Part 26

TUESDAY, MARCH 25.—This is written on the Imperial Mail train, on the line of South-African railway extending from Capetown to Victoria Falls and beyond. This will eventually become the “Cape to Cairo” railway, extending from Capetown, on the seacoast in South Africa, to Cairo, in Egypt. You may recall that Colonel Roosevelt, on his famous hunting trip in Africa, went by rail as far as he could, and then tramped through the wild country to the end of the line extending south from Egypt, and then went to Cairo. Alfred Beit, one of the bonanza kings of Johannesburg and Kimberley, left six million dollars to be used in completing the gap between the African and Egyptian lines. When the “Cape to Cairo” line is finally completed, it will become as famous as the line from Moscow, in Russia, to a port on the Sea of Japan. This line was built by the Russians, and the distance from Moscow to Japan is now made in comfortable trains in ten days. Think of ten days of continuous travel in the same coaches, in the same train, and on the same railway! Great as is America, it has nothing like it; although we are talking of a line from New York to Buenos Aires, in South America. Thousands of miles of the proposed line are in operation, but there are gaps in Central and South America so difficult that it may never be completed, while the “Cape to Cairo” line may be a reality within the next twenty years.... Always remember that in South Africa there is no rich, black soil such as you see in Illinois, Iowa, eastern Kansas, and other of our best states. At least, I have not seen any. The soil in Africa is usually thin and red, and stones abound nearly everywhere. No part of Africa has as reliable a rainfall as the best parts of the United States. But nevertheless there is a fascination about this frontier country to an American; were I a younger man, probably the “spirit of the Veldt” would appeal to me more strongly than it does. All sorts of problems, including irrigation and dry-farming, are being worked out here. I have seen little country in Africa that looks any better than Kansas looks two hundred miles from the river, and the trouble is lack of a dependable rainfall. Along the coast there is so much rain that sugar-cane is grown without irrigation, and there is much good country, but today, eight hundred miles from the coast, we are in a dry, mountainous district which reminds one of Arizona.... Today we are seeing blanket negroes; native blacks who wear nothing but blankets, still a habit with some of our Indians. Between the lonely stations, we see native villages which seem as primitive as anything Africa can produce; at the stations, also, we see some negro men and women dressed as well as our best negroes at home. This morning we saw negro beggars for the first time: black children ran beside the train at a stopping-place, and, patting their stomachs, indicated that they were hungry, as a means of inducing the passengers to throw pennies to them.... At the stations, also, we see strong, capable Englishmen. These are the men who are engaged in working out the South-African problems, and they are undoubtedly making progress.... The white race can only flourish in certain parts of Africa; in sections four thousand feet or more above sea-level. Other portions of country must be left, for a long time at least, to the natives. Just what proportion of Africa is 4,000 feet or more above sea-level, I do not know, but I have seen the proportion stated as one-fourth in a certain section.... Most of the native male children we are seeing today are entirely naked, and their parents wear nothing but blankets when they come out to see the train go by; no doubt they wear less when not under observation.... Tomorrow morning we will leave the train at Bulawayo, for a two-days stay. This town is in Rhodesia, which is as big as half of Europe. All of this immense territory belongs to and is administered by a British company, and is not a member of the South-African union. In Rhodesia there are 25,000 Europeans and a million natives. The head of every native family is compelled to pay the British company an annual tax of $5, with $2 extra for each additional wife. Many of the native men who work in the mines in Johannesburg and Kimberley came from the poor villages we are seeing today. The villages are all alike: the houses are straw-covered huts, and the inhabitants seem to be as poor as people can be. The native men only work as a means of buying wives.... When Abel and Sampson return home, they probably return to wretched villages such as we are seeing today. Abel and Sampson are the servants at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Mark Cary, in Johannesburg. Abel has a sweetheart, and is saving money to buy her of her father. She is probably a fourteen or fifteen-year-old girl living in a village such as we are seeing today.... Since leaving Sydney, Australia, six weeks ago, we haven’t seen an American traveler. They seem to be very scarce in this part of the world. At one of the diamond mines we visited in Kimberley, there was a book in which all visitors registered. We looked through twenty or more pages without finding a visitor registered from the United States.... I have seen only two bunches of ostriches on the trip; the second this morning near Mafeking. This town was conspicuous during the Boer war, because of the operations of General Baden-Powell. It is a pretty and important place, and has railroad shops, as the Johannesburg branch joins the main line there. It has 1,400 people, but near it is a native town with three times as many.... In some places along the line, the soil is so thin that the railroad dump is made of stones; there is not enough dirt for the purpose. The telegraph poles and ties are of iron, which