The Boers of South Africa are presented, especially in Paton’s novels,
as a simple and stern people who are also good fighters and good
haters. Subduing part of a continent and making it their own, they
regard themselves as the elect among the children of men quite as much
as do the Slavophiles. Yet these Afrikaners suffer from a curious case
of schizophrenia. Singled out by the Almighty, they are nonetheless so
fearful of the colored population that they repress them as harshly as
any European nation ever did its colonial peoples. Early in _Too Late
the Phalarope_ Paton epitomizes this national group:
they had trekked from the British Government with its officials and
its missionaries and its laws that made a black man as good as his
master, and had trekked into a continent, dangerous and trackless,
where wild beasts and savage men, and grim waterless plains, had
given way before their fierce will to be separate and survive.
Then out of the harsh world of rock and stone they had come to the
grass country, all green and smiling, and had given to it the names
of peace and thankfulness. They had built their homes and their
churches; and as God had chosen them for a people, so did they
choose him for their God, cherishing their separateness that was
now his Will. They set their conquered enemies apart, ruling them
with unsmiling justice, declaring “no equality in Church or State,”
and making the iron law that no white man might touch a black
woman, nor might any white woman be touched by a black man.
This is a patriarchal society, ruled by men such as Jakob Van
Vlaanderen, a political leader who privately calls the members of
Parliament “his span of oxen.” Fiercely nationalistic, they hate the
British, and as they fought them so they fight any force, even a
sociological one, which threatens their hard-won supremacy. In the
Union of South Africa there are willing British subjects and British
sympathizers, but they have not been represented by a group of novels
as fine as these of Paton’s. This is perhaps due to the fact that they
do not form so homogeneous a cultural and ethnic group as do the Boers
and their descendants. For another thing, the political star of the
Boers has been in the ascendant in the past few decades, while that of
the pro-British has seemed about to set as it did in India.