Native Suffrage
Practically it is only at the Cape that the experiment of native suffrage has been fairly tried. In Jamaica it failed for various reasons, and in Natal it did not work when first tried, and at present has little more than a theoretical existence. In the eastern part of Cape Colony, which contains the chief native population—including the Kaffraria of earlier days and the Transkei region—a member of the Legislative Council is apportioned to mixed constituencies containing an average respectively of 227,000 colored people and 18,000 whites; and a member of the House of Assembly is similarly given to every 56,000 natives and 4,500 whites.[[4]] There are, as yet, not very many constituencies where this colored vote is an important consideration. The chief exceptions are to be found amongst the Malays in and around Cape Town, the Hottentots of the Kat River Settlement, and the Kaffirs at King Williamstown, Beaufort and Alice. But the number of voters is growing, and in the eastern part of the Colony their influence appears to be very good. The educated Kaffir is very unlike the educated Hindoo, who is apt to become a sort of skeptic in patriotism as well as in creed. He is intensely conservative in a natural fondness for land and aversion to change. He is also loyal in the extreme to the British institutions from which his opportunities and position are derived; and in this respect has set an example of gratitude worthy the appreciation of some more civilized peoples. Practically, he is an Imperialist, and one student of the subject has recently expressed a belief that the wiping out of the native vote in Cape Colony would mean the loss of eight or ten seats to the Progressive party in the Assembly. Most instructive of all, and even more striking than the fact of their being adherents of Mr. Rhodes' advanced British policy, has been the support given by educated natives to measures presented to the Legislature for the prohibition of the sale of liquor to colored people—proposals defeated from time to time largely by the Afrikander vote. This is, indeed, a fitting statement to conclude a brief sketch of native history and development.
[[4]] Tables of Director of Census. Cape Town. 1891.
CHAPTER IX.
Character of the South African Boer.
A Peculiar Type
The Dutchmen of South Africa present in character and type one of the most peculiar racial results of all history. They came originally of a people who had proved its love of liberty and its faith in religion on many a well-fought field and in the pages of noble national annals. Yet they did not carry their qualities with them to the new land in any sufficient measure to overcome surrounding influences of a pernicious nature. They were raised from the lowest class in the home community and migrated practically for the wages offered them by the Dutch East India Company. In this respect the origin of the Colony was greatly different from that of New England, to which men of high character and earnest thought had migrated in order to obtain religious freedom; of Virginia, where men of the best English families and culture came in that adventurous spirit which has made the British Empire or the United States a present possibility; of French Canada, where Jesuits roamed the vast forests in a spirit of intense missionary zeal and where the scions of noble French families hunted in the wilderness of the West, or fought the Iroquois on the banks of the St. Lawrence; of English Canada, to which the United Empire Loyalists came from motives of loyalty to King and country.
Their Religious Life
As these Dutch settlers drifted into the Colony, over a period of a hundred years, they left every source of knowledge, refinement and high principle behind them. It is true they had their Bible. Upon its interpretation depended greatly their future development of character amid surroundings of absolute isolation, and it has been a permanent misfortune that they chose the natural view of narrow and ignorant men, and made their religious life one of practical devotion to the Old Testament dispensation in a most crude and sometimes cruel application. Around them on all sides were the moral laxities of savage life, the dangerous powers of slavery, the looseness incident to any small population of whites in the midst of great numbers of ignorant and superstitious natives. Their Government was intolerant in the extreme, they had no books or newspapers, they saw no intelligent visitors, and the naturally somewhat sombre character of the Dutchman developed under these conditions into a unique mixture of religious zeal, intolerant ignorance and qualified immorality. To this character was added the quality of undoubted bravery and into the general melting pot was thrown the further attributes, as time went on, of intense dislike and distrust of the Englishman and of absolute confidence and belief in themselves.