Bushmen

“ In extremely cold weather these people gather twigs and earth, till they have a mound heaped up as a protection on the windward side of the hole. In summer they seek the beds of rivers and, lying under the shade of the mimosas, they draw down the branches to shield themselves from the glare of the sun.
The condition of the Bushmen has been very much changed by the circumstances which have governed their lives. Every one's hand has seemed against them, and theirs raised against every one. ”

“ The Bushmen may escape to the rocks, such of them as are not hit by the bullets; and there the boers know it would be idle to follow them. Like the klipspringer antelope, the little savages can bound from rock to rock, and cliff to cliff, or hide like partridges among crevices, where neither man nor horse can pursue them. Even upon the level plain—if it chance to be stony or intersected with breaks and ravines—a horseman would endeavor to overtake them in vain, for these yellow imps are as swift as ostriches. ”

“ Now-a-days of course they are more enlightened, and the men who were here to-day I found very amiable and intelligent. All “salt water” natives despise Bushmen, and they have always stories to tell of them. There is somehow a natural feud existing between them, but the agression I must say, comes generally from the Bushmen. They do, certainly, very unaccountable things, but they are always forgiven, and their conduct explained by saying, “Oh, they are only Bushmen,” or as they say here “ (Taute) .” A small vessel passed here in the afternoon, and anchored off M. Moussu’s place “Ian̈an̈qa.” ”

“ The Bushmen inhabiting the eastern parts of the colony and a small portion of the Orange Free State belong to the pure race of Bushmen, which had been described before I ever entered South Africa. As is well known, the Bushmen are rapidly dying out. The reason of this is, that their great characteristic is a love of liberty and fondness for living in mountains. They have been accustomed to live among the hills and descend into the valleys to shoot game with poisoned arrows. ”

“ The Bushmen, we found, had fabricated the story as a means of prolonging my stay among them, in the anticipation of obtaining an occasional gorge from the spoils of the chase. The low cunning of this people is only equaled by their credulity. To them, no tales can be too ridiculous and absurd for belief. For instance, my Bushmen guides amused me by relating one evening that a tribe of black people had just [415] taken up their abode a little in advance of us, “whose stomachs rested on their knees, and whose whole aspect was of the most unnatural and ferocious character.” ”

“ Thus it is of little importance to our inquiry whether the Bushmen have sunk from a lofty civilisation, or whether they have never been much more polite than they are at present, especially as no proof of great degradation has been advanced. ”

“ I could almost hear the sandalled, pattering feet of the aboriginal dwellers of these plains,—those kings of the waste whose sceptre was the poisoned dart. The Bushmen were in many respects a wonderful people. They obeyed no chief; they had no political organisation whatsoever; each family governed itself independently. ”

“ The terror inspired by the Bushmen has indeed had an effect in the deforestation of parts of Cape Colony, for the colonists, to guard against stealthy attacks, cut down all the bush far round their holdings. Mission-work among the Bushmen has been singularly unsuccessful. But in spite of his savage nature, the Bushman is intelligent. He is quick-witted, and has the gift of imitating extraordinarily well the cries of bird and beast. ”

“ The poor Sa lead the life of pariahs, and are hated and chased by all other natives of South Africa. They are hunters and diggers for roots, while the Hottentots, perhaps their kinsmen, are cattle-breeders. [12] Being so ill-nourished, the Bushmen are very small, but sturdy. They dwell in, or rather wander through, countries which have been touched by some ancient civilisation, as is proved by the mysterious mines and roads of the Transvaal. It is singular that the Bushmen possess a tradition according to which they could once "make stone things that flew over rivers." ”

“ Those who chose the latter alternative had to encounter the hostility of their old foes, the Bushmen, who were widely spread over the plains from the Nieuwveld and Sneeuwberg mountains to the Orange river. The colonists also, pressing forward to those territories, came in contact with these Ishmaelites—the farmers’ cattle and sheep, guarded only by a Hottentot herdsman, offering the strongest temptation to the Bushman. Reprisals followed; and the position became so desperate that the extermination of the Bushmen appeared to the government the only safe alternative. ”

“ I soon tired of the life, however, and finally sold my claim and what diamonds I had acquired, fitted up a waggon, gathered together some native servants, and trekked again for those glorious hunting grounds of the interior, glad enough to resume my old and ever-charming life. Amongst my servants was a little Bushman, Klaas by name, whom I afterwards found a perfect treasure at spooring and hunting. Like all true Bushmen, he was dauntless as a wounded lion, and determined as a rhinoceros, which is saying a good deal. ”

“ The desert yields me juicy roots,
And herds of bounding deer.
"Yea, even the wasting locusts' swarm,
Which mighty nations dread,
To me nor terror brings nor harm,
I make of them my bread."
The Bushmen are not fastidious in their tastes; for they eat many plants and bulbs which other people would despise as food. Grasshoppers and other insects, and even serpents, are eaten by them with much relish.
Their huts are very inferior to those of other tribes. They are usually mere holes in the ground. They sometimes serve the purpose of a bed. ”

“ Three women of this singular tribe were not long since met with, several days’ journey from this place, who had forsaken their husbands, and lived very contentedly on wild honey and locusts. As enemies, the Bushmen are not to be despised. They are adepts in stealing cattle and sheep; and the wounds they inflict when pursued, are ordinarily fatal if the wounded part is not immediately cut out. The animals they are unable to carry off, they kill or mutilate. ”

“ The Bushmen, however had left their meal, and with their bows and small poisoned arrows had gone in pursuit. Bremen and one or two of the Hottentots proposed also to go, but our travellers would not permit them. About an hour afterwards the Bushmen returned, and Omrah had communication with them; and through Bremen they learnt that the Bushmen had come up with the lion about a mile distant, and had discharged many of their arrows at him, and, they were convinced, with effect, as a heavy growl or an angry roar was the announcement when he was hit ”

