Episode 218 - Lifestyle Update 1861 and an Ode to Landscape Motion Intensity and Physiology
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Show notes
We’re doing a little different thing today, having wondered our way through a few thousand years its time to reflect on a few things.
How did people go about their day to day lives, and what was life really like by the mid-19th Century South Africa? This period was dominated by agriculture, it was before the discoveries of most of the valuable minerals that turned the region from a sleepy agrarian backwater into one of the most dynamic economies in the world.
Cape Town had been the fulcrum around which all European expansion rotated, the southern tip of Africa had to be navigated by all the empires of Europe, first Portuguese, then Dutch, then English. So naturally Cape Town had developed quite a sense of self importance.
Some vicious and malicious Joburgers claim it continues to suffer from a superiority complex today.
All in good spirit of course.
It was a distant port, and if a Voortrekker or AmaZulu king travelled to Cape Town overland, it was like setting sail into an insecure future. The slow wagons cruising overland from the Waterberg to Cape Town took about as long as the maritime trip from Liverpool to Cape Town — two to three months.
Both routes - whether sea or land — were rife with danger.
During this perilous chapter of history, seafaring was still a high risk venture. Meanwhile, those who braved the land faced their own litany of dangers — wagons toppled on treacherous trails, lions prowled the edges of camps, venomous snakes struck without warning, and bandits lurked in the shadows. The veld itself, like the capricious ocean, seemed to conspire against the traveller, offering up a relentless gauntlet of threats to navigate.
This experience meant the journey men and women were hardy, a tough breed. Most actually walked the trip, sometimes riding their horse, but mostly leading the oxen as the wagon creaked and squeaked, rumbled and tinkled over rocky landscape.
African migrants walked from the transOrangia and deeper, into what is now Botswana, all the way to Cape Town to work on farms. That took weeks, sometimes, months. AmaZulu kings like Shaka thought nothing of walking 300 kilometres to visit his distant homesteads, taking a fortnight to recon his land.
Physiology was actually different — people had straighter spines at this time in world history — there were fewer eye problems, stronger limbs. But they lived shorter lives in general, medicine was a distant luxury for most.
19th-century Southern Africans, like many pre-industrial populations globally, generally had better postural alignment and physical conditioning compared to sedentary modern denizens of the ethernet.
Ethnographic and missionary accounts from the era—such as those by Dr. David Livingstone and Thomas Baines—frequently remark on the exceptional physical endurance of local populations. Many African societies, particularly among pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities like the San, Tswana, and Zulu, were noted for their upright posture and ease of movement over long distances.
The strength needed to walk along the tracks and slopes of southern Africa is well known, the pursuit is replicated today with the wonderful trails around the countryside.
But it wasn’t all milk and honey, of course.
The fatality rate remained high until the end of the 19th Century, although in South Africa, people were generally living longer, particularly in the Cape.
