J. J. Muskett

“ Each farm has its one spring of water where the homestead lies, and, if the spring be strong enough, a garden and cultivated land which it irrigates. There are rivers so dry that no drop of moisture can be found within their beds, and yet so large that the bridging them is expensive to the point of prohibition; so deep and rapid when it rains that no living creature can cross them. ”

“ Our village lies alone in the wilderness, a long day's journey from its nearest neighbor. A broad fringe of mountains passed, and the whole interior of the colony and the country far beyond its borders forms one great desert of stones and dull red soil, with small, hard bushes grey or brown, scattered scantily about it. ”

“ He is a well-built man, not unlike the English farmer of our early days, but more sallow and less cheery, more Puritanical and staid. His ancestors came from France and Holland, but in this wondrous climate of the Cape, perchance for animal life the finest under the sun, their offspring have developed into a race sui generis, nobly grown and quite unlike the typical Hollander or Frenchman. We converse in Dutch, the only language he cares to speak, although his children are apt scholars in the English tongue, and by-and-by he takes us into his garden. ”

“ The colored people have a minister and a chapel to themselves, nominally autonomous, but practically managed and mostly paid for by the Boers. Their services are more emotional and often more interesting than those of their pale-faced masters. Their minister is a kind of curate, socially inferior to the predikant of the Boer congregation; nor is he permitted to ascend the pulpit of the white man's church. He, too, has his elders, deacons, and churchwardens — Kafirs, Hottentots, or the mixed descendants of Malay slaves. Now these poor negroes have a passion for religious worship and for school. ”

“ Learning is the fashion, and a good one; and the professions begin to teem with scions of Boer houses who have sought pursuits more ambitious and eventful than the watching of harvests or the herding of sheep. ”

“ True, every white man born in civilized south Africa claims to be an Africander, but in the more restricted sense of the word it applies especially to the older colonists of the better classes. Some of these are found amongst the leading spirits of every township, often amongst leading officials. Dutch is the language spoken in their households, and the Boers regard them with an affection and respect which in the very nature of things could scarcely be accorded to the English settler, who comes amongst them a stranger and a foreigner at best. ”

“ As a contribution towards this knowledge I am about to picture a village — for village it is usually called although the seat of a magistracy and the capital of a division — which was founded by Boers, is almost entirely inhabited by them, and which has a local self-government of its own, in a population of six hundred there are not a dozen Englishmen, nor a dozen other Europeans of any kind, although the Germans rival the English as to numbers. ”

“ In the Boers we have the remarkable spectacle of a nation holding but one religion, strict conformity to which is essential to respectability of any sort; whilst the devotee or active professor alone can hope for social leadership among them. In the district of which our village is the only town there are three thousand souls. ”

“ At the present time, when the Transvaal Boers are in rebellion against us, it may be interesting to know something more respecting the customs, modes of thought, and ways of living of their race than is to be met with in the guidebooks or in the notes of those who have passed a few brief weeks in the show places and the busier centres of our south African colonies. ”

“ A special contractor keeps in working order the trench or canal which conveys a stream some two miles long from the higher level of the distant river bed; a stream on which depends the very existence of the town. Unpleasant for this functionary it is when the watercourse, which winds sometimes along hillsides and sometimes in deep cuttings, becomes choked with sand, or breaks its bank, or gets too palpably full of frogs and weeds. The public are aggrieved, and it is easier to worry a subordinate than to have it out with a drought or a water flood. ”

“ The local supervision of the township is entrusted to a municipality, founded on European traditions and provided with regulations which have had the previous sanction of the government. Here again the members, from the chairman to the town clerk, are Boers and Africanders. The large town lands are admirably managed. No one can quarry stone or dig sand without a license. Each householder is allowed to depasture so many sheep, horses, or oxen, and no more. ”

“ Such were the words of President Burgers when addressing a crowd of sympathizers on his way towards the Transvaal Republic. And they were true; for excepting some English settlements, isolated and relatively small, south Africa is peopled by but one white race, of mingled French and Dutch descent, having in common the same language, habits, and religion, and being by perpetual intermarriage all brothers, cousins, or near kinsmen — the Boers. ”

“ The administration of justice under English rule is much the same in south Africa as it is everywhere else. The thief has a bad time of it, the murderer stands his chance, and the ruffian comes off scot free, or thereabouts. Public business is transacted in the English language, and the sworn translator is a necessary functionary at every sitting of the court. ”

“ The Dutch minister or predikant — often a man of good Cape family who has studied at Utrecht or at Leyden — is the spiritual leader and director of his flock, subject only to the mild and hesitating control of his deacons and his elders. No English rector enjoys a higher social status. ”

“ Such a rushing and plunging of horsemen, a rumbling of wagons drawn by trains of oxen, a whirling of tented carts, as Saturday comes round; such buying and selling in the stores; such throngs of men and women in the streets, where grass would grow at other times if the growth of grass were possible in such a desert ”

“ The purchasers are mostly Boers, who will build town houses wherein to lodge when they ride in to church, once or twice a month, from their distant farms, with a large posse of servants and children; but some are storekeepers, — often German Jews, — and some artisans, who buy with a view to future trade. ”

