Now that some general idea of how nature has shaped and moulded South Africa has been conveyed to the reader, a few pages may be devoted to considering what influence on the fortunes of the country and its inhabitants has been exerted by its physical character. The history of every country may be regarded as the joint result of three factors—the natural conditions of the country itself, the qualities of the races that have occupied it, and the circumstances under which their occupation took place. And among savage or barbarous people natural conditions have an even greater importance than they have in more advanced periods of civilisation, because they are more powerful as against man. Man in his savage state is not yet able to resist such conditions or to turn them to serve his purposes, but is condemned to submit to the kind of life which they prescribe.

This was the case with the first inhabitants of South Africa. They seem to have entered it as savages, and savages they remained. Nature was strong and stern; she spread before them no such rich alluvial plains as tempted cultivation in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. Intellectually feeble, and without the patience or the foresight to attempt to till the soil in a land where droughts are frequent and disastrous, the Bushmen were content with killing game, and the Hottentots with living on the milk of their cattle. Such a life, which was one of uncertainty and often of hardship, permitted no accumulation of wealth, gave no leisure, suggested no higher want than that of food, and was in all respects unfavourable to material progress. Even the Bantu people, who probably came later and were certainly more advanced, for they carried on some little cultivation of the soil, remained at a low level. Nature gave them, except in dry years, as much corn as they needed in return for very little labour. Clothing they did not need, and their isolation from the rest of the world left them ignorant of luxuries. When the European voyagers found them at the end of the fifteenth century, they were making little or no advance in the arts of life.

Upon the growth of European settlements the influence of the physical structure of the country has been very marked. When the Portuguese had followed the long line of coast from the mouth of the Orange River to that of the Zambesi, and from the mouth of the Zambesi northward to Zanzibar, they settled only where they heard that gold and ivory could be obtained. Their forts and trading stations, the first of which dates from 1505, were therefore planted on the coast northward from the Limpopo River. Sofala, a little south of the modern port of Beira, was the principal one. Here they traded, and twice or thrice they made, always in search of the gold-producing regions, expeditions inland. These expeditions, however, had to traverse the flat and malarious strip of ground which lies along the Indian Ocean. A large part of the white troops died, and the rest arrived at the higher ground so much weakened that they could achieve no permanent conquests, for they were opposed by warlike tribes. In the course of years a small population speaking Portuguese, though mixed with native blood, grew up along the coast. The climate, however, destroyed what vigour the whites had brought from Europe, and by degrees they ceased to even attempt to conquer or occupy the interior. The heat and the rains, together with fever, the offspring of heat and rains, checked further progress. Three centuries passed, during which the knowledge of south-eastern Africa which the civilised world had obtained within the twenty years that followed the voyages of Vasco da Gama, was scarcely increased.

During those three centuries, America, which had not been discovered till six years after Bartholomew Diaz passed the Cape of Good Hope, had been, all except a part of the north-west, pretty thoroughly explored and partitioned out among five European powers. Large and prosperous colonies had sprung up and before the end of the eighteenth century one great independent state had established itself. The discovery of Australia and New Zealand came much later than that of America; but within one century from the first European settlement in Australia (A.D. 1787) the whole continent, though its interior is uninviting, had been traversed along many lines, and five prosperous European colonies had grown to importance. The slow progress of exploration and settlement in South Africa during so long a period is therefore a noteworthy phenomenon which deserves a few observations.

As regards the Portuguese part of the East African coast, the explanation just given is sufficient. As regards that part of the West coast which lies south of the Portuguese colony of Angola, the natural features of the country make no explanation needed. No more arid or barren coast is to be found anywhere, and in its whole long stretch there is but one tolerable port, that of Walfish Bay. The inland region is scarcely better. Much of it is waterless and without herbage. No gold nor ivory nor other article of value was obtainable. Accordingly, nobody cared to settle or explore, and the land would probably be still lying unclaimed had not the settlement of Herr LÜderitz and a vague desire for territorial expansion prompted Germany to occupy it in 1884.

