Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

The Half-caste is our own open, self-inflicted wound; we shall not heal it by shutting our eyes and turning away from it.

(By a curious coincidence, while writing this on the Half-caste, there hobbled up to our window a tall Half-caste woman, to whom we had often given medicines. She stuck a letter through the window, and asked us in Taal—the only language she spoke—to read it for her. The letter had been written at the request of her second son, to inform her that he had just received a sentence of four months, the crime not being stated. It also asked her whether she had heard that his brother Jacob was free again. On inquiring what this meant, she replied that her eldest son had just served four years for attempted rape. We asked her whether she had other children. She lighted up; the watery, blue, Caucasian eyes looked at us out of the shrivelled, brown face. "I have four daughters," she said, "the eldest is living with a white mason in the Fraserburg district. I have always brought my children up well," she added proudly, "since they were so high"—indicating with her hand a child of about three years old. "I have told them, 'Have nothing to do with a black man, hold by the white.' My three youngest daughters are all prostitutes among the gentlemen of Kimberley!" Her further remarks cannot be recorded. She then asked us for more salve; and, raising her skirt, showed the wound, where a gangrenous sore had eaten away the flesh, till in some places the bone was showing.

To the white woman who looks at such an object as this, deeper than any loathing—is shame. It is not the black man's sin that is staining our African sunshine, as we watch that figure amble across the yard; it is the white man's degradation. What the Boer began the Englishman finishes.)

But it is not only in the existence of our lower class of Half-castes that slavery has left to South Africa a heritage of suffering.

There are subjects which touch so closely the finest sensibilities of human nature that the hand shrinks from dealing with them as it might from etching a pattern on a palpitating human heart with the most delicate of instruments. Nevertheless, it is essential this matter should also be considered.

There were cases in which the ordinary Half-caste did not marry into the dark race, but again into the white, their descendants becoming ultimately almost purely white. There were also cases, though they were rare,[37] in which love and genuine respect found the gulf which divides race from race not wide enough to prevent their crossing, and in which white men took as their lawful wives women of dark race. The offspring of these lawful marriages naturally remarried into the white race; and so it comes to pass to-day that there are certain white men and women, both Dutch and English, often of the greatest natural intelligence, and sometimes of great culture, wealth, and physical beauty, who have in their veins this remote trace of non-European blood.

These folks are often essentially and practically entirely Aryan; the remote strain of dark blood during seven or eight generations of white inbreeding being practically so eliminated that it is no more present than a nightmare of ten years ago is present within my brains to-day; and no more manifest than in the bull-dog who may win first prize at a show is manifested the fact that, eight generations before, his ancestral tables show a strain of spaniel blood. Nevertheless, in South Africa, difficult as it may appear for those who have only lived in Europe and who have never mingled with persons of mixed race to conceive it, the position of such individuals is often one of pain and difficulty, and the cause of as acute suffering as any which human creatures are called on to go through. Over the heads of such men and women in South Africa dangles a sword, which a twirl from the hand of the most brutal and ignorant passer-by may at any moment send to their hearts. And, as the low-bred cur, safe behind a grating, may bark with safety at the noblest mastiff passing by, so the meanest and most ill-descended beings, sheltered behind the consciousness of an unmixed Aryan pedigree, may taunt with their descent men and women the latchet of whose shoes they may not be worthy to unloose.

The true anguish of the position lies in the fact that so strong is the Aryan prejudice against colour, that it affects the individuals themselves; a taunt with regard to dark ancestry is always felt by the person against whom it is directed as the most cruel and unanswerable of blows, the extent of their silent suffering being measured by the fact that as a rule no reply is ever attempted, and that by their nearest friends it may not be referred to. It may be doubted whether, even within the families themselves which are so situated, the fact of such descent is ever openly discussed, as men in a chamber where one is dying seldom use the word death—the thing itself is too near.

It is, moreover, on the most sensitive side of human nature that suffering is often inflicted on such men and women. It is on the side of the sex affections, and whenever the question of marriage arises, that men and women who have perhaps never felt their disabilities before are made to realize them, by reluctance on the part of those they desire, or of their friends, that there should be a mingling of the blood; it is then that the ancestral shadow looms large.

It may be questioned whether we, who have no such shadow hanging in the background, can ever fully realize all it signifies to those in whose existence it has place, however wide our sympathies. The man who suffers from some ancestral disease, be it consumption or gout, regards himself as an object for pity and interest, and may seek and find consolation in the sympathy of his fellows; but the man or woman who suffers from this imaginary ancestral stain must maintain a perfect and unbroken silence. To offer him sympathy would be an insult; to receive it he would feel a degradation.