NOTES ON THE MASARWA: THE BUSHMEN OF THE INTERIOR OF SOUTH AFRICA

First Bushmen seen by author in 1872—Armed with bows and arrows—Large areas of country uninhabited except by Bushmen—The Masarwa—Origin of the word "Vaalpens"—Dwarf race mentioned by Professor Keane—Notes on the language of the Bushmen north of the Orange river—Apparently very similar to that spoken by the Koranas—The author's faithful Korana servant—The Nero family—Physical dissimilarity between the Koranas and the Masarwa—Stature of Bushmen met with north of the Orange river—Probably a pure race—The Bakalahari—Livingstone's account of them—Khama's kindness to them—Habits and mode of life of the Masarwa—Their weapons—Bows and poisoned arrows—Food of the Bushmen—Bush children tracking tortoises—Terrible privations sometimes endured by Bushmen—Provision against famine—A giraffe hunt—Rotten ostrich egg found by Bushmen and eaten—Fundamental difference of nature between Bushmen and civilised races not great—Personal experiences with Bushmen—Their marvellous endurance—Skill as hunters and trackers—Incident with lion—Family affection amongst Bushmen—Not unworthy members of the human race.

In previous chapters I have often referred to the Masarwa Bushmen, the remnants probably of one of the oldest and most primitive races of mankind still surviving on the earth, and as my personal knowledge of these people is very considerable, I think that a few notes concerning their habits, language, and mode of life will prove of interest, if not to all who are likely to glance over the pages of this book, at any rate to some few amongst them who believe that "the noblest study of mankind is man."

The first Bushmen I ever saw were met with on the banks of the Orange river on January 4, 1872, in the country then occupied by the Korana chief Klas Lucas and his people.

In my diary of that date I made the following notes of this experience:—

"January 4, 1872.—Whilst poking about along the river, looking for guinea-fowls, I came upon a Bushman's lair amongst the trees by the water's edge. A few boughs woven together and forming a sort of canopy was all they had in the way of a habitation; the only weapons they possessed were rude-looking bows and neatly made poisoned arrows, some about two and a half feet in length, fashioned from reeds, whilst others were only a foot long. Their language seemed even fuller of clicks and clucks than the Korana, and altogether to a casual observer they appeared to be very few steps removed from the brute creation. The following day three more Bushmen came to the waggon begging for tobacco; they were taller and better looking than those I had first seen."

During the following month (February 1872) I met with a good many more Bushmen, and hunted with them in the Southern Kalahari to the west of the Scurfde Berg. At that time these people had no firearms of any kind, but they all carried small toy-like bows and bark quivers containing poisoned arrows.

During the twenty years succeeding my first meeting with Bushmen on the banks of the Orange river, I met with scattered communities of this primitive race throughout every portion of the interior of the country, where Bantu tribes had not been able to establish themselves owing to the aridity of the soil and the scarcity of water in sufficient quantities to satisfy the needs of a settled population possessed of large herds of cattle, sheep, and goats.

Thus at least nineteen-twentieths of the whole of the enormous area of country included in the Bechwanaland Protectorate are entirely uninhabited except by the descendants of the aboriginal Bushmen, the more civilised Bantu living crowded together in a few large towns. Khama's old town of Shoshong, which was abandoned more than twenty years ago, was said to contain 20,000 inhabitants, practically his whole tribe.

In the last Annual Report of the Transvaal Native Affairs Department, it is stated that the Bushmen living in the valley of the Limpopo in the Northern Transvaal are known as Maseroa, and are distinct from the ordinary South African Bushmen.

All the Bushmen I have seen, whether those living on or near the Orange river, or along the eastern border of the Kalahari, or throughout the Bechwanaland Protectorate, from the Chobi river to Lake N'gami and the Botletlie, and from thence to the Limpopo, appeared to me to be very much the same in appearance and absolutely identical in their ways of life and the fashion of their dress and weapons. Here and there no doubt there has been a certain admixture of Bantu blood amongst them; but seeing how little they vary as a rule both in appearance and in habits and manner of life in widely separated areas, I think that for the most part they must be a pure and distinct race throughout the greater part of the countries they inhabit.

