This was Mark Twain's second visit to the African continent. In "The Innocents Abroad" he visits North Africa. Now, three decades later, he visits South Africa as presented in "Following the Equator". Rasmussen notes "While he had mixed feelings about Britain's proper role in the South African (Boer) War, he was unreservedly opposed to the ruthless commercial exploitation of the Congo Free State -- and denounces it in "King Leopold's Soliloquy".
April 7. We are far abroad upon the smooth waters of the Indian Ocean, now; it is shady and pleasant and peaceful under the vast spread of the awnings, and life is perfect again—ideal.
The difference between a river and the sea is, that the river looks fluid, the sea solid—usually looks as if you could step out and walk on it.
From Fatout (pp 263-5): ... they were at sea once more on an eight days’ run to Durban, South Africa. During ten days there he lectured twice to the packed houses that had become routine. ... In South Africa he relished the climate and luxuriant foliage. Grassy slopes and clumps of trees reminded him of New England; rutted tracks made him think of American prairie roads. The Negroes seemed like those at home: same clothes, same faces. But tall palms destroyed the illusion, spike-like plants, the flat-roof tree, and sometimes a gang of unmodified Zulus . . . festooned with glass beads and with necklaces made of the vertebrae of snakes, the men’s hair wrought into a myriad of little wormy forms, gummed with tar, the women's greased with red clay.”
While Livy and Clara remained in Durban, he went on to Pietermaritzburg, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Queenstown, King Williams Town, East London, and Port Elizabeth, where the family was reunited about the middle of June. ...
At Pretoria, stolid Boer audiences were, he said, “hard to start, but promptly and abundantly responsive after that.” While there he visited the imprisoned Jameson raiders, and gave them an impromptu speech. ...
The family spent a week at Port Elizabeth, then five days at Grahamstown, paused at Cradock, stopped two days at Kimberley, and ended the long tour with a week at Cape Town. At Kimberley, Mark Twain was fascinated by diamond mines, going into statistics of carats and values like the Enterprise reporter of boom days in Virginia City. He commented on the country, on towns “well populated with tamed blacks; tamed and Christianized too, I suppose, for they wear the dowdy clothes of our Christian civilization.” For the Boers he could pump up no great enthusiasm, representing them as rather cloddish people dressed in outfits that “For ugliness of shape, and for miracles of ugly colors inharmoniously associated . . . were a record.” In Cape Town he saw everything: Table Rock, Table Bay, St. Simon’s Bay, the Parliament, old Dutch mansions—in fact, when he reached the Cape, he said he had seen “each and all of the great features of South Africa except Mr. Cecil Rhodes.”