The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction

The road climbs a spur in the fork of two streams, and as one ascends and looks up the narrow twin glens, the old exquisite green of the true Wood Bush takes the place of the sadder colours of the lowlands. The heads of the glens have the form of what are called in the north of England and Scotland “hopes,” rounded green cup-shaped hollows; only here all things are on a larger scale, and the evergreen forest takes the place of birch and juniper in the corries. The road wound through wood and bracken, now coming out clear on a knoll, and now sinking to the level of some little stream. The mist which had covered the mountains was clearing, and one after another the green summits came forth like jewels against the pale morning sky. The tropical scents ceased, the sun shone out, and suddenly we were on the neck of the pass with a meadow-land country falling away from our feet. It was still hazy, but as we breakfasted the foreground slowly cleared. Little white roads sped away over the shoulders of hill; a rushing stream appeared in a hollow with one noble waterfall. Still the landscape opened; wood after wood came into being, glistening like emeralds in the dawn; long sweeps of pasture, each with its glimpse of water, carried the eye to where the great Drakensberg, blue and distant, was emerging from the fleecy mists of morning. Once more we were in the enchanted garden-land.

It is easy to describe the awesome and the immense, but it is hard indeed to convey an adequate impression of exceeding charm and richness. Hard, at least, in dull prose. A line of gleaming poetry, such as Herrick’s —

 
“Here in green meadows sits Eternal May,”
 

or Theocritus’s —

 
πάντ’ ὦσδεν θέρεος μάλα πίονος ὦσδε δ’ ὀπώρας,
 

will convey more of the true and intimate charm than folios of elaborated description. The main feature of the place is its sharp distinction from the common South African landscape. The high veld with its vast spaces, the noble mountain ravines, the flats of the bush veld, have all their own charm; but the traveller is plagued with the something unfriendly and austere in their air, as if all thought of human life had been wanting in their creation. They are built on a scale other than ours; man’s labour has in the last resort no power to change them. They remain rough, unfinished, eternally strange, a country to admire, but scarcely to adopt and understand. But this garden-ground is wholly human. Natura Benigna was the goddess who presided at its creation, and no roughness enters into the “warm, green-muffled” slopes, the moist temperate weather, and the limpid waters. It is England, richer, softer, kindlier, a vast demesne laid out as no landscape gardener could ever contrive, waiting for a human life worthy of such an environment. But it is more – it is that most fascinating of all types of scenery, a garden on the edge of a wilderness. And such a wilderness! Over the brink of the meadow, four thousand feet down, stretch the steaming fever flats. From a cool fresh lawn you look clear over a hundred miles of nameless savagery. The first contrast which fascinates the traveller is between the common veld and this garden; but the deeper contrast, which is a perpetual delight to the dweller, is between his temperate home and the rude wilds beyond his park wall.

What is to be the fate of it? There is no reason why it should not become at once a closely settled farming country. If the Pietersburg line is looped round between Magatoland and the Spelonken and brought south to meet a line from Leydsdorp, this intervening plateau will have a ready access to markets. The place, too, may become a famous sanatorium, to which the worried town-dwellers may retire to recover health from the quiet greenery. Country houses may spring up, and what is now the preserve of a few enthusiasts may become in time the Simla or Saratoga of the Transvaal. How much, I wonder, will the new-comers see of its manifold graces? Any one can appreciate the mellow air, the restful water-meadows, the profound stillness of the deep-bosomed hills. These are physical matters, making a direct appeal to the simpler senses. But for the rest? It is the place for youth, youth with high spirit and wide horizon, sensitive to scenery and weather, loving wild nature and adventure for their own noble sakes. How much, I wonder, will they see of it all – the people who have the purse to compass health resorts and the constitutions to need them? For here, as in all places of subtle and profound beauty, there is need of the seeing eye and the understanding heart.

 
“We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold of higher worth
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth.”
 

