OCR Rendition - approximate

338 SiR H. B. FRERE.-On the Laws affecting the We can but cursorily glance at the changes which have taken place in the other great branch of the Bantu family, the Amakosa Kaffirs, since they came in contact with Europeans. We first hear of them at the end of the last and beginning of the present century as encroaching on the Colony, and pressing back the Hottentot tribes in the neighbourhood of Algoa Bay. They do not, however, seem to have settled much permanently south of the Bushman's river. From that time to this the history of our intercourse with them is a history of continued collision between the frontier farmers and the native tribes. Cattle thefts and reprisals leading to a savage and generally little expected outburst of hostility-a tedious war, and a truce or peace of exhaustion is the usual history-the Kaffir tribes being invariably forced back, and a hollow settlement effected, sometimes with an attempt at improved border arrangements, or at the establishment of a neutral zone, but never with the result of doing more than delay a renewal of hostilities, as soon as the memory of what the frontier tribes had suffered in war began to grow dim. The Colonial frontier has steadily advanced from the Liesbeck brook, or Salt river in sight of Cape Town, which was its boundary when the Dutch first established themselves ; it gradually advanced step by step to the Zwartkop river beyond fort Elizabeth, and then by successive but rapid steps to the Bushman river, the Fish river, the Buffalo, the Kei, the Bashee, the Umtata, till now it has practically reached the frontier of Natal, and the most independent of Amakosa Kaffir chiefs has no really sovereign authority, except what he exercises through the permission, or by the insouciance of the British Government. I am not now speaking of rights or constitutional claims, but of practical results. What has been the result of the proximity of European Colonists as regards the native tribes ? And first as to numbers. In the absence of reliable statistics we are left more or less at the mercy of fallacious personal observation and memory, and I found great differences of opinion among experienced and observant men, as to whether the natives in the aggregate had increased or decreased in numbers. Some opinions were very decided that within living memory there had been great decrease in the aggregate of Kaffir population ; but the result of the most careful inquiry I could make satisfied me that any aggregate decrease was certainly not proved. In particular localities, it is true, it was often possible to prove a decided decrease. There had often been a dispersion of large well-known and populous kraals. There had been wholesale removals of all members of particular tribes to other distant parts, and