[62] We glance at this matter briefly here as we have dealt with it in detail in Women and Labour.
[63] Tante = Auntie.
[64] To prevent misunderstanding, it is necessary to state that the term Boer, like the term Highland clansman, is more than a mere designation of race. Had Scott been asked to describe a typical Highland clansman, he would at once have described him with certain manners, ideas, virtues and wants, forming an absolutely true picture of the ancient clansman, which yet might not in any way apply to the Duke of Argyle or other cultured descendant of the Highlander, who, though being the Chief of a Highland clan, and possessing possibly no drop of foreign blood, would yet belong to a wholly different type of civilization. Probably not one half of the descendants of the Boers are Boers to-day, in the sense of speaking only the Taal and abiding by seventeenth-century manners and customs; and in twenty-five years there will not, we regret to think, be a Boer born in South Africa, though there will be more than half a million South Africans of Dutch-Huguenot descent. Serious political miscalculation is the result of the misconception that all Dutch-Huguenot South Africans are primitive Boers. In childhood we remember having heard that a Scotch Highlander was coming on a visit; and our disappointment when, instead of a clansman, speaking Gaelic, wearing a kilt, and playing the bagpipes, a delicate young man, much addicted to reading Tennyson and playing Beethoven, appeared, was probably much like that which awaits the foreigner who still in all South African Dutchmen expects to see the Boer.
[65] On December 15, 1899, was fought the battle of Colenso.
[66] Some persons going to visit the grave found the hand of one of the dead men, supposed to be that of Theunis de Klerk, protruding from the earth with the finger pointing right upward. It was taken to indicate that the men had been buried alive. But there is no reason necessarily to believe this. The soldiers had probably thrown only a thin layer of earth over the bodies, which being buried immediately while still warm, the muscles had probably contracted after death and forced the hand out with the rigid finger.
[67] It was a younger son of this noted family who so distinguished himself for bravery in a later Zulu war, when fighting side by side with English soldiers, and who is reported, with I know not how much truth, to have saved the life of a noted English General.
[68] Having, it is said, closed the doors so that he could not escape.
[69] Mosilikatsi and Umsilikazi (Umsiligaas, [p. 238]) are the same person—S.C.C.S.
[70] The yet later story of how another attempt was made by the same hands in new and subtler form, beguiling by misrepresentation a great people into lending them its national mantle to cover the grotesque misshapenness of their nakedness, in order the more easily to grasp the gold and land, and with it the independence of this little nation—this, and much that followed, is known in rough outline to all. But for the present we have gone far enough to be able roughly to estimate what the position is of the African Boer and of his nineteenth century descendant in South Africa, at the present day.
[71] There are three species of mier-kat generally known in South Africa, two of which are mild and easily tamed, and the red mier-kat, a creature absolutely fearless and which no one has ever succeeded in taming.