The name given by Khama's people to the Bushmen living in the country ruled over by that chief, which is spelt "Maseroa" in the Report above referred to, is pronounced—at least so it always seemed to me—Ma-sarr-wa (with the "r" very much rolled), and the singular—the word signifying "a Bushman"—ought, I should think, to be Li-sar-wa.

The name "Vaalpens," often applied by the Boers to Bushmen, signifies "grey belly," and has been given to them because, having no huts, but sleeping as they do in the open, they often lie so close to the fire on cold nights that they blister themselves on their shins and abdomens. The skin thus burnt peels off and is replaced by new skin of a lighter colour than that of the rest of the body. Bushmen may often be seen with their legs and bellies covered with such unsightly scars, and it is such blistered patches of skin on their abdomens which has earned them the name of "Vaalpens," or "grey belly."

Although I have travelled in the Zoutpansberg, Waterberg, and Dwarsberg districts of the Northern Transvaal, I have never met with or heard of the dwarf race spoken of by Professor Keane in his book on The Boer States. These people, Professor Keane says, are the only genuine Vaalpens, and are almost entirely confined to the above-named and adjacent districts of the North Transvaal as far as the banks of the Limpopo. Professor Keane further says that these people call themselves "Kattea," and that they are almost pitch-black in colour, only about four feet high, and quite distinct both from their tall Bantu neighbours and from the yellowish Bushmen.

It would be interesting to learn where Professor Keane got his information concerning this remarkable race of people. Personally, I find it difficult to believe in their existence, as I have been acquainted with so many Boers who had hunted for years in the very districts in which they are said to exist, or to have existed, and yet have never heard any one of them speak of a dwarf race of black Bushmen. Moreover, I have myself met with Bushmen of the same type as those I have seen in other parts of South Africa, both in the Waterberg district of the Transvaal to the south of the Limpopo and also in the desert country not far to the west of the Dwarsberg.

I believe that the researches of the late Dr. Bleek, the well-known philologist, tended to show that there was little or no affinity between the languages spoken by the Bushmen inhabiting the south-western districts of the Cape Colony and the Hottentot tribes living in the same part of the country. On the other hand, the well-known missionary, the late Dr. Robert Moffat, wrote: "Genuine Hottentots, Koranas, and Namaquas meeting for the first time from their respective and distant tribes could converse with scarcely any difficulty." The Bushmen, however, Dr. Moffat said, "speak a variety of languages, even when nothing but a range of hills or a river intervenes between the tribes, and none of these dialects is understood by the Hottentots." As bearing upon the subject of the affinity or otherwise of the language spoken by the Koranas living in Griqualand and along the Orange river with that of the Bushmen of the interior of South Africa, I must now make an extract from a book written by myself and published in 1893 (Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa) relating to this question.

Although I cannot but consider that the facts which I then brought forward were really of some value, I do not think that they have ever been noticed by any one interested in the study of the origin and affinities of the various native races in South Africa, and I am anxious, therefore, to put them on record once more.

The passage I refer to reads as follows:—"In 1871 a Korana boy named John entered my service, and went to the interior with me the following year; and as he had previously learned to speak Dutch from a Griqua master, I could converse freely with him. In 1873, when elephant-hunting in the Linquasi district to the west of Matabeleland, we saw a great many Masarwas (Bushmen), and noticing that their language, full of clicks and clucks and curious intonations of the voice, was similar in character to that I had heard spoken by the Koranas on the banks of the Orange river in 1871, I asked John if he could understand them, but he only laughed and said, 'No, sir.' During the next two years, however, John had a lot to do with the Masarwas; and one day, towards the end of 1874, as we were returning from the Zambesi to Matabeleland, I heard him conversing quite familiarly with some of these people. 'Hullo, John,' I said, 'I thought you told me that you could not understand the Bushmen?' 'Well, sir,' he answered, 'at first I thought I couldn't, but gradually I found that I could understand them, and that they understood me, and, in fact, I can say that with a few slight differences these Bushmen speak the same language as my people on the Orange river.' A Griqua family too, the Neros, who for many years lived in Matabeleland, all spoke Sasarwa (the language of the Masarwas) with perfect fluency, and they all assured me that they had had no difficulty in learning it, as it was almost the same language as that spoken by the Koranas." Now surely these facts are worthy of note. My boy John (who ran away from the Griqua master whose slave he then was and came to me in 1871) followed my fortunes for twenty-five years, and was always a most faithful servant, and in his younger days a very good elephant hunter. He is still alive to-day, and long ago christened himself John Selous.

