The Black Man's Place in South Africa

by active 1922-1937 Peter Nielsen

MISCEGENATION.

If it is true that the human nature of the Bantu is no whit different from the human

nature of the Europeans then it is a fair question to ask why the two races should not be able to live together in liberty, equality and fraternity as people of one nation or body politic. It is because human nature is governed by laws which, unlike the laws of mathematics, cannot be laid down with certainty that we find ourselves unable to give a positive answer to this question. The human nature of the whites, like the human nature of all races that have been predominant before, is swayed by the feelings of pride and prejudice that arise through differences of complexion, physical appearance and bodily odour, as well as the difference in racial achievement, and these essentially human feelings, if they remain as strong as they now are in South Africa, will render impossible the fraternity that implies the liberty to intermarry, so that there arises for our consideration a second question, namely, whether without full fraternity and social equality the two races may yet live together in the land in political liberty and equality.

We observe from the earliest times a rhythmic play, as it were, of opposite forces

that tends, alternately, to build up and to break down and mingle human races, but of the laws that underlie and govern these forces we know little or nothing. On the one hand we see how man has always and everywhere shown what the advocates of so-called racial purity have called "a perverse predisposition to mismate" which has made it exceedingly difficult to classify existing human varieties. On the other hand we see throughout nature how a pronounced disparity between varieties of the same species engenders an aversion from one another of the different varieties which seems to arise, in men and animals alike, through the instinct of sexual jealousy which is probably bound up with the primary instinct of self-preservation. Those people who profess belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race naturally look upon the tendency towards race-blending as a perverse proclivity, while those who think that all men are potentially equal regard it as a wholesome instinct provided by nature to counteract the feebleness and infertility which cause the dying-out of the race that becomes too pure.

Racial antipathy seems to depend in the degree of its strength upon the degree of physical disparity between given races. In the so-called Latin races of to-day, prejudice against black people is certainly weaker than in the blond races of Northern Europe. Is this aversion a matter of absolute instinct or is it an acquired social characteristic and as such liable to change? I think the answer must be that this racial repugnance is not naturally inherent in children, nor in women towards the men of a different kind, nor in men towards the women of another race, but that it arises naturally and spontaneously and, in this sense, instinctively, through the feeling of jealousy which is caused, in both men and women, by fear of losing their natural mates to rivals of both sexes from another and disparate race.

White children who grow up together with Native children certainly have no instinctive feeling against their black playfellows; they have to be taught to look down upon and keep away from the companions of their childhood, a fact which no candid observer will deny. It is also a truism of history that the fair-skinned women of a conquered

country, as a rule, will yield themselves easily to the swarthy barbarians who have killed or overcome their husbands and brothers. The many women who in British seaports, and in the German towns that were recently occupied by French coloured troops, have lived and cohabited with African men have proved by so doing that they have had no instinctive racial sense of hostility against black men. It has been stated by independent and competent witnesses, who are corroborated by German newspapers of good standing, that the black troops have a very marked attraction for a large number of German women, and that the German men hate the black men because the German women do not.[22] The fact that white women in South Africa and in the Southern States of America never associate with black men does not, I think, prove that they are controlled by instinctive racial or sexual aversion but rather that women, as a whole, are, by reason of their physical inability to dispute with men the ultimate ratio of all order that lies in brute force, thoroughly amenable

to the rule of social conventions imposed upon them by their jealous masters. I say this because we see that the aversion that has been inculcated from without tends to disappear wherever the man-established conventions lapse or cease to govern either through the comparatively small numbers of black men being insufficient in certain localities to cause fear in the white men living there, as in some seaport towns, or through the temporary break-down of the customary standards of society brought about by war and revolution, as in those parts of Germany that were recently garrisoned by coloured soldiers.

Nature having cast upon the male the duty of winning and holding the females of his species it is easy to see why the racial feelings of jealousy and ill-will are more positive and more active in the man than in the woman, and this explains, as far as these things can be explained, why white men will allow themselves to cohabit freely with black women to whom they feel naturally attracted but will "see red" and commit murder as soon as they find a black man attempting to gain the favour of a woman

of their own colour. "Un adolescent aime toutes les femmes" say the French, and it is generally accepted that man is by nature more inclined to polygamy than woman is towards polyandry, still man and woman are both swayed and motived by the same elemental jealousy that is born of fear of losing something valued; the emotion which Descartes has so well defined as "une espèce de crainte qui se rapport au désir qu'on a de se conserver la possession de quelque bien."

