The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction

by John Buchan

The franchise for the new colonies is the constitutional problem which is of the most immediate importance. It will not be wise to delay the era of self-government long, for between the most elastic Crown colony and the narrowest free colony there is an inseparable gulf, and though it may be said justly that with an elective legislature the colonies have something very like freedom, the one thing needful will still be lacking. It is not enough to put the oars into their hands; we must cut the painter before they are truly free. There is one postulate in all franchise discussions which is likely to be vigorously attacked. The franchise must be based in the first instance upon the principle of giving adequate representation to all districts and every interest; but, once this has been recognised, the second principle appears—of providing for the supremacy of the British population. That saying of Dogberry’s, “An two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind,” is a primary law not only of equitation but of politics in the treatment of a conquered country. For conquered it is, and there is little use disguising it: we have not been fighting for the love of it or for fine sentiment, but to conquer the land and give our people the mastery. The last word in all matters must rest with us—that is, with the people of British blood and British sympathies. Both men must be on the horse, or, apart from parable, each race must have fair and ample representation. To deny this would be to sin against sound policy. But not to take measures to see that our own race has the casting vote is to be guilty of the commonest folly. “An two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind.”

Whoever denies this principle may spare himself the trouble of reading further, for it is proposed to treat it as axiomatic. The first type of franchise need not be permanent: a day may come when it will be needless to consider the distinction of Dutch and British. But as it was right and politic on the conclusion of war to disarm our opponents, so it is right and politic in the first franchise to put no weapon of offence into their hands. The primary adjustment of the franchise and the primary distribution of seats must be made with this clear end in view—to secure a working majority for the British people. It is obvious that the words “British population” are vague, and include many odd forms of nationality, but the thing itself is simple, the class whose interests and sentiment are on the British side, who seek progress on British lines. It does not follow that the majority of the Dutch will go into opposition, but it is ordinary prudence to keep on the safe side. Such a policy involves no distrust of the Dutch population, but is the common duty of those who for a certain period must, as conquerors, take the initiative in administration, and, as bearing the responsibility, preserve an adequate means of control.

The terms of the franchise are a more difficult matter. In Cape Colony citizenship and a low property qualification are the chief conditions. In Southern Rhodesia, whose franchise law is an especially clear and sensible code, an oath of loyalty is accepted in lieu of technical citizenship, and an easy educational test is demanded—the ability of a voter to sign his name and write his address and occupation. In Natal there is a sharp distinction drawn between Europeans and all others. To them the only tests are citizenship, and the ownership or occupation of property of a certain value, or the receipt of a certain amount of income. The native is practically disqualified by a law denying the franchise to any person subject to special courts or special laws, and though a means of escape is provided, the conditions are too complex even for more intelligent minds than the native. It is an ingenious but not wholly satisfactory device. Asiatics are excluded by the law which denies votes to natives, or descendants in the male line of natives, of any country which does not enjoy the blessings of representative government; and though in their case also there is a way of escape, it is almost equally difficult. The root distinction between types of franchise lies in the method employed to exclude an undesirable class, whether a direct one, by disqualifying in so many words, or an indirect, by setting one standard of qualification for all, to which, as a matter of fact, the undesirable class cannot attain. The balance of argument is, on the whole, on the side of the second method, which has been adopted in Cape Colony and Rhodesia, though, perhaps, with too low a standard. But the first method, if followed more frankly than in Natal, has something to be said for it. There is no reason why the better class of Indians should not vote, if their race is considered fit to mix on equal terms with English society elsewhere; but to my mind there is a very good reason why the native should not vote—at least, not for the present. The easy way of securing this result is the old method of the Transvaal Grondwet, which said shortly, “There shall be no equality between black and white.” It is the way, too, which, under the Conditions of Surrender, would have to be adopted in any trial franchise put into force before self-government. I am not sure whether it is not the most philosophic as well as the simplest way, for it denies the native the franchise not for a lack of property or educational qualification, but for radical mental dissimilarity. In any case it is a matter which must be left for the people of the colony to settle for themselves. But for all others, while the property basis of the franchise should be low, there are grounds for thinking that a reasonably high educational test should be added. The lower type of European and the back-veld Dutchman have in their present state no equitable right to the decision, which the franchise gives, on matters which they are unable to come within a measurable distance of understanding. The fact that the fool may have a vote at home is no reason for exalting him to the same level in a country which is not handicapped by a constitutional history. Some form of British citizenship, obtainable by a short and simple method, must also be demanded if the land is to remain a British colony.

