Images de page
PDF
ePub

he will be a Savage to the end of the chapter. It is often very hard to find out whether the good things have been properly proffered to the Savage, and whether the man's neglect of them has come from his own intellectual inability to appreciate them or from the ill manner in which they have been tendered to him. The aboriginal of Australia has utterly rejected them, as I fear we must say the North American Indian has done also,—either from his own fault or from ours. The Maori of New Zealand seemed to be in the way of accepting them when it was found out that the reception of them was killing him. He is certainly dying whether from that or other causes. The Chinaman and the Indian Coolie are fully alive to the advantages of earning money, and are consequently not to be classed among Savages. The South Sea Islander has as yet had but few chances of working; but when he is employed he works well and saves his wages. With the Negro as imported into the West Indies the good things of the world have, I fear, made but little way. He despises work and has not even yet learned to value the advantages which work will procure for him. The Negro in the United States, who in spite of his prolonged slavery has been brought up in a better school, gives more promise; but even with him the result to be desired, the consciousness that by work only can he raise himself to an equality with the white man,—seems to be far distant. I cannot say that it is near with the Kafir or the Zulu;-but to the Kafir and the Zulu the money market has been opened comparatively but for a short time. They certainly do not die out under the yoke, and they are not indifferent to the material comforts of life. Therefore I think there is a fair hope that they will become a laborious and an educated people.

At present no doubt throughout Natal there is a cry from the farmer that the Zulu will not work. The farmer cannot plough his land and reap it because the Zulu will not come to him just when work is required. It seems hard to the farmer that, with 300,000 of a labouring class around, the 20,000 white capitalists,—capitalists in a small way, should be short of labour. That is the way in which the Natal farmer looks at it, when he swears that the Zulu is trash, and that it would be well if he were swept from the face of the earth. It seems never to occur to a Natal farmer that if a Zulu has enough to live on without working he should be as free to enjoy himself in idleness as an English lord. The business of the Natal farmer is to teach the Zulu that he has not enough to live on, and that there are enjoyments to be obtained by working of which the idle man knows nothing.

But the Zulu does work, though not so regularly as might be desirable. I was astonished to find at how much cheaper a rate he works than does the Kafir in British Kafraria or in the Cape Colony generally. The wages paid by the Natal farmer run from 10s. down to 5 s. a month, and about 3 lbs. of mealies or Indian corn a day for diet. I found that on road parties, where the labour is I am sorry to say compulsory, the men working under constraint from their Chiefs, the rate is 5s. a month, or 4 d. a day for single days. The farmer who complains of course expects to get his work cheap, and thinks that he is injuring not only himself but the community at large if he offers more than the price which has been fixed in his mind as proper. But in truth there is much of Zulu agricultural work done at a low rate of wages, and the custom of such work is increasing.

As to other work, work in towns, work among stores, domestic work, carrying, carting, driving, cleaning horses,

tending pigs, roadmaking, running messages, scavengering, hod bearing and the like, the stranger is not long in Natal before he finds, not only that all such work is done by Natives, but that there are hands to do it more ready and easy to find than in any other country that he has visited.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Langalibalele.

THE story of Langalibalele is one which I must decline to tell with any pretence of accuracy, and as to the fate of the old Zulu,-whether he has been treated wrongly or rightly I certainly am not competent to give an opinion with that decision which a printed statement should always convey. But in writing of the Colony of Natal it is impossible to pass Langalibalele without mention.

It is

not too much to say that the doings of Langalibalele have altered the Constitution of the Colony; and it is probable that as years run on they will greatly affect the whole treatment of the Natives in South Africa. And yet Langalibalele was never a great man among the Zulus and must often have been surprised at his own importance.

Those who were concerned with the story are still alive and many of them are still sore with the feeling of unmerited defeat. And to no one in the whole matter has there been anything of the triumph of success. The friends of Langalibalele, and his enemies, seem equally to think that wrong has been done,-or no better than imperfect justice. And the case is one the origin and end of which can hardly now be discovered, so densely are they enveloped in Zulu customs and past Zulu events. Whether a gentleman twenty years ago when firing a pistol intended to wound or only frighten? Such, and such like, are the points which the teller of the story would have to settle if he intended to decide upon the

rights and wrongs of the question. Is it not probable that a man having been called on for sudden action, in a great emergency, may himself be in the dark as to his own intention at so distant a period,—knowing only that he was anxious to carry out the purpose for which he was sent, that purpose having been the establishment of British authority? And then this matter was one in which the slightest possible error of judgment, the smallest deviation from legal conduct where no law was written, might be efficacious to set everything in a blaze. The natives of South Africa, but especially the natives of Natal, have to be ruled by a mixture of English law and Zulu customs, which mixture, I have been frequently told, exists in its entirety only in the bosom of one living man. It is at any rate unwritten,- -as yet unwritten though there now exists a parliamentary order that this mixture shall be codified by a certain fixed day. It is necessarily irrational,

as for instance when a Zulu is told that he is a British subject but yet is allowed to break the British law in various ways, as in the matter of polygamy. It must be altogether unintelligible to the subject race to whom the rules made by their white masters, opposed as they are to their own customs, must seem to be arbitrary and tyrannical, as when told that they must not carry about with them the peculiar stick or knobkirrie which has been familiar to their hands from infancy. It is opposed to the ideas of justice which prevail in the intercourse between one white man and another, as when the Zulu, whom the white man will not call a slave, is compelled through the influence of his Chief to do the work which the white man requires from him;- -as an instance of which I may refer to those who are employed on the roads, who are paid wages, indeed, but who work not by their own will, but under restraint from their Chiefs. It must I think be

« PrécédentContinuer »