Part 20

FRIDAY, MARCH 7.—The destruction being wrought by the waves at the beach has attracted crowds daily, but a good many did not get to see it until this morning, when the storm had considerably abated. Those who went to the beach today were disappointed because no great destruction was taking place, and abused the street-railway, which had charged them three cents for the ride out. I predict that at the next meeting of the town council, several additional measures will be introduced to Make It Hot for the street-railway, which had no great show to offer at the beach this morning. People have already forgotten the magnificent sight the company offered them at the beach on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, for a charge of only three cents, including the ride out. I rode out today and was satisfied; I always get along with street-railways, as it seems to me they offer a good service at a very low price.... The captain and gunner of the whaling-ship on which I agreed to make a trip today, called on me at the hotel, and said it would be impossible to catch a whale even if one should be sighted, owing to rough seas, therefore they would not go out. I took the two sailor-men down to the fine smoking-room of the Marine Hotel, and they seemed ill at ease while smoking the cigars and drinking the beverages I provided. They are rough men, but two better fellows I have not met during the trip. I don’t suppose I ever had any actual intention of going out with them, but they thought I had, and came up to the hotel to tell me the ship could not go out today.... I regret to notice that in the papers today are references to three attempted assaults on white women by negroes. A Mr. Maurice Evans lectured in Durban last night on a recent visit to the United States, and we intended going, but were prevented by a heavy rain. Mr. Evans traveled through our Southern states, and made a special study of the negro question. He says our failure to solve the race problem is due to attempts in the North to make the negro an equal, whereas the negro is not the equal of the white man, and cannot be made such. Mr. Evans thinks our Southern whites would solve the race problem if the Northern whites would let them alone. The papers quote him as saying that an examination of a thousand, or ten thousand, average negro skulls will show that the negro is deficient in brain-power, and that he must be treated as an inferior; kindly and fairly, but always as an inferior, and subject to strict regulations. The South-African system of treating the negro is paternal; he is regarded as a ward. And in the papers of a few days ago, I saw a statement that a law was being urged which would provide a heavy fine for any white man who leased land to a negro, or gave him possession of land in any other way; by gift, purchase, lease, or renting arrangement. Wherever you find whites and blacks living in the same community, there is a race problem. One of the papers of this date, speaking of Mr. Evans’s lecture, says: “It is impossible not to be struck with the sadness and feeling of something approaching despair which seem to have been the chief impressions left on Mr. Evans by his experiences in the southern portion of the United States.”... In South Africa a dentist does not call himself a “doctor.” I saw this sign today: “Mr. Alfred Geary, surgeon dentist.”... I don’t suppose any white family in South Africa is so poor that it cannot afford a negro servant. Negro men are almost universally employed as house servants, and not negro women. Many boys are employed to take care of children. Most of the negroes who come to Durban from the interior have two or more wives. These they leave at home, to work in the fields. The English residents say it is best not to teach the negro servants the English language; that a better plan is for employers to learn Kaffir. An English-speaking negro servant demands more wages than one who speaks only Kaffir, and usually drifts to Johannesburg, the boom town of the Transvaal. A capable, all-around man servant gets $2 a week, and he is able to cook well, and do all sorts of housework. The servants become fond of their employers, and frequently remain with them for years. The negroes are said to be more honest than the Hindus; all the whites I have talked with have referred to the Hindus as thieves. But any visitor may see that the Indians are a more important class than the negroes. The Indians own many big business houses, and at the Hindu market I saw great quantities of fruits and vegetables; but almost nothing in the negro market, next door, except tobacco, which the negroes raise because they are fond of it. Although the English say one Kaffir is worth ten Indians, they admit that Indians are employed almost exclusively on the big sugar and tea plantations, where the workmen must be painstaking and reliable. My impression is that the whites are a little jealous of the Indians, and