I do not think that the place will ever become staled. The special correspondent will not rhapsodise over it – he will find many places better worthy of his genius; the voice of the halfpenny paper will not, I think, be heard in that land. Its appeal is at once too obvious and too subtle: too obvious in its main features to please the common connoisseur, too subtle and remote for the wayfaring man to penetrate. It will remain, I trust, the paradise of a few – a paradise none the less their own because towns and hotels and country houses may have sprung up throughout it. To such it will always appear (as it appeared to us when we took farewell of it from the summit above Haenertsburg and saw the hills and glades sleeping in the mellow afternoon) an old-world Arcadia, a lost classic land which Nature with her artist’s humour has created in this raw unstoried Africa.

December 1902-January 1903.

CHAPTER IX.
ON THE EASTERN VELD

Machadodorp, that straggling village called after a Portuguese commander, is the most easterly outpost of the high veld. A few miles farther and there is a sheer fall into narrow mountain glens, down which the Elands River and the Delagoa Bay Railway make the best of their way to the lowlands. North lies the hill country of Lydenburg, to which the traveller may come in a coach after a day of heart-breaking hills and neck-breaking descents. But south for a good hundred miles sweeps the high veld in a broad promontory from Machadodorp to the Pongola, and on the east to the Swaziland border. It is the highest part of the great central tableland, and a very bleak dwelling-place in winter; but in summer and autumn it has a full share of the curious veld beauty. In particular, being in the line of the Drakensberg, you can come to its edge and look over into the wild tangle of glens which lie between you and the Lebombo hills. Also it is the lake district of South Africa, being full of tarns of all sizes from Lake Chrissie, which is a respectable sheet of water, to the tiniest reed-filled pan. It is the coldest, freshest, and windiest part of the land, a tonic country where the inhabitants are rarely ill, and few doctors can make a living.

The journey to the first outspan from Machadodorp on the Ermelo road is a little monotonous, for you are not yet on the ridge of the high veld, the grass is rank, and the landscape featureless. You are pursued, too, by an unfinished railway, the Machadodorp-Carolina line, and if there is an uglier thing than the raw scar made by earthworks and excavations and uncompleted culverts, I do not know it. The line is being taken over by Government, and the sooner it is laid the better, for at present the richest farming population in the Transvaal are some sixty miles from a rail-head. At the fine stone bridge of the Komati you enter a more pleasing country, with a glimpse to the east of a gap in the hills through which the river enters the broken country. The Komati here is a slow high-veld stream creeping through long muddy pools with the slenderest of currents, but some eight miles down it is a hill torrent. This is one of the paradoxes of the high-veld rivers. Elsewhere it is in their cradle that streams have their “bright speed”; here the infant river must be content to creep like a canal, and lo! when it is almost full grown, it finds itself hurled in cataracts down a mountain valley. Who, seeing the Olifants near Middelburg, can ever believe that it is the same stream which swirls round a corner of the berg north of Ohrigstad; or, watching the sluggish Umpilusi crawling through the high veld, find any kinship between it and the Swaziland salmon-river? It is a romantic career – first a chain of half-stagnant pools, then a cataract, and then a full-grown river, rolling its yellow waters through leagues of bush and jungle to the tropical ocean.

From Everard’s store, which is a pleasant outspan among trees, the road climbs steeply to the ridge of the country. A tremendous sweep of veld comes into view, stretching to the west in hazy leagues till the eyes dazzle with the soft contours and infinite lines, and in the east barred at a great distance by a faint blue range, the Ingwenya Mountains. The first pan appeared, no larger than an English mill-dam, and overgrown with reeds which made a patch of darker green against the veld. One had the sensation of being somewhere on the roof of the world, for on every horizon but one the land sloped to a lower altitude, and even on the east the mountains seemed foreshortened, like the masts of a vessel just coming into sight at sea. Presently a little white dorp, Carolina, appeared some miles away on the left, with that curious look of a Pilgrim’s Progress village which so many veld townships possess. Then miles on miles of the same green downland, the road now sinking into little valleys with a glimpse of farm-steadings, and now holding the ridge in the centre of the amphitheatre. As the autumn evening fell, and the soft lights bathed the landscape, it became a spectral world, a Tir-an-Oig, in which it was difficult to believe that this rose-coloured slope was not a dream or that purple clump of trees a mirage. Little lochs appeared, some olive-green with rushes, some cold and black with inky waves lapping on dazzling white shores. Water, in Novalis’ quaint fancy, is as the eye to a landscape, the one thing generally lacking in the blind infinity of the veld. Strings of wild-geese passed over our heads, and from the meadow bottoms there came the call of ducks and now and then the bark of a korhaan. Curious echoes arose as we passed, for there is something in the geological structure of the country which makes it full of eerie noises. And then, as darkness closed down, a long piece of water appeared, beyond which rose a little hill with two woods of blue gum and a light between them. A nearer view showed a trim cottage, with Kaffir huts around it, the beginnings of a garden, and, even in the dusk, a glimpse of long lines of crops stretching down to the lake. It was the homestead of Florence, which stands on the apex of a large block of Crown land, and is used as the headquarters of the land commissioner of the eastern district.

