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THOUGHTS ON SOUTH AFRICA
* * * * * *
OTHER BOOKS BY
OLIVE SCHREINER
STORIES, DREAMS AND ALLEGORIES
DREAMS
DREAM LIFE AND REAL LIFE
TROOPER PETER HALKET
WOMAN AND LABOUR
T. FISHER UNWIN LTD LONDON
* * * * * *
THOUGHTS ON SOUTH AFRICA
by
OLIVE SCHREINER
T. Fisher Unwin Ltd
London: Adelphi Terrace
First published in 1923
(All rights reserved)
To
MY HUSBAND
THESE STRAY THOUGHTS ON THE LAND WE BOTH LOVE
ARE INSCRIBED BY HIS WIFE
OLIVE CRONWRIGHT SCHREINER
HANOVER,
CAPE COLONY,
_October 11, 1901_.
FOREWORD
"Stray thoughts on South Africa, by a Returned South African" (as they
were originally entitled) were left by my late wife almost exactly as
they now appear.
She went to England for the first time early in 1881 and returned
to South Africa towards the end of 1889. Cape Town not suiting her
asthmatic chest, it was not long after her return that she made
Matjesfontein her home. Matjesfontein is a railway-station on the main
line, 195 miles from Cape Town and 2,955 feet above the sea-level. The
climate suited her on the whole, and Cape Town,--where her family,
friends and social interests were,--was not too far away. Here she
leased a cottage which Mr. Logan, the owner of the little village and
the large hotel, called "Schreiner Cottage."
It was here apparently that most of the "Stray Thought" articles were
written (as well as "Our Waste Land in Mashonaland," which is included
in this volume). This would be from 1890 to somewhere towards the end
of 1892; for she again went to England in 1893, returning the same year.
The first article (Chapter I), dealing chiefly with the natural
features of South Africa, was published in the _Cape Times_, Cape Town,
as a "(_Revised Edition_)" on the 18th August, 1891, with the footnote
"(_To be continued in The Fortnightly Review_)," and the last (Chapter
VI) in 1900. The first five chapters appeared, as far as my knowledge
goes, some of them in _The Fortnightly Review_, others in _Cosmopolis_,
and the sixth chapter in _The Cosmopolitan_. The last chapter on "The
Englishman," which many will regard as the most remarkable part of
this volume, has not been published before, and was apparently never
revised; it was written so hurriedly that I had to type it myself, and
only with great difficulty; the manuscript starts abruptly on a page
numbered 3. A proposed chapter on the Native Races was never written.
"The Domestic Life of the South African Boer" appeared in _The Youth's
Companion_ in November, 1899. It is not a part of "Stray Thoughts,"
but, from its nature, seems to find a fitting place in this book. "Our
Waste Land in Mashonaland" appeared in the _Cape Times_, simply as
"Communicated," on August 26th, 1891. The Dedication, the Introduction,
and the other Notes have not hitherto been published.
All the articles were carefully revised by her, as also the
above-mentioned unpublished matter, except Chapter VIII. It will be
seen from the "Notes" that she was occupied with them at intervals,
and, from the Prefatory Note, that she intended to publish them in 1896
soon after the Jameson Raid.
About this time, however, she began to write _Trooper Peter Halket of
Mashonaland_, which absorbed her time and attention to the exclusion
of the "Stray Thoughts." She and I went to England in 1897, when
she published _Peter Halket_. Not long after our return we went to
Johannesburg and lived there until some little time before the Boer War
started. Subsequently, on account of bad health, her doctor ordered her
to leave. The Boer War and the distressing state of things in South
Africa resulting therefrom, coupled with her ill-health and then the
European War and the almost complete breakdown of her health, account
largely, no doubt, for the non-publication of these _Thoughts on South
Africa_.
S. C. CRONWRIGHT-SCHREINER.
KRANTZ PLAATS, 6 CAMDEN STREET,
TAMBOERS KLOOF, CAPE TOWN.
_January 1923._
PREFATORY NOTE
These articles were written four years ago; the first, a description
of South African scenery, appeared in _The Fortnightly Review_ at that
time.
The rest did not follow. This was owing to the fact that there were at
the Cape at that time certain parties and persons who, using the Boers
of South Africa for their own purpose, yet pandered to them that they
might ultimately more successfully obtain their own ends.
These papers, written by one who had for years lived among the Boers,
sharing their daily life and understanding their language, of necessity
attempt to delineate, not only the coarse external shell of the Boer,
but the finer fibred kernel within, which those whose contact with him
is superficial never see; and while dwelling at great length upon the
one great flaw which mars the relation of the Boer with his fellow men
in South Africa, these papers are of necessity sympathetic in their
treatment of him.
Now, it appeared not well, at a time when certain men in South Africa
were bending down to press their cheek against the heel of any pair
of vel-schoens that might pass them, that any English voice should be
raised which spoke in kindly tones of the Boer, lest the voice of the
sympathizer should blend with and be mistaken for that of the flatterer.
It was certain that the time would come when again the Boer would stand
in need of just treatment at the hands of Englishmen; and these papers
were therefore put aside.
That time has come.
The Boer has been struck a sore blow by the hand that stroked him; and
again it is necessary that he, with his antique faults and his heroic
virtues, should be shown to the world as he is.
Therefore these papers, which make an attempt to delineate him in such
guise as he lives, are now printed. They have been left as they stood
save for the addition of a few foot-notes.
OLIVE SCHREINER.
THE HOMESTEAD, KIMBERLEY,
SOUTH AFRICA.
_February 17, 1896._
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD BY S. C. CRONWRIGHT-SCHREINER 7
PREFATORY NOTE (1896) 9
INTRODUCTION (1901) 13
CHAPTER
I. SOUTH AFRICA: ITS NATURAL FEATURES, ITS DIVERSE PEOPLES,
ITS POLITICAL STATUS: THE PROBLEM 27
II. THE BOER 65
III. THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY 106
IV. THE WANDERINGS OF THE BOER 148
V. THE BOER WOMAN AND THE MODERN WOMAN'S QUESTION 191
VI. THE BOER AND HIS REPUBLICS 221
VII. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BOER 249
VIII. THE ENGLISHMAN 321
NOTE A. THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATION (1900) 367
NOTE B. THE VALUE OF HUMAN VARIETIES (1901) 384
NOTE C. THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF THE BOER (1899) 387
NOTE D. OUR WASTE LAND IN MASHONALAND (1891) 393
INTRODUCTION
As a rule, the book which requires a preface of explanation is a book
better not written, and better not read.
But certain parts of this book have appeared in periodicals and have
caused, no doubt owing to the fragmentary nature of their publication,
some misconceptions which it might be worth while setting right.
It has been stated by some kindly critic that the subject of this
little book was a valuable history of South Africa, while another has
suggested my calling it "The History of the Boer."
Nothing has been farther from my thought than the writing of any
history. In a far different manner I should have equipped myself had
it been my intention to do so. Dr. Theal, in his _History of South
Africa_, has collected as carefully and dealt as ably with the mere
historical incidents of the last two hundred years as it is possible
for any one person, in the course of one life, and from one point of
view, to do.
Still less, as has been suggested, was it my intention to write a
homily on South African problems and people.
This little book is something far less pretentious, and wholly
different.
Born in South Africa, I felt from my childhood a wish to set down what
I thought and felt about my native land. After I was grown up, but in
my youth, I went to Europe for ten years, living in London but visiting
the Continent continually.
When at the end of those ten years I came back to my native land, it
was with an even added interest that I looked at its people and its
problems and its physical features, and the wish became stronger to
jot down what I thought and felt with regard to it.
This little book is the gratification of that wish.
It is not a history, it is not a homily, it is not a political
brochure--it is simply what one South African at the end of the
nineteenth century thought, and felt, with regard to his native land:
thought and felt with regard to its peoples, its problems and its
scenery--it is nothing more than this; but it is also nothing less.
I do not think, simple as such a book is, it need be necessarily quite
without interest for any but the writer.
I myself should like to know, apart from what the learned historians
have to say, and apart from the views of passing travellers who have
lived a few years in the country, and who therefore have never seen
its life below the surface--I should like to know just what one
ordinary Chinaman feels and thinks, or does not feel and think, with
regard to his native land at the end of the nineteenth century. I
should like to know just what he sincerely thinks of its pig-tails
and its tea plantations, what he feels to its scenery on the banks of
the Yangtsekiang, and in its northern mountain regions, and exactly
how its pagodas, and its Mongolian dynasty, and the position of its
women, and its flowers, and even its stiff gardens, strike him. I
should be interested to know just what he feels towards its complex
peoples, and the foreigners; what he hopes for its future, and how he
regards its past. His views might not always be correct, perhaps not
often, but as long as they were sincerely his, set down to please no
one and to grieve no one, but because they were his, they would have
a certain interest for me. It would be the picture of only one John
Chinaman--what he thought and felt towards his land, a purely personal
document, but it might have a certain value!
Whatever value attaches to this little book is of this kind only. It is
a personal document.
Had I the health to carry out my plans and to write somewhat in detail
of what I think and feel with regard to our English folk in Africa,
and above all of our Natives and their problems and difficulties, the
little book might have had a certain rotundity; now it is a broken
segment only. Nor should I publish it now were it not at the request of
many friends; for I am unable adequately to revise even this segment.
There is also one insignificant matter I should like to notice. It has
been said I love the African Boer. That is true. But it has been given
as a reason for my doing so that I share his blood, and that is not
true. One could not belong to a more virile folk, but I have no drop of
Dutch blood.
My father was a South German, born in Würtemberg, who studied at Basel,
and when only twenty-one years old came to London, where he married my
mother, of purely English blood; and together with her came to Africa
as a missionary about the year 1836.[1] My training was exclusively and
strongly English. I did not begin learning any other language till I
was eight and have never gained the complete mastery of any other. It
is my mother speech and England is my mother land.
[1] It was at the end of 1838.--S.C.C.S.
Neither do I owe it to early training that I value my fellow South
Africans of Dutch descent. I started in life with as much insular
prejudice and racial pride as it is given to any citizen who has
never left the little Northern Island to possess. I cannot remember
ever being exactly instructed in these matters by any one, rather, I
suppose, I imbibed my view as boys coming to a town where there are two
rival schools imbibe a prejudice towards the boys of the other school,
without ever being definitely instructed on the matter. I cannot
remember a time when I was not profoundly convinced of the superiority
of the English, their government and their manners, over all other
peoples.
One of my earliest memories is of walking up and down on the rocks
behind the little Mission House in which I was born and making believe
that I was Queen Victoria and that all the world belonged to me. That
being the case, I ordered all the black people in South Africa to be
collected and put into the desert of Sahara, and a wall built across
Africa shutting it off; I then ordained that any black person returning
south of that line should have his head cut off. I did not wish to
make slaves of them, but I wished to put them where I need never see
them, because I considered them ugly. I do not remember planning that
Dutch South Africans should be put across the wall, but my objection to
them was only a little less.
