SOUTH AFRICA AND THE PORTUGUESE.* BIBLIOGRAPHERS will some day have
a quarrel of their own with Dr. Theal, whose industrious researches into the history
• The 7:Winning of South African History. By George McCall Thee, Litt.D., LL.D, London i T. Fisher Morin. [les.]
of South and South-East Africa are contained in a number of volumes with varying titles. His new work, he remarks, "as it stands, forms Volume I. of my history of South Africa"; but whereas his sixth volume carries events at the Cape down only to 1872, the year of responsible government, this pre- liminary book includes the stirring relations between the ,Portuguese and the Chartered Company during 1891 and 1892. The explanation is that it is an expansion of a
previous separate work, The Portuguese in South Africa, bring-
ing the record of that nation up to date, and incorporating some chapters on their Asiatic predecessors and the African inhabi-
tants. So far as we know, the only book in English which covers any large portion of this ground is Mr. Wilmot's Monomotapa, and any detailed comparison would be un- fair. Mr. Wilmot was attracted mainly by the fact that Rhodesia bad an early history—erant ante Agamemnona fortes—and his volume gave an interesting, if not very critical, sketch of what could be recovered of that history. He has an eye for the piaturesque, and his description of the Monomotapas' oxen-cavalry lent a touch of colour unlike Dr. Thears more sombre narrative. Moreover, Mr. Wilmot, if we mistake not, belongs to the same faith as the earlier Christian .missionaries in Zambesia, and his enthusiastic account of the labours of gallant Franciscans and Jesuits must to some minds be very attractive. Dr. Theal has sacrificed the romantic to the verifiable, and readers will search his pages in vain for the story of the martyr whose body was guarded by lions. But the scope of the two works is quite different. The Colonial Historiographer at the Cape has , devoted most minute care to the study of original authorities in Lisbon, and the fruit of his work is for the general reader (who can hardly be expected to peruse the records of South- East Africa) a succinct account of all that it is important to know of the history of Portuguese East Africa.
We can only speak of the Portuguese in South Africa at all if by " South " we mean south of the Zambesi. For the
• "South Africa" of our schooldays was only visited by Portu- guese vessels on their way to India, or, later on, to the colony of, Mozambique, and partially explored by shipwrecked sailors. . The view of the Cape as anything more than a half-way house to the East is exceedingly modern, and the early European aciventurers were intent upon India. By rounding the Cape of Good ,Hope in 1487 Bartholomew Diaz took the first step towards destroying the Venetian monopoly of Eastern trade. His successors did not care to linger on an inhospitable coast inhabited by savage Hottentots : they pressed on to the north, and when in the first decade of the sixteenth century it became necessary to maintain fixed stations on the Indian route, those stations were founded at Kilwa, Mozambique, and Sofala. Table Bay was disregarded until the Mitch and English appeared in southern seas. In 1619 there was an abortive scheme for a joint Anglo-Dutch occupation, but the rival East India Companies soon fell out. In glancing at their disagreements Dr. Theal, we notice, ignores the massacre of Englishmen by Dutchmen at Amboyna,—an event which .made co-operation in the East impossible for many years. The British captains who hoisted our flag in Table Bay in 16,20 were disavowed at home, and in 1652 the Cape became a Dtitolt settlement. But before this there bad been fierce fighting in Mozambique waters between Dutch and Portu- guese, in which the latter behaved with signal gallantry and fully held their own. Failing to take Mozambique, the Dutch • practically destroyed Portuguese influence in the East Indies, and once they were established in Cape Town, Ceylon, and Java, . the East Coast of Africa ceased to attract them. And so for nearly four hundred years the Portuguese have ruled there, at , times with vigour, too often in indolent apathy. There has, we are glad to say, been a marked revival of recent years. . The trend of events has turned Loureneo Marques and Beira into important ports, and the renunciation by Portugal of her shadowy claims to the interior of Africa has apparently induced her to develop the littoral.
