THE CAPE AND THE KAFIRS;

OR,

NOTES OF FIVE YEARS' RESIDENCE IN SOUTH AFRICA.

BY ALFRED W. COLE.

CHAPTER XIV.

Popular Education.-History of the Cape System.-Its annual Cost.—Its peculiar Advantages in a mixed Population.-John Bull and the Boers.-A regular CapeRoad, Causes of bad Roads.-A mountain Ride.-A grand and varied Panorama.-The Village of Somerset.-Cultivation of Tobacco.-The poet Pringle, -His Home.-The Scene of a romance.-An uninvited Guest.-Snakes in South Africa-Antidote for their Bites.

SOME of the colonies of England are "going-a-head" of the mother country in a matter of great importance-popular education. The system. pursued at the Cape for several years, reflects the greatest credit on the colony; and has been eminently successful.

In every town and village of the least importance, is a good and substantial school-house, open free to all classes and all sects, where instruction is given in all the essentials of a simple and sound education, by gentlemen who have been selected as teachers with great judgment. They are principally graduates of the Scotch universities, and are, without exception, men of considerable ability and high character, and who seem to have the interest of their charge thoroughly at heart.

The idea of the establishment of these schools, originated with Sir John Herschell, when the great astronomer was sojourning at Cape Town, to make his observations on the heavenly bodies in the southern hemisphere. He was ably seconded in his suggestions by Dr. Innes, then the principal of the South African College, and, by their joint exertions, the present system was elaborated. The local government most honourably voted the requisite funds to support the schools. Dr. Innes paid a visit to England, to select competent teachers,-and in a short period, a good, sound, and useful education was at the service of every child in the colony, whose parents chose to avail themselves of such an advantage, free from every kind of expense.

I must state that the broad principles of the Christian religion are taught in these schools, but with such praiseworthy and careful avoidance of all sectarian doctrines, that the children of Churchmen, Dissenters, and Roman Catholics, and even one or two Mahometans,— attend them without the slightest complaint ever having been uttered by any one on religious grounds. This is the more remarkable, inasmuch as sectarian differences run very high at the Cape.

The teachers have salaries varying from 100l. to 2001., besides a house. The instruction consists of reading, writing, history, mathematics, natural philosophy, and geography. Out of the regular school-hours the teachers take private pupils at a moderate rate, who wish to learn Latin and Greek, or French. Thus I have no hesitation in declaring that the rising generation at the Cape will be far beyond that of England in all the

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essentials of a good education. Perfect ignorance will be almost unknown, and unheard of in the colony, And what does the reader suppose is the sum requisite to secure all these inestimable advantages to a rising state? I will tell him-2500l. per annum! or less than onefourth of the amount of the "pensions," paid out of the revenue of the same colony to a set of persons who, in nine cases out of ten, have no claim whatever on its funds or its gratitude. But where in the wide the land of the Hot

*

world is "jobbery" extinct? Veritably, not in

tentots.

The advantages of these schools are nowhere more perceptible than in the district of Graaf Reinet, where there is a mixed population of Dutch and English. The children of both races are being educated together, and in another generation, all traces of difference will have been obliterated. This is a "consummation devoutly to be wished," seeing that the English and Dutch have not, hitherto, fused as kindly as might be desired. John Bull is as pompous a fellow in South Africa as in England, and his intense appreciation of his own excellences, induces him to look upon the Boers as an inferior order of animals to himself. With a due allowance for the want of certain conventional advantages on the part of the Dutchman, Master John is decidedly mistaken,—but it is useless to tell him so.

When I bade farewell to the town of Graaf Reinet, and started for the neighbouring district of Somerset, I was agreeably surprised to find myself on a tolerably good road. I have before remarked on the rarity of such a thing in the Cape Colony. An English reader can form but little idea of a really bad road. Let him picture to himself a broad straggling pathway, with loose stones scattered all over it, of the size ordinarily used for paving the streets of London, interspersed occasionally with stumps of trees, deep holes, hard rock, and sudden descents of a foot or two at a step; and further, imagine the said road constantly ascending and descending mountains at an angle of 45 degrees,-now and then plunging precipitously into the bed of a river, which is sometimes a torrent, sometimes a swamp, where you are sure to stick fast, and sometimes has great rolling stones just below the surface of the water (as large as Sisyphus rolled unceasingly up-hill), over which your horse tumbles, and pitches you unceremoniously into a cold bath: let him further conceive such road clouded with whirlwinds of sand, which penetrate into the traveller's ears, eyes, nose, and mouth; or else so greasy with mud that neither man nor beast can progress steadily along it,—and then he will have formed a faint notion of a genuine and ordinary Cape road. The only two exceptions to this species of highway that I met with, were the Fort Beaufort Road, and that over the Bruges Mountains, from Graaf Reinet to Somerset.

