religion is a form of Christian Protestant Calvinism, and differs in
no way from that still professed by the majority of Scotchmen, from
the Aberdeen grocer to the Edinburgh professor. Actually, it differs
very materially from that held by the large bulk of any truly modern
population.
It is often said of the lives of men congregated in vast cities, under
more or less completely artificial conditions, that they suffer from
these or those disadvantages--that the de-oxygenated air of cities
retards muscular development, that it renders persons continually
exposed to it anæmic; that the continual noise, vibration, and lack
of direct sunlight have an injurious effect upon the nervous system
and that a debilitated physical condition is bound to arise. But the
most serious loss entailed by life in vast cities under artificial
conditions, whether in the modern or the ancient world, is seldom
directly referred to.
The story of the small modern child, born and brought up in a modern
town, where her father, an electrical engineer, had installed all the
lights in the street and houses, and who, when at four years old was
taken to the country for the first time and allowed to see the stars,
said: "Did my father set them up too?" may or may not be true; but it
illustrates with force the terrible vacuum in knowledge and experience
of the most profound aspects of existence which a life walled in amid
artificial conditions tends to produce. That which the Buddha left
his kingly palace and sat beneath his Boh-tree to seek; that which
Zoroaster found in his solitary sojourn on the mountain top, and
Mohamed in his secret cave, which the Hebrew leader discovered in the
deserts of Sinai, and the teacher of Galilee in the wilderness and
on the mountain tops; that which, having perceived, they strove to
give voice to in the world's bibles, and which has become symbolized
in the world's temples, from the rock-hewn cave temples of India to
the Holy of Holies of the Jew; from the Greeks' Parthenon on the
hill-top bathed in light and air, to the Gothic cathedral with its
forest of shafts--that of which all the religions and all the dogmas
are but the tentative attempts of the struggling human spirit to give
voice to--this reality is not easily perceived as present and always
over-arching when the individual is swathed in by conditions of life,
the result of man's small labours, and seemingly having no root beyond
his own will; and when the tumultuous sounds and minute details forced
on it at every moment almost blind and deafen the individual to the
consciousness of anything beyond the fragmentary and present.
This is the serious danger and almost certain loss to which the spirit
of man exposes itself, when he severs himself from all contact with the
living and self-expanding forms of nature beyond himself, and surrounds
himself purely by those which have a relation to himself, and have
been modified by his action. It is an inverted view of the universe,
with accompanying narrowness and blindness, which, far more than any
danger of physical asphyxiation and nervous muscular deterioration,
constitutes the evil attendant on the ordinary life of men in great
cities, or wherever immersed in purely artificial conditions.
Undoubtedly there are lofty and powerful spirits who have reached
a deep and calm clear-sightedness which no aspect in the world
immediately about them can obscure, to whom the city and the petty
sights and sounds of our little human creation are seen abidingly to be
as much the outcome and mere passing development of the powers beyond
and behind them as the silent plain and the mountain top--
"And what if trade sow cities,
Like shells along the shore;
And thatch with towns the prairies wide
With railways ironed o'er?
They are but sailing foam-bells
Along thought's causal stream,
And take their shape and sun-colour
From that which sends the dream."
No doubt the Jew of Amsterdam in his small room grinding his lenses,
living on milk-soup and a few raisins, found his piercing mental
vision no more shut in by the city-roof above him than had he slept
with Jacob's desert-stone for a pillow; and no doubt there are as rare
souls, immersed externally in the very noisiest civilization about us,
who yet see serenely over and above it. But, with the mass, this is not
so; we cannot see past the little material conditions that press on us.
When one bends over an ant-heap on a vast plain, that ant-heap with
its little millions of existences toiling there are to the one bending
over it but an infinitesimal part of the vast landscape, where a
hundred other ant-heaps, broken and new, lie around, and over which
the sun shines and about which the mighty mountains rise; but to the
ant, down in the ant-heap, it is the universe; he does not even know
that his ant-heap was heaped out of the red sand and will return to it
to-morrow; he knows nothing of the fallen ant-heaps or of the great
human eyes looking down at him; were it possible for him to climb to
the top of his ant-heap and raise himself up on his tiny legs, and once
to look round, he might know something of what the ant-heap was.
Most of us in our human ant-heaps are unable to lift ourselves out
of them; we mistake the handful of dust we have accumulated round
us, and which we call our cities and civilization, for the universe;
and the noise we make in gathering it we think is the sound of
eternity. Were it not for two things which we cannot obliterate in our
civilization--the wail of the newborn child, and the long straight,
quiet figure, knowing nothing and seeing nothing, which the hearse
carries away--it might well be that we should sink into a state of
ignorance and superstition so profound that we should believe, not
merely every day but in our sanest moments, that the will of man was
the ruling power of life, his work the end, and we ourselves the
universe, and beyond us, nothing!
From this form of ignorance and superstition our primitive Boer is
saved, assuredly not because of any superior wisdom and insight
inherent in him, but by the conditions of his life. For the average
human creature reads life as it is continually presented to him. The
Boer has not willed to go into the wilderness and the desert to seek
for wisdom with the teacher of Galilee or the sage of India; but
for the two hundred years of his South African wandering that which
prophet, seer, and poet have in all ages turned to for wisdom has
been laid open as a book before him, whether he willed it or not; so
that he too, however slow or dull his individual intelligence, has
been compelled by the daily conditions of his life, with more or less
clearness, to decipher it. Dark and blinded beyond the average of human
souls must have been the old fore-trekker, who, as at sundown his wagon
crept for the first time into some vast plain where no white man's
foot had ever trod, and as the blue shades of evening fell across the
countless herds of antelope, and the far-off flat-topped mountains
stood sharp against the sky, could cry "I, _I_ am the centre of this
life! The earth is mine, and the fulness thereof!" And the solitary
African youth who has been out in the veld looking for his father's
sheep all day, over kopjes and through dried-up watercourses, and who
walks home in the starlight, and hears the jackals call, and pauses,
listening silently to hear if it be not the young lions crying for
their food, has been exposed to educative influences totally distinct
from those which he would have been subjected to had he spent the day
in a factory amid pulleys and wheels and a crowd of labourers, and
had walked home at night through a gas-lit crowded street, past bars,
music-halls, and policemen, to his garret. The last music-hall air,
the picture of light streaming through the public-house doors, the
whirr of the machinery, and a thousand minute complex sense-impressions
springing immediately from the action of man, the one, of necessity,
carries home with him. The other has none of these complex man-related
sense-impressions; he loses much which the other wins, but he also has
something of his own. Whether he will or no, however dull his ear and
dim his eye and torpid his intellect, he carries home with him pictures
of the colossal things which he has seen, things which the son of Jesse
beheld when in his youth he tended his father's flocks at night, to
guard them from the wolf and the bear, and which, when King of Israel,
he reproduced in that chant which has gone down the ages: "When I
behold the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars
which Thou hast ordained--what is man that Thou art mindful of him!"
The African woman on her solitary farm may have no inherent power for
grasping large wholes, or seeing behind small externals to the moving
cause beyond; yet when she sits all the morning sewing in her still
front-room, while the children play out in the sunshine by the kraal
wall and the flies buzz round, and she sees wherever she raises her
head, through the open door, twenty miles of unbroken silent veld with
the line of the blue mountains meeting the sky, she is exposed to eight
hours of an educative influence entirely distinct from that she would
have undergone had she sat in a tenement-room in a city court, and
heard her neighbours tramp to and fro on the stairs, and the omnibuses
crash in the street, and seen only from her window, when she looked
out, the red-brick wall opposite. No man, be he hunter, traveller, or
trader, or who or what he may, who has ever been exposed to both orders
of influences, will say that their educative effect is the same, or
that a man can remain long exposed to either set of influences, the
artificial life of cities or the solitude of the desert, without being
profoundly modified by it, above all, as to his view of existence as a
whole, which is religion.
