Stone Age Survivors in Africa

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1034, 26 July 1930, Page 18

Stone Age Survivors in Africa

HE oldest race of people in the world is doomed. A race which lives today in exactly the same way as man did ih pre-

historic times is fighting its last battle with fate In the; raightly wilderness of Africa’s Kala- j hari Desert (writes Eric Rosenthal for an American newspaper). Scientists, who lately visited these genuine remnants of Stone Age humanity in the midst of what settlers picturesquely entitle “The Great Thirst,” announce that the Masarwas, or Bushmen, as they are usually called in Africa, will have perished utterly before another half century, possibly before another 25 years pass. Unique efforts are being made by the Government of the. Union of South Africa, the British Dominion which rules the last home of these mysterious people, to preserve them as long as possible. Sorrowfully, scientists now maito known that there is no longer any question of reviving the vitality of those people. It seems certain that they are doomed, and all science caa do is to learn from the Masarwas how men actually lived 100,000 years ago. Not vely long ago the world was as tonished by the revelations of a fain ous French savant, the Abbe Breuti. who, together with his helpers, found wonderfully beautiful and accurate carvings and painting of extinct animals on the walls of certain caves in Spain. After all the ages that had passed since the days when the prehistoric little hunters of Southern Europe dropped their primitive brushes and flint tools, those drawings on the stone faces of subterranean caverns were as clear and as vividly coloured as on the forgotten morning when they were finished. Information of this and similar prehistoric finds were presently transmitted to Africa, where local research workers, after having compared copies of these petrolyphs with many existing in their own country, made the remarkable announcement that the race that accomplished such work in Europe when mankind was young actually survived in Africa. No sooner had this assertion been put before men of learning than they look a new and immeasurably increased interest in tbe Masarwas. Until then they had merely been con sidered one of the world’s most primitive tribes, but now it is realised that they provide the only pure-blooaed link between ourselves and the dim era preceding the Ayrans’s arrival in Europe.

Three to four thousand of these people with their astonishingly long pedigree are the only genuine, ufleontaminated survivors to be found on earth today. During the last 10 years white observers, have witnessed whole clans disappear, almost to the last man, and there is nothing to indicate that thij dying-out process can be stopped. Only a few centuries back Africa gave the busmmen a very different setting. Instead of being an obscure lemdant of a nation among 2.00,000,000 other folk, they were found and feared everywhere between Egypt and the Cape of Good Houe, with their tiny bows and snake-poisoned arrows, their inaudible, slinking, treacherous fashion of coming on and slaying all men who roused their anger. The dark, shriveled dwarfs awoke the terror of all Africans, black, white and brown. This ferocious attitude to all other races of mankind ultimately brought about their destruction. When Europeans settled in Africa the harrying and systematic killing off of the Bushmen started.' The little fellows came out of the mountains to the frontier ports and homesteads of the colonists, stealing

Dwarf Bushmen Who Shoot Foes with Poisoned Arrows . . . Seeking to Save Records of World's Oldest Race ...

cattle, killing the white farmers and their servants. They surprised hunting parties camped amid the bush and invariably killed every stranger who could be reached by their unerring, tiny arrows. Six inches was the length of most of these arrows, yet so' venomous was the liquid into which they were dipped— compounded of rotten meat, snake poison and secret vegetable mixtures unknown to modern science—that any one whose flesh wvas even grazed by the fearful missiles was straightway given up as doomed.

Small wonder that in the grim pioneering days of this continent, when settlers had to fight their way against barbarous Bantus and wild animals across the veld In an effort to make a new dominion, the Bushmen were shot down like dangerous teasts by the newcomers. Not only did the European settlers kill these “Ishmaels of the desert.” but other native tribes likewise considered them as their natural, permanent foes. Against rifles and other modern weapons the Masarwas’ Stone Age arms proved futile. Their numbers in all parts of the continent diminished until, at the beginning of the present century, only a few thousands remained.

