Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/224

 172 SOUTH AND EAST AFRICA. the whole population. Thanks to the Par Britanuica now prevailing among all the tribes, the annual rate of increase is considerable. Accurate statistics are still wanting, but most resident Europeans are unanimous in asserting that the steady growth of the population caused by the natural excess of births over the mortality is altogether phenomenal. Hence of all South African regions Kafirland is already the most densely peopled in proportion to its extent. In 1877 the various estimates ranged from four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand, and at present the number of inhabitants considerably exceeds half a million in an area of not more than sixteen thousand square miles, or about thirty-two to the square mile. Exclusive of Pondoland, the census of 1885 gave a population of 333,000. Should this rate of increase be maintained, it may be asked whether the natives may not again gradually acquire the upper hand, as they have already done in Central America and in part« of South America. In the widespread family of Bantu peoples the Kafirs take a foremost position for physical beauty, strengtn, courage, and intelligence. In many ethnological works representing the various types of mankind, the European whites are figured by the statues of gods and goddesses, borrowed from the classic period of the plastic arts. But while the noble " Caucasian," son of Prometheus, thus presents himself under the ideal form portrayed by the great artists of antiquity, the members of other races, black, yellow, or red, are shown in these collections handsome or ugly, young or old, healthy or infirm, just as they happen to pass before the object- glass of the photographer, and occasionally even as figured by the pencil of the caricaturist. But such a method of procedure is unfair to the so-called " inferior races." At any rate, it is certain that were the artist to reproduce at haphazard a given number of Europeans and of Kafirs, he would find, not amongst the foimer but amongst the latter, the largest number of individuals approaching the standard of perfect beauty, both as regards regularity of features and symmetrical proportions. The superiority claimed by the white race is true only when the comparison is restricted to picked specimens. In this case the cultured race is undoubtedly the finer of the two, and here the same difference, is observed between the fair and the dark human types as between the wild beast and the animal improved by the stock- breeder. The noblest specimens of the Kafir race would appear to be precisely those dwelling in the neighbourhood of the Europeans and under their influence ; far, as Gustav Fritsch well remarks, " Civilisation alone can complete the human ideal." The Kafir features have never the same delicacy as is found in those of the finest Europeans. They are decidedly coarse in comparison, and the lips espe- cially are nearly always too thick and tumid. But the Kafirs, as well as the Hot- tentots, are usually endowed with far greater keenness of vision, and Daltonism is an affection unknown among the natives of Africa. The valour of the Kafirs, and especially their power of dogged resistance, the English have had ample occasion to admire and respect during the long warfare carried on between the two races. A memorable instance was certainly the heroic endurance displayed by the Ama- Kosa people during the terrible year of voluntary famine, to which they fell victims in tens of thousands.