The Boer, however blind by nature he may individually be, has always
open before him the book from which the bibles were transcribed--and it
has been impossible for him to fail wholly to decipher something from
it. Therefore, even his dogmatic theology (and it is wonderful how very
little real dogmatic theology the true primitive up-country Boer has!)
lives, animated by a great, direct perception of certain facts in life.
That which the Essenes sought in their rocky caves, which the Buddhist
thinker to-day immures himself on his solitary mountain peak to find,
which the Christian monks built their monasteries and cloisters to
acquire; to supply men artificially with the means of partially
attaining to which dim-aisled churches and pillared temples have been
reared in the midst of dense populations; which the old Dissenting
divine was feeling after when he said: "Spend two hours a day alone
in your room with the window open if possible, in quiet and thought;
your day will be the stronger and the fuller for it"; and which the
Protestant hymn aims at when in its quaint doggerel it says--
"Night is the time to pray;
The Saviour oft withdrew
To desert mountains far away;
So will his followers do.
Steal from the world to haunts untrod,
To hold communion there with God."
--that which religious minds in all centuries and of all races have
sought after, has been strangely forced on the African Boer by his
silent solitary life amid vast man-unmodified aspects of nature. And
with all that he may lack in other directions of knowledge and wisdom,
of keenness and versatility, that which the conditions of his life had
to teach him, he has learnt. Therefore, though his dogmatic theology
is in no sense higher or different from that of others, his religion
oftentimes lives when theirs is dead.
We are aware, it may be said, that all this is purely a misconception;
that the man of unusual intellect seeks nature and solitude merely
that his own large mental powers may unfold themselves unhindered;
that what the saint, the philosopher, the poet, and the prophet find,
they take with them; that to the mere bucolic mind the midnight sky
studded with stars is but the covering of the plain where sheep feed;
and that the most infinite sky over him when he off-saddles alone at
midday in a vast plain is but that to which he looks up in order to
find the time. But this is not so. The great analytical reasoner may
find, labouring in his laboratory, the great thinker in his study,
watching the processes of his own mind, may discover, that which the
vast man-untouched processes of nature testify of; it is exactly on
the simple purely receptive mind that the silence and solitude of vast
unmodified natural surroundings have the most educative effect.
Driving on a hot summer's day in a cart across a great African plain,
with the light pouring down on the brak bushes and karroo, till it
seemed to shimmer out of them, the Boer who drove us was, as usual,
silent. He was a man six feet in height, large-boned and powerful, with
a still blue eye, an iron will, and indomitable persistency. Living in
a remote part of the country, he seldom went to church more than once
in the year, and could with great difficulty read a chapter in the
Bible. During the years we had known him we had never heard him refer
to anything more profound than his sheep and cattle, and the habits of
tiger-leopards, upon which he was an authority. After driving about two
hours, the horses' feet sinking into the sand and coming out again with
a sucking sound, but no movement breaking the hot stillness, he looked
round at us, with that peculiar shy glance which marks men who live
much alone, and do not often try mentally to approach their fellow-men,
and said slowly in the Taal: "There is something I have long wanted to
ask you. You are learned. When you are alone in the veld like this,
and the sun shines so on the bushes, does it ever seem to you that
something speaks? It is not anything you hear with the ear, but it
is as though you grew so small, so _small_, and the other so great.
Then the little things at the house seem all nothing. Do you hear it,
too--you who are so learned?"
We are aware of the guffaw of laughter which would greet such a
statement from souls on the stock exchange, in drinking-bars and
fashionable clubs, and perhaps the national assemblies where the
representatives of civilized nations meet. This man, it would be said,
had lived so much alone with nature that he had become a fool. If he
had been fifteen years in the share market or the diplomatic service,
and had lunched at his club and spent his evening at the theatre or the
café chantant, he would never have felt himself or his affairs small,
nor would he have perceived anything greater than himself. It will be
said it was all ignorance and superstition.
We reply: "This may be so; but if it is, then burn your world's
bibles, and destroy your world's temples, for that which the world's
bibles were written to express and its temples built to symbolize is
an 'ignorance and superstition.' Yet, before we accept your verdict
finally, answer us these two things: Where were you and I eighty
years ago? Where shall we be eighty years hence, when this throbbing
hand that writes to-night is a handful of dust, and your mouth that
smiles is quiet beneath six feet of earth? Answer these questions
without 'ignorance and superstition,' and we, too, will allow that the
man--who, in the presence of the vast life of nature which existed for
ages before he was and will continue for millions after he has ceased
to see, which waxes and wanes without regard of him or his ends--is
a fool, when he feels himself less than a fine grain of sand in the
mighty circle of that life in which we live and move and have our being
and are continually sustained."
The day may come when, with changing conditions of life, the Boer will
no more live in the presence of these large realities, and then his
religion will be dead; whatever external form it may take.
It may be, that then he will have much of the learning of the schools,
and his own material life will have become infinitely complex, and his
knowledge how to govern the powers of nature for the gratification of
his own instincts almost unlimited; he may have luxuries, comforts,
amusements he knows not now--but it may not be so well with him.
It may be, the day will come when he shall rear for himself vast
cities, and walk, with the kings that have been, upon their walls,
crying, "Behold this is Babylon, my great city, which _I_ have
built"--and know not that the sands of the desert shall cover it, and
the little shrew-mouse build her nest there.
And, if that day come, when the desert shall hold no more for him any
burning bush, and no spot on earth be longer sacred to him; when, with
increased external knowledge and material wealth, the little _I_ grows
always greater and greater for him, and the universe beyond less and
less, then he will no longer fight so bravely on his kopjes or live so
peacefully on his plains or fall asleep so quietly when the time comes
to lie beneath the sand and bushes--and it will not be so well with him.
When the day comes, when he exchanges the voice of the desert for
the ignorance and superstition of the city, then, however vast his
expansion in certain directions, the secret fountain of strength of
this strange little people will have dried up, and they will be even as
others.
* * * * *
Finally, it has been said of the African Boer that he does not
regard the African native as his brother, nor treat him with that
consideration with which man should treat his brother man.
The consciousness of human solidarity, with its resulting sense of
social obligation, has in all ages developed itself in proportion
to the nearness of man to man. Initiated in the relation of mother
to child, where the union is visible, physical and as complete as
is compatible with distinct existence, it has spread itself out
successively, as the sentient creature developed, through the relations
of family and the tribe to that of nation, and has extended, even
though in a partial and undeveloped condition, to the limits of race;
but here, almost always, in the average human creature as up to the
present time evolved, the growth has stopped. Even the most ordinary
man or woman, in the bulk of the societies existing on the earth
to-day, is conscious of a certain union with, and more or less strong
social obligation towards, the members of his own family; most men
are conscious of some sense of solidarity with, and of some social
obligation towards, the members of their own national organization; and
probably few are wholly unconscious of a certain dim sense of identity
with, and a vague (though it may be very vague) sense of obligation
towards, men of their own colour and racial development. But only
the few, and they the very few, most fully evolved and exceptionally
endowed humans have been in the past or are even at the present day
capable of carrying the sense of solidarity and social obligation
across the limit of race. Nor, when we consider how intermittent and
often feebly active is the social instinct even within the domain
of the family, the nation, and the race, is it to be wondered at
that its action should cease almost entirely when the vast chasm of
racial distinction is reached. While humanity as a whole is still
in so primitive a condition that even the bonds of family kinship,
the close interactions of a common nationality with common language,
common tradition, and common institutions, the similitude which binds
nations of a common race, are yet continually inoperative in insuring
any approach to truly socialized action; when nations as closely knit
by ties of physical resemblance, common racial habits of thought and
ideals, as are all the European nations, are yet continually animated
by the bitterest antagonism; while Frenchman hates Englishman and
Englishman German and German Italian, it is assuredly in no way to be
wondered at, that, when humans are brought into contact with those as
widely dissevered from themselves, not merely in colour and external
configuration, but in the much more important matters of anatomical
structure and the racial ideals and habits of life, the results of
countless ages of growth, as are Mongolian and Aryan, European and
African, that social instinct should become in the main entirely
inoperative.
