Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

To indulge in philanthropic sentiment is a luxury easily to be enjoyed by the idle and luxurious; to share in generous action towards weaker peoples is a possibility only to those who have sternly set out on the path of self-obliteration; and he who indulges most of the first knows sometimes least of the last.

When the fore-trekker mother lay awake at night in her wagon with her baby at her breast, she listened with strained intensity to hear if there were not a stealthy step approaching, or for the sound of the loosening of the oxen tied to the wagon, on whose continued possession the lives of her husband and children depended. When the children went out to play during the day, she bade them anxiously to keep near at hand; and as she sat alone in the heat when her husband had gone out hunting, she scanned the kopjes to see if there were not a little dark figure moving on them. To her he was no record of the past, but an awful actuality of the present; and the stern pressure of the primitive necessities of life, which in their extremest form have impelled civilized, shipwrecked men, when starving, to feed on each other's flesh, stepped in and made brotherly love impossible. The Boer fought hard and the Bushman hard; they gave and they asked no quarter; neither can I see that we have any reason to be ashamed of either of our South Africans.

St. Francis of Assisi preached to the little fishes: we eat them. But the man who eats fish can hardly be blamed, seeing that the eating of fishes is all but universal among the human race!—if only he does not pretend that while he eats he preaches to them! This has never been the Boer's attitude towards any aboriginal race. He may consume it off the face of the earth; but he has never told it he does it for its benefit. He talks no cant.

We condemn the Boer for his ruthless extermination of this little race; but to-day, we of culture and refinement, who are under no pressure of life and death, do nothing to preserve the scant relics of the race.

The last of this folk are now passing away from us, together with those infinitely beautiful and curious creatures, which made for ages the South African plains the richest on earth, in that rarest and most delightful of all beauties, the beauty of complex and varied forms of life. Over them the humanity of future ages may weep; but they will never be restored to vary and glorify the globe, or to throw light on the mystery of sentient growth.

We, as civilized men, must recognize that the extinction of a species of beast, and yet more a species of man, is an order of Vandalism compared with which the destruction of Greek marbles by barbarians, or of classical manuscripts by the Christians, were trifles; for it is within the range of a remote possibility that again among mankind some race may arise which shall produce such statues as those of Phidias, or that the human brain may yet again blossom forth into the wisdom and beauty incarnate in the burnt books; but a race of living things, once destroyed, is gone for ever—it reappears on earth no more. We are conscious that we are murdering the heritage of unborn generations; yet we take no step to stay the destruction.

The money which one fashionable woman spends on dresses from Worth; the jewels and cut flowers one woman purchases for self-indulgence would save a race! Lands might be obtained, and such conditions be instituted, for a lesser sum, as might enable an expiring race to survive. And the money and labour expended on the murder and maintenance of a few miserable foxes in a land and among a people who say they have emerged from barbarism, would send down to future ages all the incalculable living wealth of South Africa. While we are unwilling to deny ourselves our lowest pleasures for this purpose, is it wise that we condemn, with delicate humanity and lofty pride, the simple fore-trekker, who, rather than die and see wife and children die, cleared out a small human race before him?

It is probable that more enlightened ages will regard with far more sympathy the Boer who, having shot a pile of bucks, stood with his wife and sons busily cutting them up into biltong, that they might have the wherewithal to live, than that cultured savage who, to gratify a small vanity and boast of a big bag, slaughters the last of a race; and contemplates, as a Bushman might do, the heads fastened on his dining-room wall, with a pride that might only be justified had he created instead of destroyed them.

This at least is certain, that the Bushman fared no worse in the hands of the Boer than he would have done in those of the average settlers of any other race who go out to people and organize new countries inhabited by aboriginal peoples. And while we, the natives of modern Europe, are contented to leave this, the most stupendous, the most difficult, and the most honourable of all the labours which a nation can perform, to any hands that are willing to undertake it; while we send out, not our wisest and best to civilize and elevate and plant the tree of European life among simple peoples, but oftenest the most unfit among our race—the worthless son who cannot study, and who will not labour; the man who even in the much simpler and less important function of a citizenship in an old established society has been a failure—while again and again we send out these men to perform our highest national functions it will still remain a truth, that the old Boer fore-trekker has nothing to be ashamed of when his record as a civilizing and elevating power is compared with ours.

We shall return later, and then shall deal at length with this question of the relations of the European towards the original inhabitants of South Africa, and glance at those points wherein our attitude differs from that of the first white settlers; and we shall then glance at the causes which have led to this difference. But, as far as the Bushman is concerned, it may now be unqualifiedly stated that he tends to disappear as certainly under the heel of the Englishman as that of the fore-trekker, and only a little, if at all, slower. Neither does it appear that our languid and more showy methods must be much more pleasant to him than theirs—simpler and more direct.