Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

[32] Of course the same law of reversion might, under certain conditions, produce development and not retrogression. If, as is sometimes held (though we ourselves are very strongly of the opposite opinion), the Hottentots and Bushmen of South Africa are not human creatures caught in the very act of developing from lower forms, but are the result of degeneration from some higher type; then the creature resulting from a cross between the two might revert to that higher type, and be of higher social feeling and loftier intellectual power than either. We have ourselves in only one instance met an individual who was a cross between the English and Kaffir races, though we are aware that several such exist in South Africa. This man was certainly merely a composite of the two races, without any tendency to revert to a lower type. He was the son of an English gentleman, his mother was a wild Kaffir woman who had not been draggled under the feet of civilization. The man was proud, determined, resolute. Self-educated, he raised himself to a post of high trust under the English Government; he combined the dash and courage of the Kaffir with the pride and intelligence of the Englishman. He had the fault which is common to both his parent races, of being cruel and indomitable when opposed; but of the vices supposed to be inseparable from Half-castism, servility, and insincerity, he had not a trace. He was a man and a gentleman. But, whether if such crosses were common such men would generally arise, is quite another question.

[33] This somewhat surprising result has been arrived at by Havelock Ellis in the course of his scientific studies on the nature and causes of genius. He has drawn up tables of interest showing the relations of genius to race.

[34] It is interesting to note that two of America's most celebrated literary men, Bret Harte and Walt Whitman, are both of mingled Dutch and English descent.

[35] We are far from implying that there are no pure sub-varieties of Europeans even at the present day. In sequestered valleys and villages there undoubtedly are still folk who have not mingled their blood for at least two thousand years, and the inhabitants of certain Welsh valleys, Cornish hamlets, and villages in Brittany and Spain, though now divided from each other by speech, and nationality, may be absolutely of one blood and one descent. That even the artificial national lines which were drawn in the middle ages, and which form the basis of our national divisions at the present day, do coincide in some ways with more or less organic distinctions, we fully allow. In that great medley of Teutonic peoples who inhabit the German Empire to-day, there does really appear one mental characteristic which might almost mark them off from the rest of Europeans as a distinct variety; this is the musical talent. All the greatest composers have been Germans, almost every peasant and burgher you meet finds music an important element in his existence. Yet is this peculiarity wholly organic? The English are the least musical of all European nations, yet it is notorious that a family of English children reared in Germany exhibit often the same serious passion for music, the same knowledge of it, and even the same power of producing it. No two European nations are more unlike than the French and English, yet perhaps the most typical Frenchman we ever met was an Englishman born in Paris. And there can be little doubt that a French boy reared from birth in English surroundings would share the true Anglican worship for rough outdoor games, and if fed plentifully from youth upward on large quantities of beef, pudding, and ale, and leading an outdoor life, would at least as much resemble the typical John Bull of big belly, double chin, and red face, as do the Englishmen of America and the Colonies! The fact is that nine-tenths of what are popularly known as national peculiarities are not even skin-deep. This is proved when men of different nationalities are thrown into the crucible of Colonial life; after two generations spent there, if exposed to the same conditions and using the same speech, the nationality is almost undiscoverable. We in the Colonies, who stand at a vantage for perceiving how real up to a certain point are the European national peculiarities, and yet how essentially superficial, know that even the Irishman, whose peculiarities are more marked than those of any other purely European race, cannot with any certainty be distinguished from his fellows of other blood after a couple of generations, if born in a Colony. Even in the case of the Semitic Jew who does form a distinct variety, breeding more or less true, national characteristics are vulgarly attributed to blood which are undoubtedly the result of circumstance. A Jew severed from his social atmosphere and brought up in a society in which wealth was at a discount and scientific and literary attainment at a premium, would no doubt turn that intellectual fertility which is the gift of his blood into those directions; and though his descendants would undoubtedly inherit his nose, they would probably show no inherent tendency to lend money at sixty per cent.

[36] Thus supposing, for example, a cross between English and Japanese. Both these have now attained to the same high point of intellectual and social developments, the Japanese being probably more artistic and refined, the Englishman possibly more dominant. If these varieties developed from ancestors lower in the scale of growth than either are at present, then their offspring might revert to that type and be lower than either parent form; but it is also quite possible that other factors may come into play, and the extreme refinement and artistic instinct of the Japanese, combining with the coarser virility of the Englishman, might produce a creature higher in the scale of life and more desirable than either parent species. All that we are qualified to assert in the present infantile stage of our knowledge is, that there is a danger, and we are inclined to believe a very great danger, of reversion to the lower primitive type where two widely severed varieties cross, that humanity may by that process lose the results of hundreds of years of slow evolution.

[37] Such as the case of Eva the Hottentot, who married in the early days Van Meerhof, and one of whose daughters married a well-to-do Cape farmer.

[38] There may be, as we before said, rare cases in which the crossing of black and white races in the first instance was not the result of primitive lust, but of profound self-abnegating affection and sympathy; in which the man or woman has deliberately selected one of the darker race for life-long companionship, and has been willing to endure all that scorn and social contumely could conflict for the sake of that companionship. Where honour and affection and life-long marriage bind a man and woman of diverse breeds, it is difficult to speak. Perhaps so mighty a love has laws of its own; and the children of such a union might be far better born and better trained than the children of average pure-breed marriages. It can only be said that such cases are so rare that practically they need hardly be considered in studying the Half-caste problems of our day.

[39] We are well aware of the argument that, by bridging the cavity which yawns between race and race, the Half-caste serves to make possible a more kindly sense of union between the two. We see the weight of this argument, and allow something for it, even much; but, so enormous is the amount of suffering inflicted by the intermingling of the dark and light races in South Africa to-day, that no hypothetical gain seems to justify it.

[40] This was written in the April of 1891, when large treks were being organized in the Free State and Transvaal.

[41] Sloot = watercourse.