I cannot have been more than four years old when a Boer family
outspanned their ox-wagon on the veld near our mission house. As I
was walking past it a little girl of about my own age, wearing, like
myself, a great white cotton kapje, climbed off the trap at the back of
the wagon and came towards me holding out her hand. In it was a little
fistful of dark-brown sugar, a treat to up-country children in the
wilds where sweetmeats were rare. She held it out to me without saying
a word. I was too polite to refuse to take it, but, as soon as I had
gone a few steps, I opened my hand behind me and let it drop. To have
eaten sugar that had been in the hand of a Boer child would have been
absolutely impossible to me. Often, in later years, I have seen those
two small figures standing there in the African afternoon sunshine in
their great white kapjes, as in a way allegoric of the whole relation
between the Anglo-Saxon and the Boer in South Africa.
It was about the same time that a minister of the Dutch Reformed
Church, but a Scotchman by descent, came to spend a night at our
station. The accommodation of an up-country mission house is limited,
and I had to give him up my bed. On the night following when bedtime
came I inquired if fresh sheets had been put on my bed; on being told
they had not and that the clergyman had only slept in them one night
and I might well use them, I absolutely refused to get in. Nothing, I
said, would ever induce me to sleep between sheets a Dutchman had slept
between. It was in vain it was protested he was not a Dutchman though
called a Dutch minister; I was resolute and passed the night on the
outside of the quilt.
These trivial facts are not wholly without interest as showing the
possible mental attitude of the members of one society towards each
other if divided by race; and they will, I think, serve to show that
whatever sympathy I have felt with my fellow South Africans of other
races is not the result of early bias or training.
I remember it as often a subject of thought within myself at this time,
why God had made us, the English, so superior to all other races, and,
while feeling it was very nice to belong to the best people on earth,
having yet a vague feeling that it was not quite just of God to have
made us so much better than all the other nations. I have only to
return to the experiences of my early infancy to know what the most
fully developed Jingoism means.
Later on, my feeling for the Boer changed, as did, later yet, my
feeling towards the native races; but this was not the result of any
training, but simply of an increased knowledge.
When I was six years old, on a long journey from one part of South
Africa to another, our wagon outspanned at a Boer's farm and we spent
a day and a night there. I must often have visited a Boer farm-house
before, but this visit made a curiously deep impression on me, from
which I date the beginning of that consciousness of a certain political
charm about the Boer and his life, which has never left me. The
orange trees before the door, the first I had ever seen, with their
sweet-scented leaves; the great clean, bare "voorhuis" (front room)
with its mud floors and its chairs and sofa with reimpje[2] seats;
the good old mother with her good-natured smile, sitting in her elbow
chair, with her coffee table at her side and her feet on a stove; the
little shy children, who, as I could not speak Dutch nor they English,
brought me silently their little toys and patchwork to look at and
who were so anxious to be friendly (some of these children are now, I
believe, languishing as political prisoners in English prisons!); the
strange cool stillness of the air next morning when we rose at dawn to
continue our journey; the bleating of the sheep in the kraals, where
the farmer's sons had already gone to count them out; the great blue
mountain behind the house, with the still deep blue shadow beneath the
krantzes[3] on its top; and the farm-house becoming a small white
speck with the orange trees before the door as our wagon crept away in
the early light--all this made a profound impression on me; and I am
conscious that I began to feel even then that charm which the still,
free, simple life of the Boer on his land has since had for me.
[2] Reimpje = raw leather strips.
[3] Krantzes = precipices.
Living in another part of Africa, three years later, it was my duty
every morning to go to a Boer farm-house, about a mile off, to fetch
milk. Not more pleasant in my memory is the scent of the quince hedges
I had to pass, or the rushing between its stepping-stones of the river
I had to cross, than of the little daub-and-wattle house of two rooms,
with its mud floors and green windows, with the good old mother, very
stout, sitting always in her elbow-chair beside the little coffee-table
however early I came, and the great buxom daughters bustling about,
while the little bare-foot children ran off to the kraal with my pail
to fill it. They were the poorest class of by-woners (persons who have
no land of their own and live on the land of others), and the little
front room with its mud floor was often very full of flies in the
summer, but the African sunshine fell across the floor from one open
door to the other; and the good old mother used to make me sit on the
stove at her feet, and smiled good-temperedly at my shy attempts to
answer her questions in Dutch, of which I could at that time speak only
a few broken words; and sometimes she gave me a carnation or a bit of
pietercillie from her garden. The little house with its inhabitants
were all objects of interest and sympathy to me. But I am not at all
sure that, small shy person that I was, I did not even then still
regard myself as a person belonging to a quite superior race, surveying
them as it were from a height with sympathetic interest.
It was at this time that I began to study the history of the Boers and
the story of Slachters Nek, of the valiant stand made by Bezuidenhout's
wife; and the sufferings and wrongs of the old Fore-trekkers were
often in my thoughts. I was convinced that, had I lived at the time of
Slachters Nek, I would have saved the lives of those five men, even
at the risk of my own; I would have gone to the Governor, I would have
moved heaven and earth, I would have been a kind of Paladin redressing
the wrongs of the Boer, and I almost regretted that I had not been born
in those dark times that I might have lived for, and if necessary have
died for, him. But still I did not really know the Boer; he was only a
far-off object of pity and sympathy.
It was some years later that I was first thrown into close personal
contact with the South African Boer.
For five years I lived among them as a teacher on their farms,
sometimes among the more cultured, and sometimes among the more
primitive but not one whit less lovable and intelligent, class.
Sometimes for eighteen months I did not see an English face and
was brought into the closest mental contact with them which is
possible--the mental contact between teacher and taught. Watching them
in all the vicissitudes of life, from birth to marriage and death, I
learnt to love the Boer, but more, I learnt to admire him. I learnt
that in the African Boer we have one of the most intellectually virile
and dominant races the world has seen; a people who beneath a calm
and almost stolid surface hide the intensest passions and the most
indomitable resolution. Among the peoples of Europe I have been thrown
into contact with, the Swiss and the Tyrolese of remote Alpine villages
most resemble the African Boer; but there is a certain quiet but
high-spirited indomitableness and an unlimited power of self-control
which is characteristic of the average Boer man and above all the
average Boer woman, which I have not met with in an equal degree in any
other races, though individuals in all races may be found possessing
it, and certain Boers of course have it not.
It has been asked me more than once, on what ground I based the
statement made before the present war began, in papers futilely
written in the hope of preventing it, that, if England made war on the
Republics, she would have to send out at least one hundred and fifty
thousand soldiers to attack these small states, and that even then
there was a possibility that the red African mier-kat might ultimately
creep back into its hole in the red African earth, torn and bleeding,
but alive--it has been asked how I came to form this opinion, when
military authorities, keen financiers and politicians held that at
most twenty thousand soldiers and a few months would see the Republics
crushed.
To this I have only one answer. I based my statement on my knowledge
of the character of the Boer men, but above all of the Boer women. The
measure of its women is ultimately the measure of any people's strength
and resistile power. With the mother of the Gracchi, the Roman Republic
in its might and vitality: with the effete Roman woman of a later
period, the decadent Empire. The heart of the Boer woman is the true
citadel of her people; and while that remains unbroken, though every
city be taken and every village and farm-house burnt, the people is yet
to crush.
I have been blamed for an excessive love of the race, and an
unwillingness to see its faults: but I hardly think this is true.
The Boer has to the full the defects of his qualities; that
scintillating intellectual brilliance and versatility, so common and
so charming in the Frenchman and the Irishman, the Boer, even when
highly cultured, seldom has: he is deep and strong rather than broad
and brilliant: indomitable when he does act, it takes much to rouse
him into action; he is slow and often heavy. And the Boer race has its
Judases, as all other races have; nor do I know of a more sorrowful
sight than the descendant of the old Boer, speaking English often with
so foreign an accent as to be laughable, yet playing the part of the
extreme Anglo-Saxon; losing thereby the charms of the Boer without
attaining to the magnificent virtues which are characteristic of the
best Englishman. But these persons are fortunately rare; and behind
them lies the great, solid, self-respecting mass of the Dutch South
African people.
I do not appraise, as has been said, the Boer as higher or more
valuable than other human varieties. A dogmatic statement as to the
respective values of human varieties, or even of races, has always
appeared to me, since I passed out of my infantile state of ignorance,
as impossible. Each race has its virtues and the deficiencies which are
complemental to its virtues, and the loss of any one race would be to
me the falling of a star from the human galaxy.
When one travels in Italy and sees its harmoniously featured people,
and views that plastic art which the Italian alone has given the
world in many of its noblest forms, and realizes the vast debt under
which all the world rests to the Italian race for its influence on
the fourteenth-century renaissance, and remembers the list of the
mighty dead from Michael Angelo to Dante, one so considering the land
and its people is inclined to say that it would be well to barter any
folk to preserve Italy and her gifts to humanity. But when one crosses
the Alps and enters quaint German villages with their simple folk and
treads on the soil which was the birth-land of the Goethes and Kants
and Beethovens and Luthers, who are the world's wealth as well as
Germany's, when one considers that vast army of intellectual labourers
who have made the name German synonymous with the search after
knowledge and truth for truth's sake; when one walks through the Rhine
provinces with their sunshine, their vines, and their music, and their
stalwart men and fair-faced women, with their German truth of heart,
then it may be forgiven one who has any German blood in his veins if he
feels inclined to seize a flag as children do and walk about waving it
and crying, "I am a German! This is my Fatherland!"
But should one cross the Rhine and live among that folk on the other
side, so old in their civilization, so keenly alive, who have suffered
in the search for freedom, and are so capable of abandoning all for a
lofty ideal; when one considers Paris, that queen among the cities in
beauty and in tragedy, her people scintillating with intellect and an
opalescent life always varying, then one is inclined to say, "Take all,
but leave us France, the right eye of the world!"
And yet, should one cross to little Switzerland and little Holland,
where one knows one stands on ground made sacred in past ages as the
battle-ground where mighty empires which sought to crush freedom were
repelled, and studies that virile folk, one is inclined to exclaim,
"There would be nothing more grand than to belong to one of these small
heroic great peoples," and one thanks the gods they have existed.
Yet, further, if one turns to the northern peninsulas where in their
greatest purity are to be found our fair northern races, and where the
sons of the Sea Kings seem to have retained into these later times
among their fjords and frozen forests much of the charm and freshness
which we dream of as belonging to our own old northern ancestors, a
charm which lives for ever in their great northern Saga, the loftiest
song of battle and the deepest of the love of man and woman that the
world has heard, one is not surprised that sons of Scandinavia send
out into the world to-day works of genius which conquer its thought as
their forefathers conquered the bodies of the men of the ancient world;
one feels that, were the Scandinavian race obliterated, a northern
aurora would have faded.[4]
[4] If I were compelled to name the most poetical and
completely ideal human creature I have met in the course of
somewhat complex travels, I should name a Swede whom I once
met in Italy.
While, if one turns one's eyes to the great northland in whose people
Europe and Asia mingle, and studies their strangely virile and intense
literature and their characters, in which the lion and the lamb are
so strangely blended, and men willing to die rather than exercise any
form of force towards their fellows are found side by side with those
who know of no governing power but the knout; when one watches this
great, strange, strong, gentle, fierce folk, so yet unexhausted, one is
strangely drawn towards it and compelled to recognize that the Russian
is not merely physically but intellectually one of the mighty modifying
forces of the future.
