THE BOER AND HIS REPUBLICS
Such is the life and such are the social conditions of the primitive
Boer wherever he is found to-day from the Zambesi to the Cape.
In our cities and villages, the descendant of the Boer is found in
wholly different forms. He is the law-giver, the magistrate, the
successful barrister, the able doctor; everywhere children of the Boer
fill our schools and bear away the prizes; and in the yearly university
lists of successful candidates, the names of the Huguenot-Dutch youths,
and more especially the girls, rank high, and often equal or exceed in
number those of all other residents in the Colony.[64]
[64] To prevent misunderstanding, it is necessary to state
that the term Boer, like the term Highland clansman, is
more than a mere designation of race. Had Scott been
asked to describe a typical Highland clansman, he would
at once have described him with certain manners, ideas,
virtues and wants, forming an absolutely true picture of
the ancient clansman, which yet might not in any way apply
to the Duke of Argyle or other cultured descendant of the
Highlander, who, though being the Chief of a Highland clan,
and possessing possibly no drop of foreign blood, would
yet belong to a wholly different type of civilization.
Probably not one half of the descendants of the Boers are
Boers to-day, in the sense of speaking only the Taal and
abiding by seventeenth-century manners and customs; and in
twenty-five years there will not, we regret to think, be a
Boer born in South Africa, though there will be more than
half a million South Africans of Dutch-Huguenot descent.
Serious political miscalculation is the result of the
misconception that all Dutch-Huguenot South Africans are
primitive Boers. In childhood we remember having heard
that a Scotch Highlander was coming on a visit; and our
disappointment when, instead of a clansman, speaking
Gaelic, wearing a kilt, and playing the bagpipes, a
delicate young man, much addicted to reading Tennyson and
playing Beethoven, appeared, was probably much like that
which awaits the foreigner who still in all South African
Dutchmen expects to see the Boer.
We have often been led to speculate on the marked success of the
descendants of the African Boer in the purely intellectual walks of
life, not only in South Africa, but also when visiting the universities
of Europe. Race, and the healthful and stimulating climate of Africa,
may have their share in the result; but it has sometimes appeared to us
that, given these, a further explanation of the intellectual virility
of the male and female descendants of the Boer may perhaps in part be
found in the fact that for several generations the intellect of the
race lay to a large extent fallow, and was not overtaxed or strained.
Every noted judge or politician, every successful university student,
male or female, is the descendant of men and women who for generations
lived far from the fretful stir of great cities, where petty ambitions
and activities and useless complexity in small concerns tend to wear
out and debilitate the intellect and body. Vast cities, as up to
the present time they have existed, are the hot houses wherein the
human creature, over-stimulated, tends, unless under very exceptional
conditions, to emasculate and decay. In the peaceful silences of the
veld the Boer's nerve and brain have probably reposed and recuperated;
therefore the descendant to-day, thrown suddenly into the hurrying
stream of modern life, appears in it with the sound nerves and
couched-up energy of generations; though whether he will retain these
under modern conditions is to be seen.
The Boer has, as we shall see, founded two republics in South Africa.
The first, the Orange Free State, has a most unique little history.
The earliest white men who crossed the Orange River, and made their
homes in the high grass plains, were emigrant Boers who had trekked
from the Cape Colony. Later, British Sovereignty over the country
was proclaimed; but in the month of February in the year 1854 the
British Government, desiring to restrict British possessions and
responsibilities in South Africa, determined to relinquish the Free
State and its inhabitants. So opposed were the indwellers of the State
to this, that they sent home to England a deputation headed by the
Rev. Andrew Murray, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, to beg of
the English Government not to give up the territory. But the English
Government refused to entertain their request, regarding the country
as a source of expense and responsibility, without any compensatory
advantages. Diamonds were then undiscovered, and the mineral wealth of
South Africa was unknown. The inhabitants of the territory therefore
gathered themselves together, drew up a constitution and formed
themselves into a republic, under the title of the Orange Free State.
The first sitting of the first Volksraad of the Free State took
place on March 28, 1854. From that time the little Boer republic has
gone on increasing its property and multiplying its inhabitants, its
educational institutions advancing and its agricultural capacities
developing, till to-day it is allowed by all who have studied its
conditions to be one of the most harmonious and well-governed little
nations in existence.
In the year 1869, diamonds were discovered in the Free State territory,
and England, naturally, immediately desired to obtain possession of
that section of the country which contained the Kimberley mines. After
much bitter discussion, the Free State authorities were compelled to
accept ninety thousand pounds for the strip of land which they were not
strong enough for the moment to defend by force of arms.
This loss of their richest diamond field (the Free State still contains
some smaller ones) appeared a severe blow to the Free State, but by it
they were saved from the misfortune which later befell their northern
sister republic, when the discovery of vast quantities of gold made it
an object of desire and almost unconquerable lust to the speculator and
capitalist, Jew and Christian.
* * * * *
The history of the northern republic, known as the South African
Republic, or Transvaal, while resembling that of the Free State in many
points, yet differs from it largely in others.
When later we enter into a detailed consideration of the different
states and communities into which South Africa is divided, we shall
closely examine its history and structure; for the moment it is enough
to glance rapidly at its past record, merely to understand the
position of the Boer in South Africa to-day.
The story of the foundation of this state is perhaps the most epic and
unique of all the pages of human history during the last centuries,
but for the present it is enough to note the main facts. In 1795, the
British first conquered the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch East India
Company. The Stadholder, who had fled from Holland to England when the
French Army entered the Dutch provinces, acquiesced in this, but the
South African people were not consulted. In accordance with the Treaty
of Amiens, Great Britain in 1803 restored the Cape to the Batavian
Republic, but a few months later European war broke out afresh. In 1806
Great Britain again conquered it, and held it till 1814, when the King
of the Netherlands formally ceded it to her in return for six millions
pounds sterling. The King was urgently in need of money, and as Great
Britain would not restore the Cape under any circumstances he was glad
to get the six million pounds. The people of Africa were not consulted
in regard to this cession either. It was made without their knowledge
or consent. Since 1814, Great Britain has her possession of the Cape
Colony, a period now of above eighty-six years.
