Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

As in describing the physical features of South Africa, we lingered longest over the Karoo, not because it was one of the largest or most important features in the country, but because it was the most characteristically South African; so in describing its people, we shall dwell first and at greatest length on the South African Boer—not because he is the most important nor the most powerful element among our peoples, but because he is the most typically South African. The Bantu and the Englishman may be found elsewhere on the earth's surface in equal or greater perfection; but the Boer, like our plumbagos, our silver-trees, and our kudoos, is peculiar to South Africa. He is the result of an intermingling of races, acted on during two centuries by a peculiar combination of circumstances, and a result has been produced so unique as only to be decipherable through long and sympathetic study.

Our limits will not allow of our entering into an analysis of all those conditions of his early history which have made the Boer what he is to-day. The bare facts are ably and concisely set forth in works readily accessible to all[9]; but the great epic of South Africa which lies beneath them, yet awaits its seer and singer.

For our purpose, it is possible only to note shortly a few of those points in the early conditions of the Boer which bear most strongly on his later development, which have shaped his peculiarities, and made him what he is.

The history of the Boer begins, as is well known, in 1652, when Van Riebeek landed at the Cape with his small handful of soldiers and sailors to found a victualling station under the shades of Table Mountain, for the ships of the Dutch East India Company as they sailed to and from the East Indies.

If one climbs alone on a winter's afternoon to the old Block House on the spur of the Devil's Peak at Cape Town, and lies down on the ruined stone bastion, with the warm sun shining on one's back—as one lies there dreaming; the town and shipping in the bay below, blotted out in a haze of yellow light, leaving only the great curve of the sands on the Blue-Berg Strand, and the far-off mountains that peer out and disappear into the blue; then the noisy little life of the valley slips away from one, and through the mist of two centuries one is almost able to put out one's hand and touch the old, long-buried days, when the first white men built their huts on the shores of Table Bay; when at night the leopards crept down from the mountain and took lambs from the kraals, and lions were shot before the hut-doors; when the Blue-Berg Strand was trodden by elephants, and the Hottentots lit their watch fires on the banks of the Liesbeck; when the great Hout-Bay valley was flecked with antelopes; and the stream which comes down now from the mountain gorge and flows through the valley muddy and dark, was clear and crystal, and widened out into pools where the hippopotami played, and then crept away into the sea through the white sand;—days when the blue mountains were the limit of the world the white men knew, and shut out the mysterious unknown beyond. Basking alone there on one's face in the warm sunshine, so near do those old days seem, that one half expects the lammervanger[10] to spread out its wings and sail out from the cliffs above, and a bush-buck's step to break the stillness in the brushwood; and one is loath to shake one's self and go down into the hot, fretted life of the little city below; where the shop windows glitter with the work of many lands, and where women with little waists and high shoes trip down the pavement; and the Parliament Houses, with their red brick and stucco, stare at one, and on the stoep of the Club in Church Square tall-hatted men lounge and talk over the latest town gossip or retire to the bar for whisky; and where in the side streets are broken pavements, and Malays, and Half-castes, and fish-carts with their shrill whistles; and in the docks coal-dust and shipping, and convicts and sailors; and everywhere are canteens and brothels and churches—all that makes the life of a civilized modern town. It is hard to climb down through the fir-woods and go back to it.[11]

So when one sits to write of African men and things, one would like to linger long over those early days, every detail of which is precious to us now; even how Annitje de Boeren was allowed to sell milk and butter to the early men of the colony; how the handful of folks planted gardens, and traded with the Hottentots for sheep, and made expeditions into the unknown lands of Stellenbosch and Paarl. All the story of how the sapling of white man's life in South Africa first struck its roots into the soil has an interest no story of later growth can hold for us. But for the present we can only notice hurriedly, and in passing, a few of those facts in the condition of the early settlers which seem most to have made the African Boer that which we to-day find him.

The first fact we have to note is that the men Van Riebeek brought with him to found his little settlement were men of different nationalities; largely Frisian or Dutch, but also German, Swedish, and even English. They were also, almost to a man, soldiers and sailors, children of fortune, and not agricultural labourers. A century later, when we find the descendants of these men wanderers across the untrodden plains of South Africa, their flint-locks as their only guard, the motive that drives them forward and on only an unquenchable passion for movement and change, and a fierce rebellion against the limitations with which civilized life hedges about and crushes the life of the individual—then we shall find it useful to remember that in part the original stock from which these men sprang was composed of these free-fighting children of fortune, rovers of the sea and the sword. That power of persistent, patient, physical labour and submission to restraint, that tenacious clinging to one spot of earth on which he has once taken root, which constitutes at once the strength and the weakness of the true agricultural classes in all countries, has always been markedly absent from the character of our South African Boer, and could hardly have been his through inheritance. For Van Riebeek's men were not merely soldiers and sailors forced into service by conscription, but men gathered from all nations by a species of natural selection, their inborn love of a wild and roving life leading them into the service of the Dutch East India Company. Over the shoulders of the men who took their aim at Majuba Hill, and behind the men and women who again and again, on their long and terrible marches through South African deserts, have seen their kindred fall dead at their feet of thirst and want, and have yet moved on, one sees the faces of these old rough forebears looking! The South African Boer becomes fully intelligible only when we remember that the blood of those men runs in him, modified truly and powerfully by other elements, but active in him still.

We come now to a second small point, to be noted as bearing on the development of the Boer.

The commanders of the early settlement gave out to certain of their men portions of land on the peninsula, to be cultivated for their own and the Company's benefit. These men built huts, planted and sowed. Thirty years after Van Riebeek landed there were two hundred and ninety-three white men in the settlement, but only eighty-eight white women, and the men on their little allotments grumbled for want of wives. The directors of the Dutch East India Company conferred, and it was determined to send out from certain orphan asylums in Holland respectable girls to supply this want; and from time to time, ships brought small numbers. The soldiers and the sailors at the Cape welcomed them gladly; they were all speedily married and settled in their homes at the foot of Table Mountain.

It may appear fanciful, but we believe it is not so, to suppose that this small incident throws a sidelight on one of the leading characteristics of the African Boer. For the South African Boer differs from every other emigrant branch of a European people whom we can recall, either in classical or modern times, in this: that having settled in a new land, and not having mixed with the aboriginal inhabitants, nor accepted their language, he has yet severed every intellectual and emotional tie between himself and the parent lands from which he sprang. The Greek, whether he settled in Asia Minor or Sicily, though economically and politically independent, was still a Greek; an uncut cord of intellectual and emotional sympathy still bound him to the mother country; and after two hundred years the inhabitant of Syracuse or Ephesus was still a Greek of the Greeks; bound not only to Greece as a whole, but to that particular state from which he sprang; among the most immortal and typical of Grecian names are those of men not born in the parent home of the race, but in its colonies. The modern Australian, Canadian, Yankee, or even American Spaniard, if of unmixed European blood, turns still to Europe as Home. Political differences may have had to be settled in blood, and commercial interests may divide, but, emotionally and intellectually, the bond which binds a European colonist to the home from which he sprang, and to Europe as a whole, is an operative fact. The Boer has had no great conflict with his parent peoples in Europe; he has not lost his race by mingling it with the barbarous people among whom he settled; yet he is as much severed from the lands of his ancestors and from Europe, as though three thousand instead of two hundred years had elapsed since he left it.