Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

One is probably not very far from the truth in stating that, roughly speaking, out of every thirty men and women born in Australia and New Zealand, from twenty-five to twenty-eight will be found to be of purely or almost purely English descent—using the word English as it is popularly, though misleadingly, used to include Keltic Irishmen and Scots.

In South Africa, from the Zambesi to the mouth of the Orange River, southward to the sea, there are roughly calculated to be about 8,000,000 (eight millions) of souls. Now, out of this population, about 800,000, roughly speaking, are whites, about 400,000 being Dutch-Huguenot, about 260,000 British, and about 100,000 of other European nationalities. As regards persons of unmixed English blood, this is probably an over calculation, as a large number of persons popularly passing as "English" in South Africa are of blended French, Dutch, German and other extractions. But, accepting the persons of Irish, Scottish and English descent even at 300,000, they comprise about one-and-one-eighth of an Englishman in each thirty of the population. Or, to put the matter in another and more obvious light: Were to-morrow the entire population of purely or mainly British descent to leave Australia and New Zealand, those lands would at once be almost wholly depopulated. A few Maoris and quickly dwindling Australian aborigines, with a handful of Frenchmen, Germans, Swedes or Italians, and a sprinkling of Chinamen and other Asiatics, would be all that would be left. Practically, the lands would have been transformed into almost primeval solitudes. The working man, who forms the bulk of all nations, would have disappeared, and with him the farmer, the merchant, the professional man and the speculator. There would be no Australia and no New Zealand in the social sense, were all men of British descent suddenly to leave those lands.

In South Africa, on the other hand, a condition entirely the reverse would be maintained. Were every man and woman of pure British descent to disappear to-morrow, no vital diminution in the entire bulk of our population would have taken place. The vast labouring classes who build our roads and bridges, cultivate our fields, tend our flocks, perform our domestic labour and work in our mines, would be left here almost entirely untouched in the persons of our dark citizens, who form an element in our population rapidly and always increasing, and of primary importance. From the Malay fisherman, cab driver, or washerwoman, to the Bantu herdsmen and mining hands and domestic servants, our labouring class, save in the person of a few skilled overseers and workmen, would still be here untouched. Our large white farming class would be but little reduced, while more than half our professional class, our doctors, lawyers, judges and civil servants would be left in numbers amply sufficient for the needs of the country; and while, in our seaport towns and mining centres, a large number of those engaged in commerce and speculation would be gone, at least 100,000 Jews and Europeans of all nationalities engaged in these occupations would still be left, in addition to a good number of Dutch-Huguenot descended inhabitants so employed.

An element of importance, indeed, would have been abstracted from our complex communities, an element containing much of that which is noblest and most valuable in our national life, and also much that is sordid and unhealthy—but the South African people, the seed-beds of the great South African nation of the future, would still remain, as far as mere numbers are concerned, practically undiminished and untouched. The removal of the Anglo-Saxon element would affect South Africa as the sudden abstraction of its Jewish inhabitants of Great Britain would affect that land. The nation would be left intact, though an important and powerful element had disappeared.

In eighty years' time, when New Zealand and Australia are powerful and independent nations, probably infinitely exceeding in health and virility the inhabitants of the little islands in the North Sea, from which the first white Australians and New Zealanders came, their inhabitants will differ profoundly from the inhabitants of Ireland, Scotland or England, in manners, in appearance, and in tastes, habits, and political and social institutions. They will certainly no more dream of having their policy of peace or war dictated to them nor their governors forced upon them by any of the electors of Great Britain, than a healthy and sane man of forty allows his great grandmother to dictate to him the hour of his retiring or the way in which he shall spend his pence (even now an Australian-born man may be distinguished almost at once from an Englishman born in Britain, and a spirit of independence and self-respect has grown not only in Canada, but in Australia and New Zealand); yet the population of these countries may quite possibly, even in eighty years' time, bear rather more resemblance to the inhabitants of the British Isles than to any other folk.

In South Africa, on the other hand, in eighty years' time there will also be a great and independent nation, but it will be unique. It will be wholly unlike any other in the world. It will not be French or Dutch, though a large proportion of the blood in the veins of its white inhabitants will descend from these races; it will not be Russian nor Jewish, though Russian Jews are plentiful here; it will not be German, though German merchants, missionaries, doctors and agriculturists are to be found in every corner of the country; it will not be Scotch nor Irish, and assuredly it will not be English, though the blood of all these nationalities, Keltic and Teutonic, will be blended in the veins of the white South African of the future—it will be simply South African.

So also our vast dark South African race will not be wholly Negroid. The blood of the brave Bantu folk may predominate, but it will be a race largely blended of Asiatic and other peoples; there will be strains of Dutch and French blood through the slave, of English blood through the English soldiers, and the Malay, the Indian, and even the Hottentot will have place in it. It will be simply the great South African Dark Race, and assuredly not English. These two great blended varieties, dark and light, will form the South African nation of the future, their two streams of life, keeping, it may be, racially distinct for ages, but always interacting side by side and forming our South African nation.

Our South African national structure in the future will not and cannot be identical with that of any other people, our national origin being so wholly unlike that of any other; our social polity must be developed by ourselves through the interaction of our parts with one another and in harmony with our complex needs. For good or evil, the South African nation will be an absolutely new thing under the sun, perhaps, owing to its mixture of races, possessing that strange vitality and originality which appears to rise so often from the mixture of human varieties: perhaps, in general human advance, ranking higher than other societies more simply constructed; perhaps lower—according as we shall shape it: but this, certainly—it will be a new social entity, with new problems, new gifts, new failings, new accomplishments.

To-day, the different white elements of the South African nation are already entering upon a stage of rapid combination; South Africans whose ancestors were of English, French, German, Irish or Dutch descent are so rapidly intermarrying that, not in eighty, but in sixty years' time, if a man should pass through South Africa calling out for Frenchmen, Englishmen, Dutchmen or Germans, he would hear hardly a voice answer him; the reply will then be,—"We are all South Africans here."

That we cannot be an English nation is certain; but in the past there has appeared no reason why we should not ultimately be a nation bound by ties of friendly feeling to England—as America might have been, had England left her internal concerns untouched a hundred years ago; as Australia and Canada may yet be, if she abstains from interfering with their internal affairs and does not shoot down the men born on their soil.