Ignorant persons may suppose, when they hear to-day of Americans who
belong to what is probably, on the whole, the most enlightened and
humane state on the globe, first mutilating and partially dismembering
the Negro, and then applying the fire gradually to parts of his body
that he may roast the more slowly, that the men performing such deed
must of necessity be cut off from the rest of their race by a fiendish
ferocity peculiar to themselves and an anti-social structure of mind.
Such ignorant persons also undoubtedly picture to themselves the owners
of the English slave-ships (who have perhaps inflicted a larger amount
of suffering on the human race than any other body of men of equal
number in the history of the race) as persons wholly devoid of human
sympathies, who could not be trusted to deal justly or generously
with their own wives or children, and possessed of no sense of social
obligation. But we, who have obtained a sorrowful knowledge through
personal experience of racial problems, we know that this is not so.
We know well that a man may bristle with all the ordinary domestic and
private virtues, may be a loyal husband, a devoted son, a thoughtful
father, a citizen who abides within the law and would give his life
for his nation, and may even be a man who would not easily inflict an
uncalled-for wrong or wanton cruelty on any man of his own race and
colour, though divided from him by national and lingual differences;
and yet, when the limit of racial continuity is reached in this same
man, there may be a sudden, complete and abysmal hiatus in the action
of the moral sense and the socialized instincts. (Strangely enough, in
our own personal experience, several cases of the most painful cruelty
and injustice, on the part of white men towards black, have been cases
in which the white men concerned were exceptionally good-hearted,
generous and open-handed men. In one instance of particular cruelty,
where two white men were concerned, upon seeing our manifest discomfort
at their action, they were sincerely distressed. "If I had any idea you
would take on like that about a miserable nigger, I would never have
touched the wretched beggar!" remarked one. Persons ignorant of the
racial problem may regard it as improbable, if not impossible, that men
who could perform acts of ruffianly brutality towards an African should
yet be so sensitive as to be deeply concerned that they had momentarily
distressed a looker-on, whom they hardly knew and had no personal
friendship for, but who was of their own race. Yet, persons who have
practically no knowledge of inter-racial relations know that not merely
is this psychologic attitude possible, but that it is a matter of
universal occurrence.)
Social instinct has never in the past, and does not to-day, except in
a few and exceptional instances, spontaneously tend to cross the limits
of race.
The sooner this truth is recognized as axiomatic by all who attempt
to deal with problems of race, the greater will be the possibility of
dealing with them in a spirit of wisdom.
To blind our eyes to this fact, and then attempt to comprehend or deal
rationally with race-problems, is to act as would a schoolboy who sets
himself to solve an arithmetical puzzle in which he had failed to set
down the leading term. The sooner it is recognized as axiomatic that
the distinctions of race are not imaginary and artificial, but real and
operative; that they form a barrier so potent that the social instincts
and the consciousness of moral obligation continually fail to surmount
them; that the men or the nations which may safely be trusted to act
with justice and humanity within the limits of their own race are yet,
in the majority of cases, wholly incapable of so acting beyond those
limits; that only in the case of exceptional individuals gifted with
those rare powers of sympathetic insight which enable them, beneath
the multitudinous and real differences, mental and physical, which
divide wholly distinct races, to see clearly those far more important
elements of a common humanity which underlie and unite them, is the
instinctive and unconscious extension of social feeling beyond the
limits of race possible; that, for all others, wholly just and humane
action beyond the limits of their own race, can be only attained as the
result of a stern, conscious, unending, mental discipline; and that
perhaps no individual man or woman is at the present day so highly
developed as regards social instinct as to be certain that they can
at all times depend on themselves to act with perfect equity where
inter-racial relations are concerned; that no individual is so highly
developed morally as to be able wholly to dispense with a most careful
intellectual self-examination when dealings with persons of alien race
and colour are entered on; and, finally, that the great moral and
intellectual expansion which humanity has during the ensuing centuries
to undergo, if harmonized human life on the globe is ever to be,
is in the direction of extending the social instincts beyond those
limits of the family, the nation, and the race, to the humanity beyond
those limits:--the sooner we recognize as axiomatic these truths, the
quicker will be our progress towards the comprehension and satisfactory
solution of racial problems; and, failing to recognize these truths, it
is perhaps wholly useless for anyone to attempt to deal with the moral
and social aspects of inter-racial questions.
With perfect uniformity throughout the whole history of the human race
in the past, we find strong anti-sociality appearing at the point where
the light Aryan race comes into contact with darker races; and it
appears to make little difference which nations are concerned.
We Anglo-Saxons have the unhappy priority of having caused to the
natives of Africa, in our functions as slave-traders, slave-owners,
and explorers, probably more than fifty times as much suffering as
any other European nation. It appears, indeed, to have been our
unhappy prerogative to have been born to be the perpetual scourge
and torture of this vast, wonderful, attractive continent and its
interesting children. Probably at least fifty Africans have perished
under the lash, have borne the manacles, or been shot by the guns of
Anglo-Saxons, for every one that has been lashed, manacled, or shot by
a Frenchman, German, Spaniard, or European of any other variety; but
this has arisen, not at all because other nations were more socially
inclined towards the African, but because the love of material wealth
being dominant in us and trade our speciality, the African, whom all
white nations have regarded as mainly a means of producing or procuring
wealth, has naturally fallen most into our hands. Where Spaniard
has dealt with Indian, German, Frenchman or Dutchman with African
or Asiatic, exactly the same lack of lofty social feeling, and the
same mental attitude regarding them merely as means for production of
increased benefits for themselves, and not as individuals who are ends
within themselves, has prevailed.
Irrespective of nationality or time, the line at which light race meets
dark is the line at which human sociality is found at the lowest ebb;
and, wherever that line comes into existence, there are found the
darkest shadows which we humans have cast by our injustice and egoism
across life on earth.
* * * * *
If then, when the statement is made that the South African Boer has not
treated the South African native as it is desirable man should treat
man, it be meant to imply that in his treatment of the dark races his
conduct has been at one with that of all other European races, and
that he has not entered on that loftier and more socialized course of
action toward subject and dark races, to which it is our hope that
the humanity of the future will attain, then the statement is wholly
and unmitigatedly true. But if, on the other hand, it be intended by
the assertion to imply that the South African Boer, in his treatment
of the dark races with whom he has been thrown into contact, has been
less governed by just and humane instincts than men of other races
under like conditions, that the English slave-trader or speculator, the
Portuguese adventurer, the Spanish conqueror, the Jamaica planter have
treated the African native better, then the statement is wholly and
unmitigatedly false.