“ I am much interested in the Bushmen of the desert, and also in the white Bushmen of the Drakensberg mountains, because they appear from their isolation from the outer world, and cut off as they have been from the tribes that now occupy the regions around them, to be the descendants of the people who occupied the lower end of this ancient continent before the tribes from the north came down, and pushed their way south, bringing with them their Asiatic and Hebrew customs, which all without exception now practise more or less, evidently proving from what regions they had migrated. ”

“ The human inhabitants of this tract of country consist of Bushmen and Bakalahari. The former are probably the aborigines of the southern portion of the continent, the latter the remnants of the first emigration of Bechuanas. The Bushmen live in the Desert from choice, the Bakalahari from compulsion, and both possess an intense love of liberty. The Bushmen are exceptions in language, race, habits, and appearance. They are the only real nomads in the country; they never cultivate the soil, nor rear any domestic animal save wretched dogs. ”

“ I have given him a pencil and occasionally a piece of paper, and he draws all the birds, so that I can recognise them; but you must know that all the Bushmen have that talent, and that their caves are full of the sketches of all sorts of animals, remarkably characteristic. The organ of imitation is very strongly developed in the Bushmen, which accounts for their talents as draftsmen, and Omrah’s remarkable imitative powers. ”

“ Besides these, there were the Bushmen, a roving people, small in stature, and sunk to the lowest depths of barbarism, hunted down by the Dutch farmers like wild beasts, who had their hands turned against every man, and every man's hand turned against them. ”

“ I found the Bushmen very good-tempered people, and they are undoubtedly the best of all the natives of South Africa to have with one when in pursuit of game, as they are such wonderful trackers, and so intimately acquainted with the habits of every kind of wild animal. To be seen at their best they must be hungry, but not starving. They will then be capable of marvellous feats of endurance. I have known a Bushman run on elephant spoor in front of my horse for five hours, only very occasionally slowing down to a walk for a few minutes. ”

“ There was now no want of flesh, and the result was great rejoicings. The report of my success spread like wildfire, and the animal was scarcely cold before scores of hungry Bushmen—like so many vultures—had assembled to participate in the feast. Before noon, with the exception of the sternum, the head, and some of the larger bones, every vestige of the giant beast had disappeared. The way in which the Bushmen gorge on the carcass of elephants is very disgusting ”

“ Two local culture-areas, as they would be called on American soil, emerge with fair distinctness: The Bushman and the West African.
The Bushmen of the far south about the Kalahari desert are distinctive in both race (§ 26) and speech. Culturally they also stand apart as an exceptionally primitive people, lacking the agriculture, cattle and fowls, and iron working of the Negroes. They are expert hunters, stalking or wearing down game until it is within range of their poisoned bone or stone pointed arrows, while the women pry up roots with stone weighted digging sticks. ”

“ But, strange to say, these Bushmen, who are regarded as the lowest types of Africans, in one thing excel all the other South African tribes whose acquaintance I made between the south coast and 10° south latitude. I have in my possession about two hundred sketches on wood and stone and ostrich shells, by various tribes, but everyone who knows anything about drawing must acknowledge that those which were done by Bushmen are superior to any of the others. They draw heads of gazelles, elephants, and hippopotami astonishingly well. ”

“ A dozen boers, or even half that number, is considered a match for a whole tribe of Bushmen, in any fight which may occur in the open plain, as the boers make use of their long-range guns at such a distance that the Bushmen are shot down without being able to use their poisoned arrows; and if the thieves have the fortune to be overtaken before they have got far into the desert, they stand a good chance of being terribly chastised. ”

“ Bushman, a word derived from the Dutch “Bochjesman,” is literally “a man of the bushes,” and is applied to the wandering tribes that scour the country in the N.W. of Cape Colony. Not a family of these bushmen is sedentary; they pass their lives in roaming over the region lying between the Orange River and the mountains of the East, in pillaging farms, and in destroying the crops of the overbearing colonists, by whom they have been driven back towards the interior of the country, where more rocks than plants abound. ”

“ Going now over to the existing savages, we may begin with the Bushmen, who stand at a very low level of development--so low indeed that they have no dwellings and sleep in holes dug in the soil, occasionally protected by some screens. It is known that when Europeans settled in their territory and destroyed deer, the Bushmen began stealing the settlers' cattle, whereupon a war of extermination, too horrible to be related here, was waged against them. ”

“ In disposition the Bushmen are strikingly wild, malicious, and intractable, while their cerebral development is classed by Humboldt as belonging to almost the lowest class of the human species.
Close in affinity with the Bushmen, and in various respects unlike the dark races around them, are the Hottentots, the original inhabitants of Cape Colony, a race of herdsmen who are much superior in culture to the degraded desert nomads. ”

“ It is, for the most part, a dry, sandy region. It is not wholly lacking in vegetation, for it has tufty grass and creeping plants, together with deeply buried bulbous roots, except in the most central section.
The Bushmen are the nomads, or wandering tribes of the desert. They are of low figure, very thin and wiry. They make no attempt to cultivate the land and have no regular homes. Their chief occupation is to chase the herds of antelopes from place to place, and to lie in wait for them with their bows and poisoned arrows, in readiness to shoot them. ”

“ The Bushmen represent the race almost in its purity, while the Hottentots show the traits of this race somewhat modified. The stature of the latter is higher, the head more dolichocephalic, the complexion darker, and the hands are not so small as is the case with Bushmen. Their features are more negroid, and it has been suggested that contact with the neighbouring Bantu tribes has had something to do with this. ”