Page:South Africa (1878 Volume 1).djvu/58

 relief;—had indeed done what they could to prevent the self-immolation; but the more that the white men interfered the more confirmed were the black men in their faith. It is said that 50,000 of them perished of hunger. Since that day there has been no considerable Kafir war, and the spirit of the race has been broken.

Whence came the prophecy? There is a maxim among lawyers that the criminal is to be looked for among those who have profited by the crime. That we the British holders of the South African soil, and we only, were helped on in our work by this catastrophe is certain. No such prophecy,—nothing like to it,—ever came up among the Kafirs before. They have ever been a superstitious people, given to witchcraft and much afraid of witches. But till this fatal day they were never tempted to believe that the dead would come back to them, or to look for other food than what the earth gave them by its natural increase. It is more than probable that the prophecy ripened in the brain of an imaginative and strong-minded Anglo-Saxon. This occurred in 1857 when the terrible exigences of the Indian Mutiny had taken almost every redcoat from the Cape to the Peninsula. Had the Kafirs tried their old method of warfare at such a period it might have gone very hard indeed with the Dutch and English farmers of the Eastern Province.

During the last twenty years of our government there have been but two incidents in Colonial life to which I need refer in this summary,—and both of them will receive their own share of separate attention in the following chapters. These two are the finding of the Diamond Fields, and the commencement of responsible government at the Cape Colony.