It would be quite out of place here to trace the story of Portuguese enterprise, to follow Diaz, da Game, Albuquerque, Cabral, and the other gallant gentlemen who raised a small • kingdom into a world-Power. The impetus given by Henry the Navigator was maintained for some time by his kinsmen, and it is pleasant, when we find our merchants and journalists harping on the " unbusinesslike methods" in vogue at Delagoa Bay under its present management, to turn back to the great achievements of the only nation in Europe which has been the constant ally of England for nearly six centuries. The Portuguese were fierce—no one was very mild in the sixteenth century—but their record in East Africa is free from such marks as stain Spanish history in America, and, indeed, will in some ways compare very favourably with their doings in India. When the Crowns of Spain and Portugal werc united the fortunes of the smaller country declined. The Inquisition in India sapped the strength of Portuguese dominion, the Dutch waged unceasing war on all subjects of Philip IL, and the backwater of East Africa was—except for grandiloquent paper schemes—utterly neglected. The restoration of independence improved matters, but the first fine careless rapture of the Crusader-mariners was lost for ever. Dr. Theal in an interest- ing passage well worth quoting but for its length traces the causes of decadence. The colonisation of Brazil exhausted the strength of the mother-country, and the establishment of the West African slave-trade vitiated her efforts. Purity of blood in Portugal itself was lost through the introduction of negro slaves. Gradually corruption crept in, there was no adequate supervision of distant colonies, and in Mozambique, as in Goa, all appointments and privileges were for sale. The Portuguese have freely married with native women, and to-day in Africa, as in India, many possessors of good names are physically indistinguishable from natives. The " prazo " system, by which in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies vast domains were leased to adventurers—often half- caste—nominally extended dominion, but destroyed all solidarity and decent government. In places like Sena and Tete the nominal rulers had to pay tribute to native tribes. It was only very recently that by the capture of Gungun- hana, the Gaza chief, the Portuguese established the reality of their authority round Delagoa Bay. Of our claims to this region, by the way, and of the MacMahon Arbitration, which decided against us, an interesting account will be found in the present work.
The first Portuguese made no attempt to settle among the wild tribes, but passed on to the Mahommedan ports of East Africa. Trade between the ardent professors of rival creeds was difficult, and something very like a crusade was fought in eastern waters in the early years of the sixteenth century. From Mombasa to Sofala the Portuguese, when at the height of their power, dispossessed the "Moors," but in succeeding centuries they had to evacuate their stations north of Cape Delgado. These so-called " Moors " had an interesting history of their own. In recent years, of course, Mahommedan power in East Africa has been an offshoot of the Sultanate of Muscat. But the earliest settlers were heretic Arabs, called ." Emozaidi," orthodox Sunnis from Central Arabia, and Shiah Persians, who founded an important State at Kilwa. Thus the Portuguese when they came found religious dissensions amongst the Mussulmans. Of the very early Asiatic settlers who mined for gold at Zimbabwe Dr. Theal is too cautious to say very much. No trams of them exist north of the Zambesi, and the Mussulmans knew nothing of any previous colonisation. The so-called Empire of Mcnomotapa—the chief of the mountain—who ruled the Makalanga ancestors of the present Mashona, was at its best something like the realm of our ally Lewanika. As successive Sovereigns were baptised, the missionaries made the most of their converts, and, perhaps unconsciously, spread exaggerated notions of the great kingdom in Central Africa. In our own time some of the missionary books on Uganda, with their talk of dukes and nobles, are apt to mislead the unlearned reader. Though the Portnguese at first had little to do with any Bantu tribe, their permanent settlement on the coast brought them more and more closely into contact with the " Kaffus." - By the time they reached Africa the Bantu had spread southward along the sea to the present limits of Natal. Gradually they have worked south-west, until to-day the Bushmen are little more than a name and the Hottentots are squeezed into a corner of South-West Africa, civilisation having hastened what Bantu invasion began. But it is worth while to member that hardly any "Kaffir" tribe in South Africa to-day has had more than one century's possession of its present territories.
We have left no space to deal with Dr. Theal's very careful account of the habits and customs—we can hardly say the history —of Bushmen, Hottentots, and Bantu, except to -mention that these chapters are full of interest to the eth- nologist. Dr. Theal's style is not lively, but some of the events . which he records in this book are of extreme fascination. And perhaps some of us who are interested in South Africa will be glad to read of the country before the coming of the Dutch. Unhappily, most things since 1652 are as much "politics" as "history"!
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