CHAPTER XI.

BRITISH KAFRARIA.

It is not improbable that many Englishmen who have not been altogether inattentive to the course of public affairs as affecting Great Britain may be unaware that we once possessed in South Africa a separate colony called British Kafraria, with a governor of its own, and a form of government altogether distinct from that of its big brother the Cape Colony. Such however is the fact, though the territory did not, perhaps, attract much notice at the time of its annexation. Some years after the last Kafir war which may have the year 1850 given to it as its date, and after that wonderful Kafir famine which took place in 1857,-the famine which the natives created for themselves by destroying their own cattle and their own food,-British Kafraria. was made a separate colony and was placed under the rule of Colonel Maclean. The sanction from England for the arrangement had been long given, but it was not carried out till 1860. It was not intended that the country should be taken away from the Kafirs;-but only the rule over the country, and the privilege of living in accordance with their own customs. Nor was this privilege abrogated all at once, or abruptly.

Gradually and piecemeal they were to be

introduced to what we call civilization.

Gradually and piecemeal the work is still going on,-and so progressing that there can hardly be a doubt that as far as their material condition is concerned we have done well with the Kafirs. The Kafir Chiefs may feel,-certainly do feel, that they have been aggrieved. They have been as it were knocked about, deprived of their power, humiliated and degraded, and, as far as British Kafraria is concerned, made almost ridiculous in the eyes of their own people. But the people themselves have been relieved from the force of a grinding tyranny. They increase and multiply because they are no longer driven to fight and be slaughtered in the wars which the Chiefs were continually waging for supremacy among each other. What property they acquire they can hold without fear of losing it by arbitrary force. They are no longer subject to the terrible superstitions which their Chiefs have used for keeping them in subjection. Their huts are better, and their food more constantly sufficient. Many of them work for wages. They are partially clothed,-sometimes with such grotesque partiality as quite to justify the comical stories which we have heard at home as to Kafir full dress. But the habit of wearing clothes is increasing among them. In the towns they are about as well clad as the ordinary Irish beggar, and as the traveller recedes from the towns he perceives that this raiment gradually gives way to blankets and red clay. But to have got so far as the Irish beggar condition in twenty years is very much, and the custom is certainly spreading itself. The Kafir who has assiduously worn breeches for a year does feel, not a moral

but a social shame, at going without them. As I have no doubt whatever that the condition of these people has been improved by our coming, and that British rule has been on the whole beneficent to them, I cannot but approve of the annexation of British Kafraria. But I doubt whether when it was done the justification was as complete as in those former days, twenty years before, when Lord Glenelg reprimanded Sir Benjamin D'Urbin for the extension he made in the same territory, and drew back the borders of British sovereignty, and restored their lands and their prestige and their customs to the natives, and declared himself willing to be responsible for all results that might follow,-results which at last cost so much British blood and SO much British money!

The difficult question meets one at every corner in South Africa. What is the duty of the white man in reference to the original inhabitant? The Kafir Chief will say that it is the white man's duty to stay away and not to touch what does not belong to him. The Dutch Colonist will say that it is the white man's duty to make the best he can of the good things God has provided for his use, and that as the Kafir in his natural state is a bad thing he should either be got rid of, or made a slave. In either assertion there is an intelligible purpose capable of a logical argument. But the Briton has to go between the two, wavering much between the extremes of philanthropy and expansive energy. He knows that he has to get possession of the land and use it, and is determined that he will do so;-but he knows also that it is wrong to take what does not belong to him

and wrong also to treat another human being with harshness. And therefore with one hand he waves his humanitarian principles over Exeter Hall while with the other he annexes Province after Province. As I am myself a Briton I am not a fair critic of the proceeding;-but it does seem to me that he is upon the whole beneficent, though occasionally very unjust.

After the wars, when this Kafraria had become British, a body of German emigrants were induced to come here who have thriven wonderfully upon the land, as Germans generally do. The German colonist is a humble hard working parsimonious man, who is content as long as he can eat and drink in security and put by a modicum of money. He cares but little for the form of government to which he is subjected, but is very anxious as to a market for his produce. He is unwilling to pay any wages, but is always ready to work himself and to make his children work. He lives at first in some small hovel which he constructs for himself, and will content himself with maze instead of meat till he has put by money enough for the building of a neat cottage. And so he progresses till he becomes known in the neighbourhood as a man who has money at the bank. Nothing probably has done more to make Kafraria prosperous than this emigration of Germans.

But British Kafraria did not exist long as a separate possession of the Crown, having been annexed to the Cape Colony in 1864. From that time it has formed part of the Eastern Province. It has three thriving English towns, King-Williamstown, the capital, East London the port, and

Queenstown, further up the country than King-Williamstown;-towns which are peculiarly English though the country around is either cultivated by German farmers or held by Kafir tenants. The district is still called British Kafraria. I myself have some very dim remembrance of British Kafraria as a Colony, but like other places in the British empire it has been absorbed by degrees without much notice at home.

Starting from Grahamstown on a hired Cape cart I entered British Kafraria somewhere between that town and Fort Beaufort. A "Cape cart" is essentially a South African vehicle, and is admirably adapted for the somewhat rough roads of the country. Its great merit is that it travels on only two wheels ;-but then so does our English gig. But the English gig carries only two passengers while the Cape cart has room for four, or even six. The Irish car no doubt has both these merits, carries four and runs on two wheels; but the wheels are necessarily so low that they are ill adapted for passing serious obstructions. And the Cape cart can be used with two horses, or four as the need be. A one-horse vehicle is a thing hardly spoken may of in South Africa, and would meet with more scorn than it does even in the States. But the chief peculiarity of the Cape cart is the yoke of the horses, which is somewhat similar in its nature to that of the curricle which used to be very dangerous and very fashionable in the days of George IV. With us a pair of horses is now always connected with four wheels, and with the idea of security which four wheels give. Though the horse may tumble down the vehicle