These South Africans, together with those of English descent, but who have been more than two generations in the country and have had no—or very little—personal and intimate knowledge and intercourse with England, may be taken as standing on one side of us. They are before all things South Africans. They have—both Dutch and English—in many cases a deep and sincere affection for the English language, English institutions, and a sincere affection for England herself. They are grateful to her for her watch over their seas; and were a Russian fleet to appear in Table Bay to-morrow and attempt to land troops, it would fly as quickly from Dutch as English bullets.[41] Neither Dutch nor English South Africans desire to see any other power installed in the place of England. Cultured Dutch and English Africans alike are fed on English literature, and England is their intellectual home. Even with our simplest Dutch-descent Africans the memories of
THE OLD BITTER DAYS
had almost faded, when the ghastly events, which are too well known to need referring to, awoke the old ache at the heart a few years ago. But even they would see quietly no other power standing in the place of England. “It is a strange thing,” said a well-known Dutch South African to us twenty-one years ago, “that when I went to Europe to study I went to Holland, and loved the land and the people, but I felt a stranger; it was the same in Germany, the same in France. But when I landed in England I said, ‘I am at home!’” That man was once a passionate lover of England, but he is now a heart-sore man. There have been representatives of England in South Africa who have been loved as dearly by the Dutch as by the English. When a few years ago there was a talk of Sir George Grey visiting South Africa on his way home from New Zealand to England, old grey-headed Dutchmen in the Free State expressed their resolve to take one more long train journey and go down to Capetown only once more to shake the hand of the old man who more than forty years before had been Governor of the Cape Colony. So deeply had a great Englishman, upholding the loftiest traditions of English justice and humanity, endeared himself to the hearts of South Africans. “God’s Englishman”—not of the Stock Exchange and the Gatling gun, but of the great heart.
But great as is the bond between South Africans, whether Dutch or English, and England, caused by language, sentiments, interest and the noble record left by those large Englishmen who have labored among us, the South African pure and simple, whether English or Dutch, cannot feel to England just as we do. Their material interest may bind them to England as much as it binds us, but that deep passion for her honor, the consciousness that she represents a large spiritual factor in our lives, which, once gone, nothing replaces for us; that her right-doing is ours, and her wrong-doing[44] is also ours; that in a manner her flag does not represent anything we have an interest in, or even that we love, but that in a curious way it is ourselves—this they cannot know. Therefore, while on our side we are connected with them by our affection for South Africa and our resolute desire for its good, our position remains not exactly as theirs. Our standpoint is at once broader and more impartial in dealing with South African questions, in that we are bound by two-fold sympathies.
On the other hand of us, who are at once South Africans and Englishmen, stand in South Africa another body of individuals who are not South African, in any sense or only partially, but to whom from our peculiar position we also stand closely bound.
[45]Ever since the time when England took over the Cape, there has been slowly entering the country a thin stream of new settlers, English mainly, but largely reinforced by people of other nationalities. Eighty years ago, in 1820, a comparatively large body of Englishmen arrived at once, and are known as the British Settlers. They settled at first mainly in Albany, and certain of their descendants are to-day, in some senses, almost as truly and typically South African as the older Dutch settlers.
THEIR LOVE FOR AFRICA
is intense. Some years later a large body of Germans were brought to the Kingwilliams town division of South Africa. They, too, became farmers, and their descendants are already true South Africans. For the rest, for years men continually dribbled in slowly and singly from other countries. Whether they came out in search of health, as clergymen, missionaries, or doctors, or in search of manual employment, or as farmers, they almost all became, or tended to become almost immediately, South Africans. They settled in the land permanently among people who were permanent inhabitants, they often married women born in South Africa, and their roots soon sank deeply into it. They brought us no new problem to South Africa. They have settled among us, living as we live, sharing our lives and interests. It is said that it takes thirty years to make a South African, and in a manner this is true. Even now, more especially in times of stress or danger, it is easy to distinguish the African-born man from the man of whatever race and however long in the country who has not been born here. But in the main these newcomers have become South Africans with quickness and to an astonishing degree, and coming in in driblets they were, so to speak, easily digested by South Africa.
But during the last few years
A NEW PHENOMENON HAS STARTED