Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Gun and Camera in Southern Africa: A Year of Wanderings in Bechuanaland, the Desert, and the Lake River Country, Ngamiland; With Notes on Colonisation, Natives, Natural History and Sport
Between 1840 and 1880 Britain, interested and occupied in other possessions, knew little of and cared less for South Africa. Even down to the year 1884 it seemed more than likely that the Transvaal Dutch were to be, as they had always threatened, masters of the interior. Happily at the eleventh hour a revulsion of feeling came; the British public suddenly awoke to the imminence of its prospective loss; Sir Charles Warren's expedition was sent out, and the hinter-land was saved.
Recent events, and especially the Transvaal gold discoveries, the enterprise of the British South Africa Company, and a more enlightened colonial policy at home, have combined to assure finally the future of a great British South Africa. The Afrikander Dutch, thanks mainly to the wonderful developments of the Witwatersrand gold industry, have become alive to the fact that a fusion of ideas and even of nationality is possible with the once-detested Britisher; and for the future two vigorous and hardy races, who never ought to have had had blood between them, seem likely to join hands in the making of an immense and prosperous country. Nowhere is this more evident than in the new colony of British Bechuanaland, where at this moment Dutch Boers from the Trans vaal and Orange Free State are constantly to be found taking up farms under a British government.
The march of events in the countries between the Vaal and Zambesi has within these last three years been immense. The solitudes, where to-day the wild Bushman burns off the winter grass to induce the fresh vegetation and attract the game, resound to morrow with the echoing waggon-whips and the cheery voices of the digger and the colonist. In every corner of those lands, which the frontier Boer of a generation since delighted to call onze veldt, is now heard the anglo-saxon tongue.
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