Lady Barker, to whom the public is indebted for the most practically useful works on New Zealand which have been placed within the reach of the intending emigrant, having now completed a year’s residence in our South African colony, gives us, in A Year’s Housekeeping in South Africa (London: Macmillan & Co.), the benefit of her recent experience in a volume equally useful and entertaining. As compared with Christchurch, the capital of the province of Canterbury, in New Zealand, Maritzburg, in ‘fair Natal,’ is a backward and sleepy place. Recent events may have the effect of developing its ambition and accelerating its speed. But here is Lady Barker’s description of its actual condition: ‘Maritzburg consists of a few straight, wide, grass-grown streets, which are only picturesque at a little distance on account of their having trees on each side. On particularly dark nights, a dozen oil-lamps, standing at long intervals apart, are lighted; but when it is even moderate starlight, these aids to finding one’s way about are prudently dispensed with. Only two buildings make the least effect. One is the Government House, standing in a nice garden, and boasting of a rather pretty porch, but otherwise reminding one, except for the sentinel on duty, of a quiet country rectory. The other is a small block comprising the public offices. A certain air of quaint interest and life is given to the otherwise desolate streets by the groups of Kaffirs, and the teams of wagons waiting for their up-country loads. Twenty bullocks drag these ponderous contrivances—bullocks so lean that one wonders how they have strength to carry their wide-spreading horns aloft; bullocks of a stupidity and obstinacy unparalleled in the natural history of horned beasts.’ These teams are called ‘spans;’ and when, on Sundays, the teams and the wagons are ‘outspanned’ on the green slopes around Maritzburg, the aspect of the place, generally dull and lifeless, becomes strikingly picturesque.

The road to Maritzburg from Port Durban, at which travellers to Maritzburg land from the steamer which conveys them to Cape Town, is very tedious to travel by the government mule wagon, which bumps about in ruts, and sticks in mud after a fashion that renders the prospect of the railway now in course of construction very attractive to the expectant colonists; but it is also very beautiful. ‘Curved green hills, dotted with clusters of timber exactly like an English park, and a background of distant ranges rising in softly rounded outlines, with deep violet shadows in the clefts, and pale green lights on the slopes,’ form its principal features. Nestling amid this rich pasture-land are the kraals of a large Kaffir ‘location;’ and it is satisfactory to learn that in our South African colony at least, the native population has not been entirely sacrificed to the white man.

At Durban there is a funny little railway between the town and the ‘Point;’ ‘a railway,’ says Lady Barker, ‘so calm and stately in its method of progression, that it is not at all unusual to see a passenger step deliberately out when it is at its fullest speed of crawl, and wave his hand to his companions as he disappears down the by-path leading to his little home. The passengers are conveyed at a uniform rate of sixpence a head, which sixpence is collected promiscuously by a small boy at odd moments during the journey.’

A great, indeed an inexhaustible, charm of the country is the wonderful profusion and variety of flowers which grow everywhere; precious things only to be seen here in stately glass houses and per favour of scientific head-gardeners, growing in wild abundance, hiding the ugliness of buildings, delighting the eyes and cheering the heart of the colonist. As the drawbacks to a residence in ‘fair Natal’ are numerous and undeniable, it is right to dwell a little upon the exceeding beauty of floral nature there. If flowers could only be eaten, what a prosperous place Natal would be, or if the soil would only grow cereals as it grows flowers! To walk on the grassy downs is to walk among beautiful lilies in scarlet and white clusters, endless varieties of periwinkles, purple and white cinerarias, and golden bushes of the Cape broom, which we all know here as so great a beautifier of landscape. Tall arum lilies fill every water-washed hollow in the spriuts (or brooks), and ferns of all kinds abound.

If the Kaffirs would work with even moderate application, the formation of a luxuriant garden of fruit, flowers, and vegetables would be easily within the reach of any dweller on the soil. The grass is always cleared away for a considerable distance round the house, because snakes are unpleasantly numerous, and grass affords cover for them; in the instances of fine gardens, a broad walk of a deep rich red colour intervening between the house and the gardens, contrasts beautifully with the flower-beds, which are as big as small fields.

The red soil is very destructive to clothing, but it adds to the beauty of the landscape. ‘Green things,’ says the author, describing a Natal garden, ‘which we are accustomed to see in England in small pots, shoot up here to the height of laurel bushes. In shady places grow many varieties of fern and blue hydrangea, and verbena of every shade flourish. But the great feature of this garden is roses, of at least a hundred different sorts, which grow untrained, unpruned, in enormous bushes covered by magnificent blossoms; each bloom of which would win the prize at a rose-show. Red roses, white roses, tea roses, blush roses, moss roses, and the clear old-fashioned cabbage rose, sweetest and most sturdy of all; there they are at every turn—hedges of them, screens of them, and giant bushes of them on either hand.’ Add to this a bright swift brook trickling through the garden, the constant sweet song of the Cape canary, and crowds of large butterflies of ‘all glorious hues,’ which are quite fearless and familiar, perching on the flowers and on the walks, and one gets a delightful notion of a Natal garden.

