Page images
PDF
EPUB

horrid names, she upbraided him, she scolded and taunted him as if he had been her inferior and she a hard mistress. But for all her scolding, she could not make him get up. He was helplessly drunk. My first impulse was to steal back to my room and lock myself in, and leave Miss Hughes to fight her battle with Mr Colwyn as best she could. I hated her so for the way she spoke to him. I felt as if I couldn't help her. I almost hated him too; but he was our grandfather; he was a gentleman, and she -a common person-to speak to him so! In spite of myself, however, I came down to the landing and stood beside the housekeeper, and put my strength to hers, and between us we got him on his feet, and led him to his room, and there, I suppose, she put him to bed. When I was alone again I faced resolutely the discoveries of that day. Our grandmother was insane, Mr Colwyn was a drunkard.

Gladys said, after I had told her all the next day, that the trouble about grandmother was the worse of the two, and she has always said so; but then Gladys was not afraid of Mr Colwyn. "Afraid of him, Madeleine," she

said to said to me, after one of his outbursts of tyrannical anger. "Afraid of him? No; I despise him too much." And Mr Colwyn himself felt this, and it was he who quailed before her. He seemed to understand ever after the day of their first quarrel that Gladys knew his secret vice. I don't think it troubled him to guess whether I knew about it or not, he always ignored me.

But if Gladys did not fear our grandfather, there was one person in the house whom she could never close round or use, who fairly baffled her - and that one was Eleanor Hughes, the housekeeper. The history about her came out by degrees; it was told to me, not to Gladys, and Gladys never knew it all, for I folded down that leaf in the family record, and kept the memory of it secret. It troubled me for a long time, but now I have really forgotten most of the details. Gladys could never understand what she called "Eleanor's cheek," and try as much as she could to put the housekeeper down, she never succeeded in doing so. My instinctive dislike to her developed into a wellgrounded abhorrence.

(To be continued.)

E. KEARY.

A RIDE IN KAFFIRLAND.

[THE following pages were written during a coasting voyage along the tropical littoral between Mozambique and Guardafui, transcribed from notes which, still impregnated with the indescribable odour of Africa, recall vivid reminiscences of the scenes wherein they were made-sometimes in a Kaffir hut, where a hospitable headman shared with me, sheltering from a storm, his noonday meal of curdled amass; sometimes on the high veldt or beneath the shade of a mimosa-tree during the happy hour of off-saddling. The only merit of the descriptions is that they were made amid the local colouring of the country: otherwise the narrative is wofully tame compared to the thrilling recitals of more adventurous tourists, the commercial travellers of the dark continent. As, however, everything African is nowadays of interest, it has been thought worth while to print this account of a forgotten corner of the land protected by the British flag for half a century, yet less known than are the remoter regions between the Vaal and the great Equatorial lakes, which now occupy the chanceries of half the capitals of Europe.-J. E. C. B.]

One cloudless summer morning, in a month associated in England with fog and sleet, the brilliant South African sun was lighting up the red mass of the Parliament Houses at Cape Town, in striking contrast of colouring to the green background of Table Mountain and to the deep blue of the sky, as I made my way from among the trees of the Botanical Gardens to the primitive building which contains the public offices of the colony. Sir Thomas Upington was waiting for me to talk over the route he had planned for me with his colleague and successor, Sir Gordon Sprigg, for a tour in the western and eastern provinces. Nothing can surpass the kindness of all persons in authority in South Africa to English travellers who are anxious to see the country, and willing to give time and energy to so doing. Sir Hercules Robinson, who was approaching the term of his memorable governorship, not content with giving me letters and information of great value, had put me in the hands

of the Prime Minister of the Cape to help me farther on my way. The Commissioner of Works had placed at my disposal a pass over the Government railway system; but as it was my intention to travel chiefly off the beaten tracks, by Cape-cart and in the saddle, still more valuable were the good offices of the Premier in providing me with a budget of introductions to the magistrates and other functionaries stationed throughout the colony.

Sir Thomas Upington, as he went through the pile of letters with a map of South Africa, remarked, "Now, if you could only extend your tour into native territory, you would at the end of it have seen more of Africa south of the Transvaal, not only than any traveller from the old country, but than any Africander." Just as he was uttering the words the door opened, and in walked Mr de Wet, the Secretary for Native Affairs, who had that morning returned from an official tour in the Transkei.

