Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

The Huguenot, by implanting this religious passion for South Africa in the heart of the Boer, and by the fact that he brought with him no political sympathies with France, helped to sever the Boer from his parent States; but even these influences while they would account for his division from his parents' nationalities, would not alone account for that complete severance from the common social and intellectual life of Europe, and from all civilized European societies, which characterizes the Boer of the past and of to-day, and we must seek for its cause further.

When the Huguenots first arrived at the Cape, they had little to complain of in the treatment they received at the hands of the Dutch East India Company—lands were given them side by side with the earlier emigrants, by whom they were kindly received. But the Government of the Dutch East India Company, then dominant at the Cape, like that of all commercial companies, was a despotism, and resembled rather the dictatorial rule existing on board a troopship than any form of government we are now accustomed to picture as existing in a young European settlement. When the Huguenots landed their speech was French, and the ruling powers disapproved of it, and determined to exterminate it, and substitute at once the Dutch language. A decree was passed prohibiting its public use. It might not be used in the churches, nor taught to the children in the schools. The Huguenots resented this enactment. Smaller in numbers, but superior in culture and intelligence, they were unwilling to see their speech forcibly submerged; and there was a time when they went so far as to talk of physical resistance. But in the end they were subdued, and within a generation the French language was extinct. The old grandmother might still mumble it in her chair in the corner, or sing its nursery rhymes to her grandchildren in it, but they no longer understood her; law and arbitrary force had done their work. We are inclined to believe that no single autocratic action on the part of any South African Government has ever so deeply influenced the future of South Africa and its people as this seemingly small proceeding, influencing only a few hundred folk.

To show how this has happened we must somewhat digress.

The language spoken by the Boer of to-day is called "the Taal," i.e. "the Language." It is not French, nor is it Dutch, nor is it even in the usual acceptation of the word a dialect of Dutch; but it is a form of speech based on that language. It is used at the present day all over South Africa by the Boers and half-castes as their only speech; it is found in its greatest purity in the Free State, Transvaal, and frontier districts, where it has been least exposed to scholastic and foreign influences during the last few years. To analyze fully this tiny but interesting variety of speech, would take us far beyond our limits. It differs from the Dutch of the Hollander, not as archaic forms of speech in Europe often differ from the literary, as the Italian of the Ligurian peasant from that of the Florentine, or the Somersetshire or Yorkshire dialects from the language of the London newspapers; these archaic European dialects not only often represent the earlier form of the language, but are often richer in varied idioms and in the power of expressing subtle and complex thoughts than are their allied literary forms. The relation of the Taal to Dutch is of a quite different kind. The Dutch of Holland is as highly developed a language, and as voluminous and capable of expressing the finest scintillations of thought as any in Europe. The vocabulary of the Taal has shrunk to a few hundred words, which have been shorn of almost all their inflections, and have been otherwise clipped. The plurals, which in Dutch are formed in various and complex ways, the Taal forms by an almost universal addition of an "e"; and the verbs, which in Dutch are as fully and expressively conjugated as in English or German, in the Taal drop all persons but the third person singular. Thus the verb "to be," instead of being conjugated as in the Dutch of Holland and in analogy with all other European languages, thus runs:—Ik is, Je is, Hij is, Ons is, Yulle is, Hulle is,—which would answer in English to: "I is," "thou is," "he is," "we is," "you is," "they is"! And not only so, but of the commonest pronouns many are altered out of all resemblance to their originals. Of nouns and other words of Dutch extraction, most are so clipped as to be scarcely recognizable. A very few words are from Malay and native sources; but so sparse is the vocabulary and so broken are its forms, that it is impossible in the Taal to express a subtle intellectual emotion, or abstract conception, or a wide generalization; and a man seeking to render a scientific, philosophic, or poetical work in the Taal, would find his task impossible. The literary artist who has tried to introduce into his work of art in any European language a picture of Boer life, knows how impossible it has been to find any organized dialect which would correspond to it.[18] In English neither the Scotch nor country dialects, nor the Irish brogue, nor the pithy inverted forms of city slang will answer. To a certain extent he will be able to preserve its form and spirit in copying the manner of a little child, as it lisps its mother tongue. But this would not preserve all its peculiarities. Its true counterpart is only to be found in the "pigeon" English of a Chinaman or, better still, in the Negro dialects of the Southern American States. In the stories of Brer-Fox and Brer-Rabbit, as told by the old Southern slave in Uncle Remus, we have one of the few literary examples of such a speech as the Taal. In both languages there is the same poverty of vocabulary, the same abbreviated condition of words, the same clipping of forms, and the same much larger intelligence in the speakers than ill-formed language gives them the power of expressing—a thing which can never happen where a people has slowly shaped its own language—and, as a result, the same tendency to suggest indirectly ideas which the speaker has not the power of directly stating, from which results the irresistible humour of both dialects. It is often complained of by persons lately from England, that when the English South African has a joke to make, or comic story to tell, he lapses into the Taal, which is not understood by the newcomer; the truth being that it is the use of the Taal which transforms an ordinary sentence into a joke, and makes the simplest story irresistibly comic. There is hardly a South African that has not at some time told a story in the Taal who, when called upon to translate it for the benefit of some stranger, has not found that the humour had evaporated and the laugh gone. Merely to attempt to express a deep passion or complex idea in this dialect is to be often superbly humorous. The story is told of two Cape students whose Edinburgh landlady gave them notice to quit because their laughter disturbed her other lodgers. On inquiry it turned out that they were, for their own diversion, engaged in translating the book of Job into the Taal! And so entirely is the Dutch of South Africa removed from the rich sonorous Dutch of Holland, both in structure and sound, that we were lately requested by a woman, whose native speech was the Taal, to come to her aid, as her newly arrived gardener was a German, whose speech she could not therefore understand. On the gardener appearing, we found he was a Hollander, recently from Amsterdam, and speaking the most excellent Dutch!