It is, no doubt, true that the thinking white woman, no less than the thinking white man, is led to feel dismay and even resentment against the Natives by apprehension of the possibility of danger to white civilisation through fusion of white and black, but this is a feeling caused by intelligent appreciation rather than by instinctive apprehension, and as such liable to be dispelled by argument tending to show that no real danger threatens. During a recent agitation against miscegenation in Rhodesia a number of letters written by white women appeared in the press from which it was easy to gather that the chief concern of the writers was not the possible degradation of the

whites, though this was not overlooked, but rather the simple fact that some white men were cohabiting with black women to the prejudice of the matrimonial chances of eligible women of their own race.

But it is unwise to dogmatise in the realms of social and racial psychology; we have not yet discovered the means for analysing with precision the subtle elements of the human soul. I have used the word instinct here in the sense given to it by William James, who defines it as "the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance," but when we reflect upon the transitoriness of human instincts, as compared with those of animals, and recognise that the human instincts are, as James also says, implanted in us for the sake of giving rise to habits, and then to fade away, we see how difficult it is to draw a line between the instinctive and the acquired or habitual mood or feeling.

If we believe that racial antipathy is caused by the feeling of jealousy that arises instinctively, so to speak, from man's inner nature, then it is safe to say that it will

last as long as the substance from which it springs, and as long as the racial difference which provokes it remains, but this belief is not firmly established in the general mind. The whites, as a whole, feel far from sure about the permanence of their cherished pride and prejudice of race; they are, more or less consciously afraid that the antipathy upon which they rely may become weakened and eventually dissipated by close contact of the two races in places where economic pressure has reduced both to the same level of life. We shall do well to remember the words of Renan when we try to estimate the truth of this matter, "La verité consiste dans les nuances," for both estimates may be true; the racial instinct may have to yield here and there to the superior force of economic pressure, and may yet in the main prove powerful enough to prevent the contact that tends to render it of no effect.

The racial feeling which we are considering is undoubtedly much stronger at present in the whites than in the Bantu, but there is reason to believe that the awakening desire for racial self-assertion which we call pride of race will grow and increase in the Bantu

as it has done in the Negroes in the Southern States of America, and elsewhere. General education, so far from hindering the growth of nationalism and racialism seems in some sort to subserve and foster that growth; witness the strident self-assertion of the newly-constituted little nations in Europe, and the cult of "Nationalism" in South Africa to-day. It is natural for birds of feather to flock together and screech together, and in the same way throughout mankind particular groups of people tend naturally to keep together and to marry among themselves separately from the rest of the community by which they happen to be surrounded, and this ethnic instinct, if so it may be called, is seen to operate even where, as among the Italian immigrants in America, there is no great racial difference between them and the Native-born inhabitants, and, much more markedly, in the Southern States of America where, according to a recent observer, the present tendency is not towards but away from miscegenation, so that the ultimate blending of colour is not likely to take place there in the course of nature.[23]

The normal Native man does not hanker after white women, and the normal Native woman is not, as a rule, anxious to mate with a white man, but this normal disposition is apt to be disturbed by the familiarity which is bred by the close contact that occurs in towns and other centres. It is not, therefore, safe to deny the possibility that with advancing industrialism in congested areas there will be some white women ready to marry or cohabit with Native men who are either in positions of relative superiority or in possession of more money than their white fellow-workers or neighbours, making it possible for them to outbid these in the providing of comparative ease and luxury, which things have always appealed strongly to women of all races. Yet I think that those who prophesy the speedy merging of the two races in South Africa do not give sufficient weight to the fact of the collective consciousness of a racial entity which, being strongly established in the European section, is also being fostered and increased in the Natives by the civilisation which is now spreading among them, so that it seems reasonable to expect that the European

aversion from racial blending will be reciprocated from the Native side more and more as time goes on, and that this reciprocal feeling will go far towards keeping the two races biologically intact. I think, therefore, that despite the conditions that conduce to miscegenation, the factor of the growing and reciprocal desire in both races to remain ethnically separate will gain the day.