find the negroes more easily controlled.... Early this morning the skies brightened, and we expected a return of pleasant weather, but while we were at breakfast, the downpour of rain began for the fifth successive day. Since Sunday night the rainfall has amounted to nearly seventeen inches.... Natal, of which Durban is the largest town, is one of the states of the South-African federation. It is not so large as Kansas, being 350 miles one way, and 150 the other. Natal has 1,200 miles of railway, and corn, which is the easiest grown of all the cereals, is the staple crop. Sugar-cane, tea, alfalfa, ostriches, sheep, turkeys, nearly all the tropical fruits, and hogs, cattle and horses, are also produced. The planting season for corn lasts three months, instead of about eighteen days, as with us. The rainfall is 42 inches per year. The bulk of the farms are of 200 to 1,000 acres, and many stock farms are much larger. Land in Natal is worth from four dollars an acre up. Natal farm laborers receive $4 a month, and Indians about the same. It is expected that hail will destroy everything in the way of crops every fourth or fifth year. It is asserted that the European death-rate in Durban in 1910 was less than seven per thousand, as compared with a death-rate of fourteen per thousand in England and Wales in 1908.... The Dutch settled in the vicinity of Capetown in 1652, but the English claimed they ran up the British flag on the site of that town in 1620. There has always been friction between the Dutch (or Boers) and English. This culminated in the war of 1899‒1902, which cost the English 25,000 lives and a billion and a quarter dollars. The Boers had possibly 40,000 soldiers in the field, while the English had near a quarter of a million. The Boers were hardy pioneers, and the fight they put up is still regarded as one of the wonders of the world. Only the Transvaal, and later the Orange Free State, fought the English during the Boer war; Natal and Cape Colony were loyal to the British.... The English have also been compelled to fight the Zulus for possession of South Africa. The present peace with the Boers and natives will probably prove lasting, although I occasionally hear predictions to the contrary.... Six years before Columbus discovered America, a bold adventurer named Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope, but means of communication were slow in those days, and Diaz’s discovery of a water route to India was not known until several years after the death and disgrace of Columbus.... All South Africa is now in an amicable federation, except Rhodesia, and this will probably come in before many years. Other parts of Africa are controlled by the Germans, the British, the Belgians, the French, the Italians, the Portuguese, etc. Africa is an enormous country; almost as large as all of North America, and, in its remotest sections, civilization is getting a hold. More pioneering is being done in Africa today than in any other country, and, for many years to come, Africa will occupy a prominent place in the world’s news.... I can remember very distinctly when Stanley “discovered” Dr. Livingstone in the country I shall visit shortly in comfortable railway trains, and the railway has now been built four hundred miles beyond Victoria Falls. Stanley’s first expedition into Africa was a newspaper sensation, financed by the New York _Herald_, as Dr. Livingstone was not lost, and, when Stanley “found” him, was engaged quietly in making maps of the interior.

SATURDAY, MARCH 8.—We spent this day traveling from Durban to Johannesburg. The distance is four hundred and eighty-three miles, and we were twenty-four hours and a half on the way, as we left Durban at 5:50 last night, and arrived here at 6:20 this evening. The distance from New York to Chicago is about a thousand miles, and the best trains on the Pennsylvania and New York Central make it in twenty hours. Formerly they made it in eighteen hours, but the speed was so great that travelers complained. The train on which we traveled today was the Limited, and as good as there is in South Africa. The track is narrow-gauge, and, as seems the rule on all railroads operated by the government, the train was crowded, though we had no cause to complain; we were given a compartment to ourselves, without extra charge. When we arrived at the station last night, we found a placard on the window of a compartment, announcing that it was reserved for “Mr. and Miss Howe.” The compartment would have easily seated four. It was provided with a washstand, and was practically as good as a compartment on a Pullman. At ten o’clock, a white porter appeared with two bundles of bed-clothing, sealed. Breaking the seals, he made up two beds about as they are made up on a Pullman. Then the porter presented me with two tickets, for which I paid sixty cents each. The tickets read: “South African Railways. No. 98029. Bedding ticket. From Durban to Johannesburg. Date, 3-7-13. Train No. 192. Amount paid 2. 