Boers and Rhinos

“ What a mission it would be il there were no difficulties nothing but walking about in slippers made by admiring young ladies I Hey 1 that would not suit me. It would give me the doldrums.’* (A Letter from Livingstone.)

HE Boer settler’s ideal land was a land

where there were no laws, no policemen, no taxes, and nothing to prevent him doing exactly what he liked! To this list ought to be added “ no missionaries ”; for the Boers simply could not comprehend the missionaries’ point of view as to the native question. They thought it was only a pretence for spreading British influence in that wild country. The typical Boer farmer and his family of stalwart sons lived a most easygoing and very delightful life. Dressed in a slouch hat, flannel shirt and trousers, the farmer would start off with his rifle and come back with a buck for supper at night. His wants were few, and when hunting failed a small flock of cattle, goats and sheep supplied all his family needed. All the work that had to be done was done by black slaves. They were not called slaves, but Livingstone found that that was the only word that suited the case. When they could not get enough servants to do their work they deliberately organised a raid on one of the native tribes. Forcing a party of natives before them as they rodfe, the Boers, when they reached the village, would coolly fire over the heads of the blacks, using them as a shield, till the unfortunate villagers fled and left them in possession of their cattle, women and children. Raids of this kind happened nine times during Livingstone’s stay at Koloben, and over and over again he caught the Boers kidnapping native children, so that they might grow up in their service and be the more useful as slaves. In these raids they would often shoot down in cold blood both men and women, and Livingstone would hear them justify their doings in most sanctimonious fashion by calling themselves “ God’s chosen people,” and dubbing all natives as “ creatures,” given to them as an inheritance by Jehovah. The Boer could always produce a text for anything he did, and one of their most cruel raids was justified by the Boer, Pretorius, as only obeying Deuteronomy xx. 10-14.

Livingstone found the attitude of the British colonial authorities exceedingly puzzling at this time. The Kafirs were our avowed enemies, and yet there was no restriction on the sale of guns and ammunition to them. The Betshuanaland people were our loyal friends, but the strictest laws were enforced to prevent Setshele’s people from obtaining rifles. When Livingstone started for his expedition to the Zambesi he was not allowed to take more than ten pounds of gunpowder with him, lest it should find its way into Betshuana powderhorns. In the same way the Government would not see that the Boers were doing all they could to shut the country against British enterprise. The consequence was that the Boers felt pretty safe in attacking Setshele, and one day four hundred armed Boers made an assault on the Bakwains, killed a good number of natives and carried off two hundred of Livingstone’s school-children into slavery. “Setshele,” said they, “was getting too saucy.”

Poor Setshele went up to Cape Town full of his wrongs and determined to lay his case before the “ Great White Mother ”—Queen Victoria. But he was treated so coldly by the authorities that he returned to his kraal, and was there cheered up a little by the news that his young men had attacked some Boer wagons and had taken several prisoners. This rather frightened the Boers, and they agreed to return Setshele’s two sons, who had been given as slaves to a Boer named Scholz. The body of one of these unfortunates was a mass of burns when he returned to his father’s kraal.

Livingstone, however, was made a scapegoat by the Boers. They said that Setshele would never have dared to attack them if this missionary had not put absurd ideas into the heads of his people. They accordingly bided their time, and one day later on, when the Doctor was in Cape Town, a Boer force attacked the mission station, stole everything they could lay their hands upon, and destroyed the rest. After holding an auction and selling all Livingstone’s furniture and clothes, they broke up his medicine bottles, tore in pieces his precious books and the journals he had kept with such care, and strewed the country round about with the remnants of his library. Finally, they made off with eighty head of cattle.

But the Boers met their match in Setshele’s people. In the end it was Livingstone’s teaching and training that “ told.” There can be no doubt that the well-known traveller, Sir Harry Johnston, is right when he says that the real reason why Betshuanaland finally became British territory was the firm resistance of Setshele’s people to Boer aggression, and that, he says, was entirely due to the influence of the missionary. “ The Boers,” wrote Livingstone, “ resolved to shut up the interior, and I determined to open up the country; we shall see who have been the most successful in resolution, they or I.”

As a matter of fact it is only now that we really see how enormously important it was for us to keep that route through Betshuanaland.

As Earl Grey said not long ago, Betshuanaland is “ the neck of the bottle ”; it leads into the great Zambesi district. What Germany tried hard to do was to seize “ the neck of the bottle,” and then she would be able to connect her two African colonies and have a base to conquer the whole of Central and Southern Africa. That is why she tried to use the Boers as tools against us, as Livingstone’s friend, Sir Bartle Frere, was one of the first to see. He quoted Livingstone’s words to Earl Grey and to Mr Cecil Rhodes, and that clever statesman was able to put a spoke into the German wheel and stop their plan from succeeding. And now, in spite of the Kaiser’s efforts, it is the Boers themselves who have joined us and enabled us to conquer the enemy.