indicates the lack of timber. The track is excellent, and the train runs rapidly. We have become so accustomed to the narrow-gauge that we do not notice the difference.... The dining-car on this train is clean, and the meals very good. When we went in for the first meal, we were told to pay at the end of the journey; so tomorrow morning I will pay for three meals. Which is another unusual incident of railroad travel. We notice here that hotel and train employees always know our names. When we went into the dining-car for lunch to day, the waiter asked if we were Mr. and Miss Howe. Being informed that we were, the man escorted us to a table that had been reserved. We are charged seventy-two cents for lunch and dinner, and sixty cents for breakfast.... In Johannesburg and Kimberley, we frequently saw the native miners going to the station to take trains for their homes. Here at nearly every station we see native miners who have completed their visit home, and are going back to work.... In one little valley we passed through were a good many fields of kaffir corn, and in every case the workers were women and children. Possibly the men were away working in the mines.... The country in which we are traveling this afternoon is eleven hundred miles from Capetown, and the track is not fenced. The occasional bunches of goats and cattle—I see no sheep—seem to love the railroad track, and the engineer is compelled to slow up, and drive them off with his whistle.... This evening we are about as far in the interior of Africa from Capetown as the Mississippi river is from New York, and are beginning to have trouble with dust. I believe I have never been bothered with dust as I am here; but we cannot see it—it seems to be a part of the air.... We passed within thirty miles of Serome, containing thirty thousand people, and one of the largest native towns in South Africa. The chief of this tribe does not allow liquor to be sold in his territory, and is quite progressive. He rules over a territory a hundred miles square. In his town of Serome there are a good many white storekeepers and traders, who buy corn, skins, etc., and ship them to the railroad by ox teams. Serome is in a vast territory known as the “Protectorate;” the British government protects the natives in their right to rule through chiefs. British officials, usually army officers, are scattered throughout the territory, to advise and really rule the chiefs. The natives have their own petty courts, but the superior courts are British. We are well out of the Boer territory now. The Boers once planned to annex the vast territory now known as Rhodesia, which fact caused Cecil Rhodes to hurry into the country with an armed force, and claim it for the British.... The tracks of the South-African railway are uniformly good, and as night approached, the weather became cooler. The dust we experienced earlier in the day came from a desert where discomfort is always experienced.... At one place, we saw a negro hoeing corn in a field, stark naked. Whether the negro was man or woman, I could not tell at the distance, but as women do most of the field work here, I fear it was a woman, and that I saw a very improper sight while innocently endeavoring to broaden my mind by travel.... Railroad grading is done here with pick and shovel, and not with horse or steam scrapers. At one station a long siding was being put in, and the necessary cut was being made by negroes who used only picks and shovels.... The passengers on this train, which is a Limited, are a nice lot, and very polite. Although all men are supposed to be equal, the difference between the passengers on a Limited train and the passengers on an excursion train is very marked. The difference between the patrons of a first and second-class hotel may also be noted without difficulty.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26.—The distance from Mafeking to Bulawayo is 485 miles, and our train made it in twenty-four hours. If there is a town between Mafeking and Bulawayo, we passed through it during the night; we stopped at a good many lonely stations, but saw no towns. And we passed but one train on the way: a passenger train coming from Victoria Falls.... We arrived at Bulawayo this morning at 9:30, on time to the second, although we left Johannesburg and Mafeking late. We were taken to the Grand Hotel in an automobile, of which the hotel porter was the driver, and the manager met us with the question: “Mr. and Miss Howe?” You travel by schedule here, and your coming is known in advance.... Last night the weather was chilly, although the afternoon was almost insufferably hot and dusty. All day yesterday we traveled through a country covered with scrubby trees; trees so bent and twisted that they looked as though they had rheumatism in every limb and joint. This morning we awoke in Rhodesia, and the country improved in character, though the land was still of the Arizona kind rather than of the Iowa or eastern Kansas kind. In Rhodesia we saw larger cornfields than we saw yesterday, but the fields were many miles apart. Corn is the staple crop all over Africa, but the corn I have seen was small.... Africa is an enormous country; when it comes to size, we must take off our hats to it. But nine hundred miles in the interior, you do not find a city like Chicago; the fourth or fifth city in the world, and built up from agriculture. Africa was known before Columbus discovered America; had it been as rich agriculturally as North America, the negroes would have been chased out by farmers as promptly as the Indians were chased out of North America. In Africa today there are negro tribes as wild as were the wildest tribes hundreds of years ago. There is here a tribe known as the Bushmen. Their language is a collection of clicks and