When the Native Affairs Commission met the local Chiefs and headmen at Vryheid in January, 1907, the first speaker said: "I would ask the Commission this: Of whom are they making the inquiry as to what the Zulu people as a whole feel; who is that spokesman? Where is he? Where is he who is the eyes and ears of the Zulu nation, the guardian of the people?" Another Chief said: "Why is it the Governor puts such questions, as the Commission has itself put, to mere blades of grass? Where is our guardian? Where is that guardian that should have been given to us by the Governor?... The Government does not rule us with its right, but with its left, hand.... When a State is conquered, there always remains, according to our ideas, some representative or another who carries on the government of the conquered people.... The King will continue to be at a loss as to exactly what we feel, because His Majesty has failed to appoint somebody in a way that we are accustomed to to represent our interests."
Others said: "The whole Zulu people are unanimous as to the need of some person to voice their feelings." "Formerly Cetshwayo used to conduct negotiations, etc., with Sir Theophilus Shepstone. Who was in his (Cetshwayo's) place now?... Dinuzulu was their great induna, and nothing had occurred between the Natives and him which should cause them to pass by him and affiliate themselves to the Government." "They were all in a state of dispersion; sheep without a shepherd."
Although, for years, many Chiefs were opposed to being "governed" by a Paramount Chief, such as Cetshwayo was (after his restoration), it is remarkable how widespread this desire latterly became, particularly in 1905 when the poll tax was imposed. That such aspiration assumed exaggerated proportions during a time of rebellion is not to be surprised at. The universal use by insurgents of the "Usutu" war-cry, of the Usutu badge (tshokobezi), and of Dinuzulu's name, only shows the need they felt for a head. As this need existed then, is it not possible that the Rebellion was brought about largely through the need not having been seen and satisfied in one way or another?
And this need still exists and will continue to do so until adequate steps have been taken to supply it. How often has it not happened in the world's affairs that large and liberal action towards a people, so far from making foes, has transformed them into loyal and permanent allies. Let us, therefore, not blind ourselves too much to the fact that our Native races, although they may have fought us in the past, stand in as great, if not greater, need of similar consideration, though on humbler, simpler lines, than any other corporate people.
Stress has been laid on the foregoing point because the Commission omitted to face and deal with it with the directness obviously desired by the Natives. And yet that a general and permanent protector of their interests should be appointed, because, no doubt, of Ministers for Native Affairs being movable officers, was the most important of their requests.[362] It may be said to have come, although often unassociated with Dinuzulu's name, from no less than 95 per cent. of the people. The great body of Native opinion was emphatically in favour of the existing tribal system being maintained, and steps being taken to remove as far as possible the numerous abuses that had crept into it.
The position of the Native races is worthy of attention from many points of view. The dying out of many of their habits and customs, interesting and picturesque to us, but the very life-blood of the people themselves, is inevitable. With such disappearance, the social system itself has begun to decay. Many persons, indeed, have for long observed these disintegrating tendencies and proposed various religious, political, social or economic makeshifts. That is to say, that these tribes, hastening on as they are doing to the collapse of their tribal organizations, have nothing else to stem the universal undermining that is going on, always with acceleration, than the creeds, moral code, habits, customs, social and political systems of Western Civilization, that is, the equipment of a people differing essentially,—physically, morally, and intellectually. It seems to occur to no one that a State policy which resolutely and deliberately aims at maintaining the status quo ante in a sane and judicious manner, instead of assuming its downfall as inevitable, and forthwith setting about in a thousand ways to make it even more ruinously rapid and catastrophic than it would be without these reckless methods, is worthy of serious and sober consideration. Misreading the religious, political and other aspirations of a few half-educated Natives, many of the dominant European race fondly believe it is along the same road that the great inarticulate majority desire to travel. No one, of course, is infallible, ourselves among the number, but a personal experience of over forty years in the country, together with an intimate knowledge of the people, does tend to convince us that such is not the general desire,—not at present, whatever may be the case in the future,—and has only become that of the half-educated because, the various European administrations being what they have been and are, it seems to them so inevitable that nothing remains but to adopt European civilization in its entirety, and that as speedily as possible.
The doing of justice to the Natives, in the sense of eventually conferring practically every privilege which Europeans enjoy, is to blind oneself to the fact that the two races are congenitally separate. Ideal justice can be said to be possible only when meted out within the limits of a country in which the people are all of one race. Within such environment, privileges are and should be capable of extension to all. But when there are two or more separate races in a country, that is not justice which extends privileges peculiar to the dominant race to the radically-differing subject race or races. It is simply a belief, resting on no proper foundation, that justice is being done. The result of following it is gross injustice to the masses, and, later on, to the dominant race itself. The situation is manifestly governed by the idea of nationality and consanguinity. Thus, the highest justice becomes not the concession of rights and privileges of the dominant class, but a plain and constant recognition of the fact of nationality, and keeping the sense of justice well in hand, instead of allowing it to wander away to the clouds.
The spectacle of so many Natives in South Africa pressing on as they are doing to obtain higher rights and privileges than they already possess, and of forming a general Congress to give force to their demands and supposed necessities, is due to nothing else than the failure of the State to recognize the aborigines as a distinct nationality, and as, therefore, worthy of being specifically provided for in the Constitution to enable them to be managed on lines different from those of the other and widely-differing race. The misdirected energy of these 'enlightened' Natives, in the event of such provision being made, would exert itself within its proper sphere, not in agitating eternally against the Government for superior rights, but by promoting the positive welfare of the tribes or races to which they belong.
All this, we believe, was the underlying meaning of the Rebellion, and the situation will not be cured by granting the franchise, or initiating elaborate systems of land occupation as exist in the Cape Province. Fundamental experimenting of this kind may, for a season, appear to satisfy, but the day is coming when the Natives, in spite of all our education and evangelization, our concessions of the franchise and other so-called privileges, will remember that they, for the most part, are members of the Bantu family, in spite of the fact that some have already been persuaded to think, and speak, and act like Europeans,—at least, that is what is naïvely supposed by their teachers, as well as by themselves, to be the case.