John was born (probably about the middle of the last century) and brought up on the banks of the Orange river, being a member of the Korana clan ruled over by Klas Lucas. He is an absolutely pure Korana by blood, of a pale yellow brown in colour, beautifully proportioned, with small, delicately made hands and feet, and the sparse-growing peppercorn hair which I have often seen amongst full-blooded Koranas, but only rarely amongst the Bushmen living in the countries north and west of the Transvaal, who are, moreover, darker skinned than the majority of the Koranas of the Orange river, though very much lighter, as a rule, than Bantu Kafirs.

John, speaking as his native tongue one of the most extraordinary of known languages—a language full of clicks and clucks and curious intonations of the voice, and absolutely impossible of acquirement by a full-grown European—travelled with me some eight hundred miles to the north of the country where he was born on the banks of the Orange river, and there met with a race of wild people living in the desert country immediately south of the Zambesi, who he found, much to his surprise, spoke a language so similar to his own mother-tongue that, after a very little intercourse with them, he was not only able to understand what they said, but to talk to them with perfect fluency. Is not this a most remarkable fact, well worthy the attention of philologists?

When John first told me that, by listening attentively to the Bushmen inhabiting the country immediately to the south of the Chobi and Zambesi rivers, he soon discovered that they were speaking a language very similar to his own, he concluded his explanation by saying in Dutch: "Ik kan maar say daat's de selde taal" ("I can just say it's the same language").

The Nero family, with their dependents, numbered some eight or ten persons, amongst whom was a pure-blooded Korana woman named "Mina," a lady most bountifully endowed with all the physical characteristics peculiar to the Hottentot race. These people all came originally from Griqualand, and they all spoke Dutch in addition to Sintabele (the language of the Matabele) and their mother-tongue, which they told me was Korana. I have heard all these people over and over again talking with the most perfect ease and fluency with the Masarwa Bushmen inhabiting the country to the west of Matabeleland, and they all assured me that they had had no difficulty in learning Sasarwa, as it was practically the same as the language spoken by the Koranas living in Griqualand and along the Orange river.

The apparent uniformity of the language spoken by the scattered families of Bushmen living in widely separated areas of country in the interior of South Africa is somewhat remarkable. My boy John could converse without any difficulty not only with the Masarwas we met with in the valley of the Limpopo, but also with those we came across in the country between the Chobi and Mababi rivers, several hundred miles farther north, although there was never any intercourse between these widely separated clans.

In 1879 I became very well acquainted with Tinkarn, one of Khama's headmen, who has a very thorough knowledge of, and great influence over, the Bushmen living throughout the country over which that chief exercises jurisdiction. I first met Tinkarn in the neighbourhood of the Mababi river, and subsequently travelled with him from there to Shoshong, and later on again met him on the Limpopo. The Masarwa in the Mababi undoubtedly spoke the same language as those living only a couple of days' journey farther north, with whom I heard my boy John talking in 1874, and these latter, according to John, spoke the same language as the Bushmen living in the Limpopo valley near the mouth of the Shashi. Farther west, I have listened to Tinkarn conversing not only with the Masarwa of the Mababi, but also with Bushmen living on the Botletlie river, and in many places in the desert between there and Shoshong, and also with some of these people living on the Limpopo. Tinkarn told me that he had learned the language of the Bushmen when he was a child, and I always thought that he spoke to all of them in the same language, not in a number of dialects. At any rate, he was perfectly fluent with all of them.

