An African Adventure

by Isaac Frederick Marcosson

We sat down in the crowded dining room of the House of Parliament where the Prime Minister had invited a group of Cabinet Ministers and leading business men of Capetown. Around us seethed a noisy swirl which reflected the turmoil of the South African political situation. Parliament had just convened after an historic election in which the Nationalists, the bitter antagonists of Botha and Smuts, had elected a majority of representatives for the first time. Smuts was hanging on to the Premiership by his teeth. A sharp division of vote, likely at any moment, would have overthrown the Government. It meant a régime hostile to Britain that carried with it secession and the remote possibility of civil war.

In that restaurant, as throughout the whole Union, Smuts was at that moment literally the observed of all observers. Far off in London the powers-that-be were praying that this blonde and bearded Boer could successfully man the imperial breach. Yet he sat there smiling and unafraid and the company that he had assembled discussed a variety of subjects that ranged from the fall in exchange to the possibilities of the wheat crop in America.

The luncheon was the first of various meetings with Smuts. Some were amid the tumult of debate or in the shadow of the legislative halls, others out in the country at Groote Schuur, the Prime Minister's residence, where we walked amid the gardens that Cecil Rhodes loved, or sat in the rooms where the Colossus "thought in terms of continents." It was a liberal education.

Before we can go into what Smuts said during these interviews it is important to know briefly the whole approach to the crowded hour that made the fullest test of his resource and statesmanship. Clearly to understand it you must first know something about the Boer and his long stubborn struggle for independence which ended, for a time at least, in the battle and blood of the Boer War.

Capetown, the melting pot, is merely a miniature of the larger boiling cauldron of race which is the Union of South Africa. In America we also have an astonishing mixture of bloods but with the exception of the Bolshevists and other radical uplifters, our population is loyally dedicated to the American flag and the institutions it represents. With us Latin, Slav, Celt, and Saxon have blended the strain that proved its mettle as "Americans All" under the Stars and Stripes in France. We have given succor and sanctuary to the oppressed of many lands and these foreign elements, in the main, have not only been grateful but have proved to be distinct assets in our national expansion. We are a merged people.

With South Africa the situation is somewhat different. The roots of civilization there were planted by the Dutch in the days of the Dutch East India Company when Holland was a world power. The Dutchman is a tenacious and stubborn person. Although the Huguenots emigrated to the Cape in considerable force in the seventeenth century and intermarried with the transplanted Hollanders, the Dutch strain, and with it the Dutch characteristics predominated. They have shaped South African history ever since. This is why the Boer is still referred to in popular parlance as "a Dutchman."

The Dutch have always been a proud and liberty-loving people, as the Duke of Alva and the Spaniard learned to their cost. This inherited desire for freedom has flamed in the hearts of the Boers. In the early African day they preferred to journey on to the wild and unknown places rather than sacrifice their independence. What is known as "The Great Trek" of the thirties, which opened up the Transvaal and subsequently the Orange Free State and Natal, was due entirely to unrest among the Cape Boers. There is something of the epic in the narrative of those doughty, psalm-singing trekkers who, like the Mormons in the American West, went forth in their canvas-covered wagons with a rifle in one hand and the Bible in the other. They fought the savage, endured untold hardships, and met fate with a grim smile on their lips. It took Britain nearly three costly years to subdue their descendants, an untrained army of farmers.

A revelation of the Boer character, therefore, is an index to the South African tangle. His enemies call the Boer "a combination of cunning and childishness." As a matter of fact the Boer is distinct among individualists. "Oom Paul" Kruger was a type. A fairly familiar story will concretely illustrate what lies within and behind the race. On one occasion his thumb was nearly severed in an accident. With his pocket-knife he cut off the finger, bound up the wound with a rag, and went about his business.

The old Boer—and the type survives—was a Puritan who loved his five-thousand-acre farm where he could neither see nor hear his neighbors, who read the Good Word three times a day, drank prodigious quantities of coffee, spoke "taal" the Dutch dialect, and reared a huge family. Botha, for example, was one of thirteen children, and his father lamented to his dying day that he had not done his full duty by his country!

Isolation was the Boer fetich. This instinct for aloofness,—principally racial,—animates the sincere wing of the Nationalist Party today. Men like Botha and Smuts and their followers adapted themselves to assimilation but there remained the "bitter-end" element that rebelled in arms against the constituted authority in 1914 and had to be put down with merciless hand. This element now seeks to achieve through more peaceful ends what it sought to do by force the moment Britain became involved in the Great War. The reason for the revolt of 1914, in a paragraph, was Britain's far-flung call to arms. The unreconstructed Boers refused to fight for the Power that humbled them in 1902. They seized the moment to make a try for what they called "emancipation."