All the good land, all the green hunting grounds, where they had killed the game on which they lived since time immemorial, was taken for farms by the new inhabitants of the country, -and the unfortunate, untamable fighters took their last stand

amid the sandy prairies of the great Kalahari. wilderness. Attempts , to befriend and civilise these human anachronisms have been made repeatedly, but they would never make a peace. As recently as 1920 Mr. Van Ryneveld, a magistrate administering justice over one of thefrontier districts within which the Bushmen survive, was shot dead with a poisoned arrow .while he tried to settle one - of their- grievances. Scores of European prospectors, explorers, policemen and hunters have been found dead in the country where these irrecpncilables hold sway. No wonder that the Bushman reserves are hardly ever visited by Europeans, even today. A very few pioneers hfc.ve succeeded in becoming intimate with these strange people. Quite recently an expedition which crossed “The Great Thirst” in motor-cars, brought one of the Masarwas from his empty homeland to the great, modern gold mining centre of Johannesburg. The poor fellow felt extremely unhappy among the many motor-cars, skyscrapers and street cars of the town, and in a very short time he obtained permission to seek out his native hunting ground again. A thousand-mile walk across veld,

bush, jungle and desert failed to upset this Bushman. He required no maps, sign-posts or instructions howto get home. Some inexplicable instinct, like that of a wild animal, enables these people to cross a continent more easily than oilier people pick their way across a city. Bewildering powers are possessed by the Bushmen, gifts which no modem races own. When trekking through a desert of sandhills, aH shifting in the wind and maddeningly similar in appearances so far as the white traveller can see, the Masarwas, by following some sense they themselves cannot explain, discover the trails that lead to safety. These tiny, incredibly shrivelled black people arq able to smell water 20 miles away, just as an animal does. Every white hunter in Africa yearns for a Bushman tracker, who can accurately tell the chances of catching a wild beast from its footprint in the mud.

Ever since the Bushmen were identified as being “the next of kin” to the Stone Age folk, science has been able to explain many habits and customs of that prehistoric race. Having been driven from their beloved mountain country by the pressure of tlieir enemies, the Bushmen can no longer live in caves, but throughout great areas of Africa one finds magnificent pictures painted on the walls of those rock dwellings where they formerly dwelt. No one who looks upon the wizened, low-browed dwarfs—Bushmen are never more than four feet high—would fancy that these people could give valuable data to distinguished students of painting. Yet advertising experts from America and England have testified to the fact that the Masarwa rock drawings, with their simple blocks of solid, effective colour, their beautifully balanced arrangements of figures and animals, their durable pigments and easily remembered ideas, are the most perfect posters to be found.

The traditional hostility of the oldtime settlers, who chased and shot the little men of the caves when colonisation began, has now disappeared, and is replaced with a desire to keep alive the rarest race under the sun. To such lengths will the South African authorities go in the desire to accomplish this that they are even ready to relax the game protection laws.

Masarwas attain ages which other nations would refuse to credit. Aarie, a slightly civilised bushman frequenting the neighbourhood of Middleburg, Cape Province, was authentically proved to be 160 years old. His record is by no means unequalled. Accurate figures are usually unobtainable, but by comparing the testimony of several white centenarians, all of whom remembered Aarie as a very venerable man, it became possible to make a reliable estimate. Between the Auob and the Nasob Rivers a tract of country as big as many American States, and without •an inhabitant, will be kept for the Bushmen.

There this dwindling race may last some extra years. Scientists hope to obtain sufficient gramophone records of their language, cinema films of their customs, and colour photographs of their appearance, to preserve fully the records of these Stone Age survivors. Uniquely accurate replicas of their physical build were secured by the Cape Town Museum, which, not contenting itself with modelled clay figures found in other collections, actually made casts from the living bodies of a number of Bushmen and their wives. None of the dwarfs objected to this treatment. Very few white men will succeed in gaining the friendship of the Masarwas to such an extent that this can be repeated. In all parts of Africa, Investigators are trying to preserve some data of these links with a past than can never come back.