Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

On the whole, there can be no doubt as to the superficial appearance of strong anti-sociality on his part; the only debate which can arise in the mind being, as to whether this anti-sociality is inherent and the direct result of the mixture of bloods, or is an accident, dependent on external and changeable conditions.

In early childhood we remember to have heard a sapient old lady remark that she had always noticed that orphan and adopted children, as born, were differently constituted from all others; you might take them from their birth and bring them up with your own: they never turn out the same! It has since often occurred to us that the fallacy underlying that old lady's induction, and patent even to a childish intelligence, might, in a more complex form, underlie the dictum with regard to the Half-caste. As the old lady overlooked the fact that, while materially the position of the adopted child might resemble that of her own, emotionally, and therefore eventually morally, its training was wholly unlike. That a child brought up in a home which it feels its own by right, and surrounded from infancy by the yearning affection born of parental instinct, has a moral training differing by at least three-fourths from that of a child who grows up always doubtful of its own standing, and looking out with fierce and bitter eyes into a world which has no welcome for it: so it has always appeared to us that a Half-caste, even in a state in which he is politically on the same footing as his fellow-citizens, must find a something in his emotional relations with the world about him which would account for his assuming a lower social attitude, without any necessity of appealing to a theory of inborn depravity.

The social position of the South African Half-caste has been peculiar. He has originated in almost all cases, not from the union of average individuals of the two races uniting under average conditions, but as the result of a sexual union between the most helpless and enslaved females of the dark race and the most recklessly dominant males of the white. He has risen from a union not only devoid of the intellectual sympathy and kinship between man and woman which translates the relation of sex from the sphere of the crudely physical to that of the æsthetic and intellectual; but even that lower utilitarian element was wanting to this union which exists wherever men and women of the same race, and moderately respecting each other, unite permanently for the purpose of producing offspring and sharing the material burdens of life. The Half-caste came into the world as the result of the most undifferentiated sex instinct. He saw the first light usually in the back room of the slaves' compound, or in the hut across the yard, and entered a world in which there was no place prepared for him. To his father he was the broken wineglass left from last night's feast or as the remembrance of last year's sin—a thing one would rather forget—or, at best, he was a useful tool. To his master's wife, if there were one, he was an object of loathing (of that curious loathing, known perhaps only to the Aryan woman, who sees the blood that flows in her children's veins, flow also beneath the dark skin of an alien race; unless, indeed, it be shared by the dark man, when he sees on his wife's arm a child that is not of his colour); his mother had often a black husband or lover of her own; and the Half-caste crept about the backyard of its father's house, and in and out of the slave cells, and as it grew, it learnt that it belonged neither wholly to the black group who ate their food in the kitchen doorway, nor to the white, in the great dining-hall. When full consciousness came to him, half he despised the black flesh about him, with the instinct of a white man's son; and half, he hated, with the passion of the black woman's child, the folk in the large house.

He belonged to neither—the very breast he had sucked was not of the same colour as himself. But it was not even the fact that he was born into a society in which there was no appointed station for him, and no class with which he was wholly at one, that constituted the forefront of his wrong and suffering.

The true key to the Half-caste's position lay in the past, as it still lies to-day, in the fact, that he is not at harmony within himself. He alone of all living creatures despises his own blood. "I could bite my own arm," a coloured girl once said in our presence, "when I see how black it is. My father was a white man!" The Half-caste alone of all created things is at war within his own individuality. The white man loves the white man incarnate in him, and the black man loves the black. We are each of us our own ideal. The black may envy the white his power or his knowledge, but he admires himself most. "You say the devil is black! But I picture him a white man with blue eyes and yellow hair," said to us a Bantu once. "I have a great sorrow," said an intelligent native preacher. "I know that the Lord Jesus Christ was a white man, yet I could not pray to Him and love Him as I do if I did not picture Him as black and with wool like myself."

Of that divine contentment with his own inalienable personality which lies at the root of all the heroic and half the social virtues, the Half-caste can know little. If it were possible for him with red-hot pincers to draw out every ounce of flesh that was black man's, and leave only the white, in most cases he would do it. That race which would accept him he despises; and the race he aspires to refuses him.

So the first Half-caste arose: a creature without a family, without a nationality, without a stable kind, with which it might feel itself allied, and whose ideals it might accept.

As time has passed in South Africa the slave has been set free, the Half-caste has multiplied, and now forms a more or less distinct section of society, and so, to a certain extent, his position has improved on that of his first progenitor. He may now marry legally with one of his own more or less uncertain type; he may have his home; and his children are his own. Nevertheless, socially his position remains much what it was. Without nationality, traditions, or racial ideals, his position is even to-day not analogous in South Africa with that of any folk of pure-bred race. For even the Bantu, till we have utterly broken him under the wheels of our civilization, grows up with a solid social matrix about him, which inevitably results in a social training from which the Half-caste is excluded. Even when severed from that tribal organization with which all his most heroic virtues are connected, and subjected under the feet of a dominant race which does not understand him, and which he does not understand, the position of the ordinary Colonial Bantu is not identical with that of the Half-caste. We may not ourselves much more value him, and his chances of cultivating social affections and virtues may seem small as regards ourselves. But let the despised Kaffir leave you and go home; once in his hut, surrounded by his wives, his children, and his friends, he sits there a man among men. He is in a society which has its own stern traditional social standards and ideals, by living up to which he may still become an object of admiration and respect to his fellows, and, above all, to himself. His ideals and traditions may not be ours, but they form no less the basis of an invaluable discipline in social feeling. His tribe may be broken up, but he still feels himself an integral part of a great people, up to whose standard he is bound to live, and in whose eyes, as in his own, he is one of the goodliest and completest creatures on God's earth. Until we have robbed him entirely of this sense of racial unity and of racial self-respect he is not morally on the same footing as the Half-caste.

If I go into my kitchen in the early morning on my farm, and find the Kaffir herd lighting his pipe at the kitchen fire while he waits for his rations—if anxious to find out his tribe I ask him whether he belongs to this or that tribe, naming the wrong one, he starts to his feet, his eyes flashing and his shoulders drawn back, "I am Tambook oprecht!" he replies proudly. ("I am a pure-blooded Tambookie.") An ancient Greek or a modern Englishman, when proclaiming his unity with his nation, could not thrill with greater emotion than this menial of my kitchen. And I know that that fountain of social virtue, which on occasions may well out into a Marathon or a Thermopylæ, is strong in him; that beyond the narrow interests of the personal life for him, as much as for me, there exists a great human entity to which he is bound by the bonds of honour and love.

The Englishman will swear to you on the word of an Englishman, and the Bantu on the word of the Bantu, but no Half-caste ever yet swore on the honour of a Half-caste. The world would break into cackling laughter did he do so: "The honour of a Half-caste!"