So, if one crosses the sea to the little island of fogs and mists, it
may be forgiven to one who has its people's blood in his veins, if,
having well studied its people in their past and their present, their
heights and their depths, he should say, as the Jew has a right to
say of his nation--"If we are the worst of humanity, we are also of
its best!" For, like the Jew, if we English have sordid racial vices
we have magnificent virtues; and we resemble him in this, that those
very vices which most mark our national character and by which we
are known throughout the earth, are the very qualities of which our
greatest men and our noblest elements are the negation. As the Jew,
marked everywhere by his devotion to material gain and the thirst for
wealth, has yet, in his loftiest men of genius, realized the height of
spirituality and the negation of all subjection to the sensuous; so
we--the English folk, known throughout the world for our greed of power
and pelf, and as tending always to cloak our self-seeking from our own
eyes and from that of the world with a mantle of assumed virtue: a
tendency which has made the name of England synonymous with hypocrisy
and perfidy throughout the world--yet possess, in our greatest men and
our ethically developed class, a body of individuals whose lives and
ideals are a superb opposition to these qualities. Beside the sordid
gold-seeker, financial speculator, land grabber and buccaneer, stand
our Shelley and our Milton; beside the millions who use philanthropy
as a means of self-gratification and a cloak to greed and ambition,
are thousands with whom it is a heroic reality. Without any national
prejudice may one not say that no people in the world ever possessed
a section more determined to see things nakedly as they are, and,
whether personally or nationally, to prefer justice to self-interest,
than a section of our English people? Have there ever been statesmen in
any land who have more fearlessly denounced injustice and oppression,
not merely when exercised towards their own nation but by it, than
Burke and Chatham when they raised their voices to oppose George the
Third supported by the bulk of the English nation in their attempt
to crush freedom in America? If no nation has more misrepresented,
neglected and persecuted its sons of light, no nation has had more of
them to persecute. If Dante's dream were a reality, mayhap we should
find in that lowest hell, among the sad multitudes walking round
continually with iron weights upon their heads, that every third man
was an Englishman; but we should also scale to no heaven so high that
in the highest circle among the brightest spirits we should not find
the sons and daughters of the damp little isle. If ten righteous would
have saved a city once, shall not a nation be saved by ten millions?
Shall it not be counted for righteousness to our stock-jobbers and
priests and politicians, who, tongue buried in cheek, talk of spreading
Christianity and enlightenment, when he means exploitation and
destruction, that he belongs to a race thousands of whose men and women
do sincerely desire those things which he affects? When the great Jew
raised over his native city his mighty cry of--"O Jerusalem"--was it
not proved by that very cry itself that sons of light were born even in
her degenerate bosom? Was it not something that she gave birth to the
prophets whom she killed and stoned?
It may be allowed any man who has English blood in his veins to feel
that he can never fall in the gulf of insincerity and egoism but he
shall have millions of his fellow countrymen about him, but also that
there are no heights of sincerity and humanity towards which he may
aspire which thousands of his race have not attained; that he belongs
to a branch of the human race which, if it has given birth to some of
the most sordid and crumpled of human blooms, has also borne on it the
fairest of fruit.
Even if one turn to the despised African races, one finds, with much
that is immature and childlike, much that is gracious and charming.
That very strength of social instinct which characterises so many of
them, to whom the social organism is all, the individual composing
it so little, far removed as it is from our individualized Northern
standpoint, may it not yet have its aspects of value and its lessons
for humanity? The very Bushman, so little socialized, and standing
almost on the border-line between the creature that speaks whom we
call man and the creature that thinks and feels without speaking whom
we call beast, that he has something of the attraction of both, would
we be without him? And may one not well be glad one was not born so
late in the order of life that one never saw him? And one who has not
personally known the Jap, the Chinaman, the Indian, the Afghan, the
Spaniard, the Esquimo and the Turk, may well regret that the shortness
of human life has made it impossible for him to love and study them all
in their own habitats?
In truth, I am unable to conceive of the varieties and species into
which the human race has divided itself as other than varied flowers
in the garden of the gods on earth, of which the loss of one would be
heavy. In my own garden I desire to see grow all species and kinds of
flowers, the rose, the rhododendron, the violet and the orchid and the
cactus on the rocks. And I love the purple-eyed periwinkle as well as
any plant; only if it spreads inordinately and threatens to choke all
the others do I say, "It is a weed; pull it up and circumscribe it!"
OLIVE SCHREINER.
HANOVER,
CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, 1901.
Thoughts on South Africa
CHAPTER I
SOUTH AFRICA: ITS NATURAL FEATURES, ITS DIVERSE PEOPLES, ITS POLITICAL
STATUS: THE PROBLEM
There are artists who, loving their work, when they have finished it,
put it aside for years, that, after the lapse of time, returning to it
and reviewing it from the standpoint of distance, they may judge of it
in a manner which was not possible while the passion of creation and
the link of unbroken emotion bound them to it.
What the artist does intentionally, life often does for us fortuitously
in other relationships.
It may be questioned whether a man has ever been able to form an
adequate conception of his mother's face in its relation to others,
till after long years of absence he has returned to it, and, whether
he will or no, there flashes on him the consciousness of its beauty,
nobility, weariness, or age as compared with that of others; a thing
which was not possible to him, when it rose for him every morning as
the sun, and mingled itself with all the experiences of his day.
What is true of the personal mother is yet more true of the man's
native land. It has shaped all his experiences; it has lain as the
background to all his consciousness; it has modified his sensations and
emotions. He can no more pass a calm, relative judgment on it, than an
artist can upon the work he is creating, or a child at the breast can
analyze the face above it. The incapacity of peoples to pass judgments
on the surroundings from which they have never been separated is
familiar to every traveller. The mayor of the little German town does
not take you to see the costumes of the peasants, nor the old church,
nor the Dürer over the altar; but drags you away to see the new row of
gas-lamps in the village street. The costumes, the church, the picture
are unique in Europe and the world; better gas-lamps flame before every
butcher's shop in London and Paris; but the lamps are new and have cost
him much; he cannot view them objectively. The inhabitant of one of the
rarest and fairest towns in the colonies or on earth does not boast to
you of his oaks and grapes, or ask you what you think of his mountain,
or explain to you the marvellous mixture of races in his streets; but
he is anxious to know what you think of his docks and small public
buildings. He has not the emotional detachment necessary for the
forming of a large critical judgment. A certain distance is necessary
to the seeing of great wholes clearly. It is not by any chance that
the most scientific exposition of American Democracy is the work of
a Frenchman, that the best history of the French Revolution is by an
Englishman, or that the finest history of English literature is the
work of a Frenchman. Distance is essential for a keen, salient survey,
which shall take in large outlines and mark prominent characteristics.
It is customary to ridicule the traveller who passes rapidly through
a country, and then writes his impression of it. The truth is he
sees much that is hidden for ever from the eyes of the inhabitants.
Habit and custom have blinded them. They are indignant when it is
said that their land is arid, that it has few running streams, that
its population is scanty, and that vegetables are scarce; and they
are amused and surprised when he discants for three pages on the
glorious rarity of their air, and the scientific interest of their
mingled peoples: yet these are the prominent external features which
differentiate their land from all others.
Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the people of a country are
justified in their contempt of the bird's-eye view of the stranger.
There is a certain knowledge of a land which is only to be gained by
one born in it, or brought into long-continued, close, personal contact
with it, and which in its perfection is perhaps never obtained by any
man with regard to a country which he has not inhabited before he was
thirty. It is the subjective emotional sympathy with its nature, and
the comprehension not merely of the vices and virtues of its people,
but of the how and why of their existence, which is possible to a
man only with regard to a country that is more or less his own. The
stranger sees the barren scene, but of the emotion which that barren
mountain is capable of awakening in the man who lives under its shadow
he knows nothing. He marks the curious custom, but of the social
condition which originated it, and the passions concerned in its
maintenance, he understands absolutely nothing.
This subtle, sympathetic, subjective knowledge of a land and people is
that which is essential to the artist, and to the great leader of men.
Without it no artist has ever greatly portrayed a land or a people, no
great statesman or reformer has ever led or guided a nation or race.
To Balzac nothing was easier than to paint the Paris boarding-house.
All the united intellect and genius of Europe could not have painted
it if the grimy respectability of those chairs and tables, the sordid
narrowness of the faded human lives, had not eaten first into their
own substance, emotionally. To a Gladstone nothing is easier than to
make a speech which shall move five thousand Scotchmen to madness. No
foreigner could do it. He might lay out the arguments as well. He could
not put out his hand and touch chord after chord of national emotion
and passion, producing what sound he would. The knowledge of these
chords, and of the manner of touching them, is possible only to a man
within whom they potentially exist.
Both forms of knowledge are essential to the true understanding of a
country. And if it may be said that no man understands a thing till he
has coldly criticized it, it may also be said that no man knows a thing
till he has loved it.
If the perfunctory views in the following pages have any claim to
interest or attention, it rises not in any degree from any special
aptitude in the writer for discussing the questions dealt with--for
none such exists; but from the chance coincidence of fortunate
circumstances, which give to a man born and growing up in a land which
he loves, as a man loves one land once, and who returns to it after
many years' absence in other lands, a somewhat two-fold position.
Half he is outsider; half he is lover. It is only the thought that
this position may possibly yield in itself a certain slight interest,
which overcomes that natural diffidence which a man feels in dealing
with subjects so vital, complex, and large that the opinion of any
individual upon them must be of necessity tentative and limited in
value, and stand in need of large correction.
* * * * *
For the right understanding of the South African people and their
problem, the first requisite is a clear comprehension of their land.
Taking the term South Africa to include all the country south from
the Zambesi and Lake N'gami to Cape Agulhas, it may be said that few
territories possess more varied natural features; nevertheless, through
it all, from Walfish Bay to Algoa Bay, from the Zambesi to Cape Town,
there is in it a certain unity. No South African set down in any part
of it could fail to recognize it as his native land; and he could
hardly mistake any other for it.
The most noticeable feature in first looking at it, is the strip of
lowland country running along the entire south and east coast, and
bordered everywhere inland by high mountain ranges.
In the Western Province the coast belt consists of chains of huge
mountains forming a network over a tract of country some hundreds of
miles in extent, the mountains having at their feet level valleys or
small plains. They are composed of igneous though stratified rock,
covered by little soil, and showing signs of titanic subterranean
action; many of them seem to have been hurled up by one convulsive act;
bare strata of rock thousands of feet in extent are raised on end,
their jagged edges forming the summits of vast mountain ranges. In the
still, peaceful valleys at the feet of these mountains are running
streams; in the spring the African heath covers them with red, pink
and white bells, and the small wine-farms dot the sides of the valleys
with their white houses and green fields, dwarfed under the high, bare
mountains. Here and there are little towns and villages, built as only
the old Dutch-Huguenots knew how to build, the long, straight streets
lined with trees on either hand, and streams of water running down
them; and the old thatch-roofed, gabled, white-washed, green-shuttered
houses standing back, with their stone stoeps,[5] under the deep shade
of the trees, and with their vineyards and orchards behind them. No one
can build such towns now. They are as unique as their mountains.
[5] Stoep = veranda.
Perhaps one sees the Western Province to best advantage in the Hex
River Valley, with its mountains of solid rock rising up thousands of
feet on either hand, the vast strata contorted into fantastic shapes,
and below them the smiling valley with its sprinkling of wine-farms.