The conditions under which the English Government took possession of
the land were exceedingly propitious. The bulk of the inhabitants,
severed already for a century from Europe, cared little if at all which
European power it was that victualled its fleets and held official rule
at Table Bay, if their rights of free internal action were but left
untouched. The Dutch East India Company, though probably not worse
than other commercial companies, had the peculiar incapacity inherent
in all such bodies for the wise governing of a free people, and had so
alienated the hearts of the South Africans that they had already risen
against it. There was no prejudice against the English as such, and
had a tolerable amount of tact, sympathy and judgment been evinced in
dealing with the early inhabitants of the land, there need have been no
white race problem in South Africa to-day.
The English Government in the early days appears to have been not
unfortunate in some of the persons who were sent out to represent it at
the Cape. In such individuals as General Dundas, the Earl of Cadogan,
and Sir John Cradock, England had not merely well-intentioned servants,
but men of tact and judgment. But she was not always to be so fortunate.
We English are a peculiar people. More often than most other races,
and in this point resembling the Jews, we tend frequently to run to
extremes of contradictory vice and virtue. Exactly as the Jewish race
tends to incarnate itself on the one hand in a Moses, an Isaiah, or
a Spinoza, so far removed from all material and personal ambitions
and desires, and on the other hand in the grasping money-lender and
millionaire; as it is now manifest in a Christ and then in a Judas
Iscariot, so we English appear to manifest among our folk the extremes
of self-sacrificing humanity, magnanimity, and heroism, and of sordid
all-grasping self-seeking. In South Africa we have had our Livingstones
and our George Greys, and our Porters, men, who, across the arid wastes
of political and public life, shed the perfume of large and generous
individualities; men, the mere consciousness of a national relation
with whom is rightly a matter of pride to an English South African's
heart; while, on the other hand, our race has here manifested in
certain of its representatives as much of low ambition, and merciless
greed, as it has been the unfortunate province of any individuals of
any race ever to exhibit.
But between these extremes has lain the bulk of our ordinary officials
and citizens of English descent, with the blended vices and virtues
of our people; and generally possessed of the one quality which
seems to be the mark of our average Englishman. With a great deal of
loyalty toward our own race and a great deal of desire for freedom and
independence for ourselves, and a passion for carrying out our own
methods, we have also a tendency to understand very little of other
races and individuals, as less important and justifiable, and far less
virtuous, than our own. This is perhaps more or less characteristic
of all Teutonic peoples as compared with Celtic; but it appears
certainly more marked in our own English division than in any other.
This disposition has its advantages. We are not easily influenced for
evil or for good; if we do not learn readily, we do not soon give up
that which we have learned; it yields to us a great stability; and as
long as, whether as individuals or as a race, we remain on our own soil
and among our own native surroundings, though it may make life a little
narrow, and somewhat hard, its disadvantages are not serious or vital.
But the moment we are placed in close juxtaposition with other races,
or enter foreign lands, more especially as rulers or controllers, then
that which was an innoxious venial defect becomes a serious, it may be
even a deadly, deficiency.
In certain of our rulers this quality has manifested itself powerfully,
and has led to the most enormous and catastrophic effects. Among such
men was Lord Charles Somerset. While he was an energetic man of unusual
ability, as far as can be judged across the uncertain historical
shadows of seventy years (we are far from accepting as proved all the
charges of extortion and corruption made against him); it was yet
during his rule that one of the most disastrous mistakes made during
England's rule in South Africa took place; and, in truth, his rule in
South Africa may be said to have been one long blunder.
Gracious and obliging to those who submitted absolutely to his own
will, he was a man oppressive and overbearing to all who resisted his
own views. Devoid of imagination and wide human sympathies, he, in
common with certain later representatives of England in South Africa,
failed entirely to understand the nature of the people he came to
govern, the land they lived in, or the conditions evoked by the unique
combination of land and people; and the results of his rule were evil
for South Africa, and yet more disastrous for England.
The mental attitude of the brave free-men who had peopled the untrodden
land and made themselves a home in our African wilderness was for him,
as for some who have succeeded him, a region he was never able by his
mental constitution to penetrate.
Many things had produced pain among this free-folk. The mere fact that
without their consent or desire their land had been placed in the hands
of England; that there were no representative institutions through
which the people could make their voice heard; that the Dutch language
spoken by all the white inhabitants with the exception of a few English
officials was not recognized by the Government; that the Governor
received ten thousand pounds a year and four residences out of the
small revenue, and that he with a few officials absorbed one-fourth of
the entire revenue of the land; that he ruled with the same autocratic
absoluteness with which the Czar of all the Russias is supposed to
control his subjects--all these were sources of friction. But all these
smaller matters might have been removed into the background and made
of little account, had more tact and judgment been shown. But this man
moved along his own course, apparently as oblivious of the thoughts and
affections of the people whom he had to deal with as a dull menagerie
keeper is of the thought and dispositions of his lions.
One of the things most keenly felt by the colonists was the arming
of Hottentots and placing them under English officers as soldiers in
control of the country. The Hottentots are an interesting, lively and
volatile, brave little race, now nearly extinct. They were, except
the Bushmen, the most primitive of African peoples; and anyone who
has lived in countries where primitive dark races are found side by
side with white men will recognize at once how much bitterness will
be evoked by this proceeding, and how cruel is the result in the long
run to the primitive races themselves who are so used. Were England
to-morrow to conquer the United States, and to organize and drill the
American negroes for the purpose of keeping down the white races, not
merely would the whole American population rise to a man, but it would
be the most cowardly and cruel, though indirect, way of assisting in
the destruction of the negro.
From a small beginning in 1815 rose an occurrence which has set an
uncleansable mark on the history of South Africa, and which, through
South Africa, may perhaps ultimately react on other streams of life.
