by Frank Norris
San Francisco Chronicle, February 2, 1896.
IN THE VELDT OF THE TRANSVAAL
JOHANNESBURG, December 29, 1895. — Just as the approach to Kimberley suggests western Colorado, so the approach to Johannesburg puts one in mind at once of eastern Iowa. In America it is the difference between the desert and the plains; in Africa it is the difference between the karoo and the veldt. They are both flat enough, treeless enough, but whereas the karoo is a sandy waste covered with low gray bushes (for all the world like our own sagebrush), the veldt is an enormous fertile reach of low, rolling country covered with grass and thickly scattered with ant heaps, thousands of little dirt hillocks something like beavers’ huts.
One is astonished to see how little the veldt is cultivated. In any country but South Africa, any country not inhabited by the Boer, one would see all this land covered with seas of grain or broken up into pasture lands or farms or fruit ranches. But all this infinite stretch of country, nearly as fertile as the San Joaquin, is abandoned, desolate, unkempt, roamed over by a few herds of long-eared sheep. If the veldt were cultivated South Africa would be one of the largest grain-exporting countries of the world. As it is, you are told at Johannesburg that butter is imported from Australia, that mealies (grain) is actually imported from the United States, while at the Johannesburg hotels you have to sign checks if you want eggs, just as if your omelette were beer or wine. Milk is sixpence a glass, and what on the bill of fare is called vegetables is a fearful hash of potatoes and cabbage. Two weeks ago Johannesburg was suffering from a long drought. The mines were on the point of closing down, and Schweppe’s soda water was selling at nine shillings a bottle. This was not because the people wanted something to drink — they wanted something to wash in.
The Boers are responsible for all this. The Uitlanders (that is, all foreigners, English, American, etc.) are interested in the mines. The agricultural population is made up altogether of Boers, the sluggish, unambitious, unenergetic, unspeakably stupid Boers, who grow only just so much produce as suffices for their own wants. Give the Boer his four or five farm buildings of mud and corrugated iron, his Transvaal tobacco — the strangest tasting stuff ever put in a pipe — his rifle, with which he is wonderfully expert, and his bullock wagon, and the world may roll as it will.
The Arab to his camel, the Eskimo to his dogs, the Sioux to his pony, and the Boer of the Transvaal to his bullocks. The two are admirably adapted to each other; by long association they have grown to be exactly alike: slow, placid, content, stupid. His bullock wagon is the Boer’s castle. With it he can travel wherever he will, spanning out wherever he pleases, perfectly content with a day’s trek of ten miles, carrying his ponderous house about with him like a snail and moving at a snail’s pace.
These bullock wagons are a feature of every South African town. One first begins to see them at Kimberley; Johannesburg swarms with them. Eighteen bullocks go to each wagon, two wagons take up an entire block. The bullocks themselves are rather smaller than our steers, but have the same enormous horns, sometimes three and four feet from tip to tip. Somehow one always sees these wagons empty; you are impressed with the idea that they have either just delivered their load (whatever that mysterious load may be), or are about to take it on.
Once, however, I discovered two which were laden, but not with sacks of grain or crates of fruit or the household lares of a moving family, as one would have naturally expected, but with four commonplace boxed-up Mason & Hamlin’s harmoniums from Boston.
The friction between the Boer and the Uitlander in the Transvaal is sharp. It is not at all improbable that at the time this letter is read in San Francisco Johannesburg will be in a state of siege. The town is full of rumours of an approaching struggle. The situation is discussed everywhere, at street corners, between the acts at the theatres, over the tables in the hotel dining rooms. You are told that 15,000 Martini rifles have been off-loaded at Mafeking as baking powder; that 6,000 horses have been requisitioned in Swaziland and Basutoland for special service; that men prominent in affairs are sending their families down to Durban, in Natal; that the Robinson-Deep, one of the large mines within the town precincts, has laid up a store of provisions for six months, that men are being asked to enlist (this, at least, I know to be true); that the banks are full of arms and could be barricaded at a moment’s notice, and that something over 2,000 men are now about the streets of Johannesburg, in the pay of some mysterious committee, holding themselves in instant readiness.
