THE BOERS AND THE LITTLE BUSHMEN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5698, 17 October 1896, Page 7

THE BOERS AND THE LITTLE BUSHMEN.

[Prom "Stray Thoughts on South Africa."]

By Olive Sclireintr, in the " Fortnightly JUtiew.") As sweeping across, the wide colonial plains to-day, one looks out at them from the windows of the railway train, silent as they still lie, it is not yet easy to recall what they must have appeared in the eyes of those first-be m white sons of South Africa, whose waggons, creeping slowly along, bi'oke for the first timeinto those vast, silent plains. Across each one some white man's eye looked for the first x tim£, taking in the expanse, whicli* 'till then only the Bushman had seen as he tracked his game, or the Hottentot as he travelled' with his tribe; across each one of them somp solitary waggon first crept, leaving the, marks of its wheels deep in the red sand, which "in all the ages of the past had been printed only by the feet of the antelope and the claw of the ostrich and lion, or the light tread of the Bushman and Hottentot—^and the mark of those wheels made the first track of that road on which later but surely, civilisation with its colossal evils, and its infinite beneficial possibilities, was to follow.

The white man depended mainly on his gun for food. And when the little Bushman looked out from behind his rocks, he saw his game — all he had to live on— being killed, and the fountain which he or. his. fathers had found and made, and had used for ages, being appropriated by the white men. The plains were not wide enough for both, and the new-come children of the desert fought with the old. We have all sat listening in our childhood to the story of the fighting of those old days. How sometimes the Boer coming suddenly on a group of Bushmen round their fire at night, fired and killed all he could wound. If in the flight a baby were dropped and left behind, he said, " Shoot that too ; if it lives it will be a Bushman or bear Bushmen." On the other hand, when the little Bushman had his chance and found the Boer's waggon unprotected, the Boer sometimes saw a light across the plain, which was hia blazing property ; and when he came back would find the waggon cinders, and only the charred remains of his murdered wife and children. It was a bitter, merciless fight, the little poisoned arrow shot from behind the rocks, as opposed to the great flintlock gun. The victory was inevitably with the flintlock, but there may have been times when it almost seemed to lie with the arrow ; it was a merciless, primitive fight, but it seems to have been on the whole fair and even, and in the end the little Bushman vanished. It, perhaps, was not absolutely inevitable that all should have been as it was. * * * * *

It is true that ordinary missionaries, Dutch, French, English or German, have lived among these tiny folk for years, without suffering either injury or insult; but the foretrekkers were not missionaries, nor thirsting to sacrifice themselves for the aborigines. They were simply ordinary, good folk, rather above than below the common European average, who had their own ends to look after; and the Bushman, being what he was, a little human-in-embryo, determined to have hta own way, the story could take its course in no other direction than that in which it did ! It is easy for us, sitting at ease in our study chairs to-day, to condemn the attitude of the early white men towards him, and regret that they, did . not take a more scientific interest in this little half-developed child of South Africa. To the thinking man of to-day he is a link with the past of our race; a living prehistoric record; Ins speech, his scheme of social life, his physical structure, are a volume in human history, beside which the most hoary manuscript in China or India is modern p and the oldest relics of Greece and Borne are tilings of to-day. It is easy for us to feel tender orer his little paintings when suddenly we come across, them among the rocks: the artist in us recognises across the chasm of a million centuries of development its little kinsman. Something in us nods back to him across the years: — "I know why you did that, little brother. I do it, too — another way, pen or pencil, it doesn't matter which. You call it, an ox. . I call it truth. We both paint what we see, the likest we can ! They never know why we do it. Did you look at your oxen and your zebras and your ostriches, and ■ feel that you must, and you must, till you painted them? Take my hand, brother manikin ! "

And, when in the valley below we come suddenly across a little arrow-head beside some old drinking-fouutain, or find a spot where his flints and empty mussel shells lie thick among the soil on the bank of a sluit, where for this many hundred years now bo mussels have been, a curious thrill of interest comes to us : we feel as an adult who in middle life should come suddenly across the shoes and toys he had used in earliest childhood, carefully laid up to* gether. We sit down and dig the sheila and flints out Tvith our fingers, and the warm afternoon sunshine shimmers over us, as it did over some old first mother of humanity when she sat there cracking shells. And we touch with our' hands the old race days, that at other times are hardly realisable.