In the Baviaans River Valley, on what was then the extreme northern
frontier of the Colony, lived a farmer called Frederick Bezuidenhout, a
man who had always been opposed to the resignation of the Colony to the
British Government, which had now finally supplanted the Government of
Holland for nine years. He was summoned to appear before the landdrost
of Graaff Reinet for striking a Hottentot, and he refused to obey the
summons. A corps of Hottentot soldiers under the command of Lieutenant
Rousseau was sent to arrest him. They went up the wild and beautiful
valley of the Baviaans River, till they arrived at Bezuidenhout's farm
near the banks of the stream. Bezuidenhout and one of his servants
stationed themselves behind the stone wall of the sheep-kraal near
the house. When ordered to surrender in the name of George the Third,
King of England, he refused to do so, and fired his gun, but no one
was touched. He then retired to the house and slipped out at the back
before the Hottentots could capture him, and climbed into a krantz, or
precipice, across the river, accompanied by one of his native servants.
We have visited the spot; it is a scene of singular loveliness. The
wild rocky African mountains rise on every hand; at the bottom of
the valley is a tiny plain which may be cultivated; mimosa and other
typical African trees are scattered about, and the krantz, or great
precipice of broken rock, into which Bezuidenhout climbed, rises
precipitously from the bank of the river, some rocks jutting up like
fortified towers. From the lower, the riverside, this krantz is almost
if not quite inaccessible; but by going round and climbing the hill
you can easily come down upon the top. The place in which Bezuidenhout
hid is often called a cave, but in the common acceptation of the term
it is not such. The rocks which form a large proportion of our African
precipices are of a peculiar formation, apt to split vertically into
huge blocks, between which great chasms are often formed, and many of
us remember playing among such chasms in our childhood. It was into
such a cavity that Bezuidenhout retired, open to the sky at the top
and forming a kind of little room to be readily entered into from the
top only, while in the walls are small chinks and holes through which
one may look out and see the river and plain below. At the time of the
year at which we visited the spot, hundreds of the red African aloe
flower on their long spikes were in bloom at the top of the krantz, a
large wild bird had built its huge nest on the point of the rocks at
the top of the opening, and the trees springing out of the krantz were
in leaf. Some state there was one servant with him, others two. The
soldiers are said to have discovered the spot by seeing the muzzle of a
gun gleam from one of the openings in the side. Finding they could not
reach it by climbing up from the river, they went round on to the hill
and came upon it from the top of the crags. The soldiers called upon
Bezuidenhout to surrender, but he refused, declaring he would never
be seized alive by Hottentots. A volley of shots was fired down from
the top and Bezuidenhout fell dead. His native servants surrendered,
and were afterwards tried, but acquitted as being merely dependents.
Towards evening his brother, Jan Bezuidenhout, came, and with the other
relatives removed the body, which was buried the next day.
Over the grave impassioned speeches were made by friends, especially
by Jan Bezuidenhout, who declared that they would never rest till
the Hottentot corps was driven out of the country, and their wrongs
were redressed. So began the first small uprising against England of
1815. On the 9th of November a little body of farmers met at Diederick
Mulder's and resolved to take up arms, but were betrayed by a spy,
who hurried away to inform the English officials. Five days later
the little commando, under Willem Krugel, numbering fifty men, took
the oath to stand by each other till death. "I swear by God Almighty
never to rest till I have driven the oppressors of my nation from this
land." On November the 18th they were surrounded by a large body of
troops under Colonel Cuyler; eighteen of the men surrendered, while
the rest fled. Five men, Jan Bezuidenhout, Cornelius Faber, Andries
Meyer, Stefanus and Abraham Bothma, resolved to fly from the country
to take refuge in Kaffirland, and with their wagons and families to
cross the river. An English major, with one hundred Hottentots and
twenty-two white men, followed them. In the Winterberg Mountains, the
wagons of two of the men were first overtaken and captured; but Jan
Bezuidenhout, Cornelius Faber, his brother-in-law, and Stefanus Bothma
were out-spanned near a small stream by a ravine in the mountains.
They had lit their fire, and Bothma went to the stream to fetch water;
when a band of Hottentot soldiers, under an English lieutenant, who
were hidden by the stream, fired on them. Bothma had no arms and was
captured, Faber returned the fire, and fell wounded in the shoulder
and was also captured. There were now left of the fugitives only Jan
Bezuidenhout, his wife, and their son, a boy of twelve years, all of
whom were at their wagon. The Hottentots gathered round the wagon and
called to them to surrender. Bezuidenhout's only reply was to fire.
His wife stepped to his side. "Let us die together," she said. And she
stood beside him re-loading his guns. He soon fell mortally wounded.
She is said to have seized his gun and fired, but was struck by a
bullet, and her son also was wounded. Bezuidenhout died in a few hours,
and the wife and son were made prisoners.
Thirty-six persons in all were arrested for this rising and were tried
on the 16th of December--a day which became celebrated in the later
history of South Africa, being observed in the Dutch republics as a
public holiday, under the title of Dingaan's Day, because on that day
the great Zulu army of Dingaan was conquered by the Boers at Blood
River. The same day is also, curiously enough, memorable as the day of
the outbreak of the first war of independence.[65]
[65] On December 15, 1899, was fought the battle of Colenso.
The prisoners all fully admitted having taken the oath. On the 22nd of
January, 1816, they were sentenced, six of them to death, to be hanged
at Slachter's Nek, where the oath had been sworn by them; while the
rest, after witnessing the execution of their fellows, were to undergo
various punishments, ranging from banishment for life to imprisonment
and fines. Martha Faber, the widow of Jan Bezuidenhout, and the sister
of Cornelius Faber, one of the men to be hanged, was sentenced to
banishment for life from the eastern part of the colony. Krugel's
sentence was afterward changed to banishment for life, because he had
taken no part in armed resistance and had done the British Government
great service in the Kaffir wars; but Hendrick Prinsloo, Cornelius
Faber, Stefanus Bothma, Abraham Bothma, and Theunis de Klerk were
sentenced to death by hanging on the 9th of March, 1816.