grunts, these last, absent in the other African dialects, being said to bear a resemblance to the different cries of the baboon. The Bushman is so much like the baboon that he has no conception of right or wrong; it is as impossible to civilize him as it is impossible to civilize the monkey. He is the missing link between the monkey most like man, and the human animal. He can no more understand the rights of property than can the lion or the jackal; theft is not a crime with him, because he cannot appreciate that theft is wrong. So it has been found necessary to drive him to the wildest and most inaccessible sections of the country, and, when he appears in civilization, is hunted as ruthlessly as are cunning and dangerous wild animals. No Bushman has ever been known to cultivate a field; he lives entirely by hunting animals, wild berries, roots, etc., and no white man has ever been able to understand the Bushman’s language.... Africa is behind us in civilization because its land is poorer. In many of our best states it was possible in early times, before fences were introduced, to plow a furrow hundreds of miles long, and every foot of the land represented a rich, deep, black soil that would produce marvelous crops without irrigation or fertilizing. There is no such land in Africa; the abundance of such land in North America explains why it has a hundred million progressive people, and is everywhere known as the best country the sun shines on. Possibly modesty should cause us to boast less, but the big talk we use in Fourth of July addresses is not far from the truth.... Do Americans boast a good deal? On the contrary, I sometimes fear they habitually deny nearly every good thing that may be said about their country. In Johannesburg I was given a big bundle of American newspapers and magazines, and read them in coming here. I saw no boasting; on the contrary, I read dozens of sensational scandals that were in the main baseless. One worthy and useful old gentleman, I read, is being harassed by an impudent investigating committee, although so ill that he cannot speak above a whisper. I read that a prominent American manufacturer, who certainly deserves well of his country, has been sentenced to jail and fined $50,000, on a charge that seems trifling. I read of a case wherein a negro assaulted a worthy white woman in the South. The papers are determined to make out that the woman was assaulted and cut with a knife by her husband, who caught her flirting with another man. The woman and her husband, and all their friends who were about them at the time, swear in court that the assault was committed by a mulatto, whom none of them knew; there is no sworn evidence whatever to the contrary. It was rumored for months before the trial began that a newspaper reporter was smuggled into the office of the prosecuting attorney when the husband and wife were examined, soon after the assault, and that the reporter heard the husband say incriminating things to his wife, during the temporary absence of the prosecuting attorney; but at the trial, the reporter was a witness, and swore to no such incident. At this distance, it looks as though the gossips have the assistance of the courts and the newspapers in making good their vicious and untruthful tales.... Is this boasting? Is it not, on the contrary, making ourselves mean when we are usually creditable and decent?... To a hurried visitor, Bulawayo seems even handsomer, and duller, than Bloemfontein, the old Dutch town in the Orange Free State which I admired so much. The Grand Hotel here is excellent, and the town clean and handsome, but I see little business going on. It may be that the farmers come in some other day in the week, but I wonder at and enjoy the quietness in Bulawayo. So far I have seen no great number of pretty women, who always distinguish a dull town, but possibly they have been kept in by a rain which began falling soon after my arrival. Work is in progress here on a government building which would do credit to a state capital in America, but this not the capital of Rhodesia; that honor belongs to Salisbury, three hundred miles away. The new building will be occupied by officials of the British company which owns Rhodesia, and the postoffice.... When the Union Pacific Railway was built, in the days immediately following the Civil War, the government gave the company a strip of land on both sides of the track, as a reward for developing the country. In like manner, the English government gave Rhodesia to certain capitalists, except that in this case the capitalists govern the country; they collect taxes, try criminals, hang them when necessary, collect customs, and otherwise administer public affairs. The police and militia of Rhodesia serve the Rhodesia company; when a man buys public land, he buys it of the Rhodesia company; but back of the Rhodesia company, John Bull is a silent but powerful figure, and nothing can be done without his approval and consent. India was governed many years by the East India company, but finally Victoria was made Empress of India. Rhodesia will eventually become a member of the South-African union, certainly; it may be even closer than that to the British crown.... Flies and mosquitoes terrorize me in Africa. There is a fly here which gives the dreaded Sleeping Sickness with its bite, and there is a mosquito which gives you typhoid. I strike at both insects as promptly as the average man strikes at a moth miller when around home. I never knew a man so dignified that he wouldn’t take a smash at a moth miller.... The Bulawayo newspaper, issued this morning, tells of the depredations of lions in the surrounding country. Several cattle and one native were killed. Let American country editors think of exciting country correspondence of that kind.