It is, of course, ridiculous to expect anything approaching to good roads in a colony where labour is so scarce. The solitary good which New South Wales has derived from being a penal settlement is, that it has procured her an admirable set of roads. Road-making, indeed, is so dull, laborious, and unattractive an employment, that it seems to be peculiarly adapted to convict-labour. The government lately, on seeking to make convicts acceptable to the Cape colonists, did not forget to point out the advantages which would be conferred on the country in this point; but the bait did not take. The colonists were well aware that the worthy

The Cape Pension List is 10,500l. a year; the whole revenue only 50,0007.

"ticket-of-leave" gentleman would "take to the road" in more senses than one; and they were not sufficiently alive to the advantages of that interesting Australian mode of life,-"bush-ranging,"-to wish for its establishment in their own country.

I know nothing more exhilarating and delightful than riding along a mountain-ridge, with a magnificent panorama stretching away below you on both sides. Such was my enjoyment on the Bruges heights. This mountain chain was formerly the boundary of the colony under the Dutch government, beyond which no colonist was allowed to trade with the native tribes. Since that time, in the earlier wars with the Kafirs, it has been the scene of many a bloody conflict between that people and the colonists. The Kafirs had not the slightest pretensions, in point of justice, to penetrate so far to the west; their own frontier lying some one hundred miles to the East. But they have always been encroaching on the land of the Hottentots both before and since its occupation by Europeans.

I had now within eye-range the plains of Graaf Reinet sprinkled with antelopes; the sharp, jagged tops of the Tanges Berg, or Toothed Mountain; the white-capped Snewbergen, where I had been half-frozen some time since; the broken Swart Ruggens, or black ridges-a dark tract of rocky country, with strata dislocated in a manner to puzzle the profoundest geologist; and the forest range of the Kaga, with its fertile slopes, and well-watered farms: so that my panorama was both varied and beautiful.

The village of Somerset-I beg its pardon for thus terming a "municipality," is insignificant enough, and contains only five hundred inhabitants. It was formerly a kind of storehouse for provisions for the troops on the frontier, but it is not sufficiently to the east for such purposes now. Very large quantities of grain, however, are raised in this district, which is tolerably well watered, and very fertile. Cattle and sheep also abound, and some of the finest flocks of the latter in the whole country belong to Mr. Hart, whose farm is near Somerset. It is also the residence of the Pringle family; Thomas Pringle being the poet, par excellence, of South Africa.

In this district, and on the very spot where the village of Somerset now stands, tobacco was first raised in the colony under the care of a Dr. Makrill. Like almost anything else it grew, and flourished admirably on a Cape soil, and is now raised in considerable quantities in various parts of the colony. It is called Boer's tobacco, to distinguish it from the various species of the imported weed. Here again, however, the want of proper energy so constantly observable in the colonists, whether Dutch or English, is displayed. Every man smokes-and immense numbers also chew-tobacco. The Hottentots of both sexes take heaps of snuff,-not, by the way, up their nostrils, but in their mouth!-and yet tobacco has to be imported to a considerable extent into a country which might not only grow enough for its own wants, but sufficient to supply half the world beside. Every one admits the fact; but the answer is, "want of labour," that eternal complaint of South Africa. There is much truth in it; but there is a considerable "want of energy also. The colonists do not sufficiently bear in mind the good old French maxim" Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera."

The colony has produced only about 360,000 pounds of tobacco in the year; it might just as well produce a hundred-fold more.

There is no

reason (save perhaps the "labour" one), why the exports of this article should not increase in the same ratio, as that of wool. A very small space of ground will grow a great deal of tobacco, as the reader will admit when he hears that the best authorities state, that "a square yard of bed, if made with care, will grow and support 50,000 plants of tobacco !"

