Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/72

48 making resistance. They never thought of submitting and becoming the slaves of the invaders, but like the lions and leopards whose habits they knew so well, when brought to bay they did all the harm they could to their opponents, and died breathing defiance. The struggle was not over when Europeans arrived on the scene, and the Bushmen at that time still held sole possession of almost the entire interior plain from the Limpopo river southward to the second range of mountains from the sea, of the larger portion of the Kalahari desert and the land bordering on it, and of many parts of the first two steps upwards from the ocean, west, south, and east.

Though regarded and spoken of by the Hottentots and the Bantu as wild animals of a noxious kind that should be exterminated, in one particular this opinion was not acted upon. Bushman girls when captured were generally kept as concubines by the destroyers of their families, and thus a mixture of blood was gradually taking place. Captured girls, unless they could make their escape at once, were detained without difficulty, because if after a time they returned to their own people they were put to death by them as renegades, though under compulsion. Some of the Betshuana indeed, in the early days of their migration southward when they were few in number and weak, endeavoured to fraternise with the Bushmen, and obtained girls without force, from which alliances the people now known as the Masarwa sprang; but as soon as the invaders increased in number and became strong they acted towards the wild hunters as implacable foes, just as all other Bantu did. There never was any intercourse between Bushmen males and Bantu or Hottentot females, as these would have looked with horror upon such a degradation.