THURSDAY, MARCH 27.—Thirty miles from Bulawayo is a district known as the Matopo Hills, one hundred miles long by twenty-five broad. During the Matabele rebellion of 1896‒7, these rough hills of granite proved impregnable when occupied by the natives, as they are full of passes and gigantic caves, and occasional fertile but almost inaccessible valleys. Cecil Rhodes loved this district, because of its wildness, and one of his last requests was that his body be buried on top of the highest of the Matopo Hills. We visited his grave today, during the course of an automobile ride. There is no monument over his grave; a simple flat stone covers it. Two hundred feet away, and on top of the same hill, is a monument “In Memory of Brave Men.” It is a huge affair of granite, in memory of Major Allan Wilson and his party, who fell on the Shangaui river in 1893. It is a common habit of discreet men to erect handsome monuments over the graves of foolhardy adventurers, and call them brave. Thousands of men lost their lives in order that Cecil Rhodes might become noted, and be the subject of statues at Kimberley, Johannesburg, Bulawayo, etc. Other noted men have sacrificed the lives of their followers with equal recklessness.... On the four sides of the notable monument near Rhodes’s grave are bronze panels showing scenes from various campaigns in Rhodesia; the figures are of heroic size, and executed with so much faithfulness by John Tweed that many of the faces may be recognized.... From Rhodes’s grave, the Matopo Hills may be seen in all their remarkable desolation. The place looks like hell with the fires out; like the world upside down. Rhodes had a model farm of 115,000 acres just outside the Hills, and spent $150,000 on an irrigating dam. He expected this dam to irrigate 2,000 acres, but it actually irrigates less than 700. Rhodes spent considerable time on this farm, and frequently went to the high hill where his body was afterwards buried. In moods of despondency, when he knew his illness must soon result in death, he spent several moonlight nights on the spot where his grave is now located. Several attendants accompanied him, but he said little to them; he silently looked around at what is probably the most majestic scene of desolation in the world. Rhodes was less than fifty when he died, and his thoughts about the vanities of life would have been exceedingly interesting in print. He was one of the remarkable characters of recent history, and I shall long remember him; especially because of a statue erected in his memory at the crossing of two principal streets in Bulawayo. This statue is a wonderfully lifelike reproduction of a man, and I have repeatedly looked at it with more interest than I usually look at works of art.... On the journey to the Matopo Hills, we saw frequent bunches of wild baboons; in one lot there must have been twenty or thirty. These animals are a nuisance to farmers, as they kill sheep; it is therefore necessary to hunt them with dogs.... On the way to the Matopo Hills is a hotel. We ate lunch there on our return trip, and a bride and groom started out ahead of us, in an automobile. We finally overtook them, but the bride and groom were utterly unconscious of our presence, and hugged and kissed most of the way to Bulawayo. A mother and daughter, traveling acquaintances, accompanied us, and the daughter was particularly interested in the actions of the bride and groom. Later, when we punctured a tire, and stopped for repairs, the girl confessed that she is to be married in a few weeks. She is the daughter of a big farmer in the Transvaal, and will marry a young banker. A banker is as particular about marrying a rich woman as an army officer. Ever know a banker or an army officer to marry a poor girl?... The bride and groom in front of us greatly interested our party, and we laughed until our sides ached. They were fooling the driver of their automobile, but utterly unconscious of five spectators in the rear. In fooling one man, you are usually unconscious of several others who are watching you.

[Illustration: Block House used by the English in the Boer War

Entrance to Suez Canal

Native children, South Africa

Native Village, Rhodesia

An African King meeting with his Cabinet]