Milk Or Meat,
Obtained In However Small Quantities, Removed Entirely
The Excessive Longing And Dreaming About Roasted Ribs Of Fat
Oxen,
and bowls of cool thick milk gurgling forth from the big-bellied calabashes;
and I could then understand the
Thankfulness to Mrs. L.
often expressed by poor Bakwain women, in the interesting condition,
for a very little of either.
In addition to other adverse influences, the general uncertainty,
though not absolute want of food, and the necessity of frequent absence
for the purpose of either hunting game or collecting roots and fruits,
proved a serious barrier to the progress of the people in knowledge.
Our own education in England is carried on at the comfortable
breakfast and dinner table, and by the cosy fire, as well as in
the church and school. Few English people with stomachs painfully empty
would be decorous at church any more than they are when these organs
are overcharged. Ragged schools would have been a failure
had not the teachers wisely provided food for the body as well as
food for the mind; and not only must we show a friendly interest
in the bodily comfort of the objects of our sympathy as a Christian duty,
but we can no more hope for healthy feelings among the poor,
either at home or abroad, without feeding them into them,
than we can hope to see an ordinary working-bee reared into a queen-mother
by the ordinary food of the hive.
Sending the Gospel to the heathen must, if this view be correct,
include much more than is implied in the usual picture of a missionary,
namely, a man going about with a Bible under his arm.
The promotion of commerce ought to be specially attended to,
as this, more speedily than any thing else, demolishes that sense of isolation
which heathenism engenders, and makes the tribes feel themselves
mutually dependent on, and mutually beneficial to each other.
With a view to this, the missionaries at Kuruman got permission
from the government for a trader to reside at the station,
and a considerable trade has been the result; the trader himself
has become rich enough to retire with a competence. Those laws
which still prevent free commercial intercourse among the civilized nations
seem to be nothing else but the remains of our own heathenism.
My observations on this subject make me extremely desirous to promote
the preparation of the raw materials of European manufactures in Africa,
for by that means we may not only put a stop to the slave-trade,
but introduce the negro family into the body corporate of nations,
no one member of which can suffer without the others suffering with it.
Success in this, in both Eastern and Western Africa, would lead,
in the course of time, to a much larger diffusion of the blessings
of civilization than efforts exclusively spiritual and educational
confined to any one small tribe. These, however, it would of course
be extremely desirable to carry on at the same time at large
central and healthy stations, for neither civilization nor Christianity
can be promoted alone. In fact, they are inseparable.
Chapter 2.
The Boers - Their Treatment of the Natives - Seizure of native Children
for Slaves - English Traders - Alarm of the Boers - Native Espionage -
The Tale of the Cannon - The Boers threaten Sechele -
In violation of Treaty, they stop English Traders and expel Missionaries -
They attack the Bakwains - Their Mode of Fighting -
The Natives killed and the School-children carried into Slavery -
Destruction of English Property - African Housebuilding and Housekeeping -
Mode of Spending the Day - Scarcity of Food - Locusts - Edible Frogs -
Scavenger Beetle - Continued Hostility of the Boers - The Journey north -
Preparations - Fellow-travelers - The Kalahari Desert -
Vegetation - Watermelons - The Inhabitants - The Bushmen -
Their nomad Mode of Life - Appearance - The Bakalahari -
Their Love for Agriculture and for domestic Animals - Timid Character -
Mode of obtaining Water - Female Water-suckers - The Desert -
Water hidden.
Another adverse influence with which the mission had to contend
was the vicinity of the Boers of the Cashan Mountains,
otherwise named "Magaliesberg". These are not to be counfounded
with the Cape colonists, who sometimes pass by the name.
The word Boer simply means "farmer", and is not synonymous with our word boor.
Indeed, to the Boers generally the latter term would be quite inappropriate,
for they are a sober, industrious, and most hospitable body of peasantry.
Those, however, who have fled from English law on various pretexts,
and have been joined by English deserters and every other variety
of bad character in their distant localities, are unfortunately
of a very different stamp. The great objection many of the Boers had,
and still have, to English law, is that it makes no distinction
between black men and white. They felt aggrieved by their supposed losses
in the emancipation of their Hottentot slaves, and determined
to erect themselves into a republic, in which they might pursue,
without molestation, the "proper treatment of the blacks".
It is almost needless to add that the "proper treatment"
has always contained in it the essential element of slavery,
namely, compulsory unpaid labor.
One section of this body, under the late Mr. Hendrick Potgeiter,
penetrated the interior as far as the Cashan Mountains,
whence a Zulu or Caffre chief, named Mosilikatze, had been expelled
by the well-known Caffre Dingaan; and a glad welcome was given them
by the Bechuana tribes, who had just escaped the hard sway of that
cruel chieftain. They came with the prestige of white men and deliverers;
but the Bechuanas soon found, as they expressed it, "that Mosilikatze
was cruel to his enemies, and kind to those he conquered;
but that the Boers destroyed their enemies, and made slaves of their friends."
The tribes who still retain the semblance of independence
are forced to perform all the labor of the fields, such as manuring the land,
weeding, reaping, building, making dams and canals, and at the same time
to support themselves. I have myself been an eye-witness of Boers
coming to a village, and, according to their usual custom,
demanding twenty or thirty women to weed their gardens,
and have seen these women proceed to the scene of unrequited toil,
carrying their own food on their heads, their children on their backs,
and instruments of labor on their shoulders.
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