From Florence to the Swaziland border is some fifty miles as the crow flies, so at dawn our horses were saddled, and, with a mule-cart for provisions, we set out towards the remote hills. The morning had begun in a Scots mist, but by ten o’clock the sky was cloudless, and the intense blue of the lakes, the white shores, and the many patches of marl on the slopes caught the sun with a bewildering glare. The water in the pans is generally brackish, but some few are fresh, and one in particular, about four miles long, has wooded islets and a bold white bluff like a chalk cliff. The names are mostly Scots – Blairmore, Ardentinny, Hamilton, – for the land was first bought and settled by a Glasgow company. They are almost all stock farms, with little irrigation except along the Umpilusi; and many are fenced, efficiently enough, with slabs of stone for uprights. On one farm, Lake Banagher, we rode past a herd of some 300 or 400 blesbok and springbok, which are preserved by Mr Schalk Meyer, the owner. About noon we came into the shallow vale of the Umpilusi, and left it again for a high ridge, whence all afternoon we had a view of rolling country to the south, with the Slaangaapies mountains on the horizon. The great hills in the north of Swaziland were faint but clear, though we were still too high ourselves to see them to advantage. The country began to change, the valleys became almost glens, a great deal of tumbled rock appeared overgrown with bush and bracken, and everything spoke of the beginnings of a mountain country, which, strangely enough, we were approaching from above. In the late afternoon we came to large belts of trees around a ruined farmhouse, and as the sky was beginning to threaten we outspanned for the night. We were not more than half a dozen miles from the Swazi border and in full sight of it – a chain of little kopjes with a hint of faint mountains behind.

The farmhouse was an odd place seen in that stormy dusk. Thick woods of blue-gum and pine surrounded it, and below, also hemmed in by trees, was a lush water-meadow. The house had been a substantial stone building, but it was stripped to the walls, every scrap of woodwork having been used by the troops for fuel. The broken stoep was overgrown with moon-flowers, whose huge white blossoms gleamed uncannily in the shadows. We pushed through the wood and the overgrown paddock to a neglected orchard, where the fruit-trees had lost all semblance of their former selves, and struggled vainly among creepers and high grasses, and thence to the meadow where a little reddish stream trickled through the undergrowth. Owls flitted about like the ghosts of the place, and this relic of war with its moated-grange melancholy had a depressing effect on our spirits. We gladly sought our camp in an old barn on higher ground, where a blazing fire restored us to cheerfulness. The rain never fell, and the morning dawned grey and misty, so that when we set out for the border we had little hope of a view. We passed some Swazi kraals, and got directions from their picturesque occupants. The men are active and tall, and their wives with their curious head-dresses are better to look at than the sluttish native women of the central districts. They are beautiful dancers, and the performance of a body of Swazis in war costume is a thing to remember. The country began to be extremely rocky, and tree-ferns and other specimens of sub-tropical vegetation appeared in the hollows. One glossy-leaved bush bore a berry about the size and shape of a rasp, called by the natives “infanfaan,” which had an agreeable sub-acid flavour. A little hill, looking as if it were made of one single gigantic boulder, appeared on the right, and with some scrambling we got our horses to the foot of it. This was Bell’s Kop, a famous landmark, and beyond and below was Swaziland.

