The Transvaal of To-day

THE TRANSVAAL OF TO-DAY.

CHAPTER I.

HISTORY OF THE BOERS.

Serfs or subjects?-Pilgrim Fathers-Fighting for life-Glimpse of freedom -Chaka-Policy of Earl Grey-Founding Republics-A ConventionThe Transvaal Treaty.

WHILE many writers have devoted much space to descriptions of Kafir life and character, none have even attempted to deal with the state and position of the Boers, in such a way as to lead intelligent readers to form anything like a fairly accurate mind-picture of them as a people. This it is my pleasing duty to endeavour to do; and bringing, as I can, ten years' actual experience of Boerdom to the task, I hope to be able to set before the public a correct view of them in all their relations-social, political, and religious.

The Boers were subjects of Holland, and were essentially the Cape Colonists, when, by treaty and conquest, England got, in the beginning of this century, a footing in South Africa. As my object is not to write a history of past events, but to explain the facts of the present hour, I shall not encumber these pages with tedious descriptions of the marches, fights, and sufferings of those poor people during the last fifty years, but shall, as nearly as possible, confine myself to an examination of the reasons they put forward to justify them in their exodus from British territory. In 1833, a large number of farmers found themselves, without any

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desire of their part to become British subjects, in the position of "accidents of territory" ceded to the British by the Dutch. The sovereignty over the LAND on which they dwelt was undoubtedly vested in the European Government of Holland; but it is an important question whether a cession of territorial sovereignty can really be held to include the transfer of people as serfs from one Government to another. A serf is undoubtedly a person attached, and owing certain servitudes, to the soil on which he is born. Į know of no law, human or divine, by which the right of the Dutch inhabitants to remove from the soil transferred in sovereignty to England can be denied. Therefore if any one of those "subjects by cession" desired to remove himself, with his belongings, to the Dutch East Indies, there could be no objection to his doing so; nor, because he fell under British dominion by the cession of the Cape territory, could he have been prevented from returning to other Dutch territory and to his Dutch allegiance. I hold that he had only become a British subject in relation to his occupation of British territory, and that it was perfectly open to him to cease to be a subject by quitting that territory. It is certain that if the emigrant Boers had passed on in their flight from British rule to lands subject to the authority of other states, they would have again become foreign subjects, and could no longer have been compelled to own an allegiance to England. But the lands to which the Boers retired did not happen to belong to any recognised or constituted authority. They fled from what they, rightly or wrongly, considered to be misrule, into the "desolate places of the earth,” where no man was master. Mr Oliphant, the Cape Attorney-General (in 1834), in speaking of the Voortrekkers (advanced pioneers), says, in answer to a question put to him by Sir Benjamin Durban, then governor of the Cape Colony :

"The class of persons under consideration evidently mean to seek their fortunes in another land, and to consider themselves no longer British subjects so far as the colony of the Cape of Good Hope is concerned. Would it therefore be prudent or just, even if it were possible, to prevent persons discontented with their position to try to better themselves in whatever part of the world they pleased? The same sort of removal takes place every day from Great Britain to the United States. Is there any effectual means of arresting persons determined to run away

SERFS OR SUBJECTS?

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from an enforced_allegiance short of shooting them as they passed the boundary line? I apprehend not—and if so, the remedy is worse than the disease. Government, therefore, must ever remain without the power of preventing this evil, if evil it be."

The Boers did not want to be British subjects. They found what even Englishmen to-day are complaining of as an inconvenience, if not an evil threatening their very existence. They said they were badly protected as against the aborigines of the country-a set of thieving savages, whose conduct on the frontier in 1878 seems to differ very little from what they were guilty of in 1834. The Boers knew that the territory then actually under British rule in South Africa was limited; and gathering together their flocks and herds, they proceeded to march out of it into "fresh fields and pastures new." It must never be said that any hatred of civilised government, as such, led to this step. This would be a base calumny on the character of a body of men whose motives were as pure as those that actuated the "Pilgrim Fathers"-Englishmen who left England for conscience' sake.

When, and so often as, those people secured new homes for themselves, and established laws and government for their own guidance, they have found that their allegiance has pursued them, and consequently they have been overtaken, shot down, and annexed repeatedly-all their efforts for their own emancipation from a rule which they never sought, being defeated by brute force. It is now not denied by impartial historians, that when the Boers entered Natal that land was no man's land. Nor can it be asserted that their irruption into the Transvaal destroyed any settled government, or effected any injustice. It is, on the other hand, admitted that their march towards the Orange River, and beyond it, was the means of breaking the power of Moselekatze, a warrior chief whom they found engaged in a course of rapine and destruction almost without parallel. This man with his army had burned and devastated an enormous tract of country, and until he met with the Boers, had succeeded, not in subjugating, but in almost entirely annihilating, the various tribes and disorganised bodies "under the name of Barolongs, Basutos, Mantatees, Kor

Livros

The Transvaal of To-day: War, Witchcraft, Sport, and Spoils in South Africa