"This is providential," said

the Attorney-General; and before the interview ended I had decided to visit Kaffraria, the Minister for Native Affairs promising to ask the chief magistrate of Tembuland to summon a "pitso". a great gathering of native chiefs.

appointed day: at sunrise the whole nation was watching for the morning, and as the hours went by without any of the portents appearing, the Kaffirs awoke to the reality that they had been duped. In British Kaffraria alone there perished that year of famine nearly 70,000 natives.

The whole of the first day's journey was over ground made historic in the war of the Axe in 1846, and in subsequent Kaffir wars. My one travelling companion, the post-contractor at Umtata, had held a lieutenant's commission in the more recent Gcaika and Gcaleka campaign, and entertained me with his adventures. He pointed out a spot where in one engagement he could not extract the cartridge from his rifle. A native, seeing him thus helpless, threw an assegai at him, which struck his saddle. A friendly Fingo now came up and went for the Gcaika at close quar

To a ters. The two Africans pointed

A month later, after a wonderful journey of over a thousand miles through the southern parts of Cape Colony, I left King William's Town on my way into Kaffirland. The people in the old frontier town had advised me, as my time was not unlimited, to push on by post-cart from Kei Road through the Transkei as far as Umtata, the capital of Tembuland. The road at first lay through miles of monotonous rolling veldt, and after an hour or two of driving in the low Cape-cart drawn by six horses, the air was so clear that our destination at night was plainly visible when still fifty miles away. This was the Amaxosa country, the scene of the great cattle - slaughter of 1857. young girl, Nongquanse, a Kaffir Marie Bernadette, there appeared on the banks of a stream the spirit of a dead chief, who bade her tell the nation to slay all the cattle of their vast herds, and to destroy all the corn stored in pits. Then on a certain day myriads of oxen would issue from the earth to take the place of the slaughtered kine; fields of ripe waving corn would spring up; the ancient warriors of the past would reappear; and the sky would fall and crush the whites and the Fingo dogs. Agents of the British Government and missionaries vainly tried to stem the frenzy. Two hundred thousand hides of slaughtered cattle were bartered to traders for trifles, and great kraals were prepared for the promised herds. Thousands of the Amaxosa race were famishing even before the

their guns at one another's foreheads, and the officer, incapacitated from helping his ally, gazed expecting to see two black heads blown to atoms: both pulled their triggers

-and both had forgotten to load!

In our first stage, the grass of the rolling veldt looked as green as English pastures in June, beneath the deep blue sky; but presently heavy clouds began to gather, and a terrific thunderstorm raged all round us. We escaped the worst of it; but later in the day we climbed a mountain road, strewn with giant boulders washed down by the deluge, and the next morning we passed a kraal where three native women had been struck dead by the lightning the Kaffir huts, notwithstanding their lowness, frequently attracting thunderbolts. As the Kei river was approached, beyond

the straggling village of Komgha, the country became very picturesque, the mimosa-trees, fragrant after the rain, giving it the appearance of a park laid out amid mountain terraces, till suddenly the Kei bridge came in sight the finest bridge in Cape Colony -uniting the old eastern province and Kaffraria.

On the river-bank squatted a group of Red Kaffirs,-six young men, all well built, and all adorned with great care- -Fingo mashers. On their heads they wore a fanlike erection of feathers; their blankets had slipped down and they sat in complete nudity, excepting for their necklaces of beads, armlets and anklets of metal, rings or feathers pierced through their ears, and the minute adornment which Kaffir modesty ordains for its males. They sang a monotonous chant, swinging their arms from their heads to the ground, and when it was done they got up, threw their blankets over their bodies as gracefully as a Spaniard adjusts his poncho, and with an insolent air swaggered into the canteen of the Kei Bridge Hotel. These boys are the worst class of natives to deal with, in their pride at having passed the age of circumcision. They refuse to work, but when brought before the magistrates plead that they are poor blacks. They form the class in which the native difficulties will lie in the future. English rule has disestablished the authority of the chiefs to which their fathers looked, and these youths are growing up bereft of that tradition, with nothing else to reverence in its place. Tembuland had just been given the franchise; but though the black population is estimated in proportion to the whites as 200 to 1, the restriction which disallows the qualification

in respect of property held tribally makes the proportions of the electorate in the opposite ratio of black and white.

