Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

Many years ago, we travelled from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown in a post-cart with a woman who had just come from England. All day we had travelled up through the bush, and at noon came out on a height where, before us, as far as the eye could reach, over hill and dale, without sign of human habitation or break, stretched the bush. She began to sob; and, in reply to our questionings, could only reply, almost inarticulately: "Oh! It's so terrible! There's so much of it! There's so much!"

It is this "so much" for which the South African yearns when he leaves his native land. The lane, the pond, the cottage with roses climbing over the porch, the old woman going down the lane in her red cloak driving her cow, the parks with the boards of warning, the hill with the church and ruin beyond, oppress and suffocate us. Amid the arts of Florence and Venice, the civilizations of London and Paris, in crowded drawing-rooms, surrounded by all that wealth, culture and human fellowship can give, there comes back to us the remembrance of still Karoo nights, when we stood alone under the stars, and of wide breezy plains, where we rode; and we return. Europe cannot satisfy us.

The sharp business man who makes money at the "Fields" and goes to end his life in Europe, comes back at the end of two years. You ask him why he returned. He looks at you in a curious way, and, with his head aside, replies meditatively: "There's no room there, you know. It's so free here." Neither can you entrap him into further explanations; South Africa is like a great fascinating woman; those who see her for the first time wonder at the power she exercises, and those who come close to her fall under it and never leave her for anything smaller, because she liberates them.

If we turn from the land itself, to examine more closely the people who inhabit it, we shall be struck in the first place by the marvellous diversity of races found among us.

For not only are the South Africans not of one national variety (a fact not surprising when the extent of our country is taken into consideration); not only do we belong to the most distinct branches of the human family to be found anywhere on the surface of the globe, representing the most widely different stages in human development, from the Bushman with his ape-like body, flat forehead and primitive domestic institutions, to the nineteenth-century Englishman fresh from Oxford, with the latest views on social and political development, and the financial Jew; but we are more or less a mixture of these astonishingly diverse types. We are not a collection of small, and, though closely contiguous, yet distinct peoples; we are a more or less homogeneous blend of heterogeneous social particles in different stages of development and of cohesion with one another, underlying and overlaying each other like the varying strata of confused geological formations.

It is this fact which lies at the core of the social and political problem of South Africa, and which makes it at the same time the most complex and difficult, and the most interesting, with which a people has ever been called upon to deal.

To grasp our unique condition clearly, it will be well to take a blank map of South Africa, and pass over it, from east to west, from north to south, from the Zambesi to Cape Town, from Walfish Bay to Kaffirland, a coating of dark paint, lighter in the west, to represent the yellow-tinted Bushmen and Hottentots, and half-caste races; and darker, mounting up to the deepest black, in the extreme east, to represent vast numbers of the black-skinned Bantus. From no part of the map, so large that a pin's point might be set down there, will this layer of paint representing the aboriginal native races be absent; darker here and lighter there, it will always be present. If we now wish to represent the earliest European element, the Boer or Dutch Huguenots, we shall have to pass over the whole map lines and blots of blue paint, more plentiful in some parts, rarer in others, but nowhere entirely absent. And if again we wish to represent the English and modern continental element we shall have to pass over the entire map, from the Zambesi to Cape Agulhas, a fine layer of red paint, thinner in spots and thicker in others, but never wholly absent. If we now add a few insignificant dots on the extreme east coast, to represent the Portuguese, our racial map of South Africa will be complete.

Looking at it, the first thing which must strike us is the fact that no possible line which can be drawn across it will separate the colours one from another, or even combine their darker shades. There is a dark patch of red to the north of our map, but there are others equally dark in the south; the blue colour is prevalent at the north end, but also in the east; the dark tone is everywhere visible; the colours are intermingled everywhere, like the tints in a well-shot Turkey carpet. They cannot be separated.

But should we wish to make our map truly representative of the complexities of the South African problem, it will be necessary to go further, and across this intermingled mass of colours to draw at intervals, at all angles, and in all directions, lines of ink, which shall cut up the surfaces into squares and spaces of different sizes. If these lines be truly drawn they will be found to bear no relation to the proportions of the colours beneath them; they will run straight through masses of colour, cutting them into parts; and except in the case of some of the smallest divisions, where the dark predominates, it will be impossible to trace the slightest connection between the lines and the colouring.

Our political as well as our racial map of South Africa will now be complete; for these lines represent the boundaries of the political states into which South Africa is subdivided. For (and this is a matter which requires our carefullest consideration) not only is South Africa peopled everywhere by a mixture of races overlying and underlying each other in confused layers; but these mixtures of peoples are redivided into political states whose boundaries, except in the case of a few of the necessarily ephemeral native states, have no relation to the racial divisions of the people beneath them, but are purely the result of more or less political combination and therefore have in them, at core, nothing of the true nature of national divisions.