Hardly less characteristic is Cape Town itself, the capital of the
Province and of the whole Colony, which lies on its promontory at the
extreme end of the continent. In a valley between two mountains, one
high, flat and of pure rock, its stupendous front overhanging the
town, the other lower and rounded, its cliff worn away everywhere but
on one mighty head which it rears into the blue, the town lies, with
its flat-roofed houses and long straight streets, on a bay as blue and
delicately curved as that of Naples.
Here it was that the wandering Hottentots on the shore saw the first
sails creep across the waters of their blue bay. Here it was that in
1652 Jan Anthony van Riebeek, the servant of the Dutch East Indian
Company, landed with his dependents and built the first houses and made
the first gardens. The fort which they built in those early days may
still be seen near the sea shore; the small block-houses which you may
still see on the spurs of the mountain, a disputed tradition says, were
used in those days as outlook towers against the incursions of possible
foes.
Here the Dutch East Indian Company imported its slaves, often from
Madagascar, English slave-ships bringing them. Here, Peter Kolben tells
us that, about the year 1712, he saw a slave burnt to death. They are,
says he, speaking of the slaves, "most detestable and wicked wretches,"
and "'tis now and then a most difficult thing to keep them in order."
This slave had tried to burn down his master's house; they tied him to
an upright post by a chain which allowed him to make one turn about it.
"Then," said Peter Kolben, "was kindled a fire round about him, just
beyond the stretch of the chain; the flames rose high; the heat was
vehement; he ran for some time to-and-again about the post, but gave
not one cry. Being half roasted he sank down, and said (speaking in
Portuguese), _Dios mio Pays_ (_O God, my Father_), and then expired."
These things have passed away now, as the elephant and hippopotami have
passed from the slopes of Table Mountain, and the thumb-screw and the
rack and stake from Europe, and as other things will pass away yet.
For ten miles along the foot of the mountains stretch the suburbs
of Cape Town, villa and garden, and pine and oak avenue mingling
themselves in endless succession. Here it seems a man might dream away
his life, buried in roses and plumbago, and forget that pain and care
existed.
Perhaps one of the finest views in the world is that from the top of
the Kloof behind Cape Town. To your right is Table Mountain, one of the
sublimest masses of solid matter in the world; below are the pine woods
and the town, with its white, flat houses, and, beyond the blue curved
bay and Blue-Berg Strand, the mountains of Hottentot's Holland, with
a canopy of clouds appearing and receding again into the blue sky. As
you turn, behind you is the blue South Atlantic as far as the eye can
reach, and the terrible serrated peaks of the Twelve Apostles stand
facing it, peak beyond peak, as they have stood for endless ages, with
the sea breaking in the little bays at their feet.
The population of the Western Province is partly English and partly
Boer or Dutch-Huguenot, the descendants of the Dutch East Indian
Company's servants and settlers, and of a large number of French
Huguenots who arrived in the Colony about 1687, driven from France
by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who, winnowed by the
unerring flail of religious persecution, form, perhaps, the finest
element that has ever been added to the population of South Africa. The
labouring classes are, as elsewhere in South Africa, coloured, and here
largely half-castes, the descendants of the first Dutch residents and
their slaves, or much more rarely of blended Dutch and Hottentot blood.
In Cape Town itself are found also Malays, Chinamen, Hindus, and the
representatives of all European nations.
If leaving Cape Town we go a few hundred miles eastward, along the
coast, we shall find the lowland belt assume new characteristics. The
hills, though high, are softer and more rounded, covered completely
with soil and grass; or their sides, and even summits, are clothed in
bush, stretching for ten or twenty or forty miles. This bush is neither
forest nor scrub. In the valleys of high mountains, or along the
beds of watercourses, it becomes true forest, of vast, thick-stemmed,
timber-producing trees; monkey-ropes thicker than a man's arm hang down
from the branches, and there is forest shade. But, in the main, South
Africa bush is composed of creeper-like bushes, sometimes attaining
forty feet in height, and of many hollow-skinned succulent plants,
aloe, elephant's food, euphorbia, which often attain the height of tall
trees, but are of so light a structure that cut down a child may drag
them. Sometimes the bush grows more or less continuously, the clumps
and bushes being merely intersected everywhere by what seem like little
dry paths.
But in its most characteristic form the bush consists of large
isolated clumps of vegetation. The kunee, a vast creeper-like tree,
whose interlaced branches, touching the ground everywhere, forming
beehive-shaped masses, looking like immense Kaffir huts, often, though
not always, forms the foundation of these masses; around it spring up
elephant's food, namnam, geraniums and plumbago, and perhaps a tall
euphorbia tree, with its cactus-like leaves, shoots up into the air
through it. These clumps of vegetation, sometimes almost solid, and
often forty or fifty feet in circumference, are divided from others by
spaces of short, smooth grass, generally brown except after the early
rains.
In this bush it is particularly easy to lose yourself. As you pass
round clump after clump, there are always others of exactly the same
shape before you, and you sometimes find you have gone two or three
times round the same mass of vegetation. Oxen once lost in this bush
are not easily discovered for days, though hidden behind the next
clump, and it is almost hopeless to look for them unless one can gain
an eminence and oversee a wide stretch of country. In this bush several
Europeans have lost their lives during the last fifteen years.
It is the peculiar home of the great scarlet geranium now common in
English hot-houses, and of the delicate, blue, star-like plumbago, and
of endless ferns; but the heaths and bulbs of the Western Province are
not found here.
Eighty years ago it was alive with elephant, lion, bush-buck, and
wild animals of all kinds. Now, the elephant is extinct, except where
artificially preserved; bush-buck are scarce; a few large leopards may
still be found in sequestered kloofs, and wild cats and monkeys and
parrots are yet abundant, but a lion has not been seen for forty years.
Thousands of small birds feed on the berries that abound here, and
fifty small birds may sometimes be heard chirping in the depths of one
kunee tree.
Eighty years ago, the inhabitants of this tract were warlike Kaffir
tribes of the Bantu race. They have not been exterminated as the
Hottentots and Bushmen in the west have largely been, but are still
found as the servants on farms and in towns. The white inhabitants at
the present day are mainly English, the descendants largely of a group
of emigrants who landed here in 1820, and who proved themselves one of
the most entirely successful and satisfactory bodies of emigrants whom
England has ever sent forth.
Here and there throughout the entire tract are scattered small English
towns and villages; and thriving farms, where sheep and agriculture go
together, are hidden away in the bush.
To see this land typically one should outspan one's wagon on the top
of a height on a hot summer's day, when not a creature is stirring,
and the sun pours down its rays on the flaccid, dust-covered leaves
of the bushes. When the leader has gone to take the oxen to water and
the driver has gone to lie down behind the bushes, if you stand up on
the front chest of the wagon, and look out, as far as your eye can
reach, you will see over hills and dales, the bush stretching, silent,
motionless, and hot. Not a sound is to be heard; your hand blisters on
the tent of the wagon; suddenly a cicada from a clump of bush at your
right sets up its keen, shrill cry; it is glorying in the heat and the
solitude of the bush. You listen to it in the unbroken silence, till
you and it seem to be alone in the world.
Not less characteristic is the bush, when, as a little child, you
travel through it at night. The ox-wagon creaks slowly along the sandy
road in the dark, the driver walks beside it and calls at intervals
to his tired oxen; you look out across the wagon-chest, and, as the
wagon moves along, the dark outlines of the bushes on either side seem
to move too; now a great clump comes nearer and nearer like a vast
animal; then, as you peer into the dark, they seem like great ruined
castles coming to topple over you; and you creep closer down behind
the wagon-chest. Against the dark night sky to the right, on the ridge
of the hill, are the gaunt forms of aloes standing like a row of men
keeping watch. You remembered all the stories you had heard of Kaffir
wars and men shot down and stabbed, as they passed along hill-sides;
and then a will-o'-the-wisp comes out from some dried-up torrent bed,
and far before you dances in and out among the bushes, now in sight
and now gone. You are not afraid; but you are glad when the people in
the wagon begin to sing hymns; and more glad yet when at half-past
nine it stops, drawn up beside a great clump of bush at the roadside.
The tired oxen are taken from the yoke, and you climb out and light a
fire and gather from afar and near stumps of dried elephant's food and
euphorbia, and throw them on the fire, and the flame leaps up high.
Then you all sit down beside the ruddy blaze; and away off the driver
and leader have lighted their fire, and are talking to each other in
Kaffir as they boil the coffee and roast the meat. The light from your
own fire blazes up and lights the great, dusty body of the wagon, and
the tired oxen, as they lie tied to their yokes, chewing the cud; and
it glints on the bush with its dark-green leaves behind you, and on the
faces round the fire; and you laugh, and talk; and forget the stories
of Kaffir wars, and the great wild bush stretching about you.
This tract of coast belt forms part of the Eastern Province of the Cape
Colony, and is under English rule. It is on the whole very fertile,
though more subject to drought than the South-Western districts of the
Colony; none of its rivers are perennial, all being in long droughts
completely dry. Fruit and wool, and to a certain extent grain, are
produced here. The villages, though far less beautiful than those of
the west, show greater signs of commercial activity and civic life.
If we go further north along the coast we come to Kaffirland, a richly
wooded, fertile tract; the scenery about the mouth of the St. John's
River being supposed to be the finest combination of bush, river and
mountain scenery to be found anywhere in South Africa. It is inhabited
by Kaffir tribes of the Bantu race, in a half-civilized condition, and
who are more or less under British protection.
Further north yet we come to Natal, a British colony. The climate here
is warm, the country fertile in the extreme; coffee, sugar, rice,
pineapples, and all tropical fruits abound here, yet the climate is
not much less healthy than in the more southern portions of the coast
belt. Its population is more largely black than white, the natives
being Zulus of the Bantu race and imported coolies; the small white
population is largely English, and appear to be rather above the common
Colonial average in intelligence and culture.
Further north yet from Delagoa Bay to the mouth of the Zambesi
stretches a tract of low lying but fertile and well-watered country;
its streams, unlike most in South Africa, are more or less navigable.
It is concerning this tract that the existing difference with Portugal
has arisen. Though now fever-haunted along the beds of streams,
civilized, drained and cultivated it might become one of the most
fertile parts of South Africa. It is at present inhabited by native
tribes and by Portuguese with their half-caste descendants; the number
being inappreciable when compared to the native population. The
Zambesi, which empties itself on the north, is the largest and only
really great river of South Africa.
If we return to the Western districts of the Cape Colony, and leaving
the coast belt, climb one of the high mountain ranges that here, as
everywhere else, bound the coast belt separating it from the centre of
the country, we shall find to our surprise that on reaching its summit,
we make hardly any descent on the other side; and that what appeared
from the south to be a high mountain range was merely the edge of a
vast plateau. We shall find ourselves on an undulating plain, bounded
on every side by small fantastic hills. The air is dry and clear; so
light that we draw a long breath to make sure we are breathing it
aright. The sky above is a more transparent blue than nearer the coast,
and seems higher. There is not a blade of grass to be seen growing
anywhere; the red sand is covered with bushes a few inches high,
clothed with small, hard leaves of dull, olive-green; here and there
is an ice-plant, or a stapelia with fleshy, cactus-like leaves, or a
rod-like milk bush. As far as the eye can reach, there is often not
a tree or a shrub more than two feet high; and far, in the distance,
rising abruptly out of the plain, are perhaps two solitary flat-topped
mountains; nearer at hand are small conical hillocks, made of round
iron-stones piled so regularly on one another that they seem the work
of man rather than nature. In the still, clear air you can see the
rocks on a hill ten miles off as if they were beside you; the stillness
is so intense that you can hear the heaving of your own breast. This
is the Karoo. To the stranger, oppressive, weird, fantastic, it is to
the man who has lived with it a scene for the loss of which no other on
earth compensates.
