Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XI

Apart from its mineral development, Sir William Willcocks points out,[304] South Africa has remained "strangely stationary. Fifty years ago it was a pastoral country importing cereals and dairy produce, and even hay from foreign countries. It is the same to-day. Half a century ago it needed a farm of 5,000 acres to keep a family in decent comfort; to-day it needs the same farm of 5,000 acres to keep a single family in comfort." West of the great Drakenberg range it is an arid, or semi-arid, region. The reason is not so much that the rainfall is deficient, as that the rain comes at the wrong time, and is wasted. What is wanted is water-storage, with irrigation works to spread the water upon the land when it is needed by the farmer. Nothing short of the agency of the State will serve to bring about this physical revolution; for bad legislation must be annulled, and a great intercolonial system of water-husbandry, comparable to those of India and Egypt, must be created. Hitherto agriculture, in spite of the latent possibilities of the country, has scarcely been "attempted"; for, with the exception of the extreme south-western corner of the Cape Colony, the "conquered territory" of the Orange River Colony, and the high veld of the Transvaal, the agricultural development of South Africa "depends entirely on irrigation."