These sentences were within the letter of the law, but no blood
had actually been shed by any of the prisoners in their small and
abortive rising. It was universally supposed that the Governor would
exercise his prerogative of mercy, and commute the sentence to one of
banishment. But it was not so. On the 9th of March, 1816, a scaffold
was raised on the ridge of stony land uniting two mountains, near which
the oath had been sworn, and which has since been known throughout
South Africa as Slachter's Nek, or the Butcher's Neck. The train from
Port Elizabeth to the Midlands passes this spot daily, with the Rish
River flowing to the right and the neck on the left. Here were brought
the five men sentenced to be hanged, and the thirty-two who were to
witness it; one of them, Frans Marais, had been sentenced to be tied
with a rope around his neck to the foot of the gallows, while his
companions were being hanged.
A great crowd of people stood about, hoping and feeling convinced, even
to the last moment, that a reprieve would come. Colonel Cuyler with
three hundred soldiers guarded the scaffold from the people. The men
asked to be allowed to sing a hymn before they mounted. Their voices
were firm and clear. They appeared perfectly resigned. No reprieve
came. There was a moment of awful silence in the crowd as the drop
fell. But the scaffold was not strong enough to bear the weight of the
bodies of the five powerful men; it broke, and the men, half strangled,
were thrown to the earth. Then a wild and passionate cry arose from
the people; wives, mothers, sisters, and relatives of the condemned
men cried, as they rushed toward the gallows, that God Himself had
intervened, and the men given back to them. It was not to be. As soon
as they had recovered consciousness, the gallows were repaired and the
men were forced to remount; the three hundred soldiers guarded the
scaffold, and the work was done. A deep, low murmur is said to have
risen from the crowd as it was completed.
The relations of the dead men asked for the bodies, but were refused;
an order having been given that they should be buried under the
gallows.[66] So came to an end the day of Slachter's Nek--the worst
day's work for England that up to recent times has yet been done in
South Africa. Certainly the Governor was within the letter of the law.
Technically speaking, nations have recognized that any body of persons
strong enough to resist by force the mastership over any strip of the
earth's surface and over the individuals inhabiting it, may, if these
individuals oppose the will of the stronger, be termed rebels, and if
they seek to resist by force be hanged. But there are other modes of
regarding life than the technical. England, without the consent of
these men, had taken over their land nine years before--a land which
they and their fathers, and not the Dutch Government or the East India
Company, had won from the wilderness and peopled. They were a small
section of the population, and they had taken no single life in all
their uprising (it has not even been stated that the shots fired by
Bezuidenhout and his wife grazed any of the Hottentots!)
[66] Some persons going to visit the grave found the hand
of one of the dead men, supposed to be that of Theunis de
Klerk, protruding from the earth with the finger pointing
right upward. It was taken to indicate that the men had
been buried alive. But there is no reason necessarily to
believe this. The soldiers had probably thrown only a
thin layer of earth over the bodies, which being buried
immediately while still warm, the muscles had probably
contracted after death and forced the hand out with the
rigid finger.
Had Lord Charles Somerset exercised his prerogative and extended
mercy to these five men, he would have done more to consolidate the
English rule in South Africa than, had he been able to introduce two
hundred thousand men, he would have been able to effect. In the lives
of English soldiers alone, England has probably paid at the rate of
over a thousand a head for each man hanged; and if she could that day
have purchased the necks of those five Boers at ten millions each, they
would have been cheaply bought.
It is a curious property of blood shed on the scaffold for political
offences that it does not dry up.
Blood falling on the battlefield sinks into the earth; it may take a
generation, or it may take two, or more, for it wholly to disappear,
but it is marvellous how the memory of even the most bloody conflict,
between equally armed foes, does, as generations pass, fade.
But blood shed on a scaffold is always fresh. The scaffold may be
taken down, the bodies buried, but in the memory of the people it
glows redder and redder, and with each generation it is new-shed; it
sanctifies, sacrificially, the cause it marked. It may be questioned
whether anywhere in the history of nations, blood, judicially shed for
political purposes, whether the actual means were rifle-bullet, axe,
rope, or the slow anguish of long imprisonment, has ever really aided
the cause in which it was shed. It appears even quite possible that if
Charles the First had been killed on the battlefield instead of being
beheaded, there might have been no Restoration in England.
The African people dispersed quietly and went back to their farms; but
the picture of Slachter's Nek was engraved in the national heart.
After this blunder, Lord Charles Somerset remained in Africa for some
years. He was at last recalled, not on the ground of his treatment of
the old inhabitants, but in answer to the complaints of a few newly
arrived English colonists, by whom he was charged with corruption and
oppression.
Burke had promised to move for his impeachment, but his wealth and rank
protected him (he was an elder brother of the Lord Raglan afterwards
so notorious for his conduct of the Crimean War), and he died at
Brighton in the year 1831.
But his work lived on, and, in addition to other causes, helped to
produce that bitterness in the hearts of South Africans which led to
that important movement known in South African history as the Great
Trek.
In 1828 it was finally enacted that not only was the African Taal,
though the only language of almost the entire people, not to be used
in law courts and public documents, but even petitions written in that
language were no longer to be received by the English Government; and
a little later, men speaking their native language, in the land of
their birth, were not allowed to sit on juries unless they could speak
English, a language they had no facilities for acquiring. Other causes
worked in the same direction towards the embitterment of the minds of
the people against English rule. Even the most generous act recorded
of our English race was a cause of fresh suffering and wrongs. In 1830
the English people, guided by its best element, voted a sum of twenty
million pounds for the liberation of the slaves throughout the English
colonies and possessions; and a portion of this sum it was determined
to expend in buying and setting free the slaves in South Africa.
