The Black Man's Place in South Africa

by active 1922-1937 Peter Nielsen

The instinct of direction, the "bump of locality" as it is generally called, varies with the Natives as it does among the whites, and is no keener in the individual Native than in the individual white man. All the hunters and travellers I have met have confirmed the opinion I have myself formed from personal experience that by training his ordinary powers of observation and thereby developing

his sense of locality and direction the average European is able, after a comparatively short time, to find his way in difficult country as well as the Natives, while some European hunters who have dispensed with Native guides and trackers have acquired the art of tracking game so well that they surpass even the local Natives themselves. "Veld-craft" is simply a matter of training the ordinary faculties of observation and memory for particular purposes, and the Native shows no such superiority in this respect as would naturally be expected from him if he were indeed better provided with animal instincts than the more civilised white man.

The sexual instincts of the Natives seem in no wise different from those of other people. The African male, like the European male, is generally more amative than the female who is always more philoprogenitive than the man. But the notion is common that the Native male is more bestial when sexually excited than the white man in similar case, and this is taken to account for the fact that he is so often found guilty of crimes of violence against females of his own colour, and sometimes even against European women.

It must be borne in mind that before the white man came the Natives, like the peasants in many European countries not long ago, conducted their courtship and love-making with a show of violence which seemed to them right and proper. The idea, indeed, that any self-respecting Native girl could yield herself to a lover without, at least, a semblance of physical resistance, leading to her more or less forcible capture by the man, would have seemed, and still seems, distinctly improper to the majority of Native women in their raw state. But since the European code was set up Native women have not been slow in making use of its protection, and, as I have seen, have not infrequently abused that protection by alleging rape or assault where their own action in simulating flight and resistance served, as they well knew it would, to stimulate passion and pursuit.

In considering crimes of violence against white women it must also be remembered that the Native "house-boy" who works in constant and close physical contact with his European mistress and her daughters is exposed to sexual excitation which very few European youths are called upon to

withstand. But crimes of this kind are indeed common enough among the lower orders in Europe and America, and are particularly frequent among men who have to live for a long time in unnatural abstinence from natural intercourse with the opposite sex, and who then find themselves in new surroundings giving opportunities for the gratification of their natural desires, but without having at the same time the restraining influences of their home life to help them to overcome the temptations to which they are exposed. The seaports of Europe and America, and the Great War furnish too many sad examples of sexual ferocity by white men to allow us to think that they are in this respect inherently superior to the men of other races.

The maternal instinct is manifested in the same manner and degree in the women of both people. I have often asked Native women whether it would be possible for any mother among them to distinguish her own new-born baby from a supposed "changeling" of the same sex and of the same general appearance, and the answer has always been negative. The Native and the white woman

alike would continue to cherish the substituted child exactly as they would have cherished the issue of their own bodies. The desire to bear children is the same in all normally constituted women irrespective of colour or race, and there is no sign of any special instinct for identification in the Native woman, such as the sense of smell, which is found in all the higher animals.

There are some students who think that most of the emotions of man are but the survivals of instinctive habit. Be this as it may, the sexual attraction which is commonly called love certainly seems to be essentially instinctive whereas friendship and parental and filial devotion, when continued throughout life, seem to be emotions that depend largely upon association and conscious intelligence. Every natural mother will sacrifice herself for her offspring while it is young but the tender feeling which continues in her breast towards the child after it has grown up is sustained by association, or, where the child is continually absent, by conscious intelligence in the form of considerations of conventional approbation which in time merge into a habit or a sense of duty

which is hardly recognised as such. Many white people think that although the average Native mother is capable of the greatest devotion for her young children she is incapable of the love which a white mother feels for her children even after they have ceased to depend upon her care. This, I think, is wrong. I have seen many instances of elderly Native women who have cherished their grown up children to the last with every sign of motherly affection.