It was very different in Livingstone’s day. The Boer settlers warned him that they would attack any tribe that received a native teacher, and did all they could to make the position hot for him. But the Doctor took no notice of them whatever, and went on with his work in the district as usual. His never-failing sense of humour carried him over most of the hard places in life, as the following characteristic entry in his Journal for 1853 will testify: “ Boers are very kind, and great rogues.... The follies of men make the world interesting. What a dull, drivelling affair it would be if the universe were regulated according to the dicta of heavy Dutch Predikants, for instance! Who would not wish to escape from a chaos of everlasting humdrum! ”

He and his man Paul had rather a narrow escape from a rhinoceros while on the way back from visiting a native village. The rhinoceros is one of the stupidest beasts in Africa, but travellers agree that that makes him one of the most dangerous. He is exceedingly shortsighted, but more than makes up for that by his abnormal power of hearing. Every year a large number of natives are killed by rhinos, and the native herdsmen will drive their cattle a long way round to avoid a covert into which they see fresh rhino spoor leading. It requires some nerve to stand up to a rhinoceros and plug him at twenty yards; he comes down upon the sportsman like an express train, two tons of ugly, charging vengeance. Nowadays rhinos are scarcer, and the Government shooting licence only allows two to the hunter; but in Livingstone’s day Betshuanaland was full of the dangerous beasts and the traveller had to keep a wary eye open for them. No beast of its size can tread so silently through the bush, and it is almost uncanny to watch one moving like a silent shadow, only thirty or forty yards away, over ground covered with dry and crackly twigs and thorns. Before a man knows where he is he has almost stumbled on his rhino.

On this particular occasion Livingstone and Paul were looking for a ford across a river, and were about twenty yards from the wagon, when they came upon a black rhinoceros. Her calf had been born during the night, and she was in a fury to defend the funny little red beast that trotted beside her. In a moment she had charged, and the two men had just time to fling themselves into a deep rut before the great beast thundered past them. She went straight for their wagon, and charged it like a locomotive, smashing one of the wheels into matchwood, and playing the mischief with Livingstone’s stores. But next moment she was off, and they saw the last of her.

Livingstone risked his life a hundred times over by riding alone as he did through a country infested by lions and rhinos; and many of his rides were done by night, when some patient sent to beg the Doctor to come and attend to him. But he never gave a thought to any danger of that sort. Probably, if the truth were known, he enjoyed the risk; and, besides, he was generally thinking out some problem that puzzled him, or hatching a new grammar of the Sichuana language, which fascinated him from its likeness to the ancient tongue of the Egyptians.

The long drought at Koloben was making that settlement a very difficult one to live in, and Livingstone began to plan a move to some better position. His idea was to make an expedition into Sebituane’s territory to see if that powerful chief would give him a site for a mission settlement. In the spring of 1849 the chief’s nephew sent messengers to Livingstone asking him to pay him a visit in the lake country. This man, who called himself “Chief of the people of the Lake,” sent glowing accounts of the richness of his country, and said there was as much ivory to be had as any white man could desire. “ The Lake ” was, in fact, Lake Ngami—that mysterious stretch of water that Livingstone had for such a long time determined to discover. He told an English officer whom he met that he wanted to get up an expedition to Lake Ngami, and in that way the news came to the man of all others whom Livingstone would have welcomed as a fellowexplorer.

William Cotton Oswellwas one of the greatest hunters in Africa, the type of British sportsman and pioneer whom Sir Rider Haggard has immortalised in Allan Quatermain. In “ spooring, beastcraft and woodcraft ” the native hunters admitted him to be their equal; and among themselves he was known by the name of Tlaga (the wary, the wideawake), a title which has much the same meaning as Quatermain’s famous nickname, Macumazahn. In character one may see Oswell as he was if one can imagine Allan and big, chivalrous Sir Henry Curtis rolled into one. Oswell had an

After the Elephant-Hunt

From a photograph in the possession of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. appointment under the H.E.I.C.S. in India, but had come home to England to visit his dying mother, and after her death he applied for an extension of his leave and sailed for the Cape. It was not his first visit to Africa, for some years before this he had trekked from Cape Town to Kuruman, and had there met Livingstone. The two men had immediately taken to one another, and Oswell was always in hopes of meeting him again. During this visit to South Africa he had run across another hunter, Mungo Murray of Lintrose, the brother of a fellow-official of his own in India, and they arranged for a small hunting trip in each other’s company. Stories of Lake Ngami were at that time “ in the air,” and, even before this meeting with Livingstone, Oswell had been strongly tempted to enter the lists as a discoverer. What finally decided him was the message from the chief to Livingstone, describing the magnificent sporting country in which the lake lay. Oswell and Murray looked forward enthusiastically to a really splendid time amongst the elephants, and hoped that some fine tusks might perhaps more than repay them for the cost of the expedition.