6. This ticket must be handed to passenger on payment of charge.”... This is the sleeping-car system in South Africa; two had a compartment in a sleeping-car twenty-four hours and a half for $1.20. The Pullman charge for a service not much better would have been $9, instead of $1.20. There was a dining-car on the train, and the charge for dinner was 75 cents, and for lunch and breakfast, sixty cents each. The meals were good, but the car was always packed at meal-times, and the force of waiters not large enough. Tea was served in our compartment at 7 A. M. and 4 P. M.... I have never enjoyed a railroad ride more than I enjoyed the ride from Durban to Johannesburg. The weather was cool, and there was no dust. We left Durban in a pouring rain, but this morning the rain ceased, and by noon the sun was shining. For hours we passed through a prairie country which greatly resembled eastern Kansas as it was forty or fifty years ago. I saw thousands and thousands of acres of what seemed to be old-fashioned prairie grass, and when there was a cultivated field it was nearly always devoted to corn. I saw a good deal of hay-making in progress, and in every case the hay-rake was pulled by a yoke of oxen. In several places, negro laborers were cutting oats, and the harvester was also pulled by oxen. This was the rule in the early days in eastern Kansas; many of the older farmers will remember when oxen were used almost entirely for farm work. If I were dissatisfied with my present location (which I am not), I should have no hesitancy in locating in South Africa after seeing that part of it lying between Durban and Johannesburg. The country looks like the best portions of the United States, and not one-tenth of it seems to be cultivated. We saw a good many sheep, but not one-hundredth part as many as we saw in Australia and New Zealand, although the grass was much better. Altogether, the impression left on my mind was this: A surprisingly good country, and very little advantage taken of it.... I doubt if I saw a corn-field of fifty acres; the patches were all small, and weedy. In most cases the stalks of the field corn were as small as the stalks of our sweet corn. The farming is mostly done by negroes; either as independent farmers, or as farm laborers. If some of the corn farmers of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas had this land, it would produce better crops.... This refers mainly to Natal. The rainfall is less toward Johannesburg: I thought I could notice a difference when we crossed into the Transvaal a little before noon today. Toward Johannesburg, there is more stock-raising; the country looks much like Kansas two hundred miles west of the Missouri river. Still, the Transvaal looks better than the best parts of Australia I saw. But in Australia, the very best is made of everything, while here shiftlessness is the rule. The natives (negroes) live in round, grass-covered huts, and are a shiftless lot. If other portions of Africa are as promising agriculturally as Natal and the Transvaal (and certain parts are said to be better), I can easily believe it has a great future. But it should be remembered that this is the rainy season; in a few months the country will look brown and parched. There is plenty of rain along the coast, but in the interior, people long for rain as they do in Australia.... At one place along the road, we saw a family of Kaffirs going to town in a light wagon to which was attached three yoke of oxen. Goats and donkeys, the live-stock of shiftless men everywhere, were quite numerous along the way.... Near Durban we saw young corn and young bananas growing together. A half-dozen miles from Durban we saw a huge sugar-mill, and surrounding it a Hindu village in which there were several strange temples to strange gods. The foundation of one of these temples had been undermined by rain lasting six days, and was toppling over in the mud.... At many of the stations we saw American agricultural machinery on freight cars or on station platforms.... At one station there was a creamery which looked much like a similar establishment in the United States; at most stations, negro boys sold milk to the passengers at a penny a glass.... The cattle here are queer-looking; they are shorter than ours, and usually have enormous horns. I saw no highly bred cattle, but the native cattle were always fat, and grazing in grass up to their knees. Some of the oxen come from Madagascar, and have great humps on their backs. Oxen are as generally worked on farms here as horses are at home; frequently cows are worked with them, and when a cow works under the yoke, her calf usually travels beside her. In the middle of nearly every string of work-oxen, you see a pair of yearlings or two-year-olds being worked to “break” them. Donkeys are also extensively worked here; no disease attacks the donkey, whereas cattle often die as do our hogs with