As the student of racial problems has continually occasion to repeat,
there has been no wide difference between the attitude of different
white races when brought into contact with dark, whether in Asia,
Africa, or America; but on the whole the relation of the African Boer
with the African native, sorrowful as are all inter-racial relations,
has yet probably tended to be rather slightly more and not less pacific
than those of other races. This results in no way from the higher
humanitarian standpoint of the Boer, but from his circumstances.
Firstly, from the fact that his numbers have always been small and
insignificant as compared with those of the Bantus, the African
people with which he has mainly had to deal, and that the Bantus,
being one of the most virile and powerful of all dark races, it has
not been possible for him to dominate them as he might have done a
feebler people. (Were the natives of India of the same independent
and resolute spirit as the Bantus of South Africa, England could never
have subjected and held them down, as she has done at the point of the
bayonet, for sixty years.)
Secondly, the African Boers are a peculiarly pacific and even-tempered
people, not quickly roused to anger or any other emotion, though when
roused yet difficult to appease; and, as acts of violence towards
subject people are most often the results of sudden outburst of
passion, the native has probably fared somewhat better at their hands
than in those of a more quick-blooded race.
The strange, gentle, slow and somewhat dreamy element, which forms so
important a charm in the character of the Boer, is by no means peculiar
to the Dutch South African. It is a quality which is found almost
quite as markedly in the grandsons of the British settlers of 1820 and
other South African born men of English descent, and is especially
marked in many of the young English farmers in the Eastern and Frontier
districts, who form the flower of our English population, and who are
often South Africans of the third generation. It is by this peculiar
mental attitude more even than by their muscular build and prominent
bony structure, that one tells almost invariably and without fail
the South African born man of whatever descent from the foreigners
and newcomers who fill our seaports and mining centres. It has in it
something slightly reminiscent of the Italian _dolce far niente_, and
partly finds expression in the Dutch motto of the Free State: "_Wacht
een bietje: alles zal recht kom_" (Wait a little: all will come
right); but it differs wholly from the Italian quality, in that this
gentleness and slowness covers almost invariably a power of stern,
persistent, concentrated emotion which we have not found equally common
in the Italian. It takes on the average five times as long to rouse
the African-born man into action and powerful emotion as the average
foreigner of English or any other nationality; and it takes ten times
as much to pacify him again!
Speaking once to a noted American traveller and military man, who had
journeyed all over the world and noted keenly, we asked him, after
spending two years in South Africa, what had most struck him in the
country. He replied: "The strange gentleness of the African men. I
hardly knew whether to be most surprised or touched by it when I first
came. I have seen nothing like it in the world."
When we ourselves returned to South Africa after ten years' absence
in Europe, and were therefore able to view our birth-fellows almost
impartially, the true born South African man, whether Dutch or English,
reminded us of nothing so much as those huge shaggy watch-dogs, which
lie before their masters' houses placid and kindly, whom you may
stumble over and kick, almost with impunity; but when once you have
gone too far and he rises and shakes himself, you had best flee.
There is little doubt that, in the great blended South African nation
that is coming to its birth, this mental attitude will be a leading
characteristic; exactly as quickness and alertness is a distinguishing
mark of the Americans of the Northern and Western States. It appears
probable that exactly as we shall be marked by our large, powerful
bony structure and heavy muscular strength, we shall be marked by a
certain gentle passivity, covering immense emotional intensity and
dogged persistency; that the great men we shall produce will not be so
often keen financiers and speculators as artists and thinkers; that
our national existence will culminate, not in producing versatility
and skill, but persistency and depth, in our most typical individuals.
We shall probably always be a people more easily guided through our
affections and sympathies than almost any other, and more impossible to
subdue by force.
Whether the cause lie mainly in the nature of the Boer or the Bantu,
this is certain, that the African native has not tended to melt away
with anything of the rapidity with which the Indian was exterminated
by the English American in the north, and by the Spaniard in the south
of the American continent; nor in the two hundred years the Dutch have
been in South Africa is any incident so painful recorded as that which
is universally accepted, and has not, we believe, been authentically
denied, with regard to the treatment of the natives of India, when men
who, however brutally, had been fighting in defence of their native
land, were, before being blown from the gun's mouth, compelled to lick
up the blood of the persons they had killed, in order that the fear
of eternal damnation might be added to the other horrors of death. No
analogous incident, sinking civilized man so far below the level of the
wild beast and the primitive savage, has we believe ever been recorded
of the African Boer, even when his women and children have been killed
and mutilated by scores.
The same equality in the treatment of the dark races, whichever may be
the white race concerned, is illustrated when we consider the condition
of the African native in the different States into which South Africa
is divided.
In the Cape Colony, where the majority of the white inhabitants are
Dutch, though at present a British Colony, the position of the native
is more favourable than in most other states. Theoretically the
aboriginal native has in the Cape Colony almost the same rights as a
white man; he is allowed to vote at elections, and theoretically he
is allowed to sit on juries; though practically were he to attempt to
substantiate his right to try cases in which white and black men were
concerned by sitting on a jury he would probably be lynched; and in no
case has a native ever been returned for Parliament. Yet his position,
in spite of past laws and recently introduced laws--that he may not
walk on the pavement, etc.--is far more satisfactory than in any other
state.
In Natal, another British Colony, where the majority of the white
inhabitants are English, the position of the aboriginal native is far
less satisfactory, and that of the Asiatic as intolerable as it well
can be. Large numbers of Indians from India have been deliberately
imported on the plantations; but they are both hated and feared, and
vigorous endeavours are made to prevent their trading or acquiring
property in a land into which they have been deliberately introduced.
In the two Republics of the Free State and the Transvaal, the native
has not the same theoretic rights as in the Cape Colony. He has
neither the theoretic right to sit on juries or become a member of
Parliament, which in theory, though not in fact, he has in the Cape
Colony, nor is he recognized by the law as the equal of the white man.
Practically, in the Transvaal he increases and multiplies as fast as
elsewhere, if not faster, but his condition is in many ways far less
desirable than in the Cape Colony.
On the other hand, it is in the purely British possessions of Matabele
and Mashonaland that his condition is worst. Probably a larger number
of natives have been exterminated in these territories during the last
eight years than throughout the whole of the rest of South Africa by
Dutch and English together in any like period. And it is here that,
during the last few years, a determined and practical attempt has
been made to introduce a modified form of slavery under the name of
compulsory labour. The unhappy condition of the natives in these
territories rises, however, not at all from the fact that the men
dominating them are English, nor at all from the fact that the few
genuine white settlers in the country are of a lower stamp than those
elsewhere in South Africa, for this is emphatically not the case; but
to the form of government.
A body of speculators, mainly non-resident in the land, chartered for
commercial purposes and given despotic rule over a vast country and
its people, must always be the form of rule most productive of evil to
the subject people, whether the speculators so incorporated be French,
Jewish, English, Belgian, or German. The rule of such a speculative and
commercial body must necessarily be devoid of those personal sympathies
with the ruled which may soften even the government of an individual
tyrant; the conscience of such a body, if in its collective capacity it
may be said to have one, must of necessity exercise itself merely in a
conscientious striving to extract the largest possible percentage of
interest for the corporate shareholders from the land and labour of the
subject people. Under no possible circumstances can it exhibit those
virtues of consideration and self-abnegation for the subject peoples
which even a purely military conqueror might exhibit; and the rule
of such a body must always remain the most oppressive for the ruled
and the most demoralizing for the ruling people. To blame, primarily,
the men who are the mere instruments in carrying out such a form of
government would be unjust in the highest degree; and even these
speculators and adventurers who form the ruling chartered body can
only be blamed in a secondary degree, having but obeyed the instincts
of their kind, which compels individuals of a certain class to employ
their lives on earth in seeking to attain the largest amount of profit
with the smallest amount of outlay to themselves. The primary blame
must rest with that people which at the end of the nineteenth century
can allow so hoary an anachronism as a commercial chartered company to
usurp its place in the government of primitive peoples, and, from under
the ægis of its flag, to stretch forth in safety the long, grasping
fingers and the grotesque, greedy face of a Financial Chartered
Company, which should long since have been relegated to the past among
the extinct evils of the human race.
