5l6 FACTORS IN NATIVE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. 



to do SO, but his opponent, who has laid a mine secretly, g-ets an 

 accomplice to fire it at the psycholog^ical moment — his achieve- 

 ment, of course, in true native fashion, being all the more wonder- 

 ful because the lightning sprang from earth to heaven ! Yet 

 another stratagem much used in the early days was the firing of 

 rockets amongst the native hordes, who broke and fled, thinking 

 that there must be something very uncanny pursuing them. But 

 in time they got too knowing, and then, they began to desire guns 

 for themselves, and unfortunately there were unscrupulous men 

 who undertook to supply them, and one of the darkest pages of 

 South African History is to be found here. That the trade was 

 most profitable goes without saying, and many were the adven- 

 turers who engaged in it. 



Perhaps the most serious side of the business was the rude 

 shocks which the Natives received as again and again they made 

 bad bargains with these renegade white men. Many and many 

 a load of gaspipes. mounted on stocks, to look like guns, were 

 off-loaded at top prices on unsuspecting Natives, only to burst 

 at the first discharge. Some said that it did not matter whether 

 the Native had guns or not, for he could not hit a haystack if 

 he tried, and the usual way was to close both eyes and discharge 

 the gun ! But others saw the danger, and held that the very 

 possession of the weapon was a standing temptation. It is a 

 smgular fact that when the Government Railways were being 

 constructed in the early da}-s, the only wages the Native 

 labourers would accept were firearms and ammunition, with full 

 permission to carry these home when their term of service was 

 ended ; and as the railways had to be completed, the Department 

 had to connive at the practice, which later the Government 

 brought in a stringent measure to prevent. 



So keen, indeed, were the natives on the possession of guns 

 that the Basuto War actually was caused by the Government 

 attempting to deprive them of their arms. 



Again and again as we scan the pages of history we find 

 hordes of Natives ojDposed to a small band of white men, and 

 except in the rarest cases the rifles of the white men proved more 

 than a match for the thousands that had been made invulnerable 

 by the tribal priest. The plain fact is that they could not stand 

 against the rifle, and with the development of the maxim gun 

 ICaffir wars were reduced to wholesale niurder, as the last Zulu 

 rebellion showed. Verily the rifle has for ever settled the issue, 

 and ensured the Pax Britannica, and made it possible for develop- 

 ment to proceed unhindered from without. 



(2) Iviplcv.icnts of Peace. — The Plough. — ^^It is now an 

 established fact that the Bushmen were wont to make use of a 

 pointed sti^ in their primitive agricultural operations, the stick 

 being weighted for convenience by means of a rounded stone, 

 through which a hole had been bored, in order that the shaft 

 of the stick might pass through it, and so into the desired 

 position. Certain Bushman paintings have been found in which 



