John Chinaman on the Rand

by Anonymous

It has been said, of course, that the miners along the reef have always worked against the Chinese. It is not to be wondered at if they have. Nobody could reasonably blame them—except the Rand lords. But so far from this being true, the white miners have done their best to work with them. Even the chairman of the Chamber of Mines has confessed that the innumerable riots that have occurred down in the mines were not the result of the white men's machinations. The white man does his best, but under circumstances without parallel in the history of labour. He works always with the certain knowledge that at any moment he may be killed. To him the yellow terror is not a myth or the dream of fiction writers. He knows what it means. It is present with him every hour of his work. Down the mine in the stopes a white man has under him thirty or forty Chinese. If any grievance, real or imaginary, arose, the Chinese could turn round and take his life. He has no protection whatever. He has to stand by and listen as best he can to the insults heaped upon him by the children of the Celestial Empire; and insults heaped not only upon him but upon his womenfolk. He has to see that the work is done efficiently, or he is dismissed from his employment. But there is little wonder that his anger or fear gets the better of his discretion. It is bad enough that Chinamen are doing the work that should be done by white men, but it becomes even a greater scandal when the white men, who sacrificed so much blood and treasure for the Transvaal, should be insulted by these yellow slaves.

The low-class Chinaman is probably the most bestial and degrading brute on this earth. He is intelligent enough, but his mind is as vile and unwholesome as a sewer. The bestial insults which he heaps upon the white overseers, and, indeed, upon every white man that he comes across, three years ago would not have been tolerated in any quarter of the British Empire. It is tolerated to-day in the Transvaal by the sanction of German Jews and un-British Gentiles.

Lord Selborne, when the matter was brought to his notice, declared—"No wonder a white miner who has had such language said to him would fail to have roused within him feelings which would take a certain natural direction of satisfying themselves. But where has the Chinaman learnt this kind of language? he did not come here knowing it."

Lord Selborne's implication was, of course, that the Englishmen, in their conversation in the presence of Chinamen, were accustomed to use this bestial talk.

I don't pretend that the conversation of miners is always savoury. I am sure that the method of conversation in vogue in some of the Yorkshire and Lancashire factories would scandalize decent, quiet-living people, but such language on the part of the British workman is the result of his inability to express himself properly. What he says is said for emphasis. He does not, like a more educated man, add vigour to his conversation by making use of the endless variations of his mother tongue; he simply peppers his talk with epithets which in no way are used in their original meaning. If they were used in their original meaning, if the British workman really meant what he said, all the deadly sins in thought or in practice would be committed millions and millions of times a day. But the Chinaman is noted for his taste for all the most bestial vices which the imagination of man has ever conceived. What the miner may say in a coarse moment the Chinaman will commit without any hesitation.

Lord Selborne asked where the Chinamen learnt this kind of language, and added that they did not come to the Transvaal knowing it. If Lord Selborne visited some of the treaty ports in China he would soon become aware that the Chinaman has added to his taste for committing all the vile and bestial vices, a knowledge of how to express these vices in all the vile and bestial language of Europe. As most of the criminal classes are to be found within the fringe of European civilization, and as, moreover, the Chinese Government has drafted, with a certain grim humour, a large number of the criminal classes into the Transvaal, I think the question as to where the Chinaman learnt his bestial language is answered equally as well as the statement, that he did not come to the Transvaal knowing it, is contradicted.

This is the state of affairs in the mines themselves. But if these yellow slaves are intractable in the mines, they are even more intractable in the compounds.

What they want to do that they will do, and not all the prisons and ingeniously-compiled penal laws can prevent them. They soon realized that if they wished they could be masters of the Rand. They foresaw that the Rand lord would be chary of using force, would hesitate to put into execution his slave-owning ideals, for fear of public opinion at home; that is to say, to put them into full force.

But the Rand lords were not the type of men who would be chary of impressing upon the Chinamen in secret the full meaning of their position on the Rand.

As it is the case in the mines, so is it the case in the compounds.