Samuel Florman - The Aftermath

“Our small company of twenty-five hundred souls is not about to work farms, excavate mines, build machinery, and otherwise create Detroit or Pittsburgh—or even Oslo, which I would prefer—on this shore of the Indian Ocean. What do we do if the survivors in this very strange corner of the world do not care to join with us in our enlightened enterprise? Officer Gustafsson reports that he has had a cordial meeting. Well and good, but that is just one meeting.”

Captain Nordstrom paced back and forth for a moment with his hands behind his back. Suddenly, he looked off into the distance, pointed upward into hills, and asked, “What do we do if a hostile band of Zulus suddenly comes charging down that ravine over there, brandishing spears and chanting war songs? Or, how about the Afrikaners, one of the more eccentric groups of people in all of history? What if they decide that this catastrophe is a special sign from their Calvinist God, and that our entry on the scene is not welcome? What if black and white, in a classic end-of-the-world scenario, start to fight with each other and we get caught up in the carnage? What I’m trying to say is, let’s forget about the resources for a moment and think about something even more important: the people.”

The people. What can I say about the people of KwaZulu Natal? Only this, and without exaggeration: No novelist or playwright could have dreamed up a more fantastic, exotic, implausible cast of characters than those who awaited us in this foreign land. And—more to the point, in light of our perilous circumstances—no technocrat or social planner could have conceived a group with better survival skills. At least I dare to hope that this is the case.

Before I found myself cast away on these shores, I knew hardly anything about this part of the world. I still know very little. But once I realized that this is where world civilization is fated to be reborn, I figured that I’d better try to correct that deficiency. My father, as I have related, has directed me to keep a record of our group’s experiences and activities. But I can’t make much sense going forward without giving some account of what has happened here in the past. I’ve tried to learn about the past, not so much for its own sake—although I do love the historical narrative—but more for the light it sheds on our present situation and our future prospects.

I’ve read any number of books and talked with many people, both ordinary folk and so-called experts. What follows is an admittedly casual recapitulation of facts, impressions, and assumptions. It would drive my history professors to distraction, I’m certain. But I’m not working on a Ph.D. thesis any more. In a sense, this sets me free.

If the human race is to endure and reconstitute itself, there is an appropriate symmetry to having this occur in Africa. Most paleontologists have agreed that this is the continent where our forebears emerged, evolving from apelike creatures into hominids over a period of some four million years. Remains of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, dating back 130,000 years, have been found in various locations on the African continent, including caves not far from where our camp is today. The “Nahoon” footprints, found along the coast southeast of here, and which scientists have called “compellingly human,” have recently been dated as approximately two hundred thousand years old.

These human ancestors of ours, established in clans of about one hundred and fifty individuals, gradually made their way to the northern part of the continent, and then ventured across the Isthmus of Suez. This momentous migration commenced, according to current thinking, about one hundred thousand years ago, and eventually extended to the farthest corners of the globe. Descendants of these wanderers were destined to return to the mother continent time and again through the centuries, coming with a variety of purposes, most of them not to the advantage of the people who had stayed behind.

One of the most fateful of these returns occurred in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company authorized a certain Jan van Riebeeck, with a party of ninety, to set up a provisioning station at Table Bay on the Cape of Good Hope. The Cape had first been rounded in 1488 by Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese navigator; and as maritime trade developed between Europe and the Indies, the need for such a station became apparent. Neither the company nor the Dutch government planned on colonization by Dutch citizens. But, once established on shore, some of the pioneers started thinking about making this new world their permanent home. Within ten years, more than two hundred and fifty Dutch settlers were living near the Cape, farming and beginning to move inland. In 1689, they were joined by two hundred French Huguenots fleeing from government persecution. By 1707, there were almost two thousand freeholders of European descent.

This was three centuries ago, not long in the grand scheme of things, but a very long time when we think in terms of historical change. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, St. Petersburg was just being built, George Washington’s father was a boy, Johann Sebastian Bach was starting to write his music, and Isaac Newton was the newly elected president of the Royal Society. In Southern Africa, Negroid tribes—the Bantu—descending from the North, had not completed the process of replacing small bands of hunter-gatherers—the so-called San Bushmen. The white settlers at the Cape—called Boers, which is the Dutch word for farmers—occupied portions of the land almost as early as some of the black tribes migrating into the area. Small wonder that these Europeans came to think of themselves as genuine natives of the continent, as Afrikaners. It is with good reason that they are sometimes referred to as the “white tribe.” When the British came on the scene at the end of the eighteenth century, the Boers numbered more than fifteen thousand and had begun to develop their own Dutch-based language, Afrikaans.

Ah yes, the British. As a consequence of various European wars and the treaties that followed, they occupied the Cape in 1795, and a decade later, made it a Crown Colony. They promptly set about irritating the Boers in numerous ways, most notably by banning the use of slaves. The settlers had come to rely upon slave labor and felt that they could not continue farming without it. But the British—much to their credit, particularly in comparison with other nations of the world—had outlawed slavery in 1807.

In addition to feeling harassed by the British, the Boers were driven by an innate frontier-seeking hunger. For whatever complex set of reasons, in the 1830s they embarked on the Great Trek, an event of mythic import in the evolution of Afrikaner culture. Between 1835 and 1837, several thousand families—some fourteen thousand individuals—packed their wagons, hitched up their oxen, gathered their servants, their slaves, and their livestock, and headed far inland from the Cape. To the north, they founded the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, and to the east they crossed the Drakensberg Mountains and entered Natal. The territory that the whites called Natal happened to be the region that the Zulus called home.

The word “Zulu” evokes images of ferocious warriors brandishing shields and spears. Yet, for all their warlike reputation, this tribe’s entrance onto the stage of history was remarkably benign. Prior to 1800, they were one of approximately twenty Nguni-speaking clans who lived in harmony with the land, and in relative peace among themselves, in the area now known as KwaZulu Natal. These clans were patrilineal chiefdoms, consisting of a number of loosely linked family groups. The people were pastoralists, and the importance of cattle in their lives was symbolized by the position of the cattlefold in the center of every homestead. According to standard historical sources, disputes over land were few, and were normally settled by the members of two competing groups lining up to throw spears at each other, while hurling abuse as well. Casualties were few, and eventually one family group would yield and move off to another piece of available land. This sounds a bit too idyllic to ring completely true; but if there was a healthy balance between population and resources, we can believe that life was reasonably tranquil.