The south coast, from the Cape to the Tugela River, was much more attractive. Here the climate was salubrious, the land in many places fertile, and everywhere fit for sheep or cattle. Here, accordingly, a small European community, first founded in 1652, grew up and spread slowly eastward and northward along the shore during the century and a half from its first establishment. The Dutch settlers did not care to penetrate the interior, because the interior seemed to offer little to a farmer. Behind the well-watered coast belt lay successive lines of steep mountains, and behind those mountains the desert waste of the Karroo, where it takes six acres to keep a sheep. Accordingly, it was only a few bold hunters, a few farmers on the outskirts of the little maritime colony, and a few missionaries, who cared to enter this wide wilderness.

When exploration began, it began from this south-west corner of Africa. It began late. In 1806, when the British took the Cape from the Dutch, few indeed were the white men who had penetrated more than one hundred miles from the coast, and the farther interior was known only by report. For thirty years more progress was slow; and it is within our own time that nearly all the exploration, and the settlement which has followed quickly on the heels of exploration, has taken place. Just sixty years ago the Dutch Boers passed in their heavy waggons from Cape Colony to the spots where Bloemfontein and Pretoria now stand. In 1854-56 David Livingstone made his way through Bechuanaland to the falls of the Zambesi and the west coast at St. Paul de Loanda. In 1889 the vast territories between the Transvaal Republic and the Zambesi began to be occupied by the Mashonaland pioneers. All these explorers, all the farmers, missionaries, hunters, and mining prospectors, came up into South Central Africa from the south-west extremity of the continent over the great plateau. They moved north-eastward, because there was more rain, and therefore more grass and game in that direction than toward the north. They were checked from time to time by the warlike native tribes; but they were drawn on by finding everywhere a country in which Europeans could live and thrive. It was the existence of this high and cool plateau that permitted their discoveries and encouraged their settlement. And thus the rich interior has come to belong, not to the Portuguese, who first laid hold of South Africa, but to the races who first entered the plateau at the point where it is nearest the sea, the Dutch and the English. Coming a thousand miles by land, they have seized and colonised the country that lies within sixty or eighty miles of the ocean behind the Portuguese settlements, because they had good healthy air to breathe during all those thousand miles of journey; while the Portuguese, sunk among tropical swamps, were doing no more than maintain their hold upon the coast, and were allowing even the few forts they had established along the lower course of the Zambesi to crumble away.

The same natural conditions, however, which have made the plateau healthy, have kept it sparsely peopled. Much of this high interior, whose settlement has occupied the last sixty years, is a desert unfit, and likely to be always unfit, for human habitation. Even in those parts which are comparatively well watered, the grazing for sheep and cattle is so scanty during some months of the year that farms are large, houses are scattered far from one another, and the population remains extremely thin. The Wilderness of the Karroo cuts off Cape Town and its comparatively populous neighbourhood from the inhabited, though thinly inhabited, pastoral districts of the Orange Free State. Between these two settled districts there are only a few villages, scattered at intervals of many miles along a line of railway four hundred miles in length. In the Free State and the Transvaal the white population is extremely sparse, save in the mining region of the Witwatersrand, because ranching requires few hands, and only a few hundred square miles out of many thousands have been brought under cultivation. Thus, while the coolness of the climate has permitted Europeans to thrive in these comparatively low latitudes, its dryness has kept down their numbers and has retarded not only their political development, but their progress in all those arts and pursuits which imply a tolerably large and varied society. The note of South African life, the thing that strikes the traveller with increasing force as he visits one part of the country after another, is the paucity of inhabitants, and the isolated life which these inhabitants, except in six or seven towns, are forced to lead. This is the doing of nature. She has not severed the country into distinct social or political communities by any lines of physical demarcation, but she has provided such scanty means of sustenance for human life and so few openings for human industry unaided by capital, that the settlers (save where capital has come to their aid) remain few indeed, and one may call the interior of South Africa a vast solitude, with a few oases of population dotted here and there over it.