cholera, and I frequently saw ten to twelve donkeys working to one wagon.... Soon after passing into the Transvaal, I noticed that much of the prairie land seemed somewhat stony. What we call “nigger-heads” were numerous; reddish-looking stones worn into the shape of circular beehives, by long exposure to the weather. These turned out to be ant-hills, so hardened by long exposure to the weather that they will turn a bullet; during the late war, the Boers used them for protection. There are countless billions and trillions of ants here, and you are never out of sight of their hills in the Transvaal. In some places the ant-hills are so large that the natives chase out the ants, and use the hills for houses.... The fences in the prairie country are always of wire, and the posts of iron, and sod houses, most of them tumbling down, are as common as they were in western Kansas thirty years ago.... The Transvaal is that section to which the Boers made their great trek, owing to friction with the English along the coast. In the Transvaal was later discovered the Johannesburg gold mines, and it was the owners of these mines who brought on the Boer war. Should Kansas and Nebraska go to war with England, it would not be a much more remarkable performance than the Transvaal and Orange Free State fighting England, and forcing it to put a quarter of a million men in the field. Early this morning we passed through Ladysmith, famous because of the long siege, and throughout the day we have seen occasional relics of the war; mainly cemeteries wherein were buried English soldiers, and we also saw lone monuments erected in memory of special heroes. Mr. and Mrs. May, the fine old people we saw embark on the “Anchises” at Adelaide, and whom we knew on the long voyage to Durban, had a son killed in the Boer war, as Australia and New Zealand, as well as Canada, sent troops to help the English suppress the terrible Boers. We had heard Mrs. May say her son was buried at Sanderton, and we passed through that town, and saw the cemetery where the young soldier was buried.... The country between Durban and Johannesburg is what Americans call rolling. Small mountains are occasionally seen in the distance, but the general effect is like our prairie country. At one place we crossed a divide by means of a switch-back, and two engines were usually attached to our train.... Two hours before we left Durban, we saw the warship “New Zealand” come into the harbor. Immediately on landing, sixty of the officers and men left for Johannesburg, and were accommodated in three sleepers and a dining-car on our train. Hundreds of people gathered at the stations to see the sailor-men, and Johannesburg will entertain them lavishly.... A gentleman told me today of a farm in South Africa which is eight miles square. Plenty of good land can be bought here at $6 an acre, and the English government, much as it is abused, is as good as any in the world.... At 5 P. M. we had our first glimpse of Johannesburg: small mountains of white rock taken out of the different mines, and which are known as “the Johannesburg Alps.” We stopped at suburbs and switched around for more than an hour before we finally left the train at the greatest gold-mining camp in the world, at 6:20 P. M.

SUNDAY, MARCH 9.—Johannesburg was a pleasant surprise, as was Durban; it is a new, clean city of 237,000 inhabitants, and up-to-date in all respects. The population is about equally divided between whites and blacks. It has department stores as big as Kansas City, and last night the main streets were so crowded that it was almost impossible to get along. Although this is a boom town, something like but greater than our Cripple Creek, prices are not unreasonable. I am staying at the Langham Hotel, which is excellent in every way. The price is $3.60 per day, including three regular meals, and coffee at 7 A. M. and tea at 4 P. M. An orchestra plays in the dining-room during dinner. The waiters are imposing-looking Germans, wearing green coats, brass buttons, and knee-breeches. Altogether it is as satisfactory a hotel as we have encountered; and we were very fond of the Marine at Durban, and of the Grand at Wellington.... Johannesburg is not situated in the mountains, although it has hills something like the bluffs along the Missouri river. The main town is on a flat, and the surrounding hills add an agreeable variety. There is an excellent system of street railway, and the price is three cents per section; the fare to the zoölogical garden is fifteen cents. This garden shows most of the game animals of Africa, in addition to as handsome a display of flowers as one cares to see. A peculiarity of the flowers here is that they are almost without scent. While coming in from the zoo this morning, the conductor, when taking my fare, asked:

“What part of the country do you come from?”

I told him from the United States.

“I know that,” he replied; “but what section? I am from Georgia.”