The morning had cleared, and though the horizons were misty, we saw enough to reward us. The ground fell sharply away from our feet to a green glen studded with trees, down which a white road wound. A hill shut the glen, but over the hill and at a much lower altitude we saw the strath of the Umpilusi, with the river running in wide sweeps with shores of gravel, not unlike the Upper Spey as seen from the Grampians. Beyond were tiers of broken blue hills, rising very high towards the north, where they culminate in Piggs’ Peak, but fading southward into a misty land where lay the Lebombo flats. The grey soft air had an intense stillness, a kind of mountain melancholy, but far to the south there was a patch of sunlight on the green hills above Amsterdam. It is a type of view which can be had in all parts of the Drakensberg, from Mont aux Sources frowning over Natal to the Spelonken looking down on the plains of the Letaba – a view to me of infinite charm, for you stand upon the dividing line between two forms of country and two climates, looking back upon the endless prairies and their fresh winds and forward upon warm glens and the remote malarial tropics.

From Bell’s Kop we fetched a wide circuit, going to Amsterdam, which was not more than fifteen miles from where we stood, by Florence and Ermelo, a journey of over 100 miles. The afternoon ride was something to remember, for the day had cleared into a bright afternoon with cool winds blowing, and the green ridges had a delicate pastoral beauty, as of sunlit sheep-walks. When we forded the Umpilusi its sluggish pools were glowing with the fires of sunset. Cantering in the hazy twilight of the long slopes was pure romance, and the sounds from a Kaffir kraal, the slow mild-eyed oxen on the road, and the wheeling of wild birds had all the strangeness of things seen and heard in a dream. I know no such tonic for the spirits, for in such a scene and at such a time the blood seems to run more freely in the veins, the mind to be purged from anxious indolence, and the whole nature to become joyous and receptive. Much comes from the air. There is something in those spaces of clear absolute ether, eternally wide, fresh as spring water, pure as winds among snow, which not only sustains but vitalises and rejuvenates the body. There is something, too, in the life. Fine scenery is too often witnessed by men when living the common life of civilisation and enjoying the blessings of a good cook and a not indifferent cellar. But on the veld there is bare living and hard riding, so that a man becomes thin and hard and very much alive, the dross of ease is purged away, and body and mind regain the keen temper which is their birthright.

We outspanned at a Boer farm and dined with the family off home-made bread, confyt, and tea. They were very hospitable and friendly, and discussed the war and current politics with all freedom. The walls were adorned with numerous portraits of British generals; and the farmer, who had been in Bermuda, displayed with much pride the carvings with which he had beguiled his captivity. One of the sons read assiduously a Dutch translation of one of Mayne Reid’s novels, and when he could tear himself from the narrative contributed to the talk some details of his commando-life under Ben Viljoen, for whom, in common with most of the younger Dutch, he had a profound admiration. These people are a strange mixture – so hospitable, that the traveller is ashamed to go near a Boer farm, seeing the straitness of their lives and the generosity with which they give what they have; and yet so squalid that they make little effort to better their condition. This particular farmer owned four large farms, worth in the present market not less than £20,000; the sale of one or a part of one would have given him ample means to buy stock and start again. But he was content to go on as he was, running up a long bill with the Repatriation depot, and grumbling at the high prices for stock compared with what he had been used to pay. The result was that, though he had been back for nine months, I saw no living thing on that farm but a few chickens, six goats, and a spavined horse.

We made the last stage to Florence shortly after sunrise, and arrived at the homestead in time for breakfast. The twenty odd miles to Ermelo were the easy journey of an afternoon. We passed the ruined township of Chrissie, with a roofless kirk and some flourishing plantations of firs. The lake itself lay over some meadows, a pear-shaped piece of water, very shallow, and at its greatest perhaps some six or eight miles round. Yet in spite of its shallowness there is ample depth for a small centre-board; and when the railway is completed and Chrissie becomes a summer sanatorium, there is no reason why a modest kind of yachting should not be enjoyed. For the rest it is a bare road, with outcrops of coal appearing here and there, and the infant Vaal to be crossed, a very mean and muddy little stream. You come on Ermelo with surprise, dipping over the brow of a barren ridge and seeing a cheerful little town beneath you. It suffered heavily in the war, being literally levelled with the ground, but when we passed most of the houses had been cobbled together and new buildings were arising. It lies in a rich mineral tract, and is also the centre of a wide pastoral district, so with improved communications it may very well become a thriving country town. Whoever laid it out showed good judgment in the planting of trees; and in that bare land it is pleasant to come on such a village in a wood. My chief recollection of Ermelo is of a talk with a deputation of neighbouring farmers on the subject of cattle diseases. One admirable old man explained his perplexity. “Formerly,” he said, “we used to be told that all diseases came from on High. Now we are told that some are from on High and some are our own fault. But which is which? Personally,” he concluded, “I believe that Providence is a good deal to blame for them all.”

