A SOUTH AFRICAN ARCADIA. 651 



through the thickets by foot-men and the heavy ox-wagons, and the 

 chief villages are connected by a kind of highway, but no one is 

 obliged to keep the roads if he does not want to. They are of no more 

 significance than the zebra or rhinoceros tracks which led to the drink- 

 ing-places before man appeared in the country ; and there is no reason 

 why the traveler should not make a new road at pleasure. The past- 

 urage is free for the teamster's hungry cattle, the wood for the fire 

 needed to cook his supper. If a stray spark sets the grass on fire, no 

 one thinks of complaining ; if a hunter commits devastation among 

 the game, the native may grumble at the waste, but he will not imag- 

 ine that his rights are trespassed upon, or venture to interfere with 

 the proceedings. The game is as much the strange hunter's as his. 

 If one sees a spot that pleases him, he is at liberty to settle upon it, and 

 build himself a house there. If any objection is made to the stranger, 

 nothing worse happens than that something unreasonable is demanded 

 of him, in the same way that people in other parts of the world are 

 not ashamed to overreach strangers : this is not so easily done, how- 

 ever, if the intruder is a native or a member of the same tribe ; and 

 even a stranger, if he does not allow himself to be scared away, is at 

 last permitted to remain undisturbed. Whoever settles in any partic- 

 ular spot must, however, expect that other persons, finding it well sup- 

 plied with water and pasturage, will bring their herds there too ; and 

 it is the practice of the Herero, when they wish to get rid of an un- 

 welcome neighbor, notwithstanding their communism, to bring up so 

 many herds and establish so many cattle-ranges about his house that 

 he becomes disgusted with the frequent intrusions, and is obliged to go 

 away from the exhausted tract. Some of the Herero chiefs have 

 recently begun to drive single settlers away by force, but they are 

 actuated by ulterior jjolitical views. The people are not disposed to 

 grudge a stranger the particular spot of land he occupies, but they 

 wish to drive foreigners out of the country altogether. An incident 

 from Damara history will help to illustrate the extent to which this 

 sense of communism goes. When the Hereros had succeeded, after 

 nine years of warfare, in shaking off the domination of the Namaquas, 

 to whom they had previously been subjected, the Namaqua chief, Jan 

 Afrikaner, asked the missionaries to help him make a peace with them. 

 The missionaries proposed that the two parties should fix a boundary 

 between themselves, which they would both respect. Both refused to 

 do this. They were ready to make a peace, they said, and keep it, but 

 they would have the land, over which they had fought so hard, in 

 common. The Herero chief, Kamaherero, declared repeatedly that 

 Jan might live in any part of the land he chose after the peace, and 

 that he should expect a fair proportion of his own people to be allowed 

 to live in Jan's land. The peace contracted on these terms lasted 

 fully ten years. 



The custom is the same with regard to that which the earth con- 