The order of things that now obtains in Johannesburg is curious. The town belongs to the Dutch, the officials are Dutch, the “Zarps” (the cant name for policemen) are Dutch, everything about the post office and government buildings is Dutch. But there the Dutch control ends. The language is English, most of the money in circulation is English, the stores are English, the population is almost entirely English, the mines are exploited by English — in fact, Johannesburg is an English town, run by English capital and English enterprise, but ruled by the Dutch.
The great trouble is that the English are not allowed to vote. This restriction is, of course, applied to all the Uitlanders, but it is especially hard upon the English, because the ratio of the English to the Dutch is as three to one. The taxes are very heavy and the money thus raised is wasted with an absurd extravagance.
“Oom Paul” Kruger, the Dutch President, has treated all petitions and remonstrances with great contempt, and the English population of Johannesburg have worked themselves up to a fine state of fury over the grievance.
It is very curious to see the old, indomitable Anglo-Saxon spirit rousing up again in this far-away corner of the world as it roused itself in the Puritan colonies in the days of 1776 over the identical question of taxation without representation. Of course, the English will get the franchise in time, and not only the franchise, but probably the whole Transvaal as well. They have a good deal more than the proverbial inch already. It will not be the English if they do not get the entire ell to boot.
There is a big fish somewhere in these troubled waters. One never sees him, but one may feel his presence at every moment. Poor, old, purblind, stupid, obstinate “Oom Paul,” with Majuba Hill still in his mind; poor, little, stupid Zarps, hardly able to read a newspaper; oxlike, placid, country Boers, content to grow only such produce as will keep them from starvation, are so much small fry almost within the jaws of the big fish already. The big fish is never seen and is but little talked of; he lives down yonder in Cape Town and his name is Cecil Rhodes. What part he is to play in the coming struggle is not yet discernible, but it would not be at all surprising if within the course of the next ten years a United States of South Africa, embracing everything between the Cape of Good Hope and the Zambesi River, should spring into existence with the Honourable Cecil as its first president.
Johannesburg has not grown: it has been built; and, unlike Rome, one might almost say it has been built in a day. Four years ago it was a few tin sheds, a mining camp. To-day it is the largest and most important city in Africa. It is as large as Los Angeles, but not nearly so attractive. The buildings are all low, for the most part built of the eternal sheet iron. The streets are wide and abominably dusty. There are a few trees and no mountains, while in the vista at the end of every street, like the masts of vessels in a seaport town, can be seen the tall iron chimneys and headgear of the mines. Your first glimpse of the Witwatersrand gold fields is from the windows of the railway carriage as you come in from Kimberley. You strike the mining district first at Vogel-fontein, and the first impression you receive, especially if you have in recollection the mountainous gold districts of California and Nevada, is that of the strangeness of mining straight down in a flat open country. The great Witwatersrand reef lies underneath a plain as flat, as open, and as treeless as any stretch of country in Iowa or Kansas. The train passes directly through the mining country, running almost parallel to the direction of the outcrop of the reef. The first mine you strike is the New Blue Sky, in the Vogelfontein d
istrict; then the East Rand Proprietary; then the New Comet, the Angelo, and the Dreifontein Consolidated, and then mine after mine by the score, by the hundreds. The Gardner Main Reef, the Balmoral, the Mynpacht-Witwatersrand, the Glencairn, the May Consolidated, the New Primrose, the Geldenhuis and the Gelden Luis Deep, the Simmer and Jack, the Jumpers Deep, the Heriat, the Spes Bona, the Jubilee, the Wemmer, the Ferriera, the City and Suburban, and so on to apparent infinity, through the Langlaagte and Roodeport districts on to the Randfontein and Middle-Vleu districts, nearly a hundred miles from the New Blue Sky.
In all directions, and in apparently the greatest confusion, one sees nothing but the same scene repeated. The tall black stack (with its own arrangement of coloured bands like the funnel of a Cunarder), the head-gear, with its scaffolding, wheels, and cables, the corrugated iron engine houses and machine shops, the white walls of the compound, the huge, regular heap of gray waste rock, and the enormous vats, where the tailings are cyanided. It looks jumbled throughout, but if one could obtain a bird’s-eye view of the Witwatersrand one could trace the course of the outcrop by the chimney stacks of the mines as regularly and as easily as it can be followed by the red line on the maps hanging on the walls in the offices of the Consolidated Gold Fields Company.