As an elephant hunter the natives had an unbounded awe of Mr Oswell’s skill and daring. Stories went the round of how he had killed four large old bull elephants in a day. In the true old sportsman’s fashion, he hunted without dogs, F and as that greatly increased the risk of elephant hunting, the natives spoke of him as a man of exceptional bravery. The greatest compliment they ever paid Livingstone was when they said to him: “If you were not a missionary you would be just like Oswell; you would hunt without dogs! ”

The same remark applies in lion hunting. Undoubtedly the safest way to shoot a lion is to follow him with a pack of especially trained dogs. But it is more than doubtful if that method deserves to be called sportsmanlike. The lion is so worried and distracted by the noisy, yapping crowd that the hunter can just walk up to him and shoot him in the head. In fact such well-known lion hunters as Mr Cunninghame and Mr S. E. White have said it is quite as unjustifiable to kill the king of beasts by such tactics as it is to poison him. It was not in that way that William Oswell and Livingstone went a-hunting.

Livingstone and the two English sportsmen accepted the chief’s invitation to the lake country, and Oswell generously paid all the expenses of the guides. At the beginning of June the expedition set out, and the long procession of eighty oxen, twenty horses and about twenty men made its way slowly through the country skirting the desert land, and then struck off boldly north-westward across a corner of the great Kalahari Desert.

Oswell was “ the guide ” of this celebrated expedition, which resulted in the discovery of the River Zuga and Lake Ngami. He also shared in many of Livingstone’s other important discoveries, most notably in the discovery of the Zambesi and these regions. The name of Oswell deserves to be remembered and held in honour, and yet it is doubtful whether it will ever be as well known to posterity as the name of many a traveller of far less greatness. It was not Livingstone’s fault that Oswell never had his due, for again and again he most publicly acknowledged what his friend had done for Africa. It was simply owing to Oswell’s own modesty and his dislike for the pen of the ready writer. He was the despair of the Geographical Society, and could hardly be induced to state in black and white the results of his own wonderful journeys and discoveries. Both Murray and Captain Vardon belonged to the same brave brotherhood of hunters. They were not fond of describing their doings, and it is doubtful if their names are known outside the circle of old friends and of those who really know what their discoveries helped to do for modern Africa.

The men who have “ done things ” have very often lacked the power to describe them. Someone once said: “ Speke was named a non spekendo! ” In one of Oswell’s letters to his friend, Sir Samuel Baker, he said: “ I think most ancient Africans are dumb.” Oswell himself, when he was amongst friends, had a very wonderful gift of description, and his contribution to the Badminton Library on Big Game shows what a vivid writer he was as well. But he could seldom be persuaded to write about his own doings; he had a natural disinclination for it and a positive dread of “ the journalist.”

Oswell was the closest and most intimate friend that Livingstone ever had. Their friendship, as Louis Stevenson would have said, was “ without capitulation,” as all true friendships are. They both knew their own minds, but in very many ways they mutually influenced one another. Livingstone, quite unconsciously, gave his hunter friend a very real sense of the Purpose of his work and of all their travels, just as the inner steadfastness of the man influenced everyone who travelled much with him. And living in close friendship with a man like Oswell was in many ways just the kind of experience that meant much to David Livingstone; “ it widened things out a bit ” for him, and helped him to become the man he was.

Six feet in height, sinewy and muscular; a handsome, fearless face; an eagle glance, but full of kindliness; a man who loved horses and bore the unmistakable mark of one of the greatest of our Public Schools and of Indian official life, Oswell was a perfect travelling companion, and a most generous and lovable character.

One can see clearly from Livingstone’s Journals how unconsciously he was influenced by Oswell’s standpoint in very various ways. Oswell belonged to the true order of sportsmen. He loved natural history as passionately as Livingstone did, and the entire butcher tribe, bent only upon “ making a bag,” had not, as he said, a single kindly word from him. In one of his letters he writes: “I am sorry now for all the fine old beasts I have killed, but I was young then; there was excitement in the work; I had large numbers of men to feed, and if these are not considered sound excuses... the regret is lightened by the knowledge that every animal I shot, save three elephants, was eaten by man, and so put to a good use.”

When they first met, Oswell was a little disappointed because Livingstone, the serious young missionary, seemed to look upon shooting game for a large camp as a mere amusement, and evidently did not grasp the importance of the matter on a march, when the shikar has to provide perhaps several hundred persons with their daily food. But Livingstone’s attitude towards that and other things changed as time went on. In his Journal he wrote: “We had reason to be proud of Oswell’s success, for the inhabitants conceived from it a very high idea of English courage.” A hundred times in Oswell’s letters that sentiment was returned; for he looked upon Livingstone, both in moral courage and personal pluck, as the bravest man he ever met.