Although, however, there would seem to be strong presumptive evidence that all the various families or tribes of Bushmen living scattered over the more arid regions of South-Western Africa to the north of the Orange river speak a language, or dialects of a language, which is essentially the same as that spoken by the Koranas, yet, speaking generally, all the Bushmen I have seen differ considerably in physical appearance not only from pure-blooded Koranas—very few of whom are left to-day—but also from the descriptions I have read of the dwarf race of Bushmen that used to inhabit the Cape Colony. It is these latter whose language was studied by Dr. Bleek, and pronounced to be fundamentally different to that of the Hottentot tribes inhabiting the country near Cape Town. That, prior to the incursion of the tall, dark-coloured Bantu tribes from the north, the whole of Africa south of the Zambesi was inhabited by a race akin to the Bushmen of the Cape Colony is, I think, proved by the similarity of the rock-paintings in Mashunaland and Manicaland—which I think that I was the first to discover—to those existing in caves in many parts of the Orange and Cape Colonies.

I have never seen any pigmy Bushmen. Those I met with on the Orange river and in the country to the west of Griqualand in 1872, as well as a small number I saw near the Vaal river above its junction with the Orange in the same year, may not have been as tall as the average of the Masarwa farther north, but I feel sure that all the men were well over five feet in height.

Speaking generally, I should say that the Bushmen that I have seen—and they were many—whilst they were considerably lighter in colour and shorter and more slightly built than Kafirs, were at the same time darker skinned than most Koranas, and neither so thickset nor so short of stature as the average of those people.

The average height of the Masarwa men I have met with in the country extending from the western border of Matabeleland to Lake N'gami would certainly, I think, be over 5 feet 4 inches, and I have seen many of these people standing quite 5 feet 8 or 9 inches, and a few even 6 feet.

I have, however, occasionally seen men amongst them of a distinctly Korana type, short and stout built in figure, very light in colour, with small black glittering eyes, high cheek-bones, and hair growing in small tufts. There were two young men of this type amongst the Masarwa Bushmen living near the Mababi river in 1884. They reminded me very forcibly of the life-sized figure of a Cape Colony Bushman in the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, though they were, I think, nearly if not quite five feet in height. From time to time, no doubt, members of various Bantu tribes have fled to the desert for refuge from their enemies and amalgamated with the Bushmen, and this may account for the greater stature observable amongst certain clans of Masarwas, when compared with full-blooded Koranas, or with the Bushmen of the Cape Colony, and the very general absence of the peppercorn growth of the hair in the former which is general in the latter; but if further investigation should definitely establish the fact that there is a very close similarity between the very peculiar languages spoken by the Koranas on the Orange river and all the scattered Masarwa clans that wander over the arid country stretching from the Limpopo to the Chobi river, there must be a very close racial connection between the two peoples. On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the greater part of the Bushmen I have met with were of pure race, with very little, if any, admixture of Bantu blood in their veins.

I never remember to have noticed any marked tendency to that wonderful development of the buttocks (steatopygia) in Masarwa women which is so characteristic a feature in pure-bred Korana women after they have reached middle age. Bushmen and Bushwomen, however, lead terribly hard lives, and do not often get the chance to become really fat, in the districts in which I have met with them. Should they do so, the men noticeably—far more so than the women—put on more flesh on the buttocks than do well-fed Europeans; but this is the case with the men of all the Bantu races as well. All the members of the royal family of Matabeleland, both male and female, who had passed middle age showed a most extraordinary development of the thighs and buttocks.

In addition to the yellow-skinned Bushmen, however, who are without doubt the oldest aboriginal race in South Africa, there are—or were—also to be found living in the eastern part of the Kalahari a few scattered communities of a race known to the Bechwanas as Bakalahari—they of the desert.

Speaking of these people, Dr. Livingstone wrote long ago, in that most admirable book Missionary Travels: "The Bakalahari are traditionally reported to be the oldest of the Bechwana tribes, and they are said to have possessed enormous herds of the large horned cattle mentioned by Bruce, until they were despoiled of them and driven into the desert by a fresh migration of their own nation. Living ever since on the same plains with the Bushmen, subjected to the same influences of climate, enduring the same thirst and subsisting on similar food for centuries, they seem to supply a standing proof that locality is not always sufficient of itself to account for difference in races. The Bakalahari retain in undying vigour the Bechwana love for agriculture and domestic animals. They hoe their gardens annually, though often all they can hope for is a supply of melons and pumpkins. And they carefully rear small herds of goats, though I have seen them lift water for them out of small wells with a bit of ostrich egg-shell or by spoonfuls."