The native is best off and happiest in South Africa where, as amid
the mountains of Basutoland, he still maintains a semi-independence.
Both Dutchmen and Englishmen have carried on bloody wars against
this people, but neither the Boers nor the English have been able
wholly as yet to break up their tribal organization; and, guarded by
their mountains and their courage, they are slowly absorbing modern
civilization, in a manner more healthful than would be possible under
a sudden dislocation of their social and moral system. How long this
interesting phenomenon in national African development will be allowed
by circumstances to continue, it is difficult to say. Should gold or
precious stones be found in their territory, it would then be worth
while expending many millions in destroying the people and taking
complete possession of the land.
Thus, viewing the South African states as a whole, we find that
the question of the condition of the native does not depend on the
nationality of the governing power, or of the majority of the white
inhabitants, but on other and more intricate causes.
The question is frequently asked one when visiting in Europe: "Which
treats the African native the best, the Dutchman or the Englishman?"
It is a question which awakens a certain silent amusement. It is as
though, after spending ten years in Europe in the study of labour
problems, one had been asked on one's return to South Africa: "Who
treats his employees best, a Scotchman or an Englishman?" The true
answer is, that the relation of white man to black, as of employer to
employed, depends on far deeper and more complex conditions than any
racial variety of the white man or the employer will explain.
The individual equation always tells for much; but, roughly speaking
(one can but deal roughly with the delicate, complex, organic
intricacies of social life), there are in South Africa, as a whole,
four attitudes among white men as regards the native, which attitudes
have no causative relation with the matter of race.
Firstly:--There is the attitude of the farming population who, more
especially in frontier districts and to the north and east, are,
and have been for generations, thrown into close contact with the
aboriginal native in his most crude and primitive form, and who are
compelled by the conditions of their life to live in close relations
with him, and to act upon and to be re-acted on by him. These men and
women, whether Boer fore-trekkers and their descendants, or British
settlers of 1820 and their children and grand-children, have borne, and
to a certain extent still bear, the crude brunt of the first impact
between light and dark races, with their widely opposing ideals,
manners of life, and physical differences. These people and their
ancestors, whether Dutch-Huguenots who landed in Africa two hundred
years ago, or British settlers who came eighty years ago, have in
almost all cases passed through a life-and-death struggle with the
natives for the possession of the land, a struggle which, even in the
case of the British settlers who were backed by the soldiers and the
power of the British nation, was bitter enough; and this struggle has
left behind it in many cases that intense, curious bitterness which
is engendered by a race feud. Further, it is these folk who to-day are
brought directly face to face with the difficulties which must arise at
the point where the divergent ideals, social, ethical and racial of the
Aryan and the African, are first brought into contact.
Generally speaking (and allowing for the many exceptions which will
always occur where men are spoken of in large masses), there is,
in this class of the population, a strong tendency, not so much
towards scorn and indifference towards the native, as of keen, bitter
resentment, which can sometimes not be described otherwise than as
hatred: a feeling which is not generally found in any other large class
of the community. Nor is this in any way to be wondered at, when we
recall the century-long bitterness between folk so closely allied as
are Highland Scots and Lowland English, and the deathless feuds of the
border, and, above all, when we recall the fact that in modern times
a whole civilized nation has howled frantically for the blood of a
brother nation, to avenge defeat sustained by superior numbers of its
own men, fighting against inferior numbers, inferiorly placed, of the
fellow nation.
With the wild-beast cry of "Avenge Amajuba" still ringing in our ears,
it appears rather wonderful than otherwise that so much of pacific
human feeling should prevail between frontier farmer and fore-trekker
and the aboriginal races as still does exist.
There are few old frontier families in Dutch or English in the Cape
Colony, Transvaal, Free State, or Natal, who, if their past family
history were written, would not have to record hair-breadth escapes of
women and children who have fled for miles at night to avoid sudden
attacks, of farm-houses destroyed, of men coming home to find the women
and children killed and mutilated; this in addition to the record of
countless open battles in which their ancestors or they themselves took
part. And, on the native side, are even bitterer memories, and the
consciousness, in many cases, that the land on which the white man now
lives, and where he dominates, was once his father's. Alike among Dutch
and English, these memories have left their bitter mark. We have never
heard the natives so bitterly and fiercely denounced as by descendants
of English settlers whose ancestors had suffered racially from them.
"I almost hate you," has cried a friend belonging to one of the most
cultured and intelligent of our English Cape families, "when you talk
of raising and educating the natives. Hewers of wood and drawers of
water they shall be to us to the end, in spite of you." "I feel a
shudder of hatred go up my spine when I look at a Kaffir," said another
refined and, in many respects, noble frontier English woman to us once;
"I feel as if I could just put out my foot and crush them."
On the other hand, it would be very easy to exaggerate the universality
and intensity of this antipathy. We have known, not isolated instances,
but scores of cases, where both English and Dutch farmers have
entertained the kindliest feelings towards natives generally, and their
own servants in particular. We have known intimately an unlettered
Boer, so innately gifted with the power of ruling wisely that for
fifteen years, during which time he had always from fifteen to thirty
natives on his farm, he had never found it necessary to punish, or even
to threaten, one, and who was so beloved by his servants that, during
a long illness, when he was obliged to leave his farm for months in
the care of his Kaffir servants, he found on his return not one head
of stock missing, and the farm managed as though he had been there
himself. We have known both English and Dutch farmers who have kept
their servants twenty years, cared for them in old age, and aided them
in illness. We have known a Boer woman, herself an invalid, who would
go evening by evening to the hut of her sick servant to comfort and
help her; we have seen a whole Boer family gathered weeping round the
grave of a black Bantu; we have known both English and Dutch farmers
who have treated their native servants with far more consideration and
kindness than the average English landowner shows towards the labourers
on his estates; and, on the other hand, we have known both English and
Dutch farmers with whom no native would willingly remain in service;
who were as cordially hated as they hated; and whose whole relation
with the native was a series of petty oppressions, with occasional acts
of gross injustice or cruelty. But we believe that every one who has
attentively and impartially studied this matter on the spot will allow
that it is a question into which the Dutch or English extraction of the
farmer does not materially enter.
In the notorious Hart case of a few years back when, in the Cape
Colony, an English farmer of that name flogged a Bantu to death in cold
blood, they were English and not Dutch farmers who offered to subscribe
to pay the small fine inflicted on him, and who resented his being
punished at all. The most hopeful sign with regard to this feeling of
"race feud" is that, on the whole, it is a decaying feeling. To find it
in its full intensity among Dutch or English one must always go to the
older men and women of forty, fifty, seventy, or older, who in their
youth went through bitter experiences of conflict with the native, or
remember the experiences of their parents. It is far less intense among
the younger men and women of from twenty-five and under, now growing
up, and in another generation it will probably be all but extinct in
the form of a true race feud.
