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John Mackenzie, who has worked for so many years in Bechuanaland, and who states in his recent work, entitled, "Austral Africa" "I come now to give my own thoughts as to the capabilities of Bechuanaland as a field for colonisation. My mind reverts at once to thrifty, and laborious people who are battling for dear-life on some small holding in England or Scotland, and who can barely make ends meet.
During my present journey I had a most interesting conversation one morning with a transport driver, who was travelling by the northern part of the Transvaal, with three hundred lean cattle from the Cape Colony into Bechuanaland. He gave me some very valuable and important information with regard to Colonial feeling in the country districts of the Cape Colony.
The bucolic ambition of the Boer, which is to dwell in a house from which he cannot see the smoke of his nearest neighbour's chimney, can be satisfied in a flat country only when the house stands in the midst of a farm many thousand morgen in extent. For a generation or two before the war, the Transvaalers had been encroaching upon Bechuanaland.
The expedition to Bechuanaland in 1884, under the command of Sir Charles Warren, was accompanied by a detachment of three balloons, and the following year balloons co-operated with the Sudan Expeditionary Force, when Major Elsdale carried out some photographic experiments from the air.
At the same time 3000 troops took their station in the north of Natal in readiness to attack the Transvaal Boers, should they fall upon Warren. It soon transpired, however, that the more respectable Boers had little sympathy with the raiders into Bechuanaland.
Of the half-hearted measures taken by the War and Colonial Offices in 1899, when a war with the Transvaal seemed to be more probable every day, one of the most intelligent was the commissioning of R. Baden-Powell, who had formerly served in Bechuanaland and had recently commanded the 5th Dragoon Guards, to "organize the defence of the Bechuanaland and Rhodesia frontiers."
These tribes, coming southward, occupied the east-central part of South Africa comprising modern Bechuanaland. Apparently they had started from the central lake country somewhere late in the fifteenth century, and by the middle of the eighteenth century one of their great chiefs, Tao, met the on-coming Hottentots.
It became the Magna Charta of the great British South Africa Company, which did for Africa what the East India Company did for India. Counting in Bechuanaland, it added more than 700,000 square miles to the British Empire.
He has a high opinion of the country, and a great idea of its future. His farm and store are situated on the borders of Bechuanaland; but he now wishes he had settled there, even in preference to where he is. He laughs at the idea of there being no water. He says there is plenty to be found at from seventeen to twenty-five feet below the surface. But he says it must be dug for.
He heard that a certain young lady who resided at Luipaardsvlei, near Krugersdorp, whose fiancé occupied a good position in the Bechuanaland Border Police, had received a letter from him at Mafeking to the effect that he intended paying her a visit about the New Year, and that he would not be alone, as the whole force was coming to Johannesburg.
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