As you travel through it after fifteen, twenty, or fifty miles, you may
come upon a farm. The house, a small brown or white speck in the vast
landscape, lies at the foot of a range of hills or a small "kopje,"
with its sheep kraals on the slope behind it, of large brown squares,
enclosed by low stone walls. Sometimes there is a garden before the
house also enclosed by stone walls, and containing fruit trees, and
there is a dam with willow trees planted beside; sometimes there is no
dam and no garden, and the little brown mud house stands there baking
in the sun with its kraals behind it; the only water for men or beasts
coming from some small unseen spring.
Throughout the Karoo there are few running streams; the waters of any
fountains which may exist are quickly drunk up by the dry soil, and
men and animals are largely dependent on artificial dams filled by
rain-water. The farmer makes his livelihood from flocks of sheep which
wander over the Karoo, and which in good years flourish on its short
dry bushes.
In the spring, in those years when rain has fallen, for two months the
Karoo is a flower garden. As far as the eye can reach, stretch blots of
white and yellow and purple fig flowers;[6] every foot of Karoo sand
is broken open by small flowering lilies and waxflowers; in a space a
few feet square you may sometimes gather fifty kinds of flowers. In the
crevices of the rocks little flowering plants are growing. At the end
of two months it is over; the bulbs have died back into the ground by
millions, the fig blossoms are withered, the Karoo assumes the red and
brown tints which it wears for all the rest of the year.
[6] Fig = Mesembryanthemum.
Sometimes there is no spring. At intervals of a few years great
droughts occur, when for thirteen months the sky is cloudless. The
Karoo bushes drop their leaves and are dry withered stalks, the
fountains fail, and the dams are floored with dry baked mud, which
splits up into little squares; the sheep and goats die by hundreds, and
the Karoo is a desert.
It is to provide for these long rainless periods that all plant-life
in the Karoo is modified. Nothing that cannot retain some form of life
habitually for six months, and at need for eighteen months, without
rain, can subsist here. The Karoo bush, itself a tiny plant a few
inches high, provides against droughts by roots of enormous length
stretching under the ground to a depth of thirty feet. At the end of
a ten months' drought, when the earth is baked into brickdust for two
feet from the surface, if you break the dried stalk of a Karoo bush you
will find running down its centre a tiny thread of pale-green tinted
tissue still alive with sap.
Some plants maintain life by means of fleshy bulbs buried deep under
ground, and in years when no rain falls they do not appear above the
surface at all. Many plants have thick, fleshy leaves, in which they
store up moisture against the time of need; some, such as the common
sorrel and dandelion, become ice-plants; all over their fleshy leaves
and stems are little diamond-like drops, which when broken are found to
be full of pure water, a little plant sometimes having half a cupful
stored in this way. Some have their leaves closely pressed together
into little solid squares or balls, so saving all evaporation from
their surfaces. Many are air plants; and, fastened by the slenderest
roots to the ground or rocks, live almost entirely on the moisture they
may draw from the air, and will grow and bloom for months or even years
in a dwelling without either earth or water.
But the intense dryness modifies plant-life in another way; vegetation
being scarce, all forms are eagerly sought after by animals; and an
unusual number are protected by thorns, or by an intense bitterness,
or by imitative adaption. One curious little plant protects itself by
assuming the likeness of a hard white lichen that covers the rocks: its
sharp-pointed green leaves are placed close together with their tips
upwards, and on the tip of each leaf is a little white scaly sheath;
the resemblance to the lichen growing on the rocks, besides which it is
always found, is so great, that not till you tread on it, and your foot
sinks in it, do you discover the deception.
Even on the insect life the exceptional conditions of the Karoo have a
marked effect. Imitative colouring is more common here than elsewhere;
thus, one insect is so like the white pebbles near which it is always
found, that once dropped it cannot easily be again found; another large
square insect with hardly any power of flight protects itself by lying
motionless on red stones, which it so exactly resembles in colour,
having even the rough cleavage marks upon it, that it is impossible to
detect it, though you know it to be there; hardly any insect or reptile
exists without imitative colouring.
To see the Karoo rightly one should saddle one's horse and ride away
from some solitary farm-house. For twenty miles you may ride without
seeing a living thing, nor passing even a herd of sheep or goats, or a
korhaan or mierkat. At midday you off-saddle in a narrow plain between
two low hills, that widen out at the further end into a wider plain,
from which rise two conical, solitary, flat-topped hills; and the
horizon is bounded by a purple mountain thirty miles off. You put your
saddle down beside a milk bush and tie the halter round the horse's
knee, that he may go and feed upon the bushes; and you seat yourself
beside your saddle on the ground. The milk bush gives little shade, and
the midday sun shines hot upon you. In the red sand at your feet the
ants are running to and fro, carrying away the crumbs that may have
fallen from your saddle-bag; and in the stillness you can hear your
horse break the twigs from the bushes as he feeds; he moves further
off, and you cannot hear even that. Then you notice on the red sand a
little to the right, at the foot of a Karoo bush, a scaly lizard, with
his head raised, and his belly palpitating on the red sand, watching
you. He is a tiny fellow, three inches long. You move, and he is gone
like a flash of light across the sand. By and by the ants have carried
away the crumbs, and they too are gone. You sit alone with the sun
beating down on you. As the plain lies to-day, so it has lain for long
countless ages. Those sharp stones on the edge of the rise to your
right, with their points turned to the sky, for how many centuries have
they lain there, their edges as sharp and fresh to-day as though they
had been broken but yesterday? Those motionless hills; the very knotted
Karoo stem at your hand, for how many generations have the leaves
sprouted and fallen from its gnarled stalk? The Bushman and the wild
buck have crept over the scene; they have gone, and the Englishman with
his horse and gun have come; but the plain lies with its sharp stones
turned to the sky unchanged through the centuries. Those two stones
standing loosely one upon another have stood so for thousands of years,
because there was no hand to sever them.
It is not fear one feels, with that clear, blue sky above one; that
which creeps over one is not dread. It was amid such scenes as these,
amid such motionless, immeasurable silences, that the Oriental mind
first framed its noblest conception of the unknown, the "I am that I
am" of the Hebrew.
Nor less wonderful is the Karoo at night, when the Milky Way forms a
white band across the sky; and you stand alone outside, and see the
velvety, blue-black vault rising slowly on one side of the horizon
and sinking on the other; and the silence is so intense you seem
almost to hear the stars move. Nor is it less wonderful on moonlight
nights, when you sit alone on a kopje; and the moon has arisen and the
light is pouring over the plain; then even the stones are beautiful;
and what you have believed of human love and fellowship--and never
grasped--seems all possible to you.
And not less rare is the sunrise, when the hills, which have been
purple in the dawn, turn suddenly to gold, and the rays of light shoot
fifty miles across the plain and make every drop on the ice-plants
sparkle.
Nor less wonderful are the sunsets, when you go out at evening after
the day's work. The fierce heat is over; as you walk, a cool breath
touches your cheek; you look up and all the hills are turned pink and
purple, and a curious light lies on the top of the Karoo bushes; they
are all gilded; then it vanishes, and along the horizon there are bars
of gold and crimson against a pale emerald sky; and then everything
begins to turn grey.
In the Karoo there are also mirages. As you travel along the great
plains, such as those between Beaufort and De Aar, you continually
see, in hot weather, far off on the horizon, lakes with the sunlight
sparkling on the water; there are islands and palm trees and domes and
minarets and snow-capped mountains. If you remain for half an hour they
do not change. Why the mirage should always take the shape of lakes,
islands, and palm trees, is something which science, in giving us its
cause, has not accounted for.
There is much talk as to whether the Karoo could not be made more
useful agriculturally by the building of great dams, and so be made to
supply corn and vegetables in large quantities. This is irrelevant.
When all the more readily cultivable places in the world and in South
Africa have been brought under the plough, it may pay to turn the Karoo
into a garden. The soil is scanty in most parts, sometimes barely
covering the rocks. The long droughts, the habitual dryness of the air
sucking up all moisture, and the sharp frosts in winter, must make
agriculture always difficult, as it is now almost impossible. There are
vast tracts covered with sharp stones where it is even difficult for
sheep to find a mouthful of pasturage. But the Karoo has a future. It
is a sanatorium of the world. It has a climate that is unequalled. It
will be visited not only by those seeking recovery from illness, from
the moister Zambesi and sub-tropical regions of Africa, but from all
parts of the world. The selfish lover of the solitary Karoo may regret
it, but the day will come when the inhabitants of the Karoo will cull
millions from their dry soil and bare hills, as the inhabitants of the
Riviera cull them to-day.
At present the Karoo is inhabited sparsely by Boer and English
farmers, the homesteads lying often forty or fifty miles apart; and
there are a few small villages, often at distances of more than a
hundred miles, inhabited by the descendants of Boers and English.
The early inhabitants of the country were wandering tribes of Bushmen,
whose paintings of animals we may still find under the shelving
ledge of rocks, and whose arrow-heads of bone and flint may be still
picked up at the sources of some spring they frequented. They are now
gone, like the game which filled these plains sixty years ago; a few
wandering remnants may be found in the extreme north-east, and a few
ragged individuals in cast-off European clothing may be seen about the
back doors of farm-houses. The whole of the Karoo now forms part of the
Cape Colony.
If we leave the Karoo and go north and east, we find ourselves still
on table-lands as high or higher, but the character has changed. The
earth is more completely covered with soil, the hills are smaller and
more rounded, the plains are softer, wider, more rolling, and grass has
taken the place of the Karoo bush. At first, one who has lived long in
the Karoo experiences a sense almost of relief at the changed nature of
the scene; the soft, rolling outlines give one a sense of repose, and
tension is relaxed; it is as when, long accustomed to live with some
strongly marked individual nature, one comes for the first time into
contact with one more negative and weak: for the first moment there is
a sense of relief; then one wearies, and hungers again for the more
positive and active.
The wide rolling grass plains, with their little hills, have their
charm, but one tires of it. Throughout the Orange Free State,
Griqualand West and Bechuanaland, with slight modifications, these
grass plains extend; here they are more rolling, there more hilly;
here dotted with a few beautiful mimosa trees, there level as a table;
but there is always the same succession of level grassy plains, and
generally of low, flat-topped hills, and ant-heaps. These plains are
perhaps seen most typically in the west of the Free State. Here you may
start in your wagon in the morning, and creep all day along the level
earth, by a straight road, with the grasses on either hand; and in the
evening when you stop, you will not yet have reached the low hill you
saw before you on the horizon at starting. At great intervals you may
come upon a farm, the white or brown mud-coloured house standing at
the foot of a little hill, with its dam of rain-water and its garden
and kraals, but you may travel in an ox-wagon more than a day without
sighting one. In the spring the grass is short and green, in the autumn
long and waving, and cattle flourish on it. It is still within memory
of those who have not yet reached middle life when these plains were
alive with game. Some of us can recall, as small children, travelling
across them in the north of the Free State and Bechuanaland when the
wagon seemed to divide herds of antelope and zebra with ostriches among
them, the animals feeding on either side of the road within gunshot.