We would not, however, for a moment have it understood that an
anti-social attitude towards the native is peculiar to the African-born
farmer. So far is this from being the case, that, where men newly
arrived from Europe are thrown into the same close contact and come
into conflict with aboriginal natives, their attitude is generally
far less human, _and has in it an element of complete callousness and
cold contempt_, seldom or never found among men born in South Africa,
who have grown up among the native races. This may appear strange, but
an analogous phenomenon has often been noted in America, where it has
been observed that the slave-owners in the Southern States, in spite
of their dominance over the slaves and occasional acts of brutality
and oppression, really regarded them more as fellow humans and were
emotionally nearer to them, than were, in many cases, the Northerners
who came to live in the South, and who, on first meeting them, were
often filled with shrinking and disgust.
The African-born farmer, Dutch or English, who has grown up among the
natives, has been nursed by them in childhood, often speaks their
language, and knows something of their manners and ideas, may hate
them; but always, in his heart of hearts, he recognizes them as men;
and his very hatred and bitterness is a kind of tribute to the common
humanity that he feels binds them. Man only hates man.
To the newcomer from Europe, on the other hand, who becomes a farmer,
or is otherwise thrown into contact with the aboriginal native, he is
often an object, not merely of hatred, but of contempt and sport; there
is no mere assumption of cynicism when he speaks of the native merely
as an object of the chase; he has often no other view with regard to
him. We have heard a brilliant young English officer, who had only
been a few years in the country, but had been employed in what is
called a "Native War," dwell with manifest and almost boyish delight
on the pleasures of Bantu-hunting. He described the curious delight
you feel in finding the mark of a naked foot and tracing it down. "It
is," he said, "like the pleasure of the hunting field--with something
added!" We have also known a skilful English doctor, a man of singular
tenderness and generosity towards persons of his own nationality, who
had been only eight years in the country, but had served in two native
campaigns, remark that the only two purposes for which natives were
of any use were to serve as targets for rifle-shooting and as good
subjects for vivisection; while his inhumanity towards wounded and
other natives was a matter of common remark among the South African
burghers. And a fine young English trooper who had been two years in
the country, after hearing our view on the native question, remarked
thoughtfully: "Well, you know, all this is quite new to me; I have
never regarded the nigger as anything but something to shoot." To the
South African-born man this light-hearted, callous, sporting attitude
is quite foreign. He may take the life of a native, but he takes it
sternly, bitterly; it is something much more than hunting down the
indigenous black game of the country; he knows in his heart of hearts
that the thing he hunts is a _man_, and a strong man; and in his
hatred of him there is even an element of fear as well as revenge. This
attitude forms a far more promising field for the growth of possible
socialized feeling, than any attitude of callous contempt can even do.
Hate is nearer to love than scorn can ever be; and, paradoxical as it
may seem, we hold strongly that if, in South Africa to-day, sincere
personal affections and sympathies are to be found crossing the line of
race, they will be found most often between the African-born farming
population, Dutch and English, and their domestic servants. The warmest
expressions of affection towards individual natives which we have ever
heard have been expressed by English and Dutch farmers towards their
old servants.
Secondly:--There is the attitude of the townsman, Dutch,
South-African-English, or Newcomer, who most often never comes into
any contact with the aboriginal natives at all, and whose employees
or domestics are all more or less civilized natives or half-castes.
Here, as a rule, the element of intense racial bitterness is wholly
lacking. The townsman treats his civilized servant very much, in the
main, as men of all European nationalities treat their domestics and
dependants. As far as wages, food, and the amount of labour expected is
concerned, the civilized domestic servant and town labourer is rather
better off than in most European countries. On the other hand, there
is always a hard-and-fast line, dividing the white man from the dark,
which is never overstepped. The only real drawback to the condition
of the civilized native in towns lies in the fact that, the moment he
attempts to transcend the limits of domestic servitude, he is met by
a stern barrier, socially obstructing him; _a barrier raised quite
as much by the instinct of the descendant of the Anglo-Saxon as the
Dutch-Huguenot_. At present this matters little, as the attempt is
seldom made; but in fifty years' time this harmonizing of black and
white men in the higher walks of life will probably form a great part
of the South African problem. It is not, however, a problem which
the question of the descent of the white South African from Dutch
or English ancestors will in any way affect. Every one who has any
knowledge of South African life will allow that at the present day it
makes not the slightest difference in the condition of the civilized
servant in towns whether the doctor, lawyer, or merchant who employs
him be of Dutch or English descent. We have, indeed, sometimes been
inclined to fancy that there was a tendency, as between women, for a
slightly more friendly and harmonious condition to be common between
the mistress of Dutch descent in towns and her domestic, than between
the English woman and hers. The Dutch descended woman is often more
easy going and has less of that curious reserve which marks the
attitude of the Anglo-Saxon towards his dependants, and even his
equals, but there is probably no material difference along racial lines
in the treatment of civilized domestics and employees in town and their
employers.
Thirdly:--There is what, for want of a better name, we may define as
the financial and speculative attitude towards the native. This is
the attitude of the great labour employers. These in South Africa
are practically never individuals but great syndicates, companies,
and chartered bodies, the individual members of which are seldom or
never brought into any personal contact with the natives whose lives
they control. In the majority of cases they are non-resident in South
Africa, wholly or for the larger part of their lives. For them the
native is not a person hated or beloved, but a commercial asset. To
these persons the native question sums itself in two words "cheap
labour." Their view of the native question is as clear-cut and simple
as the outline of a gallows. There is no intricacy or sentiment about
it. The native is the machine through the action of which companies and
speculators have to extract the wealth of the South African continent;
and the more the machinery costs to keep at work, the smaller the
percentage of South African wealth which reaches the hands of the
speculator.
For them the native problem is in a nutshell: "In how far, and by what
means, can the rate of native wages be diminished, so raising profits?"
It must be remembered that the natives form almost the entire body of
the true wage-earning labouring class of South Africa. The European,
working in mines or elsewhere, becomes almost at once in the majority
of cases simply the overseer or guider of the native labourer; and
in mining and other fields of labour natives are rapidly fitting
themselves for even the more skilled forms of manual labour.
The question of the relation between the great foreign syndicates
and companies and the native races of this country is thus the great
labour-question of Europe and America, but complicated enormously by
two facts.
Firstly, by the fact that the mass of speculators, company-controllers,
and their shareholders are Jews, Englishmen, Americans, or
Continentals, wholly non-resident in South Africa, or residing here
merely while they make sufficient wealth to ensure their retirement
to a life of ease and luxury in Europe, or, in the case of ambitious
Englishmen, till they are enabled, by means of their wealth, to enter
the English Parliament or obtain titles. From this fact it follows
that a decrease in the wages of our native labouring-class and an
increase in dividends, while it makes larger the number of yachts on
the Mediterranean, the palaces of Jewish and other parvenus in London
and on the Continent, and while it increases the gains of the tables at
Monte Carlo and of the racing grounds of England, and replenishes the
purse of debilitated and degenerate English aristocrats, yet not only
adds _nothing_ to the material wealth of South Africa, but positively
diminishes those very small returns which, under existing legislation,
is all she receives from her mines. European skilled miners and
overseers, as a rule, take their extensive earnings back to Europe
with them; and, with the exception of what the Government railways may
earn, it is mainly through the wages of the native labourer, expended
in buying the necessaries of life, and to no inconsiderable extent in
supporting his schools and churches, that the legitimate commerce of
the country and its general population are benefited by its mineral
wealth. Thus, on this all-important point, our native problem, which
is also our labour problem, differs materially and most essentially
from the labour problem of Europe, in that it is not merely a question
of dividing the wealth of the country between one class or another (as
is generally the case in Europe and America), but of retaining the
products of the land in the land of all.