So widely in fact has this dialect separated itself from Dutch that the Boer boy at the Cape working for an examination finds it as hard to pass in literary Dutch as in English or French, and it not infrequently occurs that the Boer boy is plucked in Dutch who passes in all other subjects. Between the language of the Camera Obscura and the Paarl's Patriot there is hardly more affinity than between the old Saxon of Alfred's day and the slang of a modern London street boy.[19]

In answer to the question, "How did this little speech arise?" it is sometimes suggested that the original soldiers and sailors who founded the settlement being largely Frisian and wholly uneducated, never spoke Dutch at all, but a dialect; and that, being mainly uncultured persons, and using no literature, their speech easily underwent further disintegration. On the other hand, it has been said that the Taal has been formed by the intercourse between the Dutchman and his slaves, and the aboriginal races of the country; that these people, obliged to use an imperfect Dutch, taught their broken lingo to their masters' children, which has so become the language of the Boer.

Something is to be said for both views, more especially for the second. At the present day the Taal is the only tongue of the many thousands of Half-castes which have resulted from the union of the Boer with his slaves; and it is exactly such a broken form of speech as does arise, when a large body of adults are suddenly obliged to learn and use a foreign tongue, as was the case with the slaves. But neither of these theories seems to us wholly to cover the ground. In the Southern States of America for a hundred years slave nurses brought up English children, but not the slightest effect on their English speech was produced, and nowhere in America is a purer English spoken than by the descendants of the Southern planters. Even allowing that, being uncultured, the forefathers of the Boer might more easily have let their speech slip than was the case with the more cultured planters, it still seems unlikely that a people so rigidly and exceptionally conservative as the Boer has shown himself to be, even in the smallest details of daily life, during his two hundred years in South Africa, should suddenly and entirely have dropped his own pure language and accepted his speech from the hands of his despised dependents.

We put forward the suggestion with diffidence, perhaps to be corrected by those who have considered the matter more deeply, but it has appeared to us that, fully to account for the Taal, it is necessary to allow at least some place to the influence of the French Huguenot and the sudden suppression of his French speech.

A considerable body of adult persons, suddenly introduced into a population whose language they are abruptly and by force compelled to use as their own if, as in the case of the French Huguenots, they are socially the equals, and intellectually the superiors, of the people among whom they settle, and if they at once proceed to intermarry with them, may, and almost must, powerfully influence and disintegrate the speech of the majority. The Taal is precisely such a speech as the adult Huguenots, arbitrarily and suddenly forced to forsake their own language and to adopt the Dutch, must have spoken. And that they should have imposed their broken language on their fellow colonists seems far more probable than that the slave should have done so. In language, yet more than in other human concerns, imitation is the expression of an unconscious admiration. The mannerisms, accent, and intonation of an individual, admired or loved, are almost inevitably caught; those of the despised unconsciously though carefully avoided. The cultured woman, labouring from philanthropic motives for ten years in the slums of a city among the outcast poor, finds her speech become almost more punctiliously correct through shrinking from the lower forms used about her; but were the same woman to love and admire a man of an uncultured class and live ten years with him, her speech would inevitably be tinged by his. The child follows the speech of its mother; the lover of the loved.[20]

At least the fact is certain, whatever else may be doubtful, that within one generation after the arrival of the Huguenot at the Cape the language spoken by the people was neither Dutch nor French, but that broken dialect we call the Taal.