Many people think that the coloured people in South Africa, who are most numerous in the vicinity of Cape Town, but are also scattered all over the country, will form, as it were, a bridge between the two sections of the population for their eventual coalescence. But when this conclusion is closely examined it is seen to rest on debatable premises, for it is admitted that by far the greater part of the miscegenation that is now going on is between white men and coloured or black women and not between coloured or black men and white women, from which it follows, as has been pointed out by Boas,[24] that, as the numbers of children born does not depend upon the numbers of men but upon the numbers of women, the

result will be a bleaching of the black element, here and there, and not a darkening of the whites in South Africa.

Statistics have, indeed, been quoted which show that between the year 1904 and the year 1911 the coloured population increased in the Cape Province by fifteen per cent, while the total population increased by only six and a half per cent., but these figures do not show how much of the coloured increase is due to propagation among coloured people themselves and how much to unions between white men and coloured women. When it is noted that in the year 1911 the European increase over the year 1904 in the whole Union of South Africa was 14.28 per cent., and that of all non-European elements only 15.12 per cent., it will be seen that although the black increase is on a larger basis it hardly justifies alarm over an imagined flood of overwhelming coloured numbers.

If the coloured increase is due chiefly to propagation among the coloured people themselves then it forms a good argument against those who assert that the half-caste is relatively inclined to sterility, while if the

increase is found to be due to cohabitation of white men with coloured women then it is a fair illation that the coloured section is in process of absorption by the whites. This assumed process of absorption will, no doubt, entail the presence of a certain, even a large, number of coloured people for many generations to come, but this number will grow smaller, and not greater, as time goes on because there is no reason to doubt that the white women of South Africa, as a whole, will refrain in the future as they have refrained in the past from cohabiting with black men, so that the observed tendency towards the diffusion of the coloured element back into the parent streams will be allowed to continue.

But let us for a moment look calmly, and as far as possible without prejudice, at the people who in South Africa are said to furnish the awful example of the alleged evil of the crossing of white and black. The fact that the denunciation of these people is based on opposite and contradictory arguments shows that it is not the result of clear thinking. On the one side it is vehemently asserted that the coloured man is

a physiological misfit, a sort of hybrid unfit for the society of either white or black and an alleged relative sterility of his kind is advanced as proof of this assertion. On the other side it is said, with equal vehemence, that the coloured people are mongrels, unfit to mingle with the pure parental breeds, and that this is proved by their excessive fecundity. The coloured people are also accused of being inferior in physical constitution when compared with either of the parent races, and therefore undesirable.

My own observations, corroborated by the opinions of many other observers, leads me to believe that the fecundity of the coloured people is neither greater nor less than that of other people—white, black or yellow—whose birthrate is not artificially restricted, and that their general physical constitution, when not undermined by disease or stunted by underfeeding, is as strong as that of any other human variety. The great naturalist, Wallace, has insisted that some degree of difference favours fertility, but that a little more tends to infertility, and by applying this hypothesis to the facts as I have observed them I am led to believe that there is no biological

difference between the Bantu and the European of a degree sufficient to produce any difference, one way or the other, in the fertility of the offspring of the two races, but proper statistics, continued over several generations, will, of course, be required to prove or disprove this conclusion.

The gravest, and, as I think, the most unjust of the many charges brought against these people by an unthinking public, is that the half-caste, wherever he is found, partakes of all the vices but of none of the virtues of his parents. When we remember that in the towns of South Africa the coloured people of necessity form the class that in the nature of things is peculiarly exposed to the temptations of prostitution and crime, then it becomes a matter for wonder that these people are as good and as law-abiding as indeed they are. People who know South Africa will admit that the coloured girl is from childhood exposed to the temptation of loose-living far more than either the Native girl in the kraal or the European girl in her home, and that the coloured boys and youths, by reason of the lack of the right kind of home-influence, which is the result of the un

favourable position in life of the bulk of their parents, naturally gravitate towards the levels where it becomes difficult to avoid crime. But despite all these adverse conditions that press so heavily against them the coloured people of South Africa, taken as a whole, stand justified of the calumnies uttered against them. The coloured people as a whole are not behind the whites in anything except in the lack of opportunity for education and self-improvement, a lack caused not by themselves, but by their inimical surroundings.