It is a curious exemplification of the absolute impossibility of
guiding wisely, justly, or successfully the affairs of a nation six
thousand miles distant, which has again and again been exemplified in
the history of South Africa, that this plan miscarried. An intention,
which leaves Europe a white-garbed bird of peace and justice, too often
turns up, after its six thousand miles' passage across the ocean, a
black-winged harbinger of war and death.
The intention of the English folk who voted the sum was generous; in
reality, owing to the blundering of officials and the cunning and
rapacity of speculators (already the poisoners of English rule in South
Africa), all went wrong. Very little of the money voted ever reached
the hands of the people for whom it was intended. Men and women who
had been in affluence before were everywhere reduced to absolute
beggary; and they had the additional irritation of knowing that,
while they were supposed to have been generously dealt with, they had
received nothing. When one remembers that the bitterest war of this
century was waged, only forty years ago, between the English-speaking
folk of America, when one half of the community endeavoured to compel
the other to relinquish its slaves, it is a matter of astonishment that
the slave-owners of the Cape Colony so quietly gave up their claims,
claims which till that time had been recognized by every nation on
earth as wholly just and defensible.
But that which most embittered the hearts of the colonists was the
cold indifference with which they were treated by their rulers, and
the consciousness that they were regarded as a subject and inferior
race. It is this consciousness which among a high-spirited people forms
the bitterest dreg to the cup of sorrow put to the lips of a people
governed by aliens, and one for which no material advantage can atone.
In the eastern parts of the Cape Colony the feeling of bitterness
became so intense that about the year 1836 large numbers of individuals
determined to leave for ever the Colony and the homes which they had
created, and to move northward to the regions yet untouched by the
white man, where they might form for themselves new homes, and raise an
independent state. It is this movement that is known in South African
history as "The Great Trek."
Under such leaders as Carel Johannes Trichard, Andries Potgieter
(the man after whom the town of Potchefstroom in the Transvaal is
called), Gerrit Maritz, and Piet Mauritz Retief (after whom the town
of Pietermaritzburg in Natal is named), the people gathered themselves
together in families, men, women, and children, and, selling their
farms and movable property for whatever they could get, in-spanned
their great ox-wagons, and, taking with them such of their flocks
and herds as they could remove, left their birthland for ever, and
moved northward, sometimes in large bodies amounting to two hundred
souls. Crossing the Orange River, which was then the boundary of the
Cape Colony and beyond which the British control did not extend,
they entered the country, which is now the Orange Free State, and
crossing the Caledon River moved still northward towards what is now
the Transvaal. Most of these men came from the eastern and midland
districts of the Colony, and were the descendants of the men who had
already resisted the rule of the Chartered Dutch East India Company
and endeavoured to found their own republic in the midlands; men in
whom the self-governing republican instinct, inherited with their Dutch
blood and sucked in with their mother's milk, was strong as probably
in no other race on earth, unless it be the Swiss. With the exception
of Piet Retief, few, if any, of them were from the old districts of
the Western Province. Among those in Andries Potgieter's trek was one
Casper Krüger, from the Colesberg district of the Cape Colony. He took
with him all his family, among them a lad, just over ten years of age,
later known as Paul Krüger, President of the South African Republic.
Fully to describe the sufferings, struggles, and wanderings of these
people, before they succeeded in founding their republic in the
Transvaal, would far exceed the limit we have set ourselves. But to
understand the Boer of to-day and the problems of to-day we must very
rapidly glance at the march of the fore-trekkers.
At the time of the Boer trek, the great power in central and eastern
South Africa was the Zulu nation. Under their renowned chief Tchaka,
one of the most remarkable military geniuses of history, possessing to
the full the vices and virtues of his type, the small Zulu tribe had
become a great nation, dominating over and treading down other native
tribes and races. Killing the older men and women and absorbing the
youths and maidens into his own people, as he conquered tribe after
tribe, he had by his wonderful military discipline produced a vast
army of warriors, before whom no native people could stand. In 1828,
Tchaka was assassinated by his half-brother Dingaan, who, without
sharing his genius, possessed his fault as a ruthless destroyer
of men. At the time of the Great Trek, Dingaan ruled over the Zulu
nation and its dependencies in Natal and Zululand. In the Transvaal,
a division of the Zulus, which had broken from Tchaka under their
celebrated warrior-chief Umsiligaas, had, under the name of the
Matabele, founded a great warrior nation, moulded after the ideal of
Tchaka; they devastated the lands and destroyed the native tribes which
resisted their power. When the first party of the fore-trekkers under
Potgieter arrived in the northern districts of the Free State, the
native tribes there welcomed them as a possible assistance against the
inroads of the powerful Matabele. The whole country was in those days
filled with game to an almost inconceivable extent, and it was largely
on the fruit of the gun that the fore-trekkers lived. In 1836 their
first great conflict with the Matabele under Umsiligaas took place.
The fore-trekkers had spread themselves out in small parties, camping
with their wagons near the Vaal River, and the Matabele attacked them
wherever they were found in small numbers.
Near what is now known as Erasmus Drift on the Vaal River, a small
party in five waggons was suddenly surrounded and several of the Boers
were killed. Barend Liebenberg's little party was taken by surprise,
and six men, two women, and four children, with twelve native servants
were destroyed, and three white children, a boy and two girls, carried
away captive. The great Matabele army then rapidly advanced to where
the main body of the emigrants had encamped at a spot now known as
Vechtkop, about twenty miles from the present village of Heilbron,
in the Free State. Paul Krüger, then a child, can still remember the
preparations for defence, and relates how the wagons were drawn up in
a square, mimosa branches cut down and dragged to the wagons, women
and young children helping in the labour; and how these branches were
tied together by chains to fill in the spaces between the fore and back
wheels of the wagons to prevent the Matabele warriors from crawling up
between them.
Early in the morning of the 2nd of October the vast army of Umsiligaas
was reported as approaching. Commandant Sarel Cilliers, who commanded
the laager, found that he had in all, including boys of twelve and
fourteen, forty men with whom to meet the vast horde, and the women and
girls were busy smelting lead to mould bullets for the old-fashioned
guns.
