Chapter 47Johannesburg — Pretoria — DurbanJOHANNESBURG — PRETORIA — DURBAN
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
On the return journey via Bulawayo to Johannesburg and Pretoria the strange travellers on the train struck me. They were wild fellows, mostly “prospectors,” gold-seekers, who had searched the rock of the wildernesses for gold and precious stones and who had been weaned for months from all human society. Loudly and noisily they told of their lives — each could not do enough of the talking — they had, after all, to recoup themselves for the long silence.
In Johannesburg the foresight of the Consul General of Cape Town had quartered me with the family of a German “Rand magnate” in Parktown. There I gained a fairly exact insight into the workings of the mines on the “Rand.” And into the dizzying wages of most of the gold-diggers. The coloured men earn far less, a third at most1. We were also in many smelting and sorting houses — what a many-coloured new world opened before me there again. But I liked even better the motor drives into the surrounding country, to the bungalows of rich “share-holders.” Parktown, the Grunewald quarter of Johannesburg, possesses one precious villa after another, with Italian-laid-out gardens and an abundance of works of art.
In Pretoria the simple house of Oom Kruger2 touched me. The wife of the German consul, born there, showed me around and told me what an unforgettable impression it had made on her even as a child when, coming to the Krugers with an errand, she was refreshed with a little bowl of coffee by his wife (who sat perpetually with her knitting before the coffee-pot) and Oom Kruger kindly stroked her hair the while. Oom Kruger was a “Dopper” of the purest water.
Pretoria as a city is taking a gigantic upswing and lies embedded in the most delicious tropical trees. From Pretoria to Durban I travelled together with many Boers, and it struck me that most of the women and even the infants were dressed in black. Was my Boer friend right in his assertion?
The harbour city of Durban, in the garden of Natal, has an incomparable situation and the most beautiful tropical villas and botanical gardens that can be imagined. The boldest imagination falls short of the reality here. I went often to the library and read about all the dying-out Negro tribes of this region. My heart bled as I read. Here was Zululand, in which the son of Napoleon III3 lost his life. What was not destroyed in war is now being destroyed, slowly and surely, by alcohol. The chieftains of all the remaining tribes lie day and night in drink. — As if at a masked ball, Negroes of every tribe strolled about the streets of Durban; I even saw Fuegians from Cape Horn, with plaited straw in their tufts of hair, and the boldest coiffures of many of the Negro women, especially the Bassuto.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑a third at most — If anything generous: African miners' cash wages on the Rand ran nearer a tenth of white wages than a third. The colour bar was written into law in the very year of her visit — the Mines and Works Act of 1911 reserved certificated skilled work for whites. Her host being a Rand magnate, the household arithmetic she absorbed was the industry's own.
- ↑Oom Kruger — Paul Kruger (1825–1904), last president of the Boer republic of the Transvaal — “Uncle” Kruger to his people; her German has the cognate Ohm Krüger. The low white house on Church Street, with its stoep and its marble lions, was already a shrine: Kruger had died in exile at Clarens in Switzerland in 1904, having left the Transvaal ahead of the British advance in 1900. The wife with the knitting behind the coffee-pot, Gezina, never left — she died in occupied Pretoria in 1901 while he was away. And the consul's wife completes the one-armed prospector's lesson from the falls: Kruger, a Dopper “of the purest water.”
- ↑son of Napoleon III — Louis-Napoléon, the Prince Imperial, killed in a Zulu ambush on 1 June 1879 while serving with the British. The Bonaparte heir, in English exile since 1870, had begged his way to the Zulu War as an observer. His patrol was surprised at a deserted kraal; he fell under assegai wounds, and with him fell any serious Bonapartist hope — a European dynasty ended in Zululand.