l conditions of the country itself, the qualities of the races
that have occupied it, and the circumstances under which their
occupation took place. And among savage or barbarous people natural
conditions have an even greater importance than they have in more
advanced periods of civilisation, because they are more powerful as
against man. Man in his savage state is not yet able to resist such
conditions or to turn them to serve his purposes, but is condemned to
submit to the kind of life which they prescribe.

This was the case with the first inhabitants of South Africa. They seem
to have entered it as savages, and savages they remained. Nature was
strong and stern; she spread before them no such rich alluvial plains as
tempted cultivation in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates.
Intellectually feeble, and without the patience or the foresight to
attempt to till the soil in a land where droughts are frequent and
disastrous, the Bushmen were content with killing game, and the
Hottentots with living on the milk of their cattle. Such a life, which
was one of uncertainty and often of hardship, permitted no accumulation
of wealth, gave no leisure, suggested no higher want than that of food,
and was in all respects unfavourable to material progress. Even the
Bantu people, who probably came later and were certainly more advanced,
for they carried on some little cultivation of the soil, remained at a
low level. Nature gave them, except in dry years, as much corn as they
needed in return for very little labour. Clothing they did not need, and
their isolation from the rest of the world left them ignorant of
luxuries. When the European voyagers found them at the end of the
fifteenth century, they were making little or no advance in the arts of
life.

Upon the growth of European settlements the influence of the physical
structure of the country has been very marked. When the Portuguese had
followed the long line of coast from the mouth of the Orange River to
that of the Zambesi, and from the mouth of the Zambesi northward to
Zanzibar, they settled only where they heard that gold and ivory could
be obtained. Their forts and trading stations, the first of which dates
from 1505, were therefore planted on the coast northward from the
Limpopo River. Sofala, a little south of the modern port of Beira, was
the principal one. Here they traded, and twice or thrice they made,
always in search of the gold-producing regions, expeditions