If we now pass to South Africa we find problems of race and of
nationality in a more acute and tangled form than anywhere else in the
world. Long before the Portuguese had turned the Cape of Good Hope
towards the end of the sixteenth century, this land was occupied by a
confusion of contending tribal peoples belonging to at least three
well-differentiated human stocks. Bantu peoples were pushing southwards,
ousting and exterminating Hottentot tribes; these were at the same time
exercising a continuous pressure on the Bush people. At the present time
this great territory, with a total area of nearly twenty times that of
England, is occupied by about six and a quarter millions of people,
fully five millions being descendants of the original native tribes,
with a slight admixture of Asiatic elements. The masters and owners of
this territory, numbering only a little over a million, are of the
Nordic or north-west European stock. About one-half of the dominant
stock drew its original guiding spirit from Holland, the other half
carried to its new home the national spirit of England. These two
nationalities, both derived from the same North Sea stock, have been
thrown together in South Africa for over a century, and yet a sense of
difference in nationality has persisted, even in face of dangers which
threaten both alike. Thus South Africa has an acute friction arising
from the rubbing of one nationality on another. She has also her racial
problems; the more closely they are examined the more do their potential
dangers seem to grow. Boer and Briton may differ in speech, habit, and
outlook, but both agree that there is an impassable frontier between
them and the native races of Africa and Asia. They do not even
camouflage the racial barricade which they have erected; they purposely
expose it in its nakedness to full view, so that none may fail to see
it. The dark natives maintain their tribal and racial frontiers by their
inherited organizations, but the surveillance of the social barrier
between them and the whites lies with the dominant race. Only those who
have come into direct contact with racial antagonisms know how deeply
they are situated in the primitive organization of the human brain. Let
me cite only one witness on this point--one who would willingly believe,
if he could, that racial antagonisms are both superficial and acquired.
"That a very real problem exists in the race-consciousness of the white
and coloured peoples is evident, is sometimes painfully evident,
sometimes dangerously so. There is nothing to be gained by
under-estimating its deep-seated nature and the gravity of its issues."
This is a quotation from the presidential address given by Dr. W. Flint
to the last meeting (1919) of the South African Association for the
Advancement of Science. The mixture of races in South Africa has roused
to activity instincts or subconscious states which lie dormant in
members of a uniform population. National and racial frontiers, we shall
see, are part of Nature's evolutionary machinery. Meantime we merely
note that modern industrial ideals clash with the working of Nature's
instinctive mechanisms, and in South Africa the two are in actual
collision.