Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

Commercial interests we have, and they are strong; but they are not conterminous with our state boundaries, and do not strengthen them.

Viewed thus, we see that the States of South Africa are not, taken isolatedly, national; their boundaries are of the nature of electoral, cantonal, fiscal, political divisions; of immense importance, and by all means to be preserved, as such divisions are, but not to be mistaken for those deeper, subtler and organic divisions from which the life of great nations takes its rise. There is far more resemblance between the population of the Transvaal and that of the Colony, Free State, or Natal, than between the populations of Yorkshire and Surrey; there is far more subtle, deep-lying, organic difference between Normandy and Bordeaux than between Natal and the Cape Colony. In looking at the political divisions of South Africa, one is irresistibly reminded of a well-known English village, in which the boys on the one side of the street threw stones at the boys on the other, because the parish boundary ran down the centre. Great nations are not founded on such differences as these.

But, it might be yet asked: "If our peoples are so mingled that our states cannot become the foundation of healthy national life, would it not be possible in so large and sparsely peopled a country to redivide our races, giving to each its territory?" Apart from the physical impossibilities which render such a proposal ridiculous, if, by some almighty force, all our natives could be gathered into one territory, our Boers in another, and our Englishmen into a third, no sooner would that force be removed than we should remingle in the old manner, the native as labourer craving the products of our civilization, the Boer as farmer, and the Englishman, Jews and other newcomers as speculators and builders of railroads, and introducers of commerce. A natural want binds and blends our races. But there is a subtler reason why such racial divisions are not even thinkable. The blending has now gone too far. There is hardly a civilized roof in South Africa that covers people of only one nation; in our households, in our families, in our very persons we are mingled.

Let us take a typical Cape household before us at the moment. The father of the household is an Englishman; the mother a so-called Boer, of half Dutch and half French blood, with a French name; the children are of the three nationalities; the governess is a German; the cook is a Half-caste, partly Boer and partly the descendant of the old slaves; the housemaid is a Half-caste, partly Hottentot, and whose father was perhaps an English soldier; the little nurse girl is a pure Hottentot; the boy who cleans the boots and waits, a Kaffir; and the groom is a Basuto. This household is a type of thousands of others to be found everywhere in South Africa.

If a crude and homely illustration may be allowed, the peoples of South Africa resemble the constituents of a plum-pudding when in the process of being mixed; the plums, the peel, the currants, the flour, the eggs, and the water are mingled together. Here plums may predominate, there the peel; one part may be slightly thinner than another, but it is useless to try to resort them; they have permeated each other's substance: they cannot be reseparated; to cut off a part would not be to resort them; it would be dividing a complex but homogeneous substance into parts which would repeat its complexity.

What then shall be said of the South African problem as a whole? Is it impossible for the South African peoples to attain to any form of unity, organization, and national life? Must we for ever remain a vast, inchoate, invertebrate mass of humans, divided horizontally into layers of race, mutually antagonistic, and vertically severed by lines of political state division, which cut up our races without simplifying our problems, and which add to the bitterness of race conflict the irritation of political division? Is national life and organization unattainable by us?

We believe that no one can impartially study the condition of South Africa and feel that it is so. Impossible as it is that our isolated states should consolidate, and attain to a complete national life, there is a form of organic union which is possible to us. For there is a sense in which all South Africans are one. It is not only that all men born in South Africa, from the Zambesi to the Cape, are bound by the associations of their early years to the same vast, untamed nature; it is not only that South Africa itself, situated at the extremity of the continent, shut off by vast seas and impassable forests from the rest of the world, forces upon its inhabitants a certain union, like that of a crew who, in the same ship, set out on an interminable voyage together; there is a subtle but a very real bond, which unites all South Africans, and differentiates us from all other peoples in the world. This bond is our mixture of races itself. It is this which divides South Africans from all other peoples in the world, and makes us one. From Zambesi to the sea the same mixture exists, in slightly varying form, and the same problem is found. Wherever a Dutchman, an Englishman, a Jew, and a native are superimposed, there is that common South African condition through which no dividing line can be drawn. The only form of organization which can be healthily or naturally assumed by us is one which takes cognizance of this universal condition. Great and seemingly insuperable as are for the moment the difficulties which lie in our path on the way to a great, common, national unity, no man can study South Africa without feeling that, in this form, and this alone, is national life and organization attainable by South Africa. Difficult as it may be, it is at once simpler and easier than the consolidation of any separate part. It is the one form of crystallization open to us, the one shape we shall assume.

South African unity is not the dream of the visionary; it is not even the forecast of genius, which makes clear and at hand that which only after ages can accomplish: it is not even like the splendid vision of that little-understood man, the first Napoleon, of a unified and consolidated Europe, which was fated to failure from the moment of its inception, because dreamed five hundred years before its time. South African unity is a condition the practical necessity for which is daily and hourly forced upon us by the common needs of life: it is the one possible condition which will enable us to solve our internal difficulties: it is the one path open to us. For this unity all great men born in South Africa during the next century will be compelled directly or indirectly to labour; it is this unity which must precede the production of anything great and beautiful by our people as a whole; neither art, nor science, nor literature, nor statecraft will flourish among us as long as we remain in our unorganized form: it is the attainment of this unity which constitutes the problem of South Africa: How, from our political states and our discordant races, can a great, a healthy, a united, an organized nation be formed?

If our view be right, the problem which South Africa has before it to-day is this: How, from our political states and our discordant races, can a great, healthy, united, organized nation be formed?

This problem naturally divides itself into two parts. For the moment, the first is the most pressing and absorbing, that of the political union of our states; and it must precede the other. Great as are the difficulties which lie in this path at present, difficulties whose extent can only be understood by one who has deeply studied our internal condition, yet so urgent is the practical need for it, so ripe the time, that there are probably men now living who may see it accomplished. It is impossible to study the South Africa of to-day and doubt that within sixty years there will exist here a great centralized and independent form of government embodying the united political will of the people; that with regard to external defence and the most vital internal problems, South Africa will be politically one; its state divisions, while developed and intensified in certain directions, will be relegated to the performance of those invaluable functions of self-government for which they are so admirably fitted. Circumstances and individuals favouring, we may see this accomplished before the next decade is out; it must come at last.