Cilliers and thirty-two of his men rode out to meet the enemy upon the
open plain, where Matabele were formed into great squares upon Tchaka's
system, and sat upon the ground, each man with his shield before him,
as was always done preparatory to a great attack.
Cilliers sent out a loud-voiced envoy to inquire why they came to
fight the white men who had done them no harm. At once the thousands
of warriors sprang to their feet with the mighty war cry: "Umsiligaas
alone has the right to speak!" Brandishing their shields and assegais,
the front ranks deployed to right and left, forming those two horns,
so celebrated in Zulu warfare, which were intended to inclose the
enemy. The emigrants mounted their horses, reloading their heavy
muskets as they went and firing at the points of the horns; and with
great difficulty, in an hour and a half, they reached the laager.
Here men, women, and children knelt down for a short prayer, while
the Matabele indunas were massing the column for the grand assault.
Then followed a desperate fight. The Zulus poured forward in thousands
with magnificent courage, even seizing hold of the wagons with their
hands to tear them apart, and piercing the wagon sails again and again
with their assegais. The Boers fought with desperate determination,
the women reloading the guns and handing them to the men who stood at
the corners of the laager. In the end, with heavy loss on both sides,
the Matabele were repulsed, but in their retreat they swept away with
them all the sheep and cattle of the emigrants. Hunger and desolation
then reigned in the laager, and had it not been for the timely arrival
of another party of emigrants all must have perished. Later on, the
combined emigrants followed up the Matabele to their strongholds in the
Transvaal in the hope of recovering their goods and the lost children.
After long and bitter conflict the old flintlock gun conquered, and
the Matabele moved northward towards the territory where they are now
found, known as Matabeleland.
Of this war, it can only be said that South Africa has no reason to be
ashamed of the way in which either of her children, black or white,
fought. On the one side there was the Zulu with his great theory of
imperial expansion, not wholly unpardonable in a savage, resenting
the intrusion of any other powers within his sphere of influence,
if not into his actual territory, and determined to use his mighty
armies to extend his rule. On the other hand, the white emigrant, in
his small and feeble numbers, but armed with his old flintlock gun
(which, though it took some minutes to load and discharge once, was a
formidable weapon when compared with the best Zulu assegai), who was
equally determined to make a home for himself and his wife and children
in the great South African wilds. It was a fine, free fight, if any
conflict between humans can be so termed. One looks back to it with
none of that pain with which the generous spirit beholds the conflict
of overwhelming strength with weakness. When two equally prepared
gladiators enter the arena, repulsive though the sight may be, one may
well feel sympathy with both. This was no case of blowing naked savages
to fragments with Maxims or Winchester repeating rifles, and, if in the
end the old flintlock gun conquered, there were times when it seemed
more than probable the victory would be on the other side. The African
lion and the African tiger rolled together on the ground in a fair
and free fight. If the Boer fell, with him fell wife and children; he
fought for life and a home as the Zulu fought. Behind him there was no
vast civilized power to whom, when he had provoked war, he could cry
for aid, and whose hired soldiers could wipe out and be avenged upon
the feebler foe. Alone, unbacked by any extraneous force, dependent
on his own right arm, the Boer went forth. South Africa has no reason
to be ashamed of the way in which either of her sons, black or white,
fought in those old, terrible days.
In the highly cultured citizen of the end of the nineteenth century,
we rightly demand, as a primal and common virtue, breadth of human
sympathy and catholic impartiality of intellectual judgment, unwarped
by personal interests, which is the attribute of the developed man; but
we are yet able, in regarding more primitive times and men who laid
no claim to our transcendent modern virtues, to accept indomitable
courage and love of independence, though the most primitive of virtues,
as a possible foundation from which later all those higher mental
beatitudes, which we have a right to demand from the self-exulting
nineteenth-century human, may spring. In these two primitive virtues
neither Boer nor Zulu ever showed himself wanting in those old days.
While one part of the emigrant body remained in the Transvaal and
Northern Free State, another passed over the Drakensberg Mountains into
Natal, under a man who stands forth as the most romantic figure among
the early fore-trekkers, Piet Retief, a man of some culture, and of a
singular generosity of nature.
The land of Natal was at that time practically uninhabited. Tchaka and
his warriors had swept the country clean of its native tribes; but he
considered it within his sphere of imperial influence. When Retief and
his companions, who went to examine the land, looked down at it from
the top of Spion Kop, they saw that the land was fair and good and
almost wholly uninhabited, and they made overtures to Dingaan, Tchaka's
successor, who resided at his kraal on the White Umvolosi, a hundred
miles distant in Zululand, for the right without let or hindrance
from the Zulus to inhabit this country. Dingaan readily consented,
on one condition--that the emigrants should obtain from a Basuto
tribe some cattle they had taken from his people. This was easily
done, and Dingaan expressing complete satisfaction, a thousand wagons
containing the Boer families trekked over the Drakensberg into Natal,
and scattered over the unpeopled country along the banks of the Upper
Tugela and Mooi Rivers. Piet Retief, with sixty-five followers, some of
whom were mere lads of fifteen or sixteen, went to visit Dingaan at
his kraal on the White Umvolosi, in order that their agreement might be
finally ratified. Some advised caution in going, but Retief fearlessly
laughed their counsels to scorn. Dingaan met his visitors with much
apparent joy and kindliness. Great dances were given in their honour,
and an agreement of permanent peace and fellowship was drawn up by
Mr. Owen, the missionary who was with Dingaan. On the last day, when
the party came to bid farewell to the chief, they were directed, as
usual, to lay aside their weapons when entering the king's presence,
and they did so. They were then offered Kaffir beer to drink. Then,
in an instant, at a given signal from Dingaan, his warriors fell on
them. "Seize the wizards!" he cried in Kaffir. Some of them defended
themselves gallantly with their pocket knives, but all were at last
overpowered and dragged to the official place of execution, a ridge of
high rocks on one side of the kraal, where their brains were knocked
out. Their bodies were then left exposed. Not one of the men escaped.