We lay that night at Toleni, where, on a mountain-top, a long low building containing post-office, store, and inn, stands among a cluster of Fingo huts, shaped like beehives, with roofs of thatch and walls of mud. From this point to Umtata the postal authorities allow twenty hours for the mailcarts, but as the swift Kaffir horses can do the distance in fourteen, the hour for starting is four in the morning instead of ten at night, thus giving the rare passengers a little rest. The solitude of the green plains at sunrise is unbroken save for some flocks of stork. The natives are not matutinal, and nothing stirring is seen round about the frequent kraals till the day is well aired. The first signs of life we encountered were at Ibeka, a station of the Cape Mounted Rifles, one of the smartest military bodies in the empire, and most serviceable in native warfare. The men came running round the cart from the native huts they inhabit to receive the mails, the enormous size of the bags being explained by the fact that many of these young braves are Englishmen of respectable family, whose chief link with the old country is the receipt of newspapers from regretful relatives.

Whenever we ascended a rise we could now see before us the great Drakensberg range, which, rising in Pondoland, runs right through Natal into the Transvaal. On all sides scenes of native life met us. Two tiny boys, black as jet and stark naked, ran among a flock of goats; each seized one by the horns, and, leaping on their backs, they galloped after us for a mile. Now we descended to the Bashu river, so swollen by yesterday's

storm that the drift could not be forded. As we went down the steep declivity to the roaring stream six naked non-electors of Tembuland ran up to help us outspan. The horses being unloosed, the Kaffirs drove them into the river, shouting and clapping their hands as they were borne down the stream by the current. On to a primitive pontoon the blacks lifted the cart with loud cries of "hamba," in sound not unlike the Neapolitan jammo, and of equivalent meaning; and so we passed out of Fingoland.

At Umtentu, in Tembuland proper, that afternoon we espied a great multitude of Kaffirs assembled in a kraal, and found that the headman had just completed his brewing, and was entertaining all the neighbouring kraals at a beerdrinking. Most of the men squatted within a wattled enclosure ladling out the beer from barrels, and drinking it from pumpkin calabashes; while the women sat in rows before the huts, many of them carrying children slung in blankets behind. For a consideration the men, and afterwards the women, agreed to dance. The dancers did not lift their feet from the ground, but, letting their blankets slip, they advanced slowly with a quivering motion, their breasts protruding and all their muscles shaking, while they brandished their clubs and assegais aloft. The women meanwhile chanted a wild accompaniment, clapping their hands till their turn came, when they stripped themselves to the waist, and advanced in line with animated postures and gestures. The only dignified figures in the dance were the unhappy babes, who, swathed in blankets, had their young heads whacked against their mother's glossy backs, without for a moment losing their imperturbable composure. This early discipline more

probably accounts for the hardness of the Kaffir skull than the theory of exposure to the sun. After the remuneration had been distributed, and as we were driving away, a dozen boys and girls followed us asking for directions about the division of the money, as some of the visitors were of the Pondo nation, which neither loves nor respects the Fingos, who were present in large numbers; so we departed leaving a likely prospect of black wigs on the green that night.

Umtata, which we reached before sunset, after a drive of ninety miles, is a long straggling village, which, from the character of its architecture, looks in the distance like the preparation for an agricultural show. The rolling hills above the river, which is the frontier of independent Pondoland, resemble the Sussex downs, and the Kaffir huts, like stumpy ricks, keep up the illusion that the scene is in England. Here, in the little town, Major Elliot dwells in a cluster of native huts which stand in a large garden, and administers justice as chief magistrate of a great native province, with power of life and death over the people, who consider themselves his subjects, and him the embodiment of British rule in South Africa. My time being somewhat limited, the major decided that as it would be impossible to assemble a "pitso" of large proportions, in the absence of the principal tributary chief at an exhibition at Grahamstown, a better plan would be that Mr Merriman, the magistrate of Umtata, should take me for an expedition into Pondoland, and a messenger was forthwith despatched to the chief Nquiliso to request him to summon a meeting of his tribe to welcome a visitor from over the great sea.

« PreviousContinue »