Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/100

76 dead; he was (afterwards) opening and shutting his eyes; he afar lay talking. He talked while he mended his body; his head talked while he mended his body. His head talking reached his back; it came to join upon the top of his neck. He ran forward; he yonder will sit deceiving while we did cut him up with stone knives. He went feigning death to lie in front of us, that we might do so, we ran. This fatigue, it is that which we are feeling, and our hearts burnt on account of it. Therefore we shall not hunt (for food), for we shall altogether remain at home.”

It can now be asserted in positive language that the Bushmen were incapable of adopting European civilisation. During the first half of the nineteenth century agents of various missionary societies made strenuous efforts for their improvement, and often believed they had in some cases succeeded and in others were in a fair way towards success. Men more devoted to their work than many of these missionaries have never existed, and it would be unjust to accuse them of wilfully misstating the results of their teaching, but the very excess of their zeal and their dwelling constantly upon the expression that the whole human family is of one blood, without reflecting that different branches of it even in Europe are incapable of thinking alike, led them to distort what they saw and heard, so that their reports are commonly misleading. In these reports Bushmen were represented as having become civilised and Christian. But no one else ever saw those transformed savages, and no trace of them exists at the present day. The wild people in the missionary writings are described as offshoots of a higher stock, degraded by oppression or neglect, and needing only instruction and gentle treatment to elevate them again. Some of the reasoning in favour of this theory is highly acute, but it is not borne out by the deeper investigations of our day.

Apart from missionary teaching also many persons tried during long years to induce families of Bushmen to abandon their savage habits, and there were even experiments in providing groups of them with domestic cattle, in order to