Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

The little Bushman when we pressed him hard could creep away among his stones, and die; leaving nothing behind him but his little arrowheads beside the fountains and his bits of pictures on the rocks and stones, to show how he too was once on the path to become human. And our little Tottie could laugh and dodge and play at working, till he also has vanished, leaving only a few Half-caste descendants, soon to fade away after him. And our Bantu, still with us and increasing in numbers, sets his broad back persistently against compulsion to perform unremunerated labour, his strong social and tribal feeling making him hard to crush. In truth our early fellow countrymen were and are as little fitted to play the part of the dumb instruments of labour as the South African Boer or the South African Englishman of to-day.

That little door, which nature always leaves ajar that the meanest of her creatures who will may go out by it, and escape—where the voice of the oppressor is heard no more—that little door we all of us know how to enter if need be, rather than lay aside the "I will" that makes the man. If we know nothing else, at least we all of us know how to die.

It would have been as easy for the early Boers to catch and convert into beasts of draught the kudus and springbucks, who kick up our African dust into your face, and are off with the wind, as to turn into profitable beasts of burden our little, artistic Bushmen, or our dancing Hottentots; and our warlike Zulu Bantus from the East Coast would hardly have been more acceptable as domestic slaves than a leash of African lions. Then, as now, when submissive slaves are desired in South Africa, they have to be imported: we do not breed them.

The folk whom the early settlers procured as slaves, were mainly negroes from the east and west coast of Central Africa; a people who, combined with a great deal of muscular power, and a charming gift of devotion to others, exhibit a weakness of will, and an absence of individuality, which in all ages has fitted them to inflict the evils of slavery on the more dominant races. With these were Madagascan and other Eastern folk, with more individuality, who, we are told, gave their owners much trouble.

These captive people were brought in ships to South Africa, and on their arrival portioned out among the early settlers. It was by the hands of these folks that the walls of the old Dutch houses, whose thickness we still so much admire, were raised, and it was they who planted the long lines of oak avenue and vineyard which still stretch mile after mile across our land.

It is sometimes thrown into the teeth of the Boer, as an accusation which sets him on a completely lower platform than that on which his English fellow-citizen stands, that his fathers were slave-owners. That this should be so is, indeed, remarkable; not only when we reflect that most of those ships which brought the first slaves to South Africa were the property of Englishmen and manned and officered by English seamen; but when we further reflect that, if the houses and avenues of the Cape Peninsula are often the work of slaves, the yet fairer homes and the easeful leisure of certain cultured English men and women at the present day are the result of their fathers' traffic in black flesh. And it is yet more remarkable that the fact of a slave-owning ancestry should ever be thrown in the face of the Boer when we reflect that it is not forty years since the leading branch of the Anglo-Saxon people found no other means of removing the institution from among themselves than by rending their national life well-nigh to fragments.

Slavery is, in truth, a condition so common in the very early stages of social growth, and when it occurs in those stages is generally so comparatively innoxious that it may almost be regarded as a natural if not quite healthy concomitant of early social development. When the primitive master and his slave live in like huts, share like food, and are engaged in like occupations, slavery is slavery in nothing but name. It is exactly in proportion as a society has attained to a high intellectual and material development that the institution exhibits its most malignant features; causing an arrest of both moral and material progress in any highly cultured and civilized society in the midst of which it is found.

Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it abnormally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.

It certainly cannot be said of the African Boer that he continued to maintain this institution when he had reached a higher stage of development than that at which other European nations have forsaken it. Though in point of time he maintained it later than some, yet it cannot be asserted by any one who has considered the matter that it was more at variance with his intellectual and emotional standpoint, and therefore more immoral, that the African Boer should have kept slaves in South Africa seventy years ago than that the Greek of the time of Pericles, or the Roman of Cicero's day, should have done so. And it certainly was far less at discord with his intellectual and moral condition than with that of the highly-cultured and enlightened Anglo-Saxons who in America and Jamaica have continued to support and fight for the institution within the memory of this generation. In truth, we must allow that the full-fledged institution was less at discord with the moral and intellectual condition of the Boer than are to-day at variance with our own those lineal descendants of slavery, the disabilities attaching to sex or class, which in our most civilized societies still exist.

It is then not surprising, though much to be regretted, that two hundred years ago the Boer sought to become, and did become, a slave-holder.