AN AFRICAN SIBYL.
ONE merit of our oversea Empire is that it keeps us in a humble frame of mind about civilisation. We find under our rule peoples whose customs and ritual, tolerated or forbidden by our law, carry us back to the rock whence we were all hewn. " We know," in Emerson's phrase, " that the barriers of race are not so firm but that spray can sprinkle us from antediluvian seas." In the current Monthly Review the Rector of Barberton repeats a rumour which invests the present dreary struggle in Natal with something of the romance which we are wont to associate with an earlier epoch in our African history. Dinizulu, it is rumoured, has sent emissaries to consult Majaji as to the chances of a native rising, and to obtain war medicines for his people. All over South Africa in every tribe there is a kind of rude priesthood, who deal in " big medicine and strong magic." In the main they are charlatans, ghost-doctors who play strange tricks with bones, and intercede between the living and the spirits of the dead. But no white man who has lived much among natives will care to be too dogmatic on the matter of their charlatanry. They have often a rough working knowledge of medicine, and have distilled from herbs very effective remedies. They are often, too, fair
meteorologists, able to predict the weather better than the white man or their fellow-tribesmen, and they have some crude skill in hypnotism. The writer has been a witness of instances of Kaffir telepathy which make him hesitate to say what is or is not possible in that strange world. But as a rule these tribal doctors have only a small local reputation, and there are few whom other tribes would take the pains to consult. Majaji, however, is another matter. Her reputation has spread from the Zambesi to the Southern ocean. Dinizulu, for all we know, may be a model of loyalty, and may have thought as little of consulting her as of seeking advice from Mrs. Eddy. But the fact that it is commonly believed that the greatest of Zulu chiefs should send for help to a remote country five hundred miles off shows how great the repute of the wonder-worker must be.
The territory of Majaji, or Majajie, is situated in the Northern Transvaal, in the wild tangle of mountains which extend east from Pietersburg towards the Portuguese frontier, and which in their various ranges are known as the Zoutpans- berg, the Spelonken, and the Wood Bush. They represent the northern extension of the Drakensberg, where the plateau of the high veld breaks down in foothills to the tropical flats of the Limpopo. It is a strange country, for it has nothing in common with the ordinary South African landscape. Its rainfall is so high that vegetation even at a height of five thousand feet is luxuriant ; the streams are not strings of pools, but full mountain torrents; and in summer and winter alike you will find haze on the uplands. No sharper distinction can be imagined than between this humid but bracing climate and the dry clearness of the high veld. It is such a country as Mr. Rider Haggard has drawn in his "People of the Mist," and like that fanciful land the totem of one at least of the tribes is the crocodile. The natives are divided into small clans, the chieftainship of which is now more or less in commission. Malapoch, who lived in the Blaauwberg and worshipped a great crocodile, was broken by the Boers in the last of their little native wars. Magato, the Chief of the Mountain, who had his kraal in the Zoutpansberg, close to the little village of Louis Trichard, suffered the same fate, and his successor, 'Mpefu, the present chief, is under strict Government surveillance. In the Wood Bush Machubi was bunted out by a Boer commando and a hired impi of Swazis, and killed in the dense thicket where ho had taken refuge. Of all the little tribes, only Majaji's hag held its ground untouched; but as a tribe it is shrinking rapidly, and the ground originally granted as a reserve is too large for the use of those who remain, and will probably be curtailed. But if the tribe is declining, the repu- tation of the chieftainess still lingers, for it is a rule founded not upon material power, but upon occult tradition. Like the Convent of Sam ding on the road to Lhasa, the tribe is governed always by a woman who acquires the sanctity of her predecessors. The old Majaji, who was believed, like another Gagool, to have lived for hundreds of years, died or dis- appeared some years ago, and was succeeded by a little girl. An inverted Salle law prevails, for the tribe is a rude theocracy, which never sought to overcome its neighbours by arms. Its ruler was a true Sibyl, and her. reputation went forth into the length and breadth of the land. Old bunters tell how strings of natives used to be met in the bushveld- from Portuguese territory, from what is now Rhodesia, from Swaziland and Natal—all journeying to consult the oracle Since such services were not given for nothing, Majaji became rich. She was famed as a rainmaker, as a prophetess, and above all as a vendor of charms. Her medicines would make a warrior invulnerable, and her incantations would weaken the power of his enemies. Small wonder that the Sibyl did a good trade and became a name of awe to dwellers far and near.
It is a countryside which disposes the traveller to a belief in marvels. Witchcraft, he feels, could not live in the clear air of the high veld, but this misty, mountainous land belongs to another world. The perpetual haze, the intense, almost uncanny, green of the meadows, the thickets of high timber trees festooned with creepers and thick with fern, make up a landscape which has no South African parallel. Boer hunters had a story of a strange lake high up in the Zoutpansberg, and it was only the other day that it was added to the map. The Spelonken, with their caves and their curious contorted hills, are like the scenery in a fairy-tale. ' Everywhere there is the same air of strangeness and mystery, and whatever Majaji may have been or may be, she has found an appropriate dwelling. You may see it from the coach road between Pietersburg and Leydsdorp, just where it dips from the plateau of the Wood Bush to the valley of the Groot Letaba. Across the broad glen to the north-east rises a thin line of blue hills, and in these is the kraal of the Sibyl. Witchcraft has fallen on evil days, in spite of the alleged orthodoxy of Dini- zulu, and the traveller will no longer meet deputations of pious natives from the ends of the earth on their way to the shrine. Perhaps the child who at present bears the name is less potent than the old sorceress who preceded her, or perhaps the natives who go to the Rand to work have brought back a spirit of scepticism, and believe more in the white man's magic than the traditional runes and herbs. Certainly the tribe is shrinking in numbers, and the old sanctity of its head is weakening. The inquiring mind which seeks to discover the origin of the spell and what virtue may have lurked in it will find little to satisfy him. Majaji is a relic from a past over which an impenetrable veil has descended. Behind her there must have stood a corporation of medicine-men who preserved the secret learning and appointed her successor. They must have done their work well, as witness the legend of the centuries-old priestess. One old man of the writer's acquaint- ance had a string of beads which might have come out of some Egyptian tomb, and which not even the offer of a waggon would induce him to sell. He had also knowledge of certain springs, which he used daily, and no amount of watching could discover his secret. It is possible that Majaji and her counsellors may have bad some body of natural magic; of which we still get at times puzzling hints, or some strange ancestral cult, carried down through the Bantu immigra- tions, of which they were the guardians. In the movement from the north they may have brought with them rites and customs borrowed from Arab or Phoenician sources, which would be the joy of the scholar. Or, again, it may have been all a dull piece of trickery, the imposition of sharper wits upon the folly of their neighbours. Whatever it was, we may be certain that no one now will unfold the mystery.
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