The manner of their death was recorded by the missionary who, as soon
as possible, left the Zulu kraal with all his party, fearing the same
fate for himself.
On that day a great army of ten thousand Zulu warriors moved forward
silently to attack the scattered emigrants in Natal.
At a spot near to the present village of Weenen ("Weeping"--so
called in remembrance of that terrible day), which lies not very far
from the village of Colenso, the Zulu army killed an entire body of
emigrants--forty-one men, fifty-six women, one hundred and eighty-five
children, and two hundred and fifty coloured servants. The bodies
were mutilated, and neither woman nor child were spared; some were
found with as many as thirty spear-wounds in them. All the white souls
in Natal would have perished had not three young men escaped, who
warned the remaining scattered parties of their danger. The wagons
were hastily drawn together into little laagers, and after a long and
desperate struggle the Zulus were repulsed, women standing beside the
men, reloading their guns and aiding almost as greatly in the defence
as the men.
Then the remnant of the people gathered themselves together to discuss
what should be done. A few had given up all hope, and even spoke of
retracing their steps across the hundreds of weary miles they had
traversed. But the women--then as always, the strength of the South
African people, and who resembled more those old Teutonic ancestresses
of our northern races, of whom Tacitus tells us that "they dared
with their men in war and suffered with them in peace," than we in
the drawing-room and the ballroom--the women raised their voices
unanimously, and cried that there should be no surrender; there, where
their fellows had fallen, they would found their republic or die, and
they, who had faced death, beside man, were listened to. In one battle
ten Boers fell, among them Piet Uys, the father of a family noted down
to the present day for courage, whose young son, a mere lad, seeing his
father unhorsed and stabbed by the Zulu soldiers, rushed back and died
beside him.[67]
[67] It was a younger son of this noted family who so
distinguished himself for bravery in a later Zulu war, when
fighting side by side with English soldiers, and who is
reported, with I know not how much truth, to have saved the
life of a noted English General.
But in the end, at the great and terrible battle of Blood River,
December 16, 1838, the Zulus were defeated, and Dingaan fled. His
brother Panda was made king in his stead. From that time the 16th of
December has been always a holiday in the African Republic.
When the Boer army arrived at Umgungunhlovo, Dingaan's kraal, they
found still the bodies of their sixty-six comrades, which after
eighteen months were yet untouched by beasts of prey, though dried
and decayed. In Retief's leathern bag was found the paper signed with
Dingaan's cross, giving them permission to inhabit the land of Natal,
from the Drakensberg to the sea at Durban, from the Tugela River to the
Umzimvobu.
In this land the Boers now settled down to plant their new Republic. At
Pietermaritzburg, named after their dead leader, they built the church,
standing to this day, which they had vowed to their God if He enabled
them to conquer Dingaan; and they planted their seat of government
there. But it was not long before the English Government at the Cape
Colony, many hundred miles away, became uneasy at the success of the
Boer in realizing his dream of founding an independent state, and there
was issued a proclamation stating that Natal was henceforth to become
a British territory; and soldiers were despatched to Natal to support
this claim.
We know of few pages in the history of our English imperial expansion
which fill us with more shame than this. We had already more land in
the Colony than we could people, and these folk, at the cost of much
life, had travelled far to find freedom from our rule. After a war,
the most even and the most justifiable of all those of which South
African history has any record between a black race and a white, the
fore-trekkers had saved themselves from Dingaan's power; and when they
had set about the realization of their dream and the foundation of
their little republic, we stepped in. We had the ships, and the men,
and the money, and we crushed their dream--for the moment.
At Durban, the seaport of the Republic, there was some sharp fighting
between the soldiers we sent and the Republicans, but in their infant
state the Republicans were wholly unable to compete in numbers or arms
with the forces we could put in the field.
When the Commissioner sent by the English authorities to annex the
land arrived at Pietermaritzburg, there were bitter and stormy scenes.
Most of the inhabitants absolutely refused to remain under British
rule. There was a mass meeting of women, whose leader, the ancient
wife of Erasmus Smit, the old fore-trekkers' preacher, addressed the
Commissioner for two hours,[68] painting a picture of all they had
suffered in founding their new state and of the injustice done in
robbing them of it.
[68] Having, it is said, closed the doors so that he could
not escape.
At the end of the meeting, the women passed an unanimous resolution
that rather than submit to English rule they would leave the land
which, with so much blood and anguish, they had won. "We go across
these mountains to freedom or to death," said the old woman, pointing
toward the Drakensberg Mountains, which, through the names of Laing's
Nek and Amajuba, have since become known to all the world.
Over these mountains almost the whole population of Natal passed,
leaving only about three hundred families, the ancestors of the present
ten thousand Boer inhabitants of Natal.
Those who passed over the Drakensberg Mountains joined the bodies of
fore-trekkers who had remained on the north side of the mountains,
and entered into that great region where no British flag had yet ever
waved, which no Englishman had ever dreamed of claiming, and which was
left almost desolate and uninhabited as the result of Mosilikatzi's[69]
raids. Here they founded their republic, known as the _Transvaal_ or
_South African Republic_.
[69] Mosilikatsi and Umsilikazi (Umsiligaas, p. 238) are
the same person--S.C.C.S.
By the Sand River Convention, ratified by Sir George Cathcart in 1852,
it was agreed that the English Government should not follow them into
the territories north of the Vaal River; that their independence should
be recognized; and that there should be no attempt on the part of the
British Government to interfere with their government or management of
their own affairs.
The most interesting point with regard to the South African Boer is
his astonishing gift for forming new societies, and, as it were,
instinctively creating for himself a new social structure, under
whatever conditions he may find himself.