The conditions of mining in the Transvaal are altogether other than those which obtain in California. Roughly speaking, the Witwatersrand reef is a vast plane of gold-bearing rock, dipping to the southward at an average angle of 45 degrees. According to the mining laws of the Transvaal, the claim holder has not the right of the lateral pursuit of his reef in depth. He has only the right of extracting such gold as can be found directly beneath the boundaries of his claims (“vertical rights,” I believe, is the technical expression). For instance, the prospector has discovered the outcrop of the reef — understand it is reef, not a vein — and pegs out his claim, a parallelogram of 150 cape feet in the direction of the strike by 400 in the direction of the dip. If he wishes to follow the reef beyond these limits he must peg out further claims. A single claim is, of course, too small to be profitably worked, so what are known as “outcrop companies” are formed to exploit a block of contiguous claims. As a consequence of this system there are few small mines, the mine owners are companies, not individuals, everything being done on a colossal scale.
The great future of the Rand mines, however, is the deep-level properties — that is, claims located at considerable distance (often a quarter of a mile) from the original outcrop, and where the reef, by reason of the angle of the dip, is reached at a much greater depth. So regularly is the gold distributed throughout the reef and so uniform is the course of the reef itself that even a second row of deep levels has been opened up in many of the mines, where the reef will not be struck until a depth of sometimes 3,000 and 4,000 feet is reached. But still the reef continues beyond even the second row of deep levels, plunging deeper and deeper into the earth, just as rich, just as uniform as at the outcrop. The problem now before the Transvaal engineers is, how many thousands of feet in depth can mining operations be carried in the Witwatersrand? The gold is there — bore holes and the geological formation of the soil have established this beyond doubt. Every claim pegged out covers, on an average, $260,000 worth of gold at a greater or less depth. The question is, as above stated, will it pay to extract the gold after a certain depth has been reached? But this question need not be raised for years to come. Most of the companies have hardly begun to work even the outcrop claims, while many of the first row of deep levels are scarcely halfway down to the reef.
San Francisco Chronicle, February 9, 1896.
A ZULU WAR DANCE
FROM what I was able to learn of the habits of the Zulus, it would seem that a Zulu war dance on a large scale is a sight rarely to be met with nowadays in South Africa.
One can see a dance in Zululand on the east coast easily enough, but in the first place a long and difficult, not to say dangerous, journey into the interior of the Zulu country is necessary, and in the second place, unless the Zulus are in preparation or expectation of a war in the near future, the dance will lack the savage intensity, the fierce earnestness, that give to the war dances all the zest and the spirit that make them so marvellously interesting.
On the Rand, in the neighbourhood of Johannesburg, there are, say, 6,000 Zulus employed in the mines, but it is very rare that a dance is seen among them. One of the reasons for this is that the mines are worked day and night, Sundays and week days alike. There are no holidays, except New Year’s Day, and comparatively few of the Zulus can gather together at any one time or place. For it takes at least a hundred to make a real dance. Fewer than that, and the mob spirit is wanting. The frenzy of the crowd, the wild, blind rush that sways multitudes, savage multitudes, particularly, cannot be aroused. Again, a period of idleness is needed to bring about a dance. Fresh from the mine, swollen with rank air that is vitiated alike by gases and the stale smoke of dynamite powder, exhausted by the long bodily strain of drill and pick, the Zulu of the mines is in no mood or condition to dance. Cape Smoke (which is not smoke but alcohol), his bath, his bed of blankets in the compound corner, and his pot of mealie pap are the things uppermost in his mind at that time.