This is, however, the bright side of the picture of life in our South African colony; its practical aspects are less enticing, though the drawbacks are chiefly such as will be removed in most cases, and modified in all, when railway traffic shall be established in the country; a devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, not very distant. At present, we are told, the necessaries of life are very expensive and difficult to procure; the importation of English servants is almost always a failure; and the Kaffirs, though they have many good qualities, are difficult to teach, very lazy, and given to starting off to their native kraals for an improvised holiday of uncertain duration, without the smallest regard to domestic exigences or the convenience of their employers.

The soil is wonderfully prolific but under-cultivated, and the cost of transport is enormous. Here is a statement which will no doubt in a few years be looked back upon with wonder by the author herself, and read with self-gratulatory retrospective compassion by settlers in Natal under the railway regime: ‘The country’ (between Maritzburg and Durban) ‘is beautiful; but except for a scattered homestead here and there, not a sign of a human dwelling is there on its green and fertile slopes. All along the road, shrill bugle-blasts warned the trailing ox-wagons, with their naked “forelooper,” at their head, to creep aside out of the way of the open brake in which we travelled. I counted one hundred and twenty wagons that day on fifty miles of road. Now, if one considers that each of these wagons is drawn by a span of thirty or forty oxen, one has some faint idea of how such a method of transport must use up the material of the country. Something like ten thousand oxen toil over this one road summer and winter; and what wonder is it not only that merchandise costs more to fetch up from Durban to Maritzburg than it does to bring out from England, but that beef is dear and bad?

As transport pays better than farming, we hear on all sides of farms thrown out of cultivation; and in the neighbourhood of Maritzburg it is esteemed a favour to let you have either milk or butter at exorbitant prices and of most inferior quality. When one looks round at these countless acres of splendid grazing-land, making a sort of natural park on either hand, it seems like a bad dream to know that we have constantly to use preserved milk and potted meat, as being cheaper and easier to procure than fresh.’

Durban is a picturesque town, but the sand and the dust are overpowering. Fine timber abounds; the different kinds of wood having the queerest of names. Three of the hardest and handsomest native woods are called respectively stink-wood, breeze-wood, and sneeze-wood. In Durban too, magnificent flowers are everywhere in the utmost profusion; at the fÊte of ‘The First Sod’ the spot was beautifully decorated with plants and blossoms which would have cost a large sum in England; but these were cheaper than the nails and string used in their arrangement. This fÊte of ‘The First Sod’ afforded a favourable opportunity for seeing all classes of the population, colonists, Kaffirs, and coolies, for they all flocked into Durban; and Lady Barker says a shrewd thing in reference to the populace in general: ‘It was the most orderly and respectable crowd which could possibly be seen. In fact, such a crowd would be an impossibility in England or any higher civilised country. There were no dodging vagrants, no slatternly women, no squalid, starving babies. In fact, our civilisation has not yet mounted to effervescence, so we have no dregs.’

We have been told wonders of the salubrity and delightfulness of the climate of Natal; but Lady Barker does not indorse the statements in which we have hitherto placed confidence. The alternations of heat and cold are very trying; the rains are sudden and violent; and thunder-storms are of almost daily occurrence and great severity. After one very grand storm she found a multitude of beautiful butterflies dead on the garden paths; their plumage was not dimmed nor their wings broken; they might have been ready prepared for a collection, quite dead and stiff.

Amongst the fauna of Natal, birds, reptiles, and insects abound. The natives suffer much from snake-bites, and white new-comers from mosquitos; all classes from ‘ticks,’ which also persecute the dogs and horses. The native language is very melodious and easily learned; and the Kaffirs pick up a little English readily enough. They are indeed a clever race and very home-loving. One genius of the author’s acquaintance, called ‘Sixpence,’ had actually accompanied his master to England, whence he returned with a terrible recollection of an English winter, and a deep-rooted amazement at the boys of the Shoe Brigade who wanted to clean his boots. That astonished him, Sixpence declares, more than anything else. Lady Barker is emphatic in her advice to all colonists that they should make up their minds from the first to have Kaffir servants. One ‘Tom,’ a nurse-boy, figures in her book most amusingly; he is a capital fellow; and it is to be hoped he has abandoned the intention, which he confided to his mistress, of resigning his position after ‘forty moons,’ because by that time he should be in a position to buy plenty of wives, who would work for him and support him for the rest of his life. A Kaffir servant usually gets a pound a month, his clothes, and food. The clothes consist of a shirt and trousers of coarse check cotton, and a soldier’s cast-off greatcoat for winter—all the old uniforms of Europe find their way to South Africa; and the food is plenty of ‘mealies’—or maize meal for ‘scoff,’ the native name for a mixture which probably resembles porridge. If a servant be worth making comfortable, one gives him a trifle every week to buy meat. The only effectual punishment and the sole restraint which can be placed on the Kaffir propensity to break things, is a system of fines.

