J V V ,W 1 fM **, *0 % ' SOUTH AFKICA ' m SOUTH AFRICA FROM ARAB DOMINATION TO BRITISH RULE EDITED BY R. W. MURRAY, F.R.G.S. OF CAPE TOWN WITH MAPS, ETC. LONDON: EDWARD STANFORD 26 & 27 COCKSPUR STREET, CHARING CROSS, S.W. 1891 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/southafricafromaOOmurr PREFACE We have endeavoured to produce a concise and trust- worthy history of “ South Africa, from Arab Domina- tion to British Rule.” Professor A. H. Keane has contributed the chapter on “ The Portuguese in ” South Africa ; and the translations from the Dutch historian Dapper, appended to that chapter, have been prepared by Mr. J. J. Beuzemaker. The maps speak for themselves, whilst the engrav- ings of Cape Town (1668-1891) will show what British Rule has done for South Africa. R. W. MURRAY. London, June 1891. CONTENTS CHAPTER I The Portuguese in South Africa PAGES Their Merits and Demerits—-Sins of Commission and Omission—Claims and Pretensions . 1-71 CHAPTER II Extracts from Dapper’s “Africa” The Empire of Monomotapa—Kingdoms of Agag, Doro, Inhambana, Inhamior, Monoamugi, Sofala, Chitambo, and Angos—Seaports and Islands on the East Coast .... 72-122 CHAPTER III The Settlements of the South Their Colonisation ..... 123-154 CHAPTER IY The Northern Settlement Bechuanaland, Matabeleland, Mashonaland . 155-166 viii CONTENTS CHAPTER Y PAGES 167-192 The Occupation of Mashonaland . CHAPTER YI The East Coast; Beira, the Pungwe, and Zambesi 193-202 . 203—208 Notes on the Island of Chiloane . 209—216 Appendix, British Zambesia . INDEX ...... 217-223 LIST OE MAPS AND VIEWS Frontispiece View of the Cape of Good Hope, 1668 . Pigafetta’s Map of the Southern part of Africa, 1591 . To face page 13 Dapper’s “Africa,” by Jacob van Meurs, Amsterdam, 1668 „ „ 72 Map, showing the Territory claimed by Portugal before the Agreement of 1890 . „ „ 69 Map of South Africa, showing the present Political Divisions, 1891 . „ „ 155 Map of the Route taken by the British South Africa’s Pioneer Forces from Macloutsie River to Fort Salisbury . „ „ 167 View of Cape Town, 1891 . „ „ 208 CHAPTER I THE PORTUGUESE IN SOUTH AFRICA THEIR MERITS AND DEMERITS— SINS OF COMMISSION AND OMISSION CLAIMS AND PRETENSIONS By Prof. A. H. Keane At the close of the fourteenth century the African The African seaboard. seaboard was known only as far as the Strait of Bab-el- Mandeb on the east and a little beyond Cape Nun on the west side. The Canary Islands facing this cape had already been discovered, or rather rediscovered, for they were certainly known to the Ancients, and “ Canaria,” one of the Fortuncitce Insulae, figures on First discoveries. Ptolemy’s map (a.d. 130), though placed by that geographer nearly twenty degrees too far south. “ ” The memory of these sunny Isles of the Blest seems never to have quite died out, and after cen- turies of apparent oblivion they again emerge from the Atlantic waters in the Africa of the Arab his- Edrisi’s map. torian Edrisi (1154). Two centuries later their position is somewhat accurately fixed on the Catalan map of The Catalan map. the world (1375), for they had meantime been reached 9 / b o SOUTH AFRICA and even temporarily occupied by some daring Genoese navigators. But beyond this point all was pure fiction, and the Catalan map terminates appropriately southwards with a Finistera, or “ Land’s End,” off the mouth of a Riu de lor, or “ River of Gold,” which is drawn eastwards to a lake “Njll,” and thence still eastwards right across the continent to the Egyptian Nile below Nubia. First navi- Portuguese writers claim for their nation the glory gators not Portuguese. of having been the first to plunge into the “ Gloomy Ocean ” of Edrisi, which stretched beyond this Einis- tera away to the unknown Austral regions. But the claim must be disallowed. Their first authentic ex- pedition to the West African waters was certainly despatched about the middle of the fourteenth cen- tury by Alphonso IV., but it was commanded by Angiolino. Italians, Angiolino di Tagghia and Nicolosi di Recco, Nicolosi. and its object was neither discovery nor even conquest, but simply plunder. Nor did these “ sea-robbers,” as they were called by contemporary records, get beyond the Canary waters, where they had been preceded by other Italians, and followed by Norman rovers under Bethencourt (1402). The Cape Verd Islands also Cadomosto. were first reached in 1456 by the Venetian, Cadomosto, Usodimere. and the Genoese, Usodimere, and the next expedition Antonio di to that archipelago (1460) was conducted by Antonio Noli. di Noli, another Italian in the Portuguese service. The first But the Portuguese navigators are unquestionably Portuguese navigators. entitled to the glory of having first put a girdle round the continental periphery from Cape Bojador, doubled Gilianez 