South Africa -- Description and travel; South Africa -- History -- 1836-1909; South Africa -- History -- To 1836
But now the founder has all these examples before his eyes, and is
grandly courageous in his determination to avoid the evils of which he
has heard and perhaps seen so much. Of course he is sanguine. A founder
of cities is necessarily a sanguine man, or he would not find himself
employed on such a work. He pegs out his streets and his squares
bravely, being stopped by no consideration as to the value of land. He
clings to parallelograms as being simple, and in a day or two has his
chief thoroughfare a mile long, his cross streets all numbered and
named, his pleasant airy squares, each with a peg at each corner, out in
the wilderness. Here shall be his Belgravia for the grandees, and this
his Cheapside and his Lombard Street for the merchants and bankers. We
can understand how pleasant may be the occupation and how pile upon pile
would rise before the eyes of the projector, how spires and minarets
would ascend, how fountains would play in the open places, and pleasant
trees would lend their shade to the broad sunny ways.
Then comes the real commencement with some little hovel at the corner of
two as yet invisible streets. Other hovels arise always at a distance
from each other and the town begins to be a town. Sometimes there will
be success, but much more often a failure. Very many failures I have
seen, in which all the efforts of the sanguine founder have not produced
more than an Inn, a church, half a dozen stores; and twice as many
drinking booths. And yet there have been the broad streets,--and the
squares if one would take the trouble to make enquiry. Pretoria has not
been a failure. Among recent attempts of the kind Pretoria is now
likely to be a distinguished success. An English Governor is to live
there, and there will be English troops;--I fear, for many years. Balls
will be given at Pretoria. Judges will hold their courts there, and a
Bishop will live in a Pretorian Bishopstowe. But the Pretoria of to-day
has its unknown squares, and its broad ill defined streets about which
houses straggle in an apparently formless way, none of which have as yet
achieved the honours of a second storey. The brooks flow pleasantly, but
sometimes demand an inconvenient amount of jumping. The streets lie in
holes, in which when it rains the mud is very deep. In all such towns as
these mud assumes the force of a fifth element, and becomes so much a
matter of course that it is as necessary to be muddy, as it is to be
smoke-begrimed in London. In London there is soap and water, and in
Pretoria there are, perhaps, clothes-brushes; but a man to be clean
either in one place or the other must always be using his soap or his
clothes-brush. There are many gardens in Pretoria,--for much of the
vacant spaces is so occupied. The time will come in which the gardens
will give place to buildings, but in the mean time they are green and
pleasant-looking. Perhaps the most peculiar feature of the place is the
roses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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