I used to think that the Bakalahari were a mixed race formed by the amalgamation of broken Bechwana tribes with the desert Bushmen. But I believe there is no warrant for this. Though all those I have seen spoke the language of the Bushmen as well as Sechwana, there can be no doubt that Dr. Livingstone was quite right in saying that, although the Bakalahari have lived a life of terrible hardship and privation for centuries in the desert, they still remain in character true Bechwanas, with all the love of that race for agriculture and stock-breeding.

Under the kind and just rule of Khama many Bakalahari have given up their nomadic life and once more become a settled agricultural tribe. They were supplied with seed-corn and given cattle, sheep, and goats to look after, and in 1879 I found large communities of these once miserable outcasts living near the wells of Klabala, cultivating large areas of ground, and growing so much Kafir corn and maize that, except in seasons of severe drought, they would never again have been likely to suffer from the famine against which their immediate ancestors had constantly struggled. These people, too, were tending considerable herds of cattle, sheep, and goats belonging to Khama, a portion of the increase of which was given to them every year.

I do not think there is any instance on record of a tribe or family of the aboriginal yellow Bushmen having given up their wild free life in the desert and taken to agricultural or pastoral pursuits.

In habits and mode of life true Bushmen seem to be the same wherever they are met with, and the Masarwa—the Bushmen of the interior of South Africa—certainly resemble very closely in these respects the descriptions I have read of their now almost extinct kinsmen of the Cape Colony. They build no huts, but merely erect temporary small shelters of boughs with a little dry grass thrown on the top. They neither sow nor reap any kind of grain, nor do they possess any kind of domestic animals, except small jackal-like dogs, which cannot bark. They obtain fire very rapidly with two pieces of wood. One of these is held flat on the ground by the feet of a man sitting down, whilst the other, the end of which has been placed in a small notch cut for its reception, is whirled rapidly round between the open hands, until the fine wood dust produced by the friction begins to smoulder, when it is placed amongst some dry grass and blown into flame.

The dress for men, women, and girls amongst the Masarwa is the same as that which used to be worn by the Bechwana and Makalaka tribes before these latter had come in contact with Europeans. They obtain iron-headed spears and earthenware cooking pots from the neighbouring Kafir tribes in exchange for the skins of wild animals, their only native weapon being the bow and arrow. Their bows are very small and weak-looking, and their arrows are unfeathered, being made of light reeds into the ends of which bone heads are inserted. These bone arrow-heads are always thickly smeared with poison, which seems to be made from the body of a grub or caterpillar mixed with gum. At least, in the bark quivers of the Bushmen whose belongings I have examined, I have usually found, besides their arrows and fire-sticks, a small bark cylinder closed at one end, in which were the bodies of grubs or caterpillars preserved in gum, which I was told contained the poison they smeared on their arrows.

The Masarwa living immediately to the west of Matabeleland have long since discarded their bows and poisoned arrows in favour of firearms, but twenty or thirty years ago these curiously toy-like but very effective weapons were in general use amongst the Bushmen living in the deserts to the south and west of the Botletlie river.

Except that they do not eat grass, Bushmen are almost as omnivorous as bears. Besides the flesh of every kind of animal from an elephant to a mouse (which is acceptable to them in any and every stage of decomposition), they eat certain kinds of snakes, fish, lizards, frogs, tortoises, grubs, locusts, flying ants, wild honey, young bees, ostrich eggs, nestling birds of all sorts, and various kinds of berries, bulbs, and roots. Bushwomen may often be met with miles away from their encampments, wandering alone over the desert wastes they inhabit, searching for edible roots and bulbs, which they dig up with pointed sticks. The children, too, begin to forage for themselves at a very early age, and I have seen little mites, apparently not more than two or three years old, crawling on their hands and knees on the tracks of tortoises. It was explained to me that these reptiles make light scratches on the ground with their claws as they walk along, and these almost imperceptible marks the infant Bushmen are taught to follow. No wonder they grow up to be good game trackers!

In many parts of the countries the Bushmen inhabit not only does game periodically become scarce or almost non-existent, but all other sources of food supply are liable at times to fail them as well.

At such times these wild people sometimes endure the most terrible privations, and no doubt numbers of them succumb yearly to slow starvation.

