Des rapports observés entre les moyens d’existence et l’état social des peuples d’espèce nègre de l’

CHAP. 26: > Of the relations observed between the means of existence and the social state of the peoples of the negro species of the southern extremity of Africa. — Of the morals that result from this state.

The tribes that inhabit the southern extremity of Africa differ so much among themselves in their physical constitution, they differ so much from the peoples of the same continent placed between the tropics, that it is perhaps not very just to classify them under the same denomination. However, as it is thus that these peoples have already been classified, and as it is less a matter of determining the physical differences that exist between them than of ascertaining the influence of places and climates on the moral perfection of men of the diverse species, I adopt the classification that has been made, without claiming, however, that it is the best.

Three races of men exist at the Cape of Good Hope, not counting the colonists, nor the negroes they have introduced there: these are the Kaffirs, the Hottentots, and the Bushmen. The first, inhabiting the seacoasts, in the lowest places and those closest to the equator, enjoy the most fertile soil and the mildest or hottest temperature: these peoples are agriculturalists, pastoralists, and hunters. The second inhabit high and arid plains; they are a little further from the equator, and consequently enjoy a less mild temperature: they are only pastoralists and hunters. The third inhabit high and arid mountains: they are under a comparatively cold climate: they live only by hunting or by prey.

We have already seen that the individuals who belong to the first of these three races of men enjoy a stronger physical constitution and have a taller stature than the individuals of the second race, and that the latter in their turn are taller and better constituted than the individuals of whom the third race is composed; we have seen next that the intellectual faculties are a little more developed among the first than among the second, and that they are a little more so among the latter than they are among the third. It is now a matter of expounding what is the moral perfection to which each of these three classes of men has attained, and of comparing their morals to those of the peoples who have been classified under the same denomination, but who live under the torrid zone.

The Kaffirs, although they cultivate the land, draw from their herds the most considerable part of their subsistence, and are obliged to change location often to pasture them [694]. They are neither conquerors nor conquered, and consequently have a less complicated social organization than that of the peoples of this continent placed between the tropics. They recognize a hereditary chief; but this chief has almost no prerogatives, and lives in the same manner as all the other individuals of his tribe [695].

The women, however, are no less enslaved among them than among the other negro peoples; they are condemned to the most painful labors; not only do they plow the land, sow and gather the grain, but they make their furniture, build the dwellings, and gather the materials for them [696]. The guarding of the herds, hunting, and war are the share of the men [697]. Women being enslaved, an individual often possesses several. In the time of their periodic indispositions, they are obliged to sequester themselves like the women of Guinea, and like those of the copper-colored peoples of the north of America. They have no share of the goods that their parents leave upon dying. In their adornment they are less sought-after than the men [698].

The Kaffirs bring to their wars the same spirit of animosity and vengeance as the other peoples who live on the same coasts. If a village is surprised, all its inhabitants are exterminated, and the country is converted into a desert [699]. These peoples, however, put less perfidy into their wars than the Hottentots; they often attack their enemies from the front, and do not poison their arrows.

“The Kaffir,” says Levaillant, “always seeks his enemy face to face; he cannot throw his assegai unless he is in the open. The Hottentot, on the contrary, hidden under a rock or behind a bush, sends death without exposing himself to receiving it; the one is the perfidious tiger that treacherously pounces on its prey; the other is the generous lion that announces itself, shows itself, attacks, and perishes if it is not the victor [700].”

The Kaffirs have had enough energy and power to set limits to the usurpations of the Dutch colonists; the Hottentots have let their entire territory be invaded [701]. Finally, the Kaffirs, without being very clean, are much less filthy than the Hottentots [702].

The Hottentot tribes do not all have the same morals: they had generally adopted the pastoral life when the Dutch took possession of the Cape of Good Hope; they supplemented, by means of hunting, what they could not draw from their herds; only a small number were strangers to the pastoral life and lived only by prey. Although the invasion of their territory by the Europeans, and the oppression that was its consequence, have greatly altered their morals, one can judge their former state by the descriptions that travelers have given us of the state in which they saw them.

