part of Br'er Rabbit.[15] To poetry, even in its most rudimentary forms, they do not seem to have attained. Yet they are by no means wanting in intelligence, and have, with less gaiety, more sense of dignity and more persistence in their purposes than the Guinea negro.

When the Portuguese and Dutch first knew the Kafirs, they did not appear to be making any progress toward a higher culture. Human life was held very cheap; women were in a degraded state, and s.e.xual morality at a low ebb. Courage, loyalty to chief and tribe, and hospitality were the three prominent virtues. War was the only pursuit in which chieftains sought distinction, and war was mere slaughter and devastation, unaccompanied by any views of policy or plans of administration. The people were--and indeed still are--pa.s.sionately attached to their old customs, which even a king rarely ventured to disturb (though Tshaka is said to have abolished among his subjects the rite of circ.u.mcision, which is generally practised by the Kafirs); and it was probably as much the unwillingness to have their customs disturbed as the apprehension for their land that made many of the tribes oppose to the advance of the Europeans so obstinate a resistance. Though they feared the firearms of the whites, whom they called wizards, it was a long time before they realized their hopeless inferiority, and the impossibility of prevailing in war. Their minds were mostly too childish to recollect and draw the necessary inferences from previous defeats, and they never realized that the whites possessed beyond the sea an inexhaustible reservoir of men and weapons. Even the visit of Lo Bengula's envoys to England in 1891, when they were shown all the wonders of London, in order that through them the Matabili nation might be deterred from an attack on the whites, failed to produce any effect upon the minds of the young warriors, who were fully persuaded that they could destroy the few strangers in their country as easily as they had overthrown the Mashonas. The only chiefs who seem to have fully grasped the relative strength of the Europeans, and thus to have formed schemes of policy suitable to their inferior position, were Moshesh, who profited by the advice of the French missionaries, and Khama, who was himself a Christian and the pupil of missionaries. Nor did any chief ever rise to the conception of forming a league of blacks against whites.

The natives, as we shall see, have had harsh treatment from the Europeans. Many unjust things, many cruel things, many things which would excite horror if practised in European warfare, have been done against them. But whoever tries to strike the balance of good and evil due to the coming of the whites must remember what the condition of the country was before the whites came. As between the different tribes there was neither justice nor pity, but simply the rule of the strongest, unmitigated by any feeling of religion or morality. In war non-combatants as well as combatants were ruthlessly slaughtered, or reserved only for slavery; and war was the normal state of things.

Within each tribe a measure of peace and order was maintained. But the weak had a hard time, and those who were rich, or had roused the enmity of some powerful man, were at any moment liable to perish on the charge of witchcraft. In some tribes, such as the Matabili, incessant slaughter went on by the orders of the king. Nothing less than the prolific quality of the race could have kept South Africa well peopled in the teeth of such a waste of life as war and murder caused.

Of the character of the individual native as it affects his present relations with the whites and the probable future of the race, I shall have to speak in a later chapter (Chapter XXI), as also of the condition and prospects of the Christian missions which exist among them, and which form the main civilizing influence now at work.

[Footnote 9: See further as to this primary a.s.sembly the remarks on the Basuto _Pitso_ in Chapter XX.]