I have often met with families of Bushmen all the members of which were in such a terrible state of emaciation that it seemed a marvel that they were still alive. In such cases the flesh appeared to have almost completely wasted away from their legs and arms, leaving nothing but the bones encased in dry yellow-brown skin, whilst their faces looked like skulls covered with parchment, though the small black eyes still glittered from the depths of their sockets.

Whenever I have encountered Bushmen in this condition, they were never actually without food, but, in default of anything better, seemed to have been living for a long time past on certain kinds of berries, which were so innutritious that very large quantities had to be eaten to support life at all. The consequence was that the bellies of these slowly starving savages were always enormously distended, giving them a most grotesque though pitiable appearance.

If some large animal such as a giraffe or elephant be killed and given to a starving Bushman family they will all manage to get to the carcase, though it be miles away and they appear to be in the last stage of emaciation. Once there, it is with the men a case of "J'y suis, j'y reste," and they will not move again until every bit of the meat is eaten. The women and children have to fetch water every day, though it may be miles distant. However wasted and apparently near death Bushmen may be, once they get alongside of a dead elephant they recover flesh and regain their strength in a marvellously short space of time.

When hunting in the Linquasi district to the west of Matabeleland, in 1873, I often noticed large pieces of rhinoceros and giraffe hide which had evidently been placed by human hands high up in the branches of trees. These slabs of hide, the Bushmen told me, had belonged to animals killed by their people, and had been placed in the trees out of the reach of hyÆnas as a provision against starvation in times of famine.

I was once riding behind some hungry Bushmen looking for giraffe in the country between the Mababi and Botletlie rivers, when they came on a single ostrich egg lying on the ground. It was then late in September, and this egg had in all probability been laid in the previous May or June, and had lain on the ground in the broiling sun ever since.

My gaunt and hungry guides seemed greatly excited over their find, and each of them in turn held it up and shook it close to his ear. Then I saw they were going to break it, so I moved to one side, as I expected it would go off with a loud explosion. It was, however, long past that stage, all the contents of the egg having solidified into a thick brown-coloured paste at the one end. I never would have believed, if I had not experienced it, that so much smell could have been given off by so small an amount of matter. As I once heard an American lady remark of the atmosphere of a small mosque in which we had been watching some dancing Dervishes at Constantinople, it gave off "a poor odour"—one of the poorest, I think, I have ever encountered, in her sense of the word, though by many people it might have been thought too rich.

With the Bushmen, however, an egg in the hand was evidently considered to be worth more than a problematical animal in the bush, and they at once sat down, and taking turn and turn about, slowly and with evident relish licked up the foetid contents of the treasure which fortune had thrown in their way. Up to this time we had not even seen the fresh track of a giraffe, but not long afterwards we sighted a magnificent old bull, which I managed to kill for them after a hard gallop through some very thick and thorny bush.