It has been said by a leading speculator and millionaire in South
Africa that, if the States of South Africa could be broken down and
crushed into one, a united and uniform labour system might then be
adopted, and the wages of natives brought down; and he has held up
as an ideal for imitation the condition in India where natives are
supposed to labour for twopence a day, living therefore so closely
upon the border of starvation that the slightest rise in the price of
foodstuffs renders them liable to widespread famine and destruction,
and therefore also eager to accept the smallest amount of remuneration
which will maintain life.
To this end the Speculator and Capitalist, among others, have sought to
enter political life in South Africa, and in order that, by the passing
of laws dispossessing the native by indirect means of his hold on the
land, and breaking up his tribal tenure, and by the making of direct
wars upon him, the native, at last being absolutely landless, may be
unable to resist any attempt to lower wages, and may then sink into the
purely proletariat condition of a working class always on the border of
starvation, and therefore always glad to sell his toil for the lowest
sum that will maintain life.
Were this plan entirely successful, South Africa as a whole would lose
all the native now gains, the increased profit going to enlarge the
wealth of the foreign Speculator and often aristocratic shareholder;
and South Africa would then be saddled with a proletariat class of the
very lowest type. For, the only hope of the African native's rising,
and becoming a valuable and intelligent labouring class, lies in his
receiving such remuneration for his labour as shall enable him to grasp
at least some of the subordinate advantages of civilization, along
with those of its evils which are necessarily forced on him. If the
South African native is not in the position to obtain primary education
and in some measure to grasp such advantages and privileges as there
are in our modern civilization, then, as his old tribal ideals and
institutions are destroyed, he must inevitably sink into a condition
lower and more terrible than that of the lowest proletariat in Europe;
and, as he forms (and must do for generations, in a land where white
men refuse to perform the bulk of physical labours) the major part of
the population, South Africa will permanently be weighted and degraded
by the degradation and degeneracy of the great bulk of the inhabitants.
To the Company Director, Capitalist, or Speculator who never visits
South Africa, or remains here only while financial reasons make it
desirable, it can matter nothing what becomes in the present or in
future generations, morally or intellectually, of the native. But to
those of us, to whom South Africa is a home, to whom not only the
present but the future of this land is our most intense human concern,
and who with our descendants have got to sail with the African native
permanently in the same ship across the sea of time, it matters
everything.
The second, and even more important point, which differentiates our
labour problem from that common in Europe, is that our labouring class
is divided sharply from the employing class by the line of colour. Even
in European countries, where employers and employed are of one race and
physically identical, divided merely as being for the moment the haves
and have-nots, the adjustment of the labour problem presents sufficient
difficulty. But in South Africa, where racial and physical differences
divide employer from employed, the difficulties are immeasurably
and almost inconceivably increased. Any attempt on the part of our
labouring class to better its position or resist oppressive exactions,
being undertaken mainly by men of one colour against men of another,
will always immediately awaken, over and above financial opposition,
racial prejudice; so that even those white men, whose economic
interests are identical with those of the black labourer, may be driven
by race antagonism to act with the exactors.
The complete failure to grasp this aspect of our South African problem
leads to much of the inability in other lands to comprehend the South
African situation as a whole.
Thus, it is often said, "Why should the speculator, monopolist, and
millionaire loom so large in South African life? Why should he be so
much more of a bugbear and threaten all free political and social
institutions in South Africa in so much greater a degree than in other
lands where he also exists?"
Our answer is, that, wherever in Europe or America the great
millionaire and monopolist, Jewish or Christian, is found, with the
pluto-aristocratic speculators and shareholders who draw their wealth
through him, there also is found a great equipoise to their powers of
exaction or aggression in the great more or less organized masses of
the working classes. The limits are very sharply set, beyond which
the greatest Jew or Christian speculators backed by the most powerful
princes or plutocracy cannot go. We have no such counterpoise in South
Africa. Owing to the difference of colour and race, our great labouring
class dare not organize itself and use its strength; and we dare not
organize and use it, for fear of awakening the baneful flames of
racial antagonism. South Africa is the heaven of the Speculator, the
Capitalist and Monopolist. Here, alone, the opposing forces which meet
him in every European and civilized country do not exist.
The labour of resisting his endeavours to gain possession of the whole
mineral and landed wealth of the country and its public works, and
with them the exclusive control of the political machinery, lies with
the necessarily small middle class section of the community, mainly
farmers and small landed proprietors with a handful of skilled workmen.
These have not only to act for themselves, but for the entire labouring
class, which, on account of its difference in race and colour from the
rest of the community, cannot act for itself.
Any one who has given thought to the study of modern social phenomena
will understand at once how enormously our labour and racial problem,
being interlaced in this way, complicates our whole social condition,
and how almost helpless it throws South Africa into the hands of the
Jew or Christian foreign speculator. Let us give a concrete example.
In a town called Kimberley there is the richest diamond mine in the
earth, once the property of South Africans and belonging to multitudes
of them, but now fallen into the hands of a powerful syndicate of Jews,
Englishmen, and others, who, with the exception of a couple of South
Africans, all reside wholly or mainly out of South Africa, and whose
power is so enormous that they are able, by a mere expression of their
will, to return eight or ten men to the Cape Parliament, irrespective
of the wishes of the community. The action of this powerful syndicate
has long formed a source of disease and corruption in South African
public and social life, and the question is often asked, why the
working men and other inhabitants of Kimberley and such places as
the company dominates submit to this dictation? It is not so, as is
sometimes supposed, because the skilled workmen and overseers in the
great company are inferior to their compatriots in Europe in their
love of freedom or independence; for they are, on the whole, picked
men, and many of them are strongly democratic and freedom-loving;
it is certainly not because the inhabitants of Kimberley are more
indifferent to their manhood, or more willing to deliver up their right
to exercise the franchise into the hands of a small knot of Jews and
Speculators than other men; but because the forces opposed to them are
so overpowering compared to their own that they feel crushed.
Were the thousands of working men labouring in the mines white and
not black, and could they freely combine with the skilled European
overseers and the townsmen, the monopoly of the power would be snapped
in twenty-four hours. They would refuse to go into compounds, they
would demand higher wages and the right to spend them where they
pleased, and to vote for their own representatives, and the power for
evil of the great company would be broken.
But the bulk of the workmen being black, and any attempt to organize or
combine them being at once met with the cry "Black-men combining," the
handful of skilled English workmen and townsmen are powerless.
Our situation is very grave, and differs radically for the worse from
that of all other lands where kindred problems have to be faced. We
have nothing to fall back upon but the fierce and indomitable love of
freedom in a certain section of our farming population.
If it should be possible for the international Speculator and
Capitalist to carry out his dream, to break down the autonomy of the
different African States, each one of which is a kind of redoubt
behind which our African freedom is ensconsed, and, crushing us into
one structureless whole, to introduce "a uniform native policy,"
dispossessing the natives wholly everywhere of their lands by means of
labour, taxes and other devices, and bringing them down to the lowest
wages on which life can be sustained; then, when we shall have inured
the Bantu to the evils of our civilization, its drinking bars and its
brothels, but have left him no means of attaining to the higher forms
of knowledge or the fields of skilled labour, then we shall be left
with a great, blind, stupefied Sampson in our midst who will assuredly
some day stretch out his mighty much-wronged arms, and bring down upon
our descendants the social structure which we are to-day with so much
labour attempting to rear. Our gold and diamond mines may by that time
be exhausted, and Jew and Speculator, and foreign Shareholder will long
have carried off their gains and be here no more to feel the shock.
