CONGREGATIONAL REGISTER.

August-September.

[To prevent mistakes and delay, all communications for the Register should be addressed to the Editor, 2, Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row, E.C., and marked on the envelope, "For Congregational Register."]

FOREIGN CHRISTIAN WORK.

Quarterly Supplement.

KAFIRLAND, AND THE KAFIR MISSION.

By the Reb. T. Brockway, Missionary.

ALTHOUGH the South Sea Mission must be ever thought of as the first love of the London Missionary Society, that to South Africa can scarcely be regarded as having occupied a secondary place in the thoughtful and loving attention of the noble men who founded the Society, and of those who were, its first directors. Constrained by a like love to that which influenced Him who preached the Gospel to the poor, those men, looking from the vantage ground they occupied, and the light which so brightly irradiated their path, saw none so degraded, none upon whom the shadow of the gross darkness rested so heavily as the islander of the South Pacific, and the aborigines of South Africa.

And where, as in South Africa, has the Gospel effected such changerevolution we might have written? where has it more benefited the people to whom it has come? and where can our Society point to such results, both national and social, as in those lands on which the gaze of Christ-like love first rested?

But we tell not to-day the old story of a nation enfranchised from slavery, as the Hottentot, nor of Africaner, the Lion of the South, sitting at the feet of Jesus and thenceforth wearing his yoke, nor of Moselekatse, of whom we might truly say, "whom he would he slew, and whom he would he kept alive," yet reverencing the name of Moffat, and willing to hear the Gospel from his lips. We write of a people, strangers in a land not theirs, little known to Britain excepting by the wars they have waged against her growing power; a people unlike the tribes by whom they are surrounded, superior in physical development and mental capacity, into whose proud spirit the iron of slavery has never entered; yet too like Africa's sons in ignorance of God, of the claims of the soul and of the eternal world. It is questionable whether ignorance so intense as that which has been the heritage of the tribes of Africa has obtained among any other people upon the face of the whole earth.

Other nations have their deities, although these be false gods, but the Amaxosa tribes have lost all knowledge of God, even to the dropping out of

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their language of a name for the Divine Being; their semi-religious ceremonies are soulless forms, their sacrifices are offered neither to God nor demon, but to some influence in the atmosphere which they fail to understand or to describe; and, while using a form at the interment of a deceased chief, which implies an ancient faith in immortality, recognise in it but an isiko, a custom of their forefathers, which they do well to observe, because such was the habit of their ancestors.

About sixty years since Vanderkemp, the Apostle of the South African Mission, learning of these tribes beyond the Colonial boundary, felt concerned to carry to them that Gospel, which among the Hottentots proved through his preaching the power of God and the wisdom of God to the salvation of many of that degraded race. He reached their dwellings in safety, but found the Amaxosa a people of a strange tongue and not easy to be persuaded. After some toil which he, too soon, concluded to be unavailing, he became disheartened, and, giving up his task in despair, returned to the Colony, and ultimately made his way to the coast, determining if an opportunity presented itself to pass over to Madagascar. But before he could acomplish what was in his heart he received another su'mmons, and to him more welcome: his Master called him to his rest and reward in heaven.

WHO ARE THE KAFIRS?

Who were these people amongst whom he sought to introduce the blessings of the Gospel, and whence came they? Both questions present difficulties not easy of solution, indeed no theory hitherto presented to the writer of this paper has secured his suffrage.

The traditions of the Kafirs, which are very meagre (and they have no written records), carry us only some five hundred years up the stream of time, at which period, say they, the Amaxosa were a great nation dwelling far out-spread in and about the neighbourhood of that easterly portion of South Africa now known as Natal. Some time in the fourteenth century, Xosa (a breaker or divider) broke off from his people (as Moselekatse, himself a Kafir, did in more recent times), and coming south with a portion of the tribes, dispossessed the Hottentots and Bushmen; and finding a sufficiency of pasturage for their large herds of cattle, settled in their land, spreading westward and southward, increasing in the wealth of pastoral tribes, until they came, first into contact, then conflict, with the power before which they have been obliged both to succumb and retreat.

Yet still the Kafirs are a powerful people, occupying the eastern coast of South Africa from latitude 26° south to that of 33° 50′′, comprising different nations, among whom the Amazulu, the Amatembu, the Gcalekas, and the Gaikas are the most powerful. In physical features and productiveness, these tribes occupy some of the finest portions of South Africa. The strip of country near the sea, skirting the Colony of Natal, is almost tropical in its character and productions, and like to the whole of the favoured east

coast, and in happy contradistinction to the western and older portion of the Colony, its rains fall in summer; while on the contrary, over the western districts rain falls in the winter, or rather cold season.

Along the coast to below 30° south, tropical fruits are cultivated with success, as also sugar, coffee, cotton, &c. In the highlands behind this fertile strip of coast, our enterprising countrymen are found keeping sheep, and rearing cattle; also cultivating large tracts of land, raising the hardier crops of maize or Indian corn and red millet or amazimba. But south of this district, and in what is generally recognised as Kafirland, a more temperate climate obtains, or rather the climate is more changeable, the heat being at times intense; but the frequent occurrence of the bitterly cold south-westerly wind, blowing as if it burst wild and fierce from the bosom of some iceberg in the Southern Ocean, renders it difficult to cultivate successfully such fruits as grow freely in southern France or Spain, and prevents the cultivation of the tropical productions of Natal. Here Indian and Kafir corn are the staple productions, as also the European cereals, wheat, barley, and oats. Wheat is unfortunately an uncertain crop. Our space and design forbid us enlarging in this direction, or we might tell somewhat of its flora, and fauna, of its rivers without water, its birds without song, and its flowers without odour, so beautiful and abundant, springing as if by magic from its iron-bound soil after the spring rains; so many of whose bulbous-rooted plants now adorn our greenhouses and flowerbeds; as also of tracts of country which might be wondrously fertile, did God grant to us the early and the latter rains in their season. When these are granted the land truly is, as a native correspondent recently wrote me, one that flows with milk and honey, for pasturage is there abundant, and wild bees abound. But such seasons are too often the exception in the land which the rivers despise. Or if it were needed to add a page to the folio of science, one might write of the plagues of the country, and specially of that fearful scourge, the locust, and of its determined destroyer, the locust-bird.

MORAL CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE.

But what, it will be inquired, and perhaps impatiently, is the moral and social condition of the people who dwell in this land, amongst whom we have been labouring? To the former we have already referred as far as faith is concerned, as being a simple negation of all beliefs everywhere else obtaining in the world, even to the lack of a word in the language, otherwise a remarkable and a beautiful one, to express the idea of a Divine Being. This lack had to be supplied, when missionaries first settled amongst them, by a barbarous word from the Hottentot tongue, UTIxo; the meaning of which, if any accurate meaning can be assigned, expresses anything rather than the idea which we attach to the term God. Some vague ideas exist among them as to man's creation and of his original state of destined

immortality. When man was first formed, it is said, a messenger was