Now they have been almost exterminated, and game is only to be found
much further north.
The Free State is a small independent Republic, once under English
rule, but rashly given up by England in 1854 as not worth keeping;
it is inhabited by Boers and English, the Boers living mainly on
the farms, the English in the towns. The labouring classes here, as
elsewhere, are black.
British Bechuanaland, which comprises the larger part of this
grass-plain region, is a tract as large as several European countries
combined, inhabited mainly and sparsely by native tribes subject to
England, by a few European settlers, and the inhabitants of a few
embryo villages. Its soil is rich, and, like that of the rest of
the grass plains, if vast dams were built, it might become a great
grain-producing country. Its climate is perfect, rivalling that of the
Karoo.
Griqualand West, one of the most interesting and varied divisions of
the grass plains, is part of the Cape Colony. In it are situated the
great Kimberley diamond-mines, the richest in the world. Within the
space of a few miles lie those marvellous beds of once boiling but now
petrified mud, which have for twenty years modified, and are still
modifying, the history of South Africa.
It is through these grass plains that the Vaal and the Orange Rivers
run; the last the most typical of South African rivers. In nothing
perhaps is the difference between Europe and South Africa more
emphasized than in their rivers. The South African in Europe hardly
knows whether to admire or to scorn the smooth, gentle-flowing streams
between their green banks. The South African river alternates between
being a stupendous body of water, tearing with irresistible force to
the sea between its high banks, or being merely a vast empty bed of dry
sand with gigantic walls, the floor lined by boulders and débris, or
with a silver line of water creeping through it, and a few large pools
gathered here and there. Rising at an immense height above the sea in
the central table-lands, fed by no melting snows, dependent entirely
on the thunderstorms or the heavy rains of the wet seasons, the South
African river rises with a rapidity and sweeps onward with a force that
is almost inconceivable. A mighty body of red or dark-brown water,
it rushes with a greasy, treacherous movement between its banks, the
water being higher in the centre of the stream than at the sides and
breaking here and there into bubbles and foam; on its dark surface it
bears uprooted trees, drowned bodies of animals or men, the stupendous
rapidity of its movement being only noticeable when you mark how a
floating object now at your feet is out of sight round the bend of the
river in a few seconds. Perhaps no object in inanimate nature conveys
the same impression of conscious cruelty, and fierce, untamed strength,
as a full African river.
Every year during the rainy season large numbers of persons are drowned
in the full rivers; the numbers recorded in the papers during the last
rainy season exceeded one hundred and fifty, and a large number of
deaths of Kaffirs and others remains unchronicled. The nature of her
rivers has powerfully affected the history of South Africa.
Crossing the Vaal River, we shall find to the north the Transvaal
Republic. This is a tract of country of great extent and diversity.
In part of it we have bush, in part high grass tablelands; on the
east a low lying, moist, fever-haunted district. On the whole it is
of great fertility. On the ridges of the high tablelands, lie the
great Johannesburg gold-mines, which have drawn men from all parts of
the earth. There are probably about eight black men to each white,
the white population being probably divided between those of Boer,
and English or other European extraction in the proportion of one to
one; but no accurate census has yet been taken. The largest city,
Johannesburg, is mainly English, the farming population Dutch-Huguenot.
If, leaving the Transvaal Republic, we cross the Limpopo, we shall find
ourselves in the country known as Matabele and Mashonaland.
Bounded on the north by the Zambesi, the largest and only truly
navigable river in South Africa, whose falls are the largest in the
world, and further by Lake N'Gami and its low-lying territory, and
on the West by the Kalahari, and on the east by the strip of low
country claimed by Portugal. To the extreme left it is largely flat
and arid, like the greater part of South Africa; the central position
has mountain and bush, while along the low-lying river-beds it is
fever-haunted, to the east is a high healthy tableland, well watered
and wooded.
It is the land of Livingstone. Some of us remember on hot Sunday
afternoons, as little children, when no more worldly book than
missionary travels was allowed us, how we sat on our stools and looked
out into the sunshine and dreamed of that land. Of the Garden Island,
where the smoke of the mighty falls goes up, whose roar is heard
twenty-five miles off; of hippopotami playing in the water, and of
elephants and lions, and white rhinoceroses. We had heard of a man on
the north of the Limpopo, who once saw three lions lying under the
trees on the grass like calves, and he walked straight past them, and
they looked at him and did nothing. We had heard of great ruins--ruins
which lay there overgrown with weeds and trees. From there we believed
the Queen of Sheba brought the peacocks and the gold for King Solomon.
We meditated over it deeply. Yes, we should go and see it.[7] Up a
valley, a great white rhinoceros would wade with its feet in the water;
on each side under the trees zebras and antelopes would stand quietly
feeding on the green grass. We would creep up quietly and look at them.
No one but we would ever have seen them before. We would not disturb
them. We would see the giraffes pick the top leaves from the trees, and
elephant-cows walk along with their little calves at their sides. At
night round the fire we would hear the lions roar, and the wild dogs
howl, and sleep with our feet to the fire, and the stars above us; we
would plant seeds on the Garden Island; we would pass lions and they
should not eat us; we would climb over the ruins where the Queen of
Sheba stood! We almost dropped the book from our knees and rose to go.
In that land there were no Sunday afternoons and no boredom; you could
do as you liked. The very names Zambesi and Limpopo drew us, with the
lure of the unknown.
[7] She visited the Falls in 1911.
Even to-day there is still much to be learnt with regard to these
lands. To the west it is inhabited by the Bamangwato, under their chief
Kame; in the centre by the brave warlike Matabele, under the chief
Lobengula; in the east by the mild, industrious Mashonas, on whom the
Matabele raid; and there are to-day the men of the British South Africa
Company looking for gold.
It is more than possible that if we went there now we should not find
all we have dreamed of. Elephants are scarce; Selous says he has killed
the last white rhinoceros; if we met a lion he might eat us; the
hippopotami will soon be driven away from the Victoria Falls; the ruins
may not be three thousand years old; boredom and Sunday afternoons
may exist there as elsewhere, and the gold may need much washing from
the sand; but it is certain that in these auriferous regions will
ultimately spring up dense populations. It is from the territories
north of the Vaal and south of the Zambesi, in this moister climate,
with its more navigable rivers, that civilization in its coarser
proportions will first unroll itself. More Southern Africa may produce
better men; our greatest poet may yet be born in the Karoo; our great
artist in the valley of the Paarl; our great thinker among the keen
airs of Basutoland; neither wealth nor dense population have a tendency
to produce the finest individuals; but it is in the north-east of
Southern Africa that mineral wealth and vast populations with all that
they signify for good and evil will probably first arise.
To understand the view taken in South Africa of the opening up of these
lands, it is necessary to turn back from the present day to the Europe
of the sixteenth century, when the hearts and eyes of men were turned
to the new world, and each man who crossed the seas carried with him
the hearts and thoughts of the thousands who remained. There is no
explanation to be given of these sudden movements of entire peoples in
a given direction. Their scientific causes are as subtle as those which
govern the migrations of the lemmings. Some lead and the rest follow.
If we leave these territories we shall find to the south-east a
territory known as the Kalahari Desert; a vast tract where little rain
falls and springs are rare, and there are no running streams; but it is
less accurately called a desert than many parts of South Africa that
are never so called. There are trees and low shrubs in many places;
such antelopes as can exist without much water are found, and a few
wandering natives, who know by long experience where water may be had,
by sucking through the sand. In forty years there will probably be a
railway across it; now it is practically uninhabited.
West of the Kalahari and bordering the Atlantic, up and down the coast
runs a vast territory rich in copper and other metals, but in parts
drier than the Kalahari itself. Instead of karoo it is covered over
a large extent by a coarse, thick tuft grass, which has the curious
power of resisting drought for two or even three years; it still stands
upright and affords food for the cattle and wild antelopes. Such
wandering Bushman and Hottentot tribes as still exist are found mainly
in this part, and, except a few missionaries and traders, the country
is not inhabited largely by white men.
To the east of the Free State lies Basutoland, the Switzerland of
South Africa, rich in its mountains and with a climate of superb
quality. Here is to be found the Basuto nation, a people whose history
since their foundation under their valiant chieftainess Ma' Katees is
probably more epic than that of any other people in South Africa, save
that of the old fore-trekkers who founded the Transvaal Republic.
Again, north of Natal lie Zululand and the adjoining native territories
where the virile Bantu tribe of Zulus, along with other Bantu peoples,
may be found inhabiting an almost tropical and luxuriantly fertile
country: while further north and east yet along the coast stretch
the Portuguese territories, the remnants of Portugal's once large
empire, naturally rich and productive, but in many parts low-lying and
fever-smitten.
This, then, is South Africa; the country which the South African
regards as his native land. To the superficial observer nothing would
be more unlike than its differing parts; between the falls of the
Zambesi with their spray-drenched forest and their banks, unchanged
by civilization as when the eye of Livingstone first beheld them more
than thirty years ago, and a little Eastern Province town, with its
narrow, conventional life; between the wilds of Namaqualand, where the
little Bushman still sits down behind his bush to cook his supper of
animal entrails and lies down with the stars over him, and the white
house and tree-lined streets of the Paarl; between the Kalahari, where
under a thorn tree groups of antelopes are gathered in the moonlight,
and the gambling saloons and music-halls of Johannesburg and Kimberley;
between the kraals of Kaffirland, where the Kaffir boys are holding
their "abakweta" dances in the moonlight with whitened faces, and the
drawing-rooms of Cape Town, where women in low dresses sit aimlessly
talking, there seems little in common.
Nevertheless, through the whole of South Africa there runs a certain
unity. It is not only that geraniums and plumbago, flat-topped
mountains, aloes and euphorbia are peculiar to our land, and that
sand and rocks abound everywhere; nor is it even that the land is
everywhere young, and full of promise; but there is a certain colossal
plenitude, a certain large freedom in all its natural proportions,
which is truly characteristic of South Africa. If Nature here wishes to
make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain,
she levels eighty; if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata
on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves larger
than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor
petty in South Africa.
Many years ago, we travelled from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown in a
post-cart with a woman who had just come from England. All day we had
travelled up through the bush, and at noon came out on a height where,
before us, as far as the eye could reach, over hill and dale, without
sign of human habitation or break, stretched the bush. She began to
sob; and, in reply to our questionings, could only reply, almost
inarticulately: "Oh! It's so terrible! There's so much of it! There's
so much!"
It is this "so much" for which the South African yearns when he leaves
his native land. The lane, the pond, the cottage with roses climbing
over the porch, the old woman going down the lane in her red cloak
driving her cow, the parks with the boards of warning, the hill with
the church and ruin beyond, oppress and suffocate us. Amid the arts
of Florence and Venice, the civilizations of London and Paris, in
crowded drawing-rooms, surrounded by all that wealth, culture and human
fellowship can give, there comes back to us the remembrance of still
Karoo nights, when we stood alone under the stars, and of wide breezy
plains, where we rode; and we return. Europe cannot satisfy us.
The sharp business man who makes money at the "Fields" and goes to end
his life in Europe, comes back at the end of two years. You ask him
why he returned. He looks at you in a curious way, and, with his head
aside, replies meditatively: "There's no room there, you know. It's so
free here." Neither can you entrap him into further explanations; South
Africa is like a great fascinating woman; those who see her for the
first time wonder at the power she exercises, and those who come close
to her fall under it and never leave her for anything smaller, because
she liberates them.