Once the franchise has been determined there remains the division of constituencies. The axiom has already been explained which appears to govern this question. But in the absence of anything approaching correct census returns it is difficult to suggest, even tentatively, a distribution of seats. The fairest way to secure the representation of all interests seems to be to divide constituencies into three types. First, there are the large towns, which for the present, to take the Transvaal, may be limited to Johannesburg and Pretoria. These would be given members according to their population. Second, come groups of country burghs, such groups as the Northern Burghs, with Nylstroom, Warm Baths, Piet Potgieter’s Rust, and Pietersburg; and the Eastern Burghs, with Middelburg and Belfast, Lydenburg and Barberton. Here, too, members would be allotted according to population, though the number of voters required to form a constituency should be fewer. Lastly, there would be the country districts, substantially the present fourteen magisterial divisions, and there the numbers of a constituency would be still smaller. That it is fair to differentiate in favour of the counties against the burghs, and in favour of the burghs against the large towns, will appear on a brief consideration. The interests of the different constituencies in a city, at least in a new city, are practically identical. In the country burghs the interests vary, but still within narrow limits. In the counties, on the other hand, there is often a very wide variation. The dwellers in Barberton have wholly different problems and grievances from the dwellers in Bloemhof or Standerton. But while this principle is right, the former axiom must be kept in mind, that, provided fair representation is granted to all, the constituencies must be so arranged as to ensure British predominance. Certain counties will, I believe, be on the whole British in time—Bloemhof, Marico, Zoutpansberg, possibly Waterberg, possibly Lydenburg, undoubtedly Barberton. The burghs, too, will yield on the whole a British voting population. In all likelihood, therefore, our purpose will be secured by the division of constituencies which I have suggested, even allowing for a differentiation in favour of the rural districts. Figures are still impossible in the absence of a census, but on the roughest estimate there may be in the Transvaal at the present moment a Boer population of 100,000, with a voting proportion of 30,000, and a British population of perhaps 150,000, with a voting proportion of 50,000 or upwards. In the Orange River Colony before the war the voters’ roll showed just over 17,000, and if we put the vote on an enlarged franchise at 20,000, we may be near the mark. The position of the latter colony will not change greatly in the next decade, but the Transvaal may easily in a few years show a million inhabitants and more. With a population thus constantly increasing and liable to great local fluctuations, redistribution may soon become a vexed question and a source of political chicanery. It would be well if the endless friction which attends redistribution courts and commissions could be saved by some automatic system under which sudden local inequalities could be speedily and finally adjusted.

The greatest constitutional calamity which could befall South Africa would be for the Dutch in the new colonies to go as a race into opposition. I have said that they are not born parliamentarians, and that, to begin with at least, they will be a little strange to the forms and methods of English representative government. But they are a strong and serious people, and if they desire, as a race, to form an opposition, they will learn the tactics of a parliament as readily as their kinsmen have done in the Cape. It will be difficult to form out of so practical and stable a folk such an opposition as the Nationalist party in Ireland; but if they have real grievances to fight for, it is conceivable that the Dutch people might be organised into as solid a voting machine as the Irish peasantry under the control of the Land League and the Church. Attempts will doubtless be made to bring this about. Certain institutions will spare no pains to secure so promising a recruit in their policy of emphasising every feature in the South African situation which tends to disunion. On the other hand, certain of the natural leaders of the Dutch people, who have acquired the spurious race-hatred which intriguers and adventurers have built up during the past twenty years, in a desperately discreet and orthodox manner may work to the same end. But fortunately there are signs that the party division, when it comes, will be lateral and not vertical. It is a phenomenon often observed in a long war, that a day of apathy sets in, differences arise in a party, and one section begins to dislike the other far more than it hates the common enemy. This phenomenon, which in war spells disaster, is salutary enough in civil politics. In both races there are signs of divisions, and on each side there is a party unconsciously drawing nearer to their old opponents. The majority of the Dutch have little rancour, except against each other; to many the Bond is as much an object of suspicion as, let us say, Mr Chamberlain. The old nebulous Pan-Afrikander dreams were in no way popular with the Transvaal Boer, who would have been nearly as much annoyed at being harassed with an Afrikander federation as at being annexed to Natal. Besides, he is not a good party man, being too sincere an individualist. Intrigue of the carpet-bag and secret-league variety he will never shine in, and he does not desire to, though apt enough at a kind of rustic diplomacy. There is, further, a party ready made for him. He is frankly anti-Johannesburg, a pure agrarian. Already the anomalous labour party of the Rand are making overtures to him, and with loud declamations on his merits strive to attract his sympathies. On certain matters he may join them, but it will be an odd union, and not a long one. Town and country will never long remain in conjunction, and there are few items, indeed, of a labour programme to which he would subscribe.