1434. in 1434 by Gilianez (Gil Eannes), to Cape Guardafui, THE PORTUGUESE IN SOUTH AFRICA 3 reached in the very first years of the sixteenth century by Albuquerque. Duarte Barbosa, who wrote in 1512, already tells us that in his time the Portuguese ships “lie in wait about Cape Guardafun for the [Arab] ships plying between the Red Sea and India, and take 1 them with all their riches.” At first their progress was slow, for they had to slow progress ° along the \ . feel their way cautiously down the arid Saharan sea- West Coast, board and the more southern fever -stricken coast- lands. “ Hence it was not by any one extensive voyage, but by many successive expeditions, that the shore-line of Africa was gradually mapped out. In this way greater courage, confidence, experience, and skill were gained with each successive addition to the limits of the known, and a spirit of emulation was aroused which irresistibly carried the new knights- errant of commerce and science farther and farther 2 south in search of the promised land,” that is, the empire of the legendary Prester John, or the gold and spice regions of the Far East. Pioneers were also discouraged by the old Aristo- telian teaching that the southern regions beyond the tropic of Cancer were uninhabitable, being burnt up by the scorching solar rays, which prevented the germination of all vegetable and animal life. But that delusion was for ever exploded when in 1443 Nuno Tristam doubled Cape Blanco and reached the Nuno Tristam 1443. 1 Viage por Malabar y Costas de Africa, 1512, translated from a Spanish. MS. (itself from a Portuguese original) in the Barcelona Library, 1524, by the Hon. Henry E. J. Stanley, Hakluyt Series, 1868. 2 Joseph Thomson, Mungo Park and the Niger, p. 20. 4 SOUTH AFRICA Arguin Archipelago three degrees within the tropic. Progress was now somewhat more rapid, and the Diniz 1445. doubling of Cape Verd by Fernandez Diniz (Dinis Dias) in 1445 was followed by several expeditions, by which, within the next thirty years, the -whole of the Senegambian and Upper Guinea coasts were surveyed as far as the equator, which was crossed in 1470. A fresh impulse was given to maritime adventure by King John II., during whose eventful reign (1481- Diego Cam 95) the Congo estuary was reached by Diego Cam 1484. in 1484, and the “ Stormy Cape,” afterwards re-named Cape doubled the Cape of Good Hope, doubled by Bartholomew by Bart. Diaz 1486. Dias in 1486. A pause of over a decade now ensued, as if time were needed to study and co-ordinate the multiplicity of facts, which had been accumulated during the gradual exploration of the western sea- board. But the extreme southern limits of the Continent were now known, and the portals of the eastern seas were thrown open to the first comers. Meanwhile glowing accounts continued to be received of the boundless wealth, of the gold, and silks, and spices, and diamonds of those regions, a western route to which had been found by the discovery of the New World. It was no longer possible to hesitate, and thus risk the loss of the rich prize that had been earned by over half a century of almost superhuman efforts to reach the Austral waters. Hence, on the accession of Emanuel (1495), almost a greater en- courager of maritime enterprise than his predecessor, preparations were immediately made for the memo- rable expedition of 1497, when Yasco da Gama, THE PORTUGUESE IN SOUTH AFRICA 5 following in the wake of Dias, again doubled the Vasco da Gama opens Cape, coasted the seaboard as far north as Melinda the road to India 1497. (Malindi), and then, under the guidance of local pilots, steered straight for India. Within five years of that date the w^hole of the east coast, as far north as Cape Guardafui, was visited, and many points per- manently occupied. The barriers between East and West had been suddenly broken down for ever, and the Portuguese “burst into the Indian Ocean like a pack of hungry wolves upon a well-stocked sheep-walk.”— Sir George Birdwood. The contrast in this respect between the western Cause of slow progress on and eastern sides of the Continent was most striking. the West Coast. The exploration of the Atlantic coast had taken the greater part of a century (1434-86), whereas the opposite seaboard was surveyed and brought to a large extent under the sway of Portugal within a single decade. But this contrast finds its explanation in the still greater political and social contrasts at that time prevailing between the two regions. With the single exception of the Congo empire, the west side from Marocco to the Cape was inhabited by innumerable aboriginal populations without any political cohesion, mostly in a state of perpetual inter-tribal warfare, and at the lowest state of savagery compatible with any kind of human society.