The dancing is not encouraged by the mine managers. It is quite the other way. There are two reasons for this. A war dance, conducted on a large scale, carefully organized and consistently carried out, will demoralize the ordinary Zulu for the rest of the week. When the Zulu of the compounds has danced the war dance long enough and shouted the bayete often enough, he forgets that he is a miner, whipped to his work — the marks of the sjambok still fresh on his back, a slave in all but the name, a digger of earth and a day labourer. He begins to remember that he comes of a mighty nation of warriors before whose battle formation — the famous half-moon formation of Tchaka — whole tribes and peoples of Kaffirs have melted away and become extinct; and beneath whose assegais — the famous throwing or stabbing assegais of Moselekatse, a Prince Imperial, heir of a throne of Europe — fell and died. The result is a savage pride of race and a royal exultation that rises above all manual labour. Hence the discouragement of the dance of war by the mine managers. It is not fit that a miner should feel like a king, or a “pit boy” exult royally over anything but the consciousness of a day’s toil faithfully discharged. Then, too, amid the excitement of the swaying, leaping crowd, the droning chant, the shrill yells, the war whistles, and the booming of the drums, the genuine spirit of battle, the desire of killing will flash out all on a sudden, an assegai or a kirri will stream through the air with a long swish, and a man will drop, his knees bending under him, his head rolling on his shoulder. He is a Basuto, perhaps, or a M’nyemba, or a Shangahn, a member of any tribe guilty of some long-past slight, some apparently forgotten injury to the children of the Black Bull. The next minute a tribal fight is raging from wall to wall of the compound or rolling to and fro upon the open veldt. Not six months ago, on the occasion of a war dance in the De Beers compound at Kimberley, a tribal fight broke out in which eighty-odd M’cosas were kirried to death by Zulus. The massacre was only stopped by the action of the compound boss, who shot two Zulu indunas with his revolver. Thus it is that a war dance — a Zulu war dance — is become a rare occurrence south of the Zambesi.
The last great dance was at Buluwayo, in Matabele-land, when Buluwayo was still Lobengula’s kraal and the Matabele war was about to break out — a dance of 8,000 men. Think of it. Eight thousand Matabele in war dress, dancing together, singing in one great chorus. One white man saw this dance. He was an American and a friend of Lobengula, and he travelled forty days to see it. As the dance drew to its close Lobengula stood up and threw his assegai — threw it out over the road to the south in the direction of the English enemy who had bullied him into an unequal war, and the Matabele regiments raised a great shout and ran out after it, leaping into the air and shaking their bulls’-hide shields, very fierce and very grand, and the Matabele war was begun.
&n
bsp; During the first few days of 1896 everything that happened in and about Johannesburg appeared to happen because of the Uitlander insurrection, and the great war dance of Zulus near the Geldenhuis Deep, about eight miles out of the city, was also brought about by the rising. From the Zulu point of view it was, in a way, in celebration of it, for the Zulu hates the Boer with a hatred that cannot be uttered. The conditions were all favourable for a dance. The mines were closing down, the Kaffir miners idle, bands of 200,300, and even 600 could easily be gotten together, and there was a sense of war in the air — a war with the Zulu’s hated enemy.
Lolz and myself rode out to the Geldenhuis late in the afternoon and arrived to find the dance already under way. In front of a mine officer’s house on a broad and level strip of veldt were gathered a vast crowd. They were Zulus to a man. One could be sure of this as far as the crowd could be seen. For the men that made it up were for the most part enormous, carrying their round, sparsely covered heads six feet and more above the ground, clean limbed, though not lean, as our own Indians; mighty in the chest and shoulders, and having the peculiar development of the abdominal muscles that fills out the lower portions of the torso, and that is an unfailing Zulu characteristic. They were brown men, brown as our Negroes of the South are brown, and but for the short growth of wool upon their heads, quite hairless. Their dress was a scant calico loin cloth of dark blue. For dancing they wore all manner of ornaments — ringwork about their arms and ankles, beadwork around their necks, the coils being wound about scores of times. One or two, seemingly as a mark of distinction, carried a single heron feather in their hair. Others had knotted into their wool long spatulas of bone and ivory, and almost everyone carried his brass snuff box — made for him in Birmingham, England — thrust through a great hole slit in the lobe of his ear. Their weapons were for the most part knobsticks, kirris, and assegais, throwing and stabbing assegais and the combination of the two, a weapon invented for them by Moselekatse. There were no swords, no hatchets or knives, no bows, nothing but the club and the spear. A few of them carried long bulls’-hide shields. Most of these shields were large enough to cover the whole body, but many were curiously, inexplicably small, not more than eight inches in length.