“ Each lot or erf is charged with an annual payment for Church purposes; and thus, whilst European politicians are busy abolishing tithes and endowments, rising communities in south Africa are as busily creating analogous imposts. There is also a rent charge for water service — an important item in a land so desiccated as the Cape. Some of these lots, intended for building purposes only, are dry and barren, whilst others have an hour's right to an irrigating stream of water twice weekly, and will soon be fruitful gardens. ”

“ Not only are the ministers great men, but ecclesiastical discipline reigns supreme. Woe to the unlucky couple who have married too tardily for absolute propriety, to the young man who has been sowing wild oats, or to the jolly old fellow who has taken a glass too much! ”

“ In some the European population is much larger; in some anti-English feeling is more intense. In the Transvaal Republic the landrost took the place of the resident magistrate, Dutch was the language of the government as well as of the people, and the negroes were more palpably an inferior and subject race ”

“ We govern an alien race who hunger for the mastery. In their eyes England is represented by the unsympathizing stranger, the drunken navvy, or the quasi-aristocrat whose arrogant puppyism has made us a byword the whole world over. ”

“ Weary of living two days' journey from a place of worship, the farmers of a region large as an English county resolve to build one in their midst. They memorialize their presbytery and raise funds. A farm is bought. Now a farm means a tract of ten thousand acres, often of more, with a spring upon it. ”

“ English communities of any size are only to be met with in the coast districts around Algoa Bay, in Natal, and at the Diamond Fields. British rule is fairly tolerated, if we except the older divisions about Capetown and the widespread settlements beyond the Orange River — and there we are hated with a hatred that affects no concealment. ”

“ Servants will desert you at the school-hour and neglect their duties to con their spelling-books. The tyranny of some of their teachers is almost worthy of a school board, but it is backed by the scholars themselves, and the much-enduring employer of labor has only to grin and bear it as best he can. ”

“ The very frequent transfer of property arising from the old Roman-Dutch law of inheritance, which divides estates amongst the children at the death of either parent, has given rise to a race of inferior lawyers known as "enrolled agents," whose one and sometimes only qualification is the preliminary payment of ten pounds sterling to the government. ”

“ A small army of brick-makers, bricklayers, carpenters, and painters makes its appearance in due time, and retreats again to some more favored spot a few years later, when the first fervor of building has passed away. A minister sufficiently young and sufficiently popular receives a call. After due delay, sometimes after delay deemed very undue and unreasonable, government appoints a resident magistrate, who is also civil commissioner, with a suitable staff, including a clerk, a district surgeon, a gaoler, and some Kafir constables ”

“ The resident magistrate, who is often of Africander and sometimes of Boer descent, is mostly popular, and may even share a divided empire with the predikant of the adjoining church. In the majority of cases the district surgeon is a young Cape doctor or a German, and not unfrequently a Jew. ”

“ In the dry allotments sold for building purposes reside the half-dozen Englishmen and the half-dozen Germans who do the business of the place. There are stores, not much to look at, with ploughs and agricultural machinery standing on the stoep, or pavement, outside them, and with everything that Boer humanity can require to be sold within. ”

“ Children play around her, a colored girl sits watchful at her feet, and at favorable moments her lord and master occupies the corresponding chair, utters familiar maxims and remarks, and his friend, sitting hard by, carries on an intermittent conversation between wary mouthfuls of the scalding beverage. ”

“ Gangs, too, of prisoners have to be superintended, who clean and level the streets and construct earthworks and dams. A municipality, slow but honest, of well-to-do middle-class men, untroubled by the warfare of politicians or the hectoring of demagogues. ”

“ Of similar ancestry, and often of near kindred to the Boers, but of better education and relatively better birth, are the Africanders who hail from Capetown and the western districts, and who form the professional classes, the leading merchants, and the gentry of the colonial born. ”

“ The roads are tracks across the country, made by wheels of passing wagons, but patched and improved by the contractors, good, indifferent, or bad, — mostly the latter, — employed by the divisional councils. As it seldom rains, these roads are very tolerable after all, save where deep rivers have to be crossed or where picturesque scenery has made the engineering difficult. ”

“ Here and there rise ugly hills or ugly mountains, black or russet as the case may be. This country is parcelled out into farms larger than English parishes, varying, as they do, from six thousand to twenty thousand acres of land. ”

“ On the stoep, which is a kind of terrace, paved, but very unpretending, before each house, in policeman's clothing, spick and span, reposes a Kafir constable, tall, stalwart, and handsome in his way, but exercised, so far as his easier philosophy will permit, with speculations anent the less tardy accumulation of the wages he delights in hoarding, and the amelioration of hardships generally. Far be it from me to hint that the even tenor of official life is never varied by stormier passages. Sometimes there are taxes to be collected ”

“ A suitable spot is surveyed and marked out in streets and squares. Lots are sold on some great auction day, after a series of religious services. The bidding is enthusiastic, and fancy prices are realized. ”

“ Such men will show you ancient seals engraven with their coats of arms, and tell quaint legends of the landrost or physician, the major or the chaplain, who owned it in the days when the colony was young. ”

“ He spends his leisure in making boots of untanned leather, which he sews together with the sinews of animals which he has previously prepared for the purpose; and in mending the bottoms of his chairs and benches with leather thongs he has also manufactured to that end. ”