But tobacco has put poetry out of my head. Let us return to Mr. Pringle. This gentleman, whose poetry has made known to the general reader, many a sweet scene of South Africa, came out in 1820 as the head of a party of settlers. He pitched his tent in Glen Lynden, and in 1834 (or fourteen years later), he wrote the following interesting sketch of his little band:

"A few words in conclusion, about our settlement of Glen Lynden. Under the blessing of Providence, its prosperity has been steadily progressive. The friends whom I left there, though they have not escaped some occasional trials and disappointments, such as all men are exposed to in this uncertain world, have yet enjoyed a goodly share of health, competence, and peace. As regards the first of these blessings, one fact may suffice. Out of twenty-three souls who accompanied me to Glen Lynden fourteen years ago, there had not, up to the 24th of January last, occurred (so far as I know) a single death except one, namely, that of Mr. Peter Rennie, who was unfortunately killed by the bursting of a gun in 1825. My father, at the patriarchal age of eighty years, enjoys the mild sunset of life in the midst of his children and grand-children; the latter, of whom there is a large and rapidly increasing number, having been, with a few exceptions, all born in South Africa. The party have more than doubled their numbers by births alone, during the last twelve years. Several additional families of relatives, and old acquaintances, have also lately joined them.

"Without any pretensions to wealth, and with very little money among them, the Glen Lynden settlers (with some few exceptions) may be said to be in a thriving and, on the whole, very enviable condition. They have abundance of all that life requires for competence and for comfort; and they have few causes of anxiety about the future. Some of them, who have now acquired considerable flocks of merino sheep, have even a fair prospect of attaining by degrees to moderate wealth. They have excellent means of education for their children; they have a well selected subscription library, of about four hundred books; and what is still more important, they have now the public ordinances of religion duly and purely maintained amongst them."

And now, good reader, what think you of the poet's home? Is it not a realization of all the Arcadian simplicity which you had hitherto regarded as a mere dream?

But really I find myself quite on classic ground in this same district of Somerset. To the eastward of the village, on the banks of the Great Fish River, lies Zekoe Kraal; and here the romantic traveller, Le Vaillant, flirted with his lovely heroine, the exquisite Narina. Can you conceive anything more purely poetical than the gallant Frenchman courting the lovely nymph in Sea-cow Kraal? However, the name is here truly of no consequence, especially as I never heard of a hippopotamus being seen in the district during the last forty years; and therefore Le Vaillant's flirtations may have been quite free from the chance of an interruption by one of these river-hogs.

THE CAPE AND THE KAFIRS.

I would that all unwelcome visitors were as scarce at Somerset. But, alas! I found it otherwise. I was going quietly to bed one evening, wearied by a long day's hunting, when close to my feet, and by my bedside, some glittering substances caught my eye. I stooped to pick up; but, ere my hand had quite reached it, the truth flashed across meHad I followed my first natural impulse, I should it was a snake! have sprung away, but not being able clearly to see in what position the reptile was lying, or which way his head was pointed, I controlled myself, and remained rooted breathless to the spot. Straining my eyes, but moving not an inch, I at length clearly distinguished a huge puff-adder, the most deadly snake in the colony, whose bite would have sent me to I watched him in silent horror his the other world in an hour or two. head was from me, so much the worse; for this snake, unlike any other always rises and strikes back. He did not move, he was asleep. Not daring to shuffle my feet, lest he should awake and spring at me, I took a jump backwards, that would have done honour to a gymnastic master, With a thick stick, which and then darted outside the door of the room.

I procured, I then returned and settled his worship.

Some parts of South Africa swarm with snakes; none are free from them. I have known three men killed by them in one harvest on a farm There is an immense variety of them, the deadliest in Oliphant's Hock. friends being the puff-adder, a thick and comparatively short snake. The bite of this snake will kill occasionally within an hour. One of my lost a favourite and valuable horse by its bite, in less than two hours after the attack. It is a sluggish reptile and therefore more dangerous; for, instead of rushing away, like its fellows, at the sound of approaching footsteps it half raises its head and hisses. Often have I come to a sudden pull up on foot and on horseback, on hearing their dreaded warning! There is also the cobra-capello, nearly as dangerous, several black snakes, and the boem-slang (or tree snake), less deadly, one of which I once shot seven feet long.

The Cape is also infested by scorpions, whose sting is little less virulent than a snake bite; and the spider called the tarantula, which is extremely dreaded.

Cutting out the wounded part, and a variety of violent remedies were formerly considered the only means of preserving life after the bite of It Of late years, however, a Mr. Croft has disany of these creatures. covered a remedy which he prepares, and calls his "tincture of life." is both swallowed and applied externally, and is eminently successful. I have known cases of persons being bitten by puff-adders, applying this remedy instantly, and suffering comparatively slight injury from the bite. I knew a case in which a man was bitten in the leg by the same species of snake. It was necessary to send an hour's journey, before the tincture could be procured. Of course the evil had much spread in the meantime; it was applied as soon as obtained, and the man recovered, but he was lamed for life through the injury done by the delay.

It is now considered a species of madness for a Cape farmer to be without "Croft's Tincture of Life."