About noon the following day we set out for Amsterdam. The first part of the road is monotonous, for it follows a straight line of blockhouses in a bleak featureless country. We crossed the inevitable Vaal again, a little larger and perhaps a little dirtier, but not appreciably more attractive. Sometimes we came to a flat moor like Rannoch with faint blue mountains beyond it, but the common type was a succession of ridges without a shade of difference between them. The weather had broken, and dust-coloured showers pursued us over the face of the heavens, till, as we came in sight of the considerable hill of Bankkop, the whole sky behind us had darkened for a wet evening. As we came down from the height, where the colour of the roads told of coal, and entered a green marshy valley, the storm burst on us, – a true African rain which drenches a man in two minutes. We sought shelter in a farmhouse, or rather in a blockhouse in the stackyard, for there was little left of the house except a shanty which the owner had restored for his present accommodation. All evening it rained in solid sheets, and to dinner, a meal cooked under difficulties, the Boer farmer came and talked to us, sitting on a barrel and telling stories of the war. He had the ordinary tale – against the war at the start, compelled to fight, had remonstrated with Louis Botha on his conduct of the Natal campaign, and, grumbling greatly, had followed his leader till he was caught and sent to Ceylon. The Boer discipline must have been a curious growth, and, when we realise the intense individualism of the fighting men, we begin to see the greatness of the achievement of Botha and Delarey in keeping them together at all. Our friend was living in squalid penury, but he was drawing enough in mineral options on his farm to have restocked it and lived in comfort, if he had pleased. There is no doubt in my mind, after such experiences, as to what would have been the wisest and kindest form of repatriation for landowners, had we had the courage to adopt it, – compulsory sale of a portion of the farm, and out of the capital thus supplied the farmer could have bought what he wanted at reasonable prices from Government depots. Such a method would have given the Government more good land, which it urgently wants; it would have saved the endless credit accounts which in the long-run will give trouble both to Boer and Government; and it would have saved the pauperisation into which the Boer is only too ready to sink. There would, of course, have been many exceptions in the case of the very poor and landless classes, but for the landholder it would have been not only the most politic but in his eyes the most intelligible plan.

I shall never forget the night spent in that blockhouse. Every known form of vermin – fleas, bugs, mosquitoes, spiders, rats, and, for all I know, snakes – came out of the holes where they had fasted for months and attacked us. I lay for hours swathed in a kaross, my face tingling, watching through the open square of door a melancholy moon trying to show herself among the rain-clouds, and wishing I had had the wisdom to sleep on the wet veld rather than in that chamber of horrors. Sheer bodily weariness induced a few uneasy hours of sleep, but the first ray of dawn found me thankfully arising. We breakfasted in haste, inspanned hurriedly, and were on the road an hour after sunrise. A long ascent brought us to the ridge of those hills of which Bankkop and Spitzkop are part, an extension of the Drakensberg from Wakkerstroom across the veld to the Swazi border. Then we passed over some very flat meadows to another ridge, from which we had a clear view of the Slaangaapies mountains to the south, and before us to the north-east the long green range of hills above Amsterdam. It was a curious picture for the Transvaal, a line of hills with regular glens and soft contours unbroken by rock or tree, and at the foot in a wood a few white cottages – a reminiscence of Galloway or Tweeddale; and one can well understand how the Scots settlers, who founded the place and gave it its first name of Robburnia after their national poet, saw in the landscape a picture of their home. We skirted the village on the left, and found the farm where we were to outspan. Here heroic measures were taken to get rid of the results of the blockhouse. A large tub was filled with hot water, and a bottle of sheep-dip was emptied into it. In this mixture we wallowed, and emerged from it scarified but clean.