It is difficult to draw with any confidence the political horoscope of the new colonies. Certain eternal antitheses will exist,—Capital and Labour, Rand and Veld, Progress and the staunchest of staunch Conservatisms,—but none of them seem likely to coalesce so as to form any permanent division of parties. It is as easy to imagine Rand capitalists and country Dutch united on certain questions as Boer and Labour. Possibly the old distinction of Liberal and Tory in some form or other will appear in the end. It is said that the colonies are aggressively Liberal; but these are different from other colonies, and the groundwork of Conservatism already exists. We have a plutocracy and a landed aristocracy. We have also in the legal element a class, in its South African form, peculiarly tenacious of the letter of the law. We have an established kirk in all but name, and a racial tradition of resistance to novelty. With the growth of a rich and leisured population, and of social grades and conventions, there will come a time when politics may well be divided between those who are satisfied with things as they are, and those who hunger for things as they cannot be—with, of course, a sprinkling of plain men who do their work without theories. We shall have the doctrinaire idealist, doubtless, to experiment on the labour and native questions; and in place of having politics based on interests, we may have them based in name and reality on creeds and dogmas, which is what English constitutionalism desires. All such developments are just and normal, and in any one the land may find political stability.

There is one contingency alone which must be regarded with the greatest dread—the growth of a South African party, which is South African because anti-British. The war raised colonial loyalty to a height; but such loyalty is like a rocket, which may speedily expire in the void in a blaze of brightness, or may kindle a steady flame if the material be there. We must remember that we have in the Dutch a large population to which the British tie means nothing; a large and important class, in the cosmopolitan financiers, who may be covertly hostile to British interests; and even in some of the most sterling and public-spirited citizens men who, if the Dutch Government had allowed them, would have surrendered their nationality and become citizens of the republics. South African loyalty, splendid as it is, is rather fidelity to British traditions than to that overt link which constitutes empire. You will, indeed, hear the true theory of colonial policy well stated and strongly defended; but it must not be forgotten that in South Africa it is still somewhat of an exotic plant, and wants careful tending before it can come to maturity. Unadvised action on our part may nip the growth, and give a chance for a party which might declare, to adopt the words of the old loyalists of Lower Canada, that it was determined to be South African even at the cost of ceasing to be British. A too long or too straitly ordered tutelage might do it, or a harsh dictation on some local question of vital interest, or the continuance of the old calumnies about the Rand, the old vulgar sneer at the colonial-born. It is well to remember that while the land is a Crown colony it is one only in name, and that all the tact and discretion which we use in dealing with self-governing colonies should be used in this case also.

Such a party may arise, but there is no reason in the nature of things for its existence. South African and British are not opposites. As I understand the theory of colonial government, England stands towards her colonies as a parent who starts his sons in the world, wishing them all prosperity; and though in after-years he may exercise the parental right of giving advice, he will not attempt to coerce the action of those who have come to years of maturity. The tie is strongest when it is not of the letter but of the spirit. At the same time it is well to preserve certain outward and visible signs of descent,—well for the fatherland, better for the colonies, who draw from that fatherland their social and political traditions and their spiritual sustenance. At the moment South Africa is in a transition stage. Her public opinion is scarcely formed on any subject; she is full of vague aspirations, uneasy yearnings, and half-fledged hopes. She will develop either into the staunchest of allies in any imperial federation, or the most recalcitrant and isolated of colonies. She has enough and to spare of good men who desire nothing more than that the African nation, when it comes, should be a British people, and if she is trusted whole-heartedly, she will not betray the trust. She will even accept advice and reproof in proper cases, for, unless we drive her to ingratitude, she is not ungrateful for the blood and treasure which Britain has spent on her making. But she is like a young well-bred colt, whose mouth may be easily spoiled by over-bitting, and whose temper will be ruined by the bad hands or too hasty temper of its trainer.

Two important constitutional questions remain. One is the great policy of Federation, which looms as a background behind all sporadic constitutional forms. The second concerns that part of the imperial forces which is to be stationed in South Africa—a matter which is not only an army question but one deeply affecting colonial interests. To these the two succeeding chapters are devoted.

[30] Mr Bryce, in his ‘Studies in History and Jurisprudence,’ vol. i. pp. 430-467, has a valuable examination of the old Transvaal and Orange River Colony constitutions.