The South African Boer forms never a mob. With his curious love of
liberty and independent action, he combines a yet more curious instinct
for cohesion and inter-action. There is no folk on earth which has
exemplified, as this little mixed Teutonic people has done, the ancient
Teutonic instinct for combining a high standard of personal freedom
with a strong social organization.
Take at random a handful of African Boers; let them wander away into
some desert and be unheard of for a few years. When you find them
again, they are a people organized and inter-acting, with the true old
Teutonic institutions--the district gatherings, the central government,
the force for defence composed of all the burghers, under their local
chiefs--always the same outline preserved, and always instinctive
re-adaptations and variations according to the varying conditions of
the new society. Studying this matter, one is forcibly reminded of the
instinct in a swarm of bees, which, however often removed from spot
to spot, still seek at once to deposit their old hexagonal cells, yet
always varying the shape of the hive as they are compelled to build it
between two plates of glass, in a hollow tree, or in a hand-made hive.
To the scientific student of the evolution of human societies nothing
in the range of modern history is more interesting and curious than the
analytical study of the little states which the South African Boer has
always tended to deposit in varied yet kindred forms.
In the South African Republic, or Transvaal, the Boer has shaped a
social organism singularly strong, and at the same time plastic; the
external governing power being responsive to the will of the electorate.
Of the latter history of this state it must suffice to note a fact,
perhaps not unknown to any student of modern affairs, that in the
'seventies of the nineteenth century an attempt was made to wrest their
country from this people and to annex it to the British Empire. All
the world knows how at Paardekraal, on the 13th of December, 1880, the
little nation gathered itself together, each man, taking a stone in his
hand, placed it upon a heap beside those of his fellows, swearing as he
set it there that he would never lay down his arms till the Republic
was freed--a heap which has been carefully preserved as a national
monument. How at Ingogo, Laing's Nek, and Amajuba they fought, all the
world knows also. How England, dominated at that moment by that wiser
and more far-seeing Jekyll, who in the past has never failed to exist
somewhere within her bosom, ready for action when not overborne by his
fellow, the purblind and all-grasping Hyde, restored to the Republic
the recognition of its independence; thereby saving England from the
indelible disgrace of a persistent attempt to crush a great and free
little people, and from the permanent loss of South Africa, which,
had she persisted in her course, would long ere this have yielded
her no foothold in the southern seas, this also all the world knows.
How, gold being found in vast quantities in the Republic, the eyes
of all men of greed and wealth-lust turned towards this little land
from all parts; how the Chartered Company incorporated by the Hyde of
England while the Jekyll slept, having become needy and greedy, and
finding the land given it not filling its pockets as it desired, could
wait no longer, and sent in an armed force to take possession of the
goldfields; how the Republicans started to their feet to drive out the
invaders; and how at Doorn Kop, on the 3rd of January, 1896, was fought
the most memorable battle of modern times; for here, for the first time
in history, the military force of the international capitalist and
speculator, armed, hired, and equipped by him, without even the decent
covering of a national cloak to hide from the world the ugly outline
of its greedy form, met the simple citizens of a state, farmers and
peasants and townsmen, who leaped up from their New Year's feast, and
thrusting a slice of bread or New Year's cake into their pockets, and
a hunk of meat into their saddle-bags, mounted and were off to meet
the foe; met it and defeated it--so opening the long campaign of the
twentieth century which began between two little African kopjes and
which will end on the earth's mightiest battlefields--this, too, all
the world knows.[70]
[70] The yet later story of how another attempt was made
by the same hands in new and subtler form, beguiling by
misrepresentation a great people into lending them its
national mantle to cover the grotesque misshapenness of
their nakedness, in order the more easily to grasp the
gold and land, and with it the independence of this little
nation--this, and much that followed, is known in rough
outline to all. But for the present we have gone far enough
to be able roughly to estimate what the position is of the
African Boer and of his nineteenth century descendant in
South Africa, at the present day.
The descendants of the original white inhabitants of the land,
entering it a century before we English folks arrived, have, as we
have seen, spread themselves out over the whole country, and now form
the substratum of the white African Nation. In the Cape Colony,
which is still politically connected with the Island of Britain, they
number at least three out of five of the white inhabitants of the
country. In their lovely old homes in the Western Province, buried
away among oaks, and surrounded by vineyards and fruit gardens laid
out by their ancestors two centuries ago, the farming descendants of
the Dutch-Huguenot live with simple plentifulness amid their supremely
beautiful surroundings. In the remote Midlands and Northern and Eastern
frontier districts of the Cape Colony they still live often, as we
have described, in their simple homes, mighty men of the gun, and
rulers over flocks and herds. While in our Colonial towns and villages
the descendants of these farming folks are found, whom education
has transformed, often in one generation, from the Taal-speaking
Boer to the foremost rank of the nineteenth-century civilization and
intellectual culture; they are, as we have seen, often among our most
able lawyers, our best judges, our most skilful magistrates and civil
servants; while the lists of our university examinations are filled
with the names of both men and women of Boer descent.
Such is the Boer and such are his descendants in the Cape Colony to-day.
In the two Republics which he has founded he will also be found in
both the types, the old and the new; now as the old fore-trekker, with
the faiths and virtues and the vices of the seventeenth century strong
in him; then as the cultured professional man and the child of the
nineteenth century, with all its additions and omissions.
In the Colony of Natal, the northern part is still mainly populated
by Boers, the descendants of those men who there founded their early
Republic of Natal, and remained when the rest of their fellows trekked
across the Drakensberg into the Transvaal.
Taking South Africa thus as a whole, the descendants of the
Dutch-Huguenots outnumber the white men of all other races put
together, and immensely those of purely British descent. But everywhere
the process of intermarriage has been so vast and rapid during the
last thirty years that it is no more possible to draw a quite sharp
dividing line between the two races. There are probably to-day no large
South African families, Dutch or English, which have not during the
last thirty years intermarried. And in another generation the word
Dutchman and Englishman will have lost all meaning and be heard no
more; we shall then be only the blended South African Nation.