The farm was the property of a Scots gentleman, who in six months had made new water-furrows, built himself a comfortable house, put over 200 acres under crops, and was running a fair head of stock on the hills. In the afternoon we rode with him to Mr Forbes’ farm of Athole, some three miles off, which is perhaps the largest private landed estate in one piece in the country. It runs to some 60,000 acres, a huge square tract between two streams, from which is obtained a fine prospect of the Swaziland hills. Mr Forbes, who owns much land across the border, is one of the two or three living Englishmen who know the Swazis best, having for fifty years or more traded, farmed, and mined in their country. Before the war Athole was a great game-preserve, with 3000 blesbok, 2000 springbok, as well as reed-buck, impala, the two rheboks, and a few klipspringer. Now some odd springbok along the stream are almost all that remain. But when Mr Forbes first came to the place eland, koodoo, and hartebeest were the common game, and one could kill a lion on most farms. Of the original Scots settlers, who gave the name of New Scotland to the district, a few still remain, and their farms can be told far off by the neat strips of plantation which make the place like a hillside in Ayrshire. The land was acquired very cheaply from the Government, – one farm, if tales be true, going for a pair of boots, and another for a keg of whisky. The Boers themselves bought the whole tract from the Swazi border to Ermelo, and from the Komati in the north to the Pongola in the south – perhaps 3000 square miles – from the Swazi king for 150 oxen and 50 blankets. As at that time an ox was worth about 30s., it was not a high price, and the Boers still further improved the bargain by declining to pay the blankets. When Mr Forbes came to the place he was visited by a deputation of Swazi chiefs to discuss the subject, and to save trouble gave them the blankets from his own stores.

In Amsterdam next morning I was taken for a prospector, and played the part for a considerable time, to the confusion of an ex-official of the place, who wished to profit by my knowledge, but could make neither head nor tail of my answers. It is a sleepy little town, with not more than half a dozen houses lying pleasantly in gardens, with mountain streams on all sides and pastoral green hills to the east and north. South, where lay our road, are swelling moorlands, flanked by the Slaangaapies and the Swazi hills, and crossed at frequent intervals by clear grey streams. The first of these is the Compies, a few miles from the village, and a more naturally perfect trout-stream I have rarely seen. There were deep blue pools, and long shallow stretches, and little rapids in whose tail one should have been able to get a salmon. When trout become thoroughly acclimatised in the Transvaal, and the proper waters are stocked, he will be a happy man who owns a mile or two of the Compies. As if to intensify the atmosphere of fishing, it began to rain heavily and a cold mist blew up from the south. The long grass became hoar with rain-drops, and the innumerable veld watercourses found their voices after months of dry silence. Still more lipping grey streams, and then the rain ceased as suddenly as it had come, and in a deceptive gleam of sunlight we came into Piet Retief. It is a long, straggling, dingy village lying on two ridges. The mountains on all sides are too far off to be a feature in one’s view of it, and save that it is one of the backdoors to Swaziland, there is little of interest for the traveller. At the entrance you pass a monument to Piet Retief, of which only the pedestal is completed – a poor tribute to a great man.

After lunch the rain began again in real earnest, and there was nothing for it but to loiter through the afternoon in waterproofs and hope for a dry morrow. It is not the most cheerful of places, but seen through the pauses of the driving wrack it had a wild charm of its own. In particular the Slaangaapies mountains, a dozen miles off, when by any chance they were visible for a moment, stood out black and threatening, with white cataracts seaming their sides and murky shadows in their glens. The Dutch name means “Snake-monkeys,” but the natives call them beautifully “The Mother of Rains.” The inhabitants of the district are almost the lowest type in the Transvaal, – poor, disreputable, half-bred, despised by their neighbours and neglected by the late Government. The progressive element in the district is represented by a German colony, who were originally placed there by the wily Boer as a buffer against the natives, but who throve and multiplied and now own the best farms in the district. The most interesting thing I saw in the place was a large Boer hound, with the hair on the ridge of his back growing in an opposite direction to the rest of his coat. Now this type is rare, and, when found, makes the finest hunting dog in the world, for he will tackle a charging lion, and, indeed, fears nothing created. I had often been advised if I came across such a dog to buy him at any price, but in this case his Dutch owner utterly refused to sell, and I had to depart in envious gloom.