If we turn from the land itself, to examine more closely the people who
inhabit it, we shall be struck in the first place by the marvellous
diversity of races found among us.
For not only are the South Africans not of one national variety (a
fact not surprising when the extent of our country is taken into
consideration); not only do we belong to the most distinct branches
of the human family to be found anywhere on the surface of the globe,
representing the most widely different stages in human development,
from the Bushman with his ape-like body, flat forehead and primitive
domestic institutions, to the nineteenth-century Englishman fresh from
Oxford, with the latest views on social and political development,
and the financial Jew; but we are more or less a mixture of these
astonishingly diverse types. We are not a collection of small, and,
though closely contiguous, yet distinct peoples; we are a more or
less homogeneous blend of heterogeneous social particles in different
stages of development and of cohesion with one another, underlying and
overlaying each other like the varying strata of confused geological
formations.
It is this fact which lies at the core of the social and political
problem of South Africa, and which makes it at the same time the most
complex and difficult, and the most interesting, with which a people
has ever been called upon to deal.
To grasp our unique condition clearly, it will be well to take a
blank map of South Africa, and pass over it, from east to west, from
north to south, from the Zambesi to Cape Town, from Walfish Bay to
Kaffirland, a coating of dark paint, lighter in the west, to represent
the yellow-tinted Bushmen and Hottentots, and half-caste races; and
darker, mounting up to the deepest black, in the extreme east, to
represent vast numbers of the black-skinned Bantus. From no part of the
map, so large that a pin's point might be set down there, will this
layer of paint representing the aboriginal native races be absent;
darker here and lighter there, it will always be present. If we now
wish to represent the earliest European element, the Boer or Dutch
Huguenots, we shall have to pass over the whole map lines and blots of
blue paint, more plentiful in some parts, rarer in others, but nowhere
entirely absent. And if again we wish to represent the English and
modern continental element we shall have to pass over the entire map,
from the Zambesi to Cape Agulhas, a fine layer of red paint, thinner
in spots and thicker in others, but never wholly absent. If we now add
a few insignificant dots on the extreme east coast, to represent the
Portuguese, our racial map of South Africa will be complete.
Looking at it, the first thing which must strike us is the fact that no
possible line which can be drawn across it will separate the colours
one from another, or even combine their darker shades. There is a dark
patch of red to the north of our map, but there are others equally
dark in the south; the blue colour is prevalent at the north end, but
also in the east; the dark tone is everywhere visible; the colours are
intermingled everywhere, like the tints in a well-shot Turkey carpet.
They cannot be separated.
But should we wish to make our map truly representative of the
complexities of the South African problem, it will be necessary to
go further, and across this intermingled mass of colours to draw at
intervals, at all angles, and in all directions, lines of ink, which
shall cut up the surfaces into squares and spaces of different sizes.
If these lines be truly drawn they will be found to bear no relation
to the proportions of the colours beneath them; they will run straight
through masses of colour, cutting them into parts; and except in the
case of some of the smallest divisions, where the dark predominates, it
will be impossible to trace the slightest connection between the lines
and the colouring.
Our political as well as our racial map of South Africa will now be
complete; for these lines represent the boundaries of the political
states into which South Africa is subdivided. For (and this is a matter
which requires our carefullest consideration) not only is South Africa
peopled everywhere by a mixture of races overlying and underlying each
other in confused layers; but these mixtures of peoples are redivided
into political states whose boundaries, except in the case of a few of
the necessarily ephemeral native states, have no relation to the racial
divisions of the people beneath them, but are purely the result of more
or less political combination and therefore have in them, at core,
nothing of the true nature of national divisions.
This matter lies so deeply at the heart of the South African, and has
so much to do with our complicated problem, that it will be well to
look at it more closely.
A nation, like an individual, is a combination of units; in the nation
the units are persons; in the individual body they are cells. The
single cell, alone and uncombined, is capable only of the simplest
forms of development; the solitary amœboid germ can undergo no high
development, as it floats unconnected in the water or air; it is
only when cells are combined in close and vital union with others,
and there is interaction, that high development is possible. The
highly differentiated complex cells that go to form a human eye or
brain are possible only as parts of a larger interacting organism, a
long-continued and close interaction between millions of cells, and
could come into being in no other way.
Yet more is the analogous fact true with regard to human beings. Alone
and divided from his fellows, the individual man is capable of only
the very lowest form of development. The accounts of persons who have
been lost in infancy and grown up alone, apart from any organization
or interaction with their fellows, shows in the extremest form how
very low is the natural condition of the human amœboid. Speechless,
knowledgeless, its very hands incapable of performing the simplest
operation which the veriest child in the lowest organized society
learns to perform (as we imagine intuitively), such an individuality
impresses on us, in its extremest form, a lesson which all human
history teaches us in other shapes.
Great men, great actions, great arts, great developments, are
impossible without those closely united, interacting organic
combinations of men which we call nations, using that word in its
largest sense, and to include all organized, centralized, interacting
masses of humans and to exclude such as are inorganic and only united
in name or by force. The organically united nation is the only known
matrix in which the human being can attain to full development. A
Plato, an Aristotle, a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo, implying as much
the existence of a Greece, an England, or an Italy, are as impossible
without them as an eye or brain imply and would be impossible without a
whole human organism. They are the efflorescence of the nations.
Without the closely united, interacting, organically bound body of
humans, no great men, no highly developed masses.
Therefore, in all ages, and rightly, men have set the highest value
on the maintenance of their social organization, and have regarded
as a greater evil than any which could afflict them personally the
destruction of their organism as a whole. The individual particles may
be left untouched (as in the case of Poland), but they suffer more
deeply from the loss of interaction and organized union than had they
separately been individually destroyed.
Nor is it only the particles composing a national organism that gain by
its maintenance in health and unity. From a wider standpoint it is of
importance to humanity as a whole. The virile organized individuality
of Greece, of Rome, of England (while it remained an organized unity
and had not begun to dissolve itself into an inchoate trading firm,
seeking to dominate by force peoples and lands in all parts of the
world for trade purposes), and of France has bequeathed almost as much
to humanity at large as to its own members; and an old, diseased or
disorganized nationality, or a young, shapeless, unorganized mass of
humans, however healthy the individual units composing it may be, is
a mass without the capability of full development or of adding to the
common fund of humanity.
The first need of an unorganized mass of humans is to attain to some
form of vital organization. This must precede the fullest development
of the individual units, and must adjust itself before any complex
internal growth can begin.
Painfully trite as these observations are, it is necessary to keep them
in mind when dealing with the South African question.
Were the political states into which South Africa is to-day
divided--not highly organized and developed nations, bound together by
bonds of race, language, religion and long-continued interaction into
organic wholes, for that is impossible--but, did they possess, however
sporadically and embryonically, the germs from which national life and
unity might develop itself, if without the union of race, language
and ideas which goes to form the ideally united people, there were at
least this one condition, from which national life and unity might
be expected to develop itself: that, divided from each other as the
inhabitants of each of one state might be in race, religion, language
and interest, they were yet more nearly united to the majority of their
fellows within their state on these matters, than with large masses of
the peoples _immediately beyond their borders_--if this were so, then
the problem of South Africa would not only not be what it is; it would
be reversed. Our problem would then be: _How can each separate state
into which South Africa is divided be maintained in its integrity and
so strengthened that it may most quickly attain to full national unity
and organization?_ For so would the benefit of national life be most
quickly and simply attained by the peoples of South Africa.
Geographical size has nothing to do with the perfection or value of
a nation. Greece in her palmiest days, Rome at the height of her
power, were not larger than small South African states; an ant or a
bird are not less valuable or highly organized than an elephant or a
hippopotamus. Small countries such as Greece or Holland, or Switzerland
or England in the days of her greatness, have contributed as much to
the common fund of humanity as the largest countries; indeed, in the
past, when the means of communication were less perfected than at
present, a very minute geographical extent seemed essential to the
health and vitality of a nation; and if the converse seems to hold at
the present day, there is yet no reason why, in a country of such vast
extent as South Africa, half a dozen great, independent nations should
not co-exist. The Cape Colony or Transvaal are larger than France;
there is no _a priori_ reason, if our political states possessed the
least germ of organic unity or nationality, why the ultimate form
of organization in South Africa should not be that of half a dozen
distinct nations. The question is:
Does such a germ exist?
We believe the most temporary survey will prove that it does not.
Short as is the time at our disposal, let us rapidly glance at a few of
our states to see if any germ of national life lies at their core.
Let us take first the Cape Colony, as the oldest, best organized, most
important, and most powerful of our divisions; one whose boundaries,
except at the north-east, are tolerably well defined, and which has
a centralized form of political government. There are in the Colony,
roughly speaking, a million and a half of men.
One million of these are natives, Hottentots, and half-castes, but
mainly Bantus, of the Chuana or Kaffir races; the remaining half
million are divided between men of English and other European descent
speaking English, and the men of Boer descent, often speaking the
"Taal." Now not only are these peoples who form our population not
united to each other by race, language, creed or custom but, and this
is a far more important fact, each division forming our population is
far more closely connected by all these ties to masses of humans beyond
our borders than to their fellow Cape Colonists within. Thus, our
Bantus and Chuanas are absolutely one in race, language and sympathy
with countless of thousands of Kaffirs and Chuanas of Kaffirland,
Basutoland, the Free State, and even Transvaal. They are far more
closely bound to these fellows of theirs in other states than to the
white men in their own. The same may be said of the white population.
Not only are they not bound to the native population in their state,
but the Cape Colonial Englishman is absolutely identical with those
in the Transvaal, Zambesia, Free State and Natal; and the Boer of the
Cape Colony is absolutely identical with the Boers of these different
states; he is only artificially divided by a political line from his
friends and kinsfolk in the Transvaal, Free State or Natal. Race,
language, creed, tradition, which in the true national state form
centripetal forces, binding its parts to one centre, in such a state
become centrifugal, driving them from it; and the political boundaries
are so crossed and recrossed by these lines of union that they are
rendered void.
Let us look at the Transvaal. We have here a great state. Its vast
native population is absolutely identical with those immediately beyond
its borders; and its small white population is far more deeply tied
to its fellow race, men beyond its boundaries, than to blacks or even
to white fellow Transvaalers. Its largest and most powerful city,
Johannesburg, is the most truly cosmopolitan city in South Africa. It
is called the Boer Republic, but if the Boer or Dutch Huguenot element
is to be sought for in its highest perfection, it must be looked for
not in the Transvaal towns, but in the beautiful villages of the Paarl
and Stellenbosch, in the old Cape Colony. The lines which divide the
newly arrived European of Johannesburg from the newly arrived European
of Kimberley, Cape Town and Durban, and the Boer of the Transvaal from
the Boer of the Paarl, are necessarily fictions in any but the most
superficial sense.
All that has been said holds yet more in the Free State. We have
here a small republic whose population is absolutely one with the
populations on all sides of it. The Basuto of the Free State is divided
by absolutely nothing but a political line, the result of a political
agreement, from the Basuto of Basutoland. The Boer farmer is absolutely
one with the Boer of the Colony on the one hand and the Transvaal on
the other; the Englishman of the towns are the Englishmen of the Colony
and the Transvaal. Between the towns of Beaufort West, Harrismith and
Pretoria there is no difference, except that the last is a little more
English than the first.
