United States or Lithuania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Along the edge of the stream to our left were placed Kaffir kraals, built in orderly groups with verandahs, after the Basutu fashion, and a very large part of the entire space of land was under cultivation. All of this I noted at once, as well as the extraordinary richness and depth of the soil, which for many ages past had been washed down from the mountain heights.
Half-way up, we saw the poor horse we had left sick the day before, lying dead, with dry foam all round his mouth, and half his skin taken off by some passing Basutu. A couple of hundred yards farther on we found another dying, left by the party who had started before us. It was in truth a valley of the shadow of death.
He was not the son of a chief, though related closely to the reigning family of the Basutu; and when, in an attack by Sikonyele, the tribe was driven out of one part, Sebituane was one in that immense horde of savages driven back by the Griquas from Kuruman in 1824.* He then fled to the north with an insignificant party of men and cattle.
For to bring home to all within her borders who bear rule and responsibility, from the village headman in India and Nigeria, the Basutu chief and the South Sea potentate, to the public opinion of Great Britain and the self-governing Dominions, the nature of the British Commonwealth, and the character of its citizenship and ideals, and to study how those ideals may be better expressed in its working institutions and executive government that is a task to which the present crisis beckons the minds of British citizens, a task which Britain owes not only to herself but to mankind.
The hands of the Cape Government were full with the Basutu war, so no help could be expected from it.
"That the Secocoeni war, which would have produced but little effect on a healthy constitution, has not only proved suddenly fatal to the resources and reputation of the Republic, but has shown itself to be a culminating point in the history of South Africa, in that a Makatee or Basutu tribe, unwarlike and of no account in Zulu estimation, successfully withstood the strength of the State, and disclosed for the first time to the native powers outside the Republic, from the Zambesi to the Cape, the great change that had taken place in the relative strength of the white and black races, that this disclosure at once shook the prestige of the white man in South Africa, and placed every European community in peril, that this common danger has caused universal anxiety, has given to all concerned the right to investigate its cause, and to protect themselves from its consequences, and has imposed the duty upon those who have the power to shield enfeebled civilisation from the encroachments of barbarism and inhumanity."
As a case in point I may quote that of Hlubi, the Basutu appointed chief of one of the divisions of Zululand, by Sir G. Wolseley. Hlubi is at heart a Christian, and a good man, and anxious to be baptized. The missionaries, however, refuse to baptize him, because he has two wives.
All that was required was a signature, and that once obtained the treaty was published and submitted to the Raad for confirmation, without a whisper being heard of the conditions under which this ignorant Basutu was induced to sign. Had no Commission visited Secocoeni, this treaty would afterwards have been produced against him in its entirety.
They can be roughly divided into two great races, the Amazulu and their offshoots, and the Macatee or Basutu tribes. All those of Zulu blood, including the Swazies, Mapock's Kafirs, the Matabele, the Knobnodes, and others are very warlike in disposition, and men of fine physique. They do not love war; in fact, they are timid and cowardly by nature, and only fight when they are obliged to.
Our approach had been observed by a crowd of natives, whose race I have never been able to determine accurately; they belonged to the Basutu and peaceful section of the Bantu peoples rather than to the Zulu and warlike. Several of these ran up to take the horses, gazing on us with astonishment, not unmixed with awe.
Word Of The Day