Each tribe is subject to a chief or captain who probably had no other functions in the past than to march at the head of his tribe, when it went hunting, or when it wanted to attack an enemy tribe. This chief is now only a police officer, who holds his authority, and the staff that is its sign, from the chief of the Dutch colony, today subject to the English. His authority is not always very respected, and in the quarrels that arise, it sometimes happens that he sees his staff of command broken upon himself [703].

Women are no less enslaved, nor less debased in this part of Africa than under the most burning climates. A Hottentot, who gives an ox for a nail or any other piece of iron, believes he is making an excellent bargain by giving one of his daughters in exchange for a cow [704]. A man can have the number of wives he judges suitable; but it is rare that he takes more than two, and indeed only the chiefs permit themselves this kind of luxury [705]. As soon as a woman belongs to a man, it is she who does all the labors that the maintenance of the household requires: she goes to cut the wood she needs to prepare food; she goes in search of the roots on which these peoples feed; she is, in a word, treated like a slave. The husband, who has no other occupation than to drink, eat, smoke, and sleep, lets her take rest only on the few occasions when he goes away, either to go hunting or fishing, or to watch over his herds. A daughter shares the slavery of her mother, and contributes to the same labors as soon as she has the strength for them [706].

The woman is not admitted to eat with her husband, nor even to always lodge in the same hut; she lives in a separate cabin, and feeds on foods that her husband considers vile or impure [707]. When a boy is judged worthy of being admitted among the men, he separates from his sisters and his mother, and no longer admits them to eat with him: he can then insult them and treat them as slaves, without fear of being punished for it by his father. A mother is ceaselessly exposed to the ill-treatment of her children; far from these outrages being considered the effects of a bad nature, the men consider them as unequivocal proofs of a male courage and a distinguished bravery, and applaud the author of them [708]. The Hottentot women are obliged to keep themselves sequestered at a certain distance from the horde, in the same case as the women of the Kaffirs [709]. They can be sent away by their husbands, and remain deprived of all resources, if they are not defended by their own parents [710]. They are generally chaste and reserved in their conduct: only one tribe has been found where they appeared not to be so [711].

If children incapable of providing for their own needs lose their father and mother, not only are they not helped and protected by anyone, but one hastens to bury them alive, whatever their age, to spare them the horrors of a longer agony; a child is buried alive, even when it loses only its mother, if it is not weaned at the moment she dies; a woman who gives birth to twins ordinarily destroys one, in the powerlessness to raise them both [712].

Individuals who reach old age, and who can no longer suffice for themselves, nor render services to others, are relegated to a cabin built expressly; they are brought food once, and then they are abandoned. There, they perish from hunger or are devoured by wild beasts: this fate is reserved even for the elderly who possess herds and who have children; it is the son to whom their property is exclusively devolved who pronounces and executes the sentence [713]. The sick whom one believes one does not have the means to cure experience the same fate [714].

If such is the destiny of all weak beings in the ordinary course of life, it is easy to see what their fate is in cases where one can escape the enemy only by flight, and in the still more common cases where a tribe is attacked by famine. In such circumstances, the children, the elderly, the sick, the stragglers, in a word, all weak beings, are abandoned; they die in the torments of hunger, or are massacred. Those who flee, says Levaillant, are not themselves any more sure of escaping the general scourge: more than three-quarters perish on the way, amidst the sands and rocks, burned by thirst and consumed by hunger; the small number who survive make long marches before having found some slight resources [715].

The Hottentots are distinguished from all the peoples of the same species by an excessive filth, and by an invincible laziness. They habitually rub themselves, from head to foot, with a mixture of grease, soot, and the excrement of their animals; and one smells them by the odor they exhale, long before seeing them. The sheepskins that cover them, and the huts they inhabit, are, if possible, even filthier than their persons. They are covered with vermin, and they get rid of it only to eat it [716].

