Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

Slavery in its legal form was extinguished at the Cape about the year 1834. The English Government, who had at that time taken over the Colony, purchased and liberated all the slaves at the cost of £1,247,000. Official slavery passed away; but it left, as always, its indelible marks on the dominant race who had suffered from it. We shall deal later with its intellectual and emotional reaction on South Africa. We have now only time to consider one of its large legacies.

Slavery bequeathed to the Boer, and to South Africa mainly through him, its large Half-caste population: a population which constitutes at once the most painful, the most complex, and—if any social problem were insoluble in the presence of human energy and sympathy, we might add—the most insoluble portion of our South African national problem.

The bulk of that Half-caste population which to-day fills our Western towns and throngs upon our Western farms, and which is found scattered over the whole of South Africa, arose originally and mainly as the result of sexual intercourse between the Boer and his imported slaves; and also with such aboriginal Hottentots or Bushmen, as he obtained possession of.[28]

In the early records of the Colony we find that out of every four children born to slave-mothers three were at one time the children of white men and masters. Only nineteen years ago there died in the Colony an old white man who left behind him forty Half-caste descendants—grandchildren and others—and whose standard saying in his early days is reported to have been: "When I want a smart slave, then I beget him!"

It may be remarked that no particular turpitude can be attributed to the action of the Boer in this matter. English, Dutch-Huguenot, or Spaniard, our Indo-European pride of race and our vaunted self-respect have always failed to save our breed where Aryan males have become absolutely possessed of even the most loathsome or degraded females of non-Aryan peoples. That our pride should have the strength to save our blood is the dream of the future, not a realization of the past.

As long as slavery continued at the Cape this mixture of Boer and black men went on.

Into the absorbingly interesting question of Half-castism as looked at from the scientific standpoint, it is not possible for us now fully to enter. This one thing is certain, that to the question, "What are the exact physiological, intellectual, and moral results which arise from the admixture of Aryan with Negroid or other non-Aryan races?" science has as yet no really definite answer to give. The whole question—one of the most vital and wide-reaching of those which lie before the human intellect for solution in the ages to come—is yet one the very hem of whose skirt science has not begun to raise.

To obtain any really exact knowledge on the subject it would be necessary to carry on extensive experiments: to obtain large numbers of individuals of pure Aryan blood, of non-Aryan blood, and of mixed blood, and placing them in exactly identical conditions (not merely materially, but morally and emotionally), to exclude from them the knowledge of any tradition or history which might modify their development. If this were done it would then be possible, if the numbers were large enough to exclude individual variations, to determine exactly in how far the mixed creature was better, worse, different from, or like to either parent species. As, however, the human race is not likely to undertake such experiment during the next millennium, and as we have at present no such exact knowledge of the conditions which govern the laws of inheritance as would enable us to deduce the nature of offspring from the study of the two parent forms (our knowledge even with regard to animals being purely empirical on this point), we are obliged to fall back on cruder and less scientific methods.

We are compelled, in the first place, to study the vulgar verdict, which rough, ungeneralized human experience has recorded, and to see in how far any other evidence we can obtain sustains or opposes it. The universality and unanimity of the popular verdict on the Half-caste is remarkable. The Half-caste, it is asserted in every country where he is known, whether it be in America, Asia, or Africa, and whether his ancestors be English and Negroid, Spanish and Indian, or Boer and Hottentot—the Half-caste is by nature anti-social. It is always asserted that he possesses the vices of both parent races and the virtues of neither; that he is born especially with a tendency to be a liar, cowardly, licentious, and without self-respect. "You may catch a jackal among the bushes, but not a Half-caste when he doubles," says the Indian. "God made the white man, perhaps he made the black; but the devil made the Half-caste," says the South American. "The devil sits behind the ears of a Half-and-half," says the Boer proverb. "Who the white man is we know; and who we are we know," says the black Bantu to his Half-caste fellow-servant; "but what are you? Half-monkey whom no one can believe!" "The Half-caste as he creeps out of his mother's womb is a born liar," says the Colonial Englishman; "he is never a man."

This unanimity of verdict demands our attention. Like the old faith that the earth was stationary and the sun moved round her, it would not be universally received were there not some specious appearances in its favour, though it need contain no necessary truth. Mankind is easily duped, but not without an adequate show of reason. In South Africa the truth of the assertion of the inherent depravity of Half-castes seems on the surface borne out to the full by facts. Three-fourths of the prostitutes who fill our brothels and lock-hospitals are "coloured," or Half-caste; only the remaining fourth are of pure breed.[29] In the smaller criminal cases tried in our Magistrates' Courts, the "coloured-man" figures out of all proportion to the pure-blooded Europeans, Bantus, or Malays. If you pass a gang of convicts clanking in their chains, you will find the number of tawny faces exceeds those pure white or black in a manner not warranted by their proportional numbers in the community.