Note 1431 — Chapter XVII · —The Influence Of Climate

When one type of climate extends monotonously over a vast area, as in Russia. Siberia, Central Asia or immense tracts of Africa, the differences of temperature which prick and stimulate national endeavor in small climatic districts here lose much of their force. Their effects flatten out into insignificance, overwhelmed by the encounter with too large a territory. All the southern continents are handicapped by the monotony of their zonal location. The map of annual isotherms shows Africa quite enclosed between the two torrid lines of 20° Centigrade, except for a narrow sub-tropical belt along the Barbary coast in the north, and in the south an equally narrow littoral extending east and north from the Cape of Good Hope. At first glance, the large area of South Africa lying on the temperate side of the Tropic of Capricorn raises hopes for a rich economic, social and cultural development here; but these are dashed by an examination of the isotherms. Excessive heat lays its retarding touch upon everything, while a prevailing aridity (rainfall less than 10 inches or 25 centimeters), except on the narrow windward slope of the eastern mountains, gives the last touch of climatic monotony. The coastal belt of Cape Colony and Natal raise tropical and sub-tropical products1431 like all the rest of the continent, while the semi-arid interior is committed with little variations to pastoral life. [See maps pages 484 and 487.] Climatic monotony, operating alone, would have condemned South Africa to poverty of development, and will unquestionably always avail to impoverish its national life. South African history has been made by its mines and by its location on the original water route to India; the first have dominated its economic development, and the latter has largely determined its ethnic elements—English, Dutch, and French Huguenots, while the magnet of the mines has drawn other nationalities and especially a large Jewish contingent into the urban centers of the Rand.1432 In the background is the native Kaffir and Hottentot stocks, whose blood filters into the lower classes of the white population. The diversity of these ethnic elements may compensate in part for the monotony of climatic conditions, which promise to check differentiation. However, climatic control is here peculiarly despotic. We see how it has converted the urban merchants of Holland and the skillful Huguenot artisan of France into the crude pastoral Boer of the Transvaal.