Their laziness of body and mind is such that nothing is capable of making them renounce it, not even hunger. There is no people under the sun, says Kolbe, who has such an aversion for thinking and for acting. One would say that they make their felicity consist in living in inaction and in indolence [717]. When they have sated their hunger they sleep; and, if the means to appease it are lacking, they sleep still, and thus calm its pains.

Experiencing, like all animals that live by prey, alternatives of scarcity and abundance, they contract the same habits.

“The Hottentot,” says Levaillant, “is gluttonous as long as he has provisions in abundance; but also, in scarcity, he is content with little; I compare him, in this respect, to the hyena, or even to all carnivorous animals, which devour all their prey in an instant, without thinking of the future, and which in fact remain several days without finding food, and are content with clay to appease their hunger. The Hottentot is capable of eating in a single day ten to twelve pounds of meat: and, in another unfavorable circumstance, a few locusts, a honeycomb, often also a piece of leather from his sandals, suffice for his pressing needs. I have never been able to make mine understand that it was wise to reserve some food for the morrow; not only do they eat all they can, but they distribute the surplus to newcomers; the consequence of this prodigality does not worry them in any way. We will hunt, they say, or we will sleep. Sleeping is for them a resource that serves them in need; I have never passed through harsh and sterile lands where game is rare, without finding entire hordes of savages asleep in their kraals, a too certain sign of their miserable position; but what will be very surprising, and which I announce only on the basis of observations repeated twenty times, is that they command sleep, and deceive at will the most powerful need of nature.

“There are, however, moments of wakefulness beyond their strength and habit. They then employ another expedient no less strange, and which, though it may inspire no belief, will not cease to be an incontestable and irrefutable fact; I have seen them tighten their stomachs with a belt; they thus diminish their hunger, bear it longer, and satisfy it with very little [718].”

Their improvidence equals their laziness: the women, who are charged with making the provisions necessary for the family's existence, rarely make them for more than one day. If it happens that they have some provisions in advance, they are disposed to yield them for the first object that strikes them, and which can be of no use to them. When bad weather, excessive rains, or storms do not permit them to go out according to their custom, the family finds itself reduced to the greatest scarcity, and lives only by eating the dried skins that have long served them as sandals [719].The frequent scarcities that are the consequence of their improvidence and their laziness cause them to contract the habit of feeding on objects that would inspire an invincible repugnance in less stupid and less coarse peoples. If the wind brings them one of those clouds of locusts that are a scourge for the cultivated parts of Asia or Africa, they manifest an extraordinary joy. They hasten to gather those that fall or land on the ground; they fill their stores with them, and however foul the odor they exhale, they eat them with delight [720]. If a whale, a hippopotamus, or any other animal is cast up dead and half-rotten on the seashore, the Hottentots run to it and devour it on the spot, even when they are not pressed by any extraordinary need [721]. The vulture, which exhales the putrid odor of the animals on which it has always fed, and which the most carnivorous animals reject, is a dish that is not disagreeable to them [722]. They eat with such avidity and filth that one would take them for famished wild beasts [723].

Upon establishing themselves at the Cape of Good Hope, the Dutch, to better ensure the subjugation of the Hottentots, deprived them of the ability to bear arms, even for their personal defense [724]; if some dispute arises between two tribes, it is they themselves who decide it [725]. The national hatreds and antipathies that war produces among all nations, and which are so violent among peoples still barbarous, must therefore be very weakened among the Hottentots, assuming they existed there with the same force that has been observed among other nations. The travelers who have visited them have experienced from them only good conduct; they have found among them generosity, gratitude, probity, and exactness in keeping their promises. They are incapable of perfidy and even of dissimulation; lying is so foreign to them that they do not even know how to hide the crimes they have committed; if they are accused of a true fact, they acknowledge it and seek only to excuse themselves. They are susceptible to an inviolable attachment and a steadfast fidelity toward the masters they serve [726]. Levaillant assures, however, that those who live habitually with the colonists are completely depraved men: it is very rare, he says, that they do not become monsters; but he does not say in what their vices consist [727].

