If it be asked, "Was slavery, as carried out at the Cape, of a more or less vindictive nature than as carried on among other civilized nations?" the reply can only be that slavery among civilized folk is a disease so monotonous in its symptoms that whether we study its story as inlaid on the mud tablets of ruined Chaldean cities, or as described in Greek or Roman literature, or view its image in such stone picture as that which Sennacherib, King of Assyria, caused to be made (and which to-day hangs on the walls of the British Museum for him who wills to see); or whether, on the other hand, we examine it as described in the nineteenth-century novel, or sit in the evening beside the old Boer grandmother, as, with her feet on her stove, she describes the remembrance of her far-off youth—the story is one, and its details monotonously unvarying.
Old white men and women are still living in South Africa who can remember how, in their early days, they saw men with guns out in the beautiful woods at Newlands hunting runaway slaves. They can tell you what a mistress once did when a slave became pregnant by her master; and there are stories about hot ovens—such stories as the story of Dirk, whose master seduced his wife, and Dirk bitterly resented it. "And one day," says the narrator, "we children saw Dirk taken across the yard to the wine house; we heard he was to be flogged. For some days after we fancied we heard noises in the cellar. One night, in the moonlight, we heard something, and got up and looked out; and we saw something slipped across the yard by three men. We children dared say nothing, because my grandfather never let anyone remark about the slaves; but we were sure it was Dirk's body." There is nothing new in these stories; they are as old as the times of the Romans and Chaldeans, and older than the ruin of Nineveh which they preceded. They would be echoed by the walls of half the out-buildings still standing in Jamaica and Cuba, had they the power of speech. To pretend we have never heard them before is hypocrisy; to be surprised at them is folly; to imply that they are peculiar to South Africa and the outcome of the abnormal structure of the Boer soul is a lie.
Old black men and women are still living in South Africa who remember how, as little children, they were playing on a beach in a hot land, where there were tall, straight trees that do not grow in South Africa, and how white men came and took them away. They remember the names of some of their playmates; and the "yellow food" that they used to eat, they say it does not grow here. If you look at their backs, from their necks to below their thighs they have white stripes which have been there for sixty or seventy years, and with which they will go to their graves. Neither in this is there anything peculiarly South African.
No more were these people always submissive. Sometimes the human in them woke. Especially the Madagascar slaves got tired, and tried to run away. "They are a most evil-disposed people," says an old German writer, "and have always only one thought, and that is, to escape." "They fear nothing so that they may be free of their masters."
These people looked up at Table Mountain, and at our blue African sky, and our veld with its sage-green bushes, all the world that for the rest of us has meant freedom, and which for them meant despair, and their one idea was to flee. They did not know the land across the mountains, but singly or in parties they were always running away. They were caught and brought back, and flogged or broken on the wheel, says the old Chronicle; they hardly ever escaped.
There are times to-day, riding across the plains in the direction of Hottentots Holland, when the vision of these creatures creeping across the veld in search of freedom comes suddenly to one; and a curious feeling rises. We are not in that band that rides booted and spurred across the plain, looking out to right and left and talking loud. We are in the little group cowering behind the milk bushes; we are looking out with furtive, bloodshot eyes, to see how the masters ride! We—we—are there;—we are no more conscious of our identity with the dominant race. Over a million years of diverse evolution white man clasps dark again—and we are one, as we cower behind the bushes; the black and the white.
But slavery in South Africa, as elsewhere, did not always show its misshapen and deformed side; there were cases in which as men grew up they learnt to feel gently to the hands that had tended them in early infancy, and showed kindness; and kindness begat gratitude, and gratitude begat love—and the circle of human beatitude was complete. In certain rare instances the words master and slave came to mean not user and used, but giver and lover, and human nature was justified in the lowest of her kinships.
If it were, however, made absolutely compulsory on us to pass a relative judgment on slavery as it existed at the Cape or elsewhere among civilized nations, we should say that probably it was less touched by humanizing and elevating conditions than was the case occasionally where, as among the Greeks and Romans, it existed among men of the same colour, and often of the same race and intellectual standing; but that the Boer, being, though not more gentle when roused, yet naturally of a somewhat more pacific nature than the Spaniard or Englishman, it is highly probable that slavery at the Cape was of a much less, than more, ferocious nature than elsewhere, where an Aryan people has enslaved a dark one.
If a more minute and exact history of what slavery really was in South Africa be required, it will perhaps be found best recorded by each of us in our hearts. If in those lowest moments which come, if rarely, to each human soul, when the primitive man wakes, and hatred and passion, aided by self-interest, fight for the mastery within us; if at these moments the most developed among us will turn our gaze inwards, and imagine that the object of our hatred or desire lies in our hand, unshielded from us by any fear of reprisals, unguarded from us by that mighty wall, which long ages of contact with our brethren has built up in the human heart round the rights of our equals—if we imagine that the wall reared by conscience does not in this case exist, hedging our fellows from us, that early training has convinced us that he lives for us, and that the primal law of his moral being in submission to our will—we shall then have a clearer picture of what slavery really was in South Africa and elsewhere than any pen can paint. We shall understand, as none can make us, why it is that humanity, as she creeps on her upward path, is slowly but surely withdrawing herself from all remnants of those institutions which are based on the conviction that it may be well for one man to dominate another for his own ends.
The causes and evils of slavery are not to be studied in South Africa or America, but among the shadows within our own hearts. And this much-talked-of slavery in South Africa was but what you and I, and the man over the way would have made it had we lived in South Africa two hundred years ago.