A native kraal consists of a cluster of huts which exactly resemble huge beehives. There is a rude attempt at sod-fencing round them, and a few head of cattle graze in the neighbourhood. Women roughly scratch the earth with crooked hoes to form a mealy-ground. Cows and mealies are all the Kaffirs require, except blankets and tobacco. The latter is smoked out of a cow’s horn. ‘They seem a very gay and cheerful people,’ says the author, ‘to judge by the laughter and jests I hear from the groups returning to their kraals every day by the road just outside our fence. Sometimes one of the party carries an umbrella; and the effect of a tall Kaffir clad in nothing at all, and carefully guarding his bare head with a tattered “Gamp,” is very ridiculous. Often one of the party walks first, playing upon a rude pipe; whilst the others jig after him, laughing and capering like boys let loose from school, and all chattering loudly.’

No man, except he be a white settler’s servant, ever carries a burden. When an ‘induna’ or chief is ‘on the track,’ he rides a sorry nag, resting only the point of his great toe in the stirrup, like the Abyssinians. He is followed by his ‘tail’ or great men, who carry bundles of sticks and keep up with the ambling steed. Then come the wives, bearing heavy loads on their heads; but walking with firm erect carriage, their shapely arms and legs bare, their bodies, from shoulder to knee, clothed in some coarse stuff, which they drape in exquisite folds. Lady Barker describes the Kaffir women as looking neither oppressed nor discontented, but healthy, happy, jolly, lazy, and slow to appreciate any benefit from civilisation, except the money, concerning which they, in common with most savages, display a keenness of comprehension hardly to be improved upon.

A dozen miles from Maritzburg, on the road which forms the first stage of the great overland journey to the Diamond Fields, is the little town of Hawick, on the river Umgeni, which widens down just beneath it to an exquisitely beautiful fall. Over the brink goes the wide, smooth, waveless sheet of water, in an absolutely straight descent of three hundred and twenty feet. From the highest point of the road above the river, the Drakensberg Mountains, snow-covered, except in the hottest summer, are visible, and though majestic, they are disappointing. They are a splendid range of level lines, far up beyond the floating clouds. ‘I miss,’ says the author, ‘the serrated peaks of the Southern Alps and the grand confusion of the Himalayan range. This is evidently the peculiarity of the mountain formation of South Africa; I noticed it first in Table Mountain at Cape Town; it is repeated in every little hill between Durban and Maritzburg, and carried out on a gigantic scale in this splendid range.’

Lady Barker made an interesting excursion of over one hundred miles into the Bush, where she saw real savage Kaffir life, splendid forest scenes, and came on traces of the wild animals, which are being rapidly exterminated. With one forest picture we regretfully take leave of this interesting volume: ‘The tall stately trees around, with their smooth magnificent boles, shoot up straight as a willow wand for sixty feet and more before putting forth their crown of leafy branches; the more diminutive undergrowth of gracefulest shrubs and plumy tufts of fern and lovely wild-flowers, violets, clematis, wood anemones, and hepaticas, shewing here and there a modest gleam of colour. But indeed the very mosses and lichens at our feet are a week’s study, and so are the details of the delicate green tracery creeping close to the ground. Up above our heads the foliage is interlaced and woven together by a perfect network of “monkey-ropes,” a stout and sturdy species of liane, which are used by the troops of baboons which live in those great woods, coming down in armies when the mealies are ripe, and carrying off the cobs by armfuls.’ It is spring-tide (September) when Lady Barker lays down her pen; soon, we hope, to resume it, and tell us of the growth of the colony. ‘Everything is bursting hurriedly and luxuriantly into bloom. The young oaks are a mass of tender green, and even the unpoetical blue gums try hard to assume a fresh spring tint. The fruit-trees look like large bouquets of pink blossom, and the loquot trees afford good sport in climbing and stone-throwing amid their cluster of yellow plums. On the veldt the lilies are pushing up their green sheaths and white or scarlet cups through the yet hard ground, and the black hill-slopes are turning a vivid green, and the flowers are springing up in millions all over my field like flower-beds. Spring is always lovely everywhere, but nowhere is it lovelier than in fair Natal.’