That many of the coloured people are immoral and shiftless need not be denied; the same may be said about the "poor whites," who as a class perplex well-meaning legislators, but neither of these proved accusations give reason for thinking that either of these classes is inherently inferior to their more favourably-placed fellow-beings. We must always remember the tremendous handicap of being reared in the depressing surroundings of sloth and squalor. I have seen hundreds of poor whites—as white as any blond German could wish to be—who seemed utterly unfit for the complexities of

civilised life, but I have also seen many of the children of these people who, after being removed from their home surroundings, have risen to positions of usefulness and trust, in which they have earned reputations for integrity and capacity. The trenchant saying of a British working-man is in point, "Treat a man like a dog and he will behave like a dog," and the corollary is equally true, that if you treat a man as a man he will, as a rule, rise and quit himself like a man.

The familiar cry that once white blood is diluted with black it is "all up" with our civilisation is not convincing when we remember that the ground-work of this civilisation was built up by races that were not "pure white"; that the white civilisation during the dark ages sank to a very low level through no dilution of African blood, and that it was a mixed race, the Moors, who brought back into Europe the lost principles of Aristotelian science on which the crumbling structure of European culture was rebuilt. To believe that the people of Asia and of Africa may be capable of attaining to Western civilisation, but that the offspring produced by the crossing of these races with whites

will not have the necessary capacity therefor is to me impossible. So far from being deterrent to mental growth it would seem that an infusion of African blood in the European serves rather to increase mental capacity; at any rate, those who know South Africa well will not deny that an unmistakable tincture of African blood in a white family is often associated with marked intellectual ability. Against this concession it has indeed been alleged that, while it must be admitted that a small admixture of black blood in a white race enriches it, a small admixture of white blood in a black race degrades it, but this fanciful notion has not been supported by scientific data. The truth of the matter is that as the blacks are the underdogs, the half-breed becomes a racial and social bastard, as indeed he is openly named in South Africa, a man condemned before he is tried, handicapped from birth in a way that would drag down and keep under most of those who shout loudest about their racial superiority. It is his condition and not his nature that keeps the coloured man underneath.

To the man who in face of the facts of history and of to-day believes that all we

have of civilisation we owe to the Teutonic or to the Nordic type of man, and that nothing good can ever come out of coloured Nazareths, the possibility of the whites in South Africa becoming browned by the selective agency of tropical light or by an infusion of African blood, no doubt, seems an evil to be prevented at any cost, but those who, like myself, have seen coloured women working in their homes as thriftily and self-sacrificingly as the best of our own women, and coloured men labouring steadily against heavy odds to improve their condition, have become convinced that the coloured people of South Africa suffer under no inherent disabilities when compared with the whites, and for this reason we cannot join in the general wail over a predicted evil which we regard as exaggerated in itself and not, moreover, likely to happen. I would not, however, be taken to advocate the inter-breeding of white and black. Those who have witnessed the misery and suffering which the coloured people have to endure for being coloured will welcome any fair means of preventing miscegenation in South Africa. Proscriptive legislation has been advocated by both the

detractors and the defenders of the half-breed, as a means of preventing what both schools, for their different reasons, regard as wrong and undesirable, but I cannot agree that it can ever be right or expedient to penalise and make criminal a natural act which under existing conditions is in many places unavoidable.

There can be no doubt that the evil of miscegenation in South Africa has been greatly exaggerated, both in respect of its nature and its extent, but, nevertheless, so long as the racial prejudice of the white man remains as strong as it is to-day—and there is nothing to show that it is likely to decrease in the future—so long will it be the duty of all good citizens to discourage by persuasion and precept the production of children for whom the ruling race has no love and little pity. Even those among the whites who, in a spirit of good will and tolerance urge that the coloured people should receive preferential treatment because of the white blood which is in them, cannot escape having their point of view warped by their racial prepossession, for, surely, it is not because of a man's class or

colour that he is treated as a man to-day but because of his being a civilised member of a civilised community. Nevertheless, the day when civilisation shall be the sole qualification for full membership of the civilised community of South Africa is not yet.

I say, therefore, in answer to the question whether, without the full fraternity which seems impossible here, the white and the black races may not live together in South Africa in political liberty and equality, that the trend of events leads to the belief that the established pride of race of the whites, and the growing pride of race among the Natives will conduce to voluntary separation wherever this is possible, and that in this way the coming generations will contrive to live territorially separate under a common governance, founded upon political equality and liberty.