All that has been said holds also of Natal. The vast native population
is one with that in the native states beyond its boundaries; its
Englishmen are as little divided by any racial, religious or social
difference from their brothers, cousins and friends in the Cape Colony,
Zambesia and the Transvaal as if they were still living in neighbouring
European streets.
Certain there are of the small native states under British or other
protection, which have a semblance of national unity. In Basutoland,
Pondoland, and Matabeleland a more or less homogeneous race does
inhabit a given area; but these states are exactly those which cannot
possibly survive in contact with civilization. Apart entirely from
any nefarious desires or actions on the part of civilized men, there
are a few mechanical inventions, and a few intellectual conceptions
inherent to civilization, which, coming in contact with any savage
state, must inevitably send it into solution; a savage organization
can no more stand in a stream of civilization than a polyp can remain
in a current of corrosive fluid without dissolving into water. But, it
might be suggested, if our political state boundaries are not national
in the true sense of the word, they may at least represent the lines
of united commercial interests, lines which, in such a civilization as
ours, might be almost strong enough to found a quasi-national unity
on! But even this is not so. Commercial interests we have, but they
are not conterminous with our political boundaries. The Eastern and
Western Provinces of the Cape Colony have far more cause for commercial
jealousy and antagonism that have either with the Free State, the
development and increased wealth of which benefits both. Natal is as
deeply interested in the wealth and development of the Transvaal as if
it were a department of her own.
Commercial interests we have, and they are strong; but they are not
conterminous with our state boundaries, and do not strengthen them.
Viewed thus, we see that the States of South Africa are not, taken
isolatedly, national; their boundaries are of the nature of electoral,
cantonal, fiscal, political divisions; _of immense importance, and
by all means to be preserved, as such divisions are_, but not to be
mistaken for those deeper, subtler and organic divisions from which the
life of great nations takes its rise. There is far more resemblance
between the population of the Transvaal and that of the Colony, Free
State, or Natal, than between the populations of Yorkshire and Surrey;
there is far more subtle, deep-lying, organic difference between
Normandy and Bordeaux than between Natal and the Cape Colony. In
looking at the political divisions of South Africa, one is irresistibly
reminded of a well-known English village, in which the boys on the one
side of the street threw stones at the boys on the other, because the
parish boundary ran down the centre. Great nations are not founded on
such differences as these.
But, it might be yet asked: "If our peoples are so mingled that our
states cannot become the foundation of healthy national life, would it
not be possible in so large and sparsely peopled a country to redivide
our races, giving to each its territory?" Apart from the physical
impossibilities which render such a proposal ridiculous, if, by some
almighty force, all our natives could be gathered into one territory,
our Boers in another, and our Englishmen into a third, no sooner would
that force be removed than we should remingle in the old manner, the
native as labourer craving the products of our civilization, the Boer
as farmer, and the Englishman, Jews and other newcomers as speculators
and builders of railroads, and introducers of commerce. A natural want
binds and blends our races. But there is a subtler reason why such
racial divisions are not even thinkable. The blending has now gone
too far. There is hardly a civilized roof in South Africa that covers
people of only one nation; in our households, in our families, in our
very persons we are mingled.
Let us take a typical Cape household before us at the moment. The
father of the household is an Englishman; the mother a so-called Boer,
of half Dutch and half French blood, with a French name; the children
are of the three nationalities; the governess is a German; the cook is
a Half-caste, partly Boer and partly the descendant of the old slaves;
the housemaid is a Half-caste, partly Hottentot, and whose father was
perhaps an English soldier; the little nurse girl is a pure Hottentot;
the boy who cleans the boots and waits, a Kaffir; and the groom is a
Basuto. This household is a type of thousands of others to be found
everywhere in South Africa.
If a crude and homely illustration may be allowed, the peoples of South
Africa resemble the constituents of a plum-pudding when in the process
of being mixed; the plums, the peel, the currants, the flour, the
eggs, and the water are mingled together. Here plums may predominate,
there the peel; one part may be slightly thinner than another, but it
is useless to try to resort them; they have permeated each other's
substance: they cannot be reseparated; to cut off a part would not
be to resort them; it would be dividing a complex but homogeneous
substance into parts which would repeat its complexity.
What then shall be said of the South African problem as a whole? Is
it impossible for the South African peoples to attain to any form of
unity, organization, and national life? Must we for ever remain a vast,
inchoate, invertebrate mass of humans, divided horizontally into layers
of race, mutually antagonistic, and vertically severed by lines of
political state division, which cut up our races without simplifying
our problems, and which add to the bitterness of race conflict the
irritation of political division? Is national life and organization
unattainable by us?
We believe that no one can impartially study the condition of South
Africa and feel that it is so. Impossible as it is that our isolated
states should consolidate, and attain to a complete national life,
there is a form of organic union which is possible to us. For there is
a sense in which all South Africans are one. It is not only that all
men born in South Africa, from the Zambesi to the Cape, are bound by
the associations of their early years to the same vast, untamed nature;
it is not only that South Africa itself, situated at the extremity
of the continent, shut off by vast seas and impassable forests from
the rest of the world, forces upon its inhabitants a certain union,
like that of a crew who, in the same ship, set out on an interminable
voyage together; there is a subtle but a very real bond, which unites
all South Africans, and differentiates us from all other peoples in
the world. _This bond is our mixture of races itself._ It is this
which divides South Africans from all other peoples in the world,
and makes us one. From Zambesi to the sea the same mixture exists,
in slightly varying form, and the same problem is found. Wherever a
Dutchman, an Englishman, a Jew, and a native are superimposed, there
is that common South African condition through which no dividing line
can be drawn. The only form of organization which can be healthily or
naturally assumed by us is one which takes cognizance of this universal
condition. Great and seemingly insuperable as are for the moment the
difficulties which lie in our path on the way to a great, common,
national unity, no man can study South Africa without feeling that, in
this form, and this alone, is national life and organization attainable
by South Africa. Difficult as it may be, it is at once simpler and
easier than the consolidation of any separate part. It is the one form
of crystallization open to us, the one shape we shall assume.
South African unity is not the dream of the visionary; it is not even
the forecast of genius, which makes clear and at hand that which only
after ages can accomplish: it is not even like the splendid vision
of that little-understood man, the first Napoleon, of a unified and
consolidated Europe, which was fated to failure from the moment of
its inception, because dreamed five hundred years before its time.
South African unity is a condition the practical necessity for which
is daily and hourly forced upon us by the common needs of life: it is
the one possible condition which will enable us to solve our internal
difficulties: it is the one path open to us. For this unity all great
men born in South Africa during the next century will be compelled
directly or indirectly to labour; it is this unity which must precede
the production of anything great and beautiful by our people as a
whole; neither art, nor science, nor literature, nor statecraft will
flourish among us as long as we remain in our unorganized form: it is
the attainment of this unity which constitutes the problem of South
Africa: _How, from our political states and our discordant races, can a
great, a healthy, a united, an organized nation be formed?_
If our view be right, the problem which South Africa has before it
to-day is this: How, from our political states and our discordant
races, can a great, healthy, united, organized nation be formed?
This problem naturally divides itself into two parts. For the moment,
the first is the most pressing and absorbing, that of the political
union of our states; and it must precede the other. Great as are the
difficulties which lie in this path at present, difficulties whose
extent can only be understood by one who has deeply studied our
internal condition, yet so urgent is the practical need for it, so
ripe the time, that there are probably men now living who may see it
accomplished. It is impossible to study the South Africa of to-day and
doubt that within sixty years there will exist here a great centralized
and independent form of government embodying the united political will
of the people; that with regard to external defence and the most vital
internal problems, South Africa will be politically one; _its state
divisions, while developed and intensified in certain directions_,
will be relegated to the performance of those invaluable functions of
self-government for which they are so admirably fitted. Circumstances
and individuals favouring, we may see this accomplished before the next
decade is out; it must come at last.
For the moment, the political aspect of our problem is the most
pressing; but there is another, deeper and more important, and of which
no man now living will see the final solution. A central government,
a customs union, a common treasury for purposes of external defence,
these are but the shell in which the vital unity of the community must
be contained if we are ever to become, not simply a large, but a great,
a powerful and a truly progressive people. Day by day, and hour by
hour, every man and woman in South Africa, whether they will it or
no, labours to produce the final answer which will be given to this
question: How, of our divided peoples, can a great, healthy, harmonious
and desirable nation be formed?
This is the final problem of South Africa. If we cannot solve it, our
fate is sealed. If South Africa is unable so to co-ordinate, and, where
she cannot blend, so to harmonize her differing peoples, that if in
years to come a foreign foe should land upon her shores, and but six
men were left to defend her, two English, two Dutch, two of native
extraction: if those six men would not stand shoulder to shoulder,
fighting for a land that was their own, in which each felt, widely
as he might otherwise be separated from his fellows, that he had a
stake,--then the fate of South Africa is sealed; the handwriting has
already appeared on the wall against us; we must take for ever a last
place among the nations; however large, rich, populous we may become,
we shall never be able to look free, united peoples in the face. In
past ages empires have existed which were founded on racial hatred
and force. Of this type were the great states of antiquity--Egypt,
Assyria, Rome, and Greece. They passed away; but for a time they were
able to maintain themselves against states of like construction with
themselves, only falling when they came into contact with freer and
more united peoples.
In the twentieth century it will not be possible for a state
constructed after the plan of the ancient world to attain to power and
developed greatness, even for a time. In an age in which the nations of
the civilized world are with titanic efforts shaping rafts with which
to shoot those rapids down which empire after empire, civilization
after civilization, have disappeared, and will shoot them and appear
below them, free united peoples; if the South Africa of the future
is to remain eaten internally by race hatreds, a film of culture and
intelligence spread over seething masses of ignorance and brutality,
inter-support and union being wholly lacking; then, though it may be
our misfortune rather than our fault, our doom is sealed; our place
will be wanting among the great, free nations of earth. Neither in
art, in science, in material invention, in the discovery of larger and
more satisfactory modes of conducting human life, can we stand beside
them. A man with an internal disease feeding on his vitals cannot
compete with the sound in body and limb.
Taken as a whole, so vast, so complex, and so beset with difficulty is
our South African problem, that it may be truly said that no European
nation has had during the last eight hundred years to face anything
approaching it in complexity and difficulty. To find any analogy to it
we must go back as far as the England of Alfred, when divided Saxons
and invading Danes were the elements out of which organic unity had
to be constructed. But there are elements in our problem which no
European nation has ever had to face, and which no migrating part of a
European race has ever had to deal with, in exactly the same form in
which they meet us. Our race question is complicated by a question of
colour, which presents itself to us in a form more virulent and intense
than that in which it has met any modern people. America and India
have nothing analogous to it; and it has to be faced in an age which
does not allow of the old methods in dealing with alien and so-called
inferior peoples. In South Africa the nineteenth century is brought
face to face with a prehistoric world.
To understand rightly the difficulty of our problem; to grasp the
nature of the obstacles which lie in our path to organic union; to
understand our crying need of it, and to grasp the grounds we have
for hope, it will be necessary to examine closely the different races
of which we are composed; and finally, to glance briefly at some of
the conditions and individuals that are at the present moment largely
influencing the future of South Africa.