When I met with the first Bushmen I ever saw on the banks of the Orange river, in 1872, I was a very young man, and regarding them with some repugnance, wrote in my diary that they appeared to be very few steps removed from the brute creation. That was a very foolish and ignorant remark to make, and I have since found out that though Bushmen may possibly be to-day in the same backward state of material development and knowledge as once were the palÆolithic ancestors of the most highly cultured European races in prehistoric times, yet fundamentally there is very little difference between the natures of primitive and civilised men, so that it is quite possible for a member of one of the more cultured races to live for a time quite happily and contentedly amongst beings who are often described as degraded savages, and from whom he is separated by thousands of years in all that is implied by the word "civilisation." I have hunted a great deal with Bushmen, and during 1884 I lived amongst these people continuously for several months together. On many and many a night I have slept in their encampments without even any Kafir attendants, and though I was entirely in their power, I always felt perfectly safe amongst them. As most of the men spoke Sechwana, I was able to converse with them, and found them very intelligent companions, full of knowledge concerning the habits of all the wild animals inhabiting the country in which they lived. I found the Bushmen very good-tempered people, and they are undoubtedly the best of all the natives of South Africa to have with one when in pursuit of game, as they are such wonderful trackers, and so intimately acquainted with the habits of every kind of wild animal. To be seen at their best they must be hungry, but not starving. They will then be capable of marvellous feats of endurance. I have known a Bushman run on elephant spoor in front of my horse for five hours, only very occasionally slowing down to a walk for a few minutes. He ran till it got dark, and as we had neither blankets nor food, which had been left with the Kafirs far behind, we lit a big fire, beside which we sat all night, not daring to lie down and sleep, for fear lest lions should kill my horse, which we had to watch whilst it fed round near the fire. When we took up the elephant tracks again the next morning, we had been twenty-four hours without food, and it was late in the afternoon before we were making a meal off elephant's heart. During the two days this Bushman must have walked and run for at least eighty miles without food or sleep, and he never showed the least sign of exhaustion. Living as they do in families or small communities, Bushmen have not developed any warlike qualities, and I cannot imagine any of them I have known being anxious "to seek the bubble glory at the cannon's mouth"; but for all that they are certainly more courageous with dangerous game than the generality of Kafirs. A friend of mine was once out looking for game on horseback, accompanied by a single Bushman. The Bushman, who was walking in front of the horse, suddenly spied a lion lying flat on the ground watching them, and less than fifty yards away. Raising his left hand as a sign to my friend to stop, he pointed at the crouching animal with his spear, at the same time retiring slowly backwards until he stood beside the horse. "Tauw ki-o" ("There is a lion"), he quietly said; but my friend for the life of him could not see it. The Bushman then again advanced, and taking the horse by the bridle, led it a few paces forwards, when his master at last saw the lion, and firing from the saddle, disabled it with the first shot, and finished it with a second. It was a fine big animal, but without much mane. My friend said it was the lion's eyes that he first saw, and then the twitching of its tail. He was very much pleased with the coolness and staunchness of the Bushman, quite a young man. Oh, if I had only had that Bushman for a gun-carrier on a certain day in 1877, when the most magnificently maned lion I ever saw in my life suddenly showed himself within twenty yards of me, and the wretched Makalaka who was carrying my rifle and was just behind me, instead of putting it into my outstretched hand, turned and ran off with it! Had I killed that lion, its skin would have been my trophy of trophies, but—kismet! it was not to be.

In 1874, 1877, and again in 1879, during which years I shot a great number of buffaloes along the Chobi river, and followed many of them into very thick cover after having wounded them, I always employed Bushmen to act as my gun-carriers, and better men for such work it would have been impossible to find, for not only were they always cool and self-possessed in any emergency, but the quickness of their eyesight, and their intimate knowledge of the animals we were pursuing, gave them a great advantage over the staunchest of gun-carriers drawn from any Kafir tribe.

Although the wives and children of Bushmen lead very hard lives, especially when food is scarce, and have always to keep the encampment supplied with water no matter how far it has to be carried, I have never seen them ill-treated, and I have seen both the men and the women show affection for their children. In fact, the Bushmen of South Africa, although they have never advanced beyond the primitive stage of culture attained to by their distant ancestors at a very remote period of the worlds history, are ethically much the same on the average as the members of all other races of mankind, which shows how little the fundamental nature of man has changed throughout the ages, and during the evolution and destruction of many civilisations. I have known Bushmen to be very grasping and avaricious, and to show an utter want of sympathy or kindness towards a fellow-man in distress; but has civilisation eliminated such defects of character in all members of the most highly cultured societies? Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, are crimes against the Bushman's code of morals, just as they are with more civilised peoples, and they are probably less frequently practised amongst primitive than amongst civilised races. A Bushman will resent an injury and be grateful for a kindness just like an Englishman, a Hindu, or a Red Indian. Whenever I was told, as I often was in South Africa, that all natives were black brutes who could not understand kindness and were incapable of gratitude, I always knew that the masterful gentleman or fair lady who was speaking to me had no kindness in their own natures, and that never in all their lives had they given any native the slightest reason to be grateful to them.

The Bushmen are the only really primitive race in South Africa, but, rude and uncultured though they may be, I cannot look upon them as degraded savages, but rather as a race whose development was arrested long ago, by the circumstances of their surroundings; but whose members, nevertheless, are beings whose human hearts can be touched and whose sympathies can be aroused by the kindness of another human being, however widely separated the latter may be from themselves in race and degree of culture. Well and truly has it been said by one of England's most illustrious sons, "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."