Upon us whose portion of earth to inhabit this land is, and upon our
descendants, will fall the blow.
This question of the relation between the foreign Speculator,
Capitalist, and Shareholding class, and the black labouring class, is
the very core within the core, and the kernel within the kernel, of the
South African problem.
The old race-feud attitude of the farming population, whether Dutch or
English, toward the native, embittered by the memory and tradition of
old wars and early struggles, will tend to die out, and even now is
softened by personal relations; the attitude of the employer towards
his civilized native domestic has in it little that is detrimental to
either, and suggests in itself no great coming evil. But the financial
attitude is one which will increase in its importance and in the
virulence of its evil effects with every year that passes. The small
cloud upon the horizon, to-day no bigger than a man's hand, will in
forty years have overspread the whole of our African sky, unless some
great and at present unforeseen revolution should occur. It is upon
the skill with which white man and black man combine to avert the
threatened evil, that the fate of Africa in the middle of next century
will depend. It may be easy to break down and demoralize our great, and
at present noble, Bantu races; but it may be very hard ever to build
them up again.
For the moment the men holding the purely financial attitude towards
the native happen mainly to be English or Jewish foreigners; but there
is really nothing racial in this attitude. Were the Hollander or the
Italian head of a great gold-mining, railway-building, or diamond
syndicate, there is not the very slightest reason to suppose that he
would regard the native South African less purely as a "commercial
asset" than his brother, the English financier, does.
The more profoundly one studies the question of the relations of the
white man to the black in South Africa, the more clear it becomes that
the determining factor in that relation is something far other and
deeper than the mere fact that the white man belongs to this or that
European variety.
Fourthly, and finally:--There is the attitude of a body of persons,
small in number, of no invariable occupation, sex, nationality or
creed, but gathered from every part of the white community. So small in
number is this body of persons holding this attitude, that again and
again have men and women belonging to it felt inclined to draw aside,
and in bitterness of spirit to cry with the ancient Hebrew at the door
of his cave: "I, only I, am left." Yet this body has never been wholly
extinct in South Africa, and, we believe, never will be. As we hope
later to deal exhaustively with the aims and attitude of this section,
it is not now necessary to do more than passingly to glance at them.
This attitude cannot be better summed up than by saying that it is the
extreme antithesis to the financial attitude. The man compelled by his
mental organization to take this view is of necessity obliged to regard
the native not merely as a means to an end, but as an end in himself.
Consistently with his whole view of life, he cannot regard the native
merely as a "commercial asset"; he is compelled to apply to him the
categorical imperative: "Deal with thy fellow man as, wert thou in his
place, thou wouldst have him deal with thee." He does not write up as
the motto which is to govern all the relations of black men with white:
"Cheap labour," but rather: "Noblesse oblige." He is compelled always
to see before him the moral fact that, if the native be his equal in
mental power and moral vigour, his place is beside him; but, if the
African native be _not_ his equal in mental power and moral vigour,
then there rests upon him the mighty obligation of all strength towards
weakness, of all wisdom towards ignorance, of the God towards the man:
"Rank confers obligation."
To the man holding this view the African native always presents
himself as the little dark brother of the great family-human, who
stands looking wistfully through the open door into the great hall of
the nineteenth-century civilization in which we fair-skinned Aryans
disport ourselves; and we are compelled to go to the door and say:
"Come in, little brother, come in; there are many better things out
there in the open where you have been than we have here; yet, if you
must enter, give us your hand, and we will try to show you what in this
great carnival of ours is best, and what most to fear. Walk in, little
brother, this hall was built for the sons of the children of man."
It is manifest that men holding such a view must ever be in deadly
conflict with men holding the financial view. The future of South
Africa depends largely on the result of this struggle. If the financial
attitude predominate absolutely, and the native be dispossessed of his
land by wars and the skilfully devised legislation, which, breaking up
his tribal tenure everywhere, throws him and his lands entirely into
the hands of the financial speculator, and if low wages at the same
time deprive him of the means of education, he must become a helot,
having no stake in the general welfare of the land of his birth--always
its menace, and at length its downfall.
If the other attitude prevail to any large extent, and the men holding
it are strong enough to set their mark on legislation and institutions,
the native may morally and intellectually survive the shock (as he
certainly will physically) of sudden transplantation from his moral
and social atmosphere into ours. He may grasp what is great in our
civilization along with its evils and may yet become the most valuable
element and the ablest defender of a social organization in which he
has much at stake. But even were this not so, the stern demands of
human obligation towards human would yet compel an uncompromising
justice towards him.
It will be obvious, to any person skilled in the study of human nature,
that persons, compelled by their mental organization to assume this
attitude towards the African native races, are not of necessity of any
particular European race, sex, or social condition. In the past some
of the men who have the most courageously and persistently upheld this
attitude have been Englishmen. More notable than all was Sir George
Grey, most gifted and most farseeing of all the Colonial Governors
whom England has ever sent out, a man of whose type it would appear
a country can only produce once in a century. There has also been
Sir William Porter, a great Irishman, whose name still recalls noble
ideals and generous performance to South African hearts, and who
during his stay exemplified the fact that the greatest gift which the
old European lands can send the new is one of their great sons, a man
with a heart large enough to be able to wrap itself about the people
and institutions and things in a new world, and, through loving, to
comprehend them. Another man who in the past has been noted for this
attitude was Saul Solomon, a man of brilliant gifts, said to be of
Jewish extraction, who through a long life amid endless difficulties
fought an heroic battle and never fell from the side of justice and
generosity towards the African native, and who has left a permanent
mark on the legislation of South Africa.
On the other hand, were we called upon at the present day to mention
the names of two public men who might be counted always to make
their stand and raise their voice where any action of injustice or
repression towards the native was concerned, we should give the names
of two men of purely Boer extraction, with no drop of English blood
in their veins. If during the coming century South Africa is to be
preserved from that doom which we sometimes see hovering in the dim
future before her; if her native races are to be transformed from dumb
brooding enemies, borne within her bosom, to citizens who shall be the
joy and strength of her commonwealth, it will not be through the action
of Dutchmen or Englishmen alone; but of brave souls irrespective of all
descent--"God's-Dutchman" and "God's-Englishman"--hand in hand.
* * * * *
The Boer will pass away. In fifty years the plains of South Africa
will know him no more. A mist gathers in the eye and a thickness in
the throat when one realizes that the day will come when that figure
which made for us so much of the charm and beauty of our African land
will have passed away for ever! When no more will the great ox-wagon be
drawn out to crawl slowly along the boundless plains, and Oom Piet sit
on its front-box with his great felt-hat drawn low over his forehead,
watching with keen still eye the wide veld, while Tante Annie looks out
from behind him as they move forward on their long march in search of
the Promised Land.
The little brown house on the plain, where the stranger met so stately
and so kindly a welcome, and the young South African grew up between
his parents' knees, loving South African plains and kopjes dearer
than life--will have passed away for ever. It will have gone with the
springbok and the koodoo and the eland and the lion, with all that made
the charm and poetry of this South Africa of ours, that we have loved
so. The old krantzes will still look down from the flat mountain-tops,
and the blue sky stretch above all; but the Africa we have known will
have gone for ever. Men will not know, then, what it was we loved so.
The Boer will pass away! He will pass away, not supplanted by the
stranger and the alien, but by his own cultured, complex, many-sided,
twentieth-century descendants.
If the men of that generation, bearing his blood in their veins, love
freedom as he loved it and hold resolutely by the best attainable by
them as he held by it, then the future of the great South African
Nation, as far as its strain of Dutch blood is concerned, is assured.