The peoples whose morals I have just sketched are those who, at the southern extremity of Africa, have adopted the pastoral life. But there are, in their midst, men who are even less advanced, and who live in a colder temperature; these are the Bushmen, peoples who have fixed their habitations on the mountains. There exists among them no kind of social subordination, although one sometimes encounters them in troops. They are so isolated from one another that next to the cave where a wild beast lives, one finds a cave in which lives the family of a Bushman. They live in the bushes or in the hollows of rocks like wild beasts, whose morals they have adopted. They ordinarily go naked, unless a successful hunt has given them the means to seize an animal, for then they wear its skin on their shoulders until it falls to rags [728]. As long as they can find, in the heart of their mountains, wild roots, snakes, caterpillars, spiders, locusts, ants, or other insects, they feed on them and rarely descend into the plains [729]. But, when these foods are lacking, they arm themselves with their small bow and their poisoned arrows; they descend into the valleys and go to lie in ambush, waiting, like wild beasts, for chance to bring within their reach some animal of which they can make their prey [730].

“It is in the steepest rocks and the least accessible caverns,” says Levaillant, “that they withdraw and pass their lives. In these high places, their view dominates the plain from afar, spying on travelers and scattered herds; they swoop down like an arrow, and fall unexpectedly upon the inhabitants and livestock, which they slaughter indiscriminately; laden with their prey and all they can carry, they regain their dreadful lairs, which they leave, like lions, only when they are sated, and when new needs push them to new massacres. But as treason always walks trembling, and as the mere presence of a determined man often suffices to overawe these troops of bandits, they carefully avoid the habitations where they are assured the master resides; artifice and cunning, the ordinary resources of weak souls, are the means they employ and the only guides that accompany them on their expeditions [731].”

The Bushmen are subject to even longer privations than those experienced by the Hottentots; but it is especially in times when their strength is weakened or not yet developed that these men are subject to a lack of food: then their principal nourishment is composed of ants. Often I have seen with pain, says Sparrman, some of these poor fugitive old men exhaust the rest of their strength on these hardened mounds, only to find there, when they are finally broken, a usurping animal, which, after having slipped into the nest, has eaten the ants and consumed their provisions [732]. These men, like animals that live by prey, endure hunger for a very considerable time; but, when they can make themselves masters of a piece of big game, they eat a prodigious quantity of meat; if they are obliged to reject a part of the food they have taken, because the capacity of their stomach is not in proportion to the voracity of their appetite, they set to eating again to fill the void that has been created [733].

The Bushmen are in a state of war with all the peoples who surround them; but it is the Dutch colonists who are for them the most dangerous enemies. Often, the colonists and even the other tribes that surround the Bushmen, says Péron, conduct a hunt or a drive upon these unfortunate people, and kill without pity as without remorse all those they find. The Dutch, however, sometimes keep the young children, to raise them to guard their herds; but they claim that never, even when they are raised among them, can they make them lose their first vagabond inclinations [734].

These peoples are without courage; when they are surprised, the most intrepid seek their salvation in flight, the others let themselves be taken or slaughtered without resistance. Six or seven colonists are enough to surround during the night a troop of fifty or even a hundred individuals, and to make themselves masters of most of them. When the colonists have formed a circle around the tribe, they give the alarm with a few gunshots: this unexpected noise spreads such great consternation among the savages that only the boldest and most intelligent dare to break the circle and escape; and the colonists, rid of those they feared most, lead away the others, trembling and stupid with fright [735].

These peoples are too savage and too destitute of all resources for any traveler to have been able to go and establish himself among them and study their domestic morals; but it is easy to see that, of all the natives of the Cape, the weakest, most cowardly, and most barbarous are those who live in the highest, coldest, and most arid places; and that the peoples who live on the seashore and on the banks of rivers are the strongest, most courageous, and least backward in civilization.