Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

When a primitive man wants breakfast, he takes a sheep, kneels upon it, holds it between his legs, and cuts its throat; he skins it, and taking a slice out of it, fries it on the coals for breakfast.

We also demand not less imperatively cutlets for our breakfast; but we manage it another way. We procure an individual some way off to kill the beast and another out of sight to cook it; we have a paper frill put round the bone to disguise it, and set a pot of flowers straight before us to look at while we eat it—but to the sheep—to the sheep—it can make little difference which way it is eaten! We still do our unclean work, but we do it by proxy. And it may be questioned whether what we gain in refinement we have not lost in sincerity.

The Boer cleared the land of the wild beasts and savages as expeditiously as he could. But they were not his main difficulty, as we have seen. On those arid, sparsely vegetated up-country plains, water and food for his flocks varied with the time of years, and sometimes were not to be found at all. It was seldom desirable or even possible, in those days when artificial reservoirs or springs were unknown, to remain more than a few months on one spot. So when the bushes were eaten, and the water began to dry up, he spanned in his ox-wagon and moved away with his flocks and herds in search of fresh pastures. Or, if he had no flocks and herds and lived by the chase alone, he moved yet oftener, following the droves of the springbok and hartebeest[44] as they themselves trekked in search of fresh pasture. He built no house, or, if he raised a temporary shelter, it was composed of a few cross-parts thatched with bushes, resembling a high-pitched roof placed on the ground; but his real home was his wagon.

With a constant tendency to go northward and north-east these men moved slowly on; visiting for the first time plain after plain in the karoo and grass-veld, and piloting their huge canvas-sailed wagons across the infinite expanses of sand and rock, as their sailor forefathers a few generations earlier had piloted their ships across the sea.

In many cases for generations this wandering life was continued. Men were born, grew up, grew old, and died, who knew no home but the ox-wagon, and had no conception of human life but as a perpetual moving onward. Even at the present day there are still to be found a few of these men, hunters and nomads, whose fathers and forefathers also led this wandering life. They are generally large-limbed, large-handed men, powerfully built, but somewhat loosely, and a little slouching about the shoulders; often with long, straggling, yellowish-brown beards.[45]

They are generally somewhat silent of tongue, their blue or grey-blue eyes often dull as though not fully awakened, but starting into keenness and life when they catch the glimpse of a springbok across the plain or a korhaan on wing overhead; and striking forth sparks of fire when you mention to them the benefits of taxation and a foreign government—as the flint-lock guns of their forebears struck fire, when the old flints hit the steels.

These men, whose mothers brought them forth kneeling upon the red sand amid the bushes at the wagon-side, under the blue African sky, with little more aid than the wild buck receives when she bows herself to bring forth her desert young—women who knew nothing of the tinsel and luxuries of life, who were content to bake their children's bread in some scooped-out anthill, and who, when for months or years there was no bread, fed their households with the wild buck's flesh, which they had prepared with their own hands; who, in time of danger, stood side by side with their husbands and sons, and when the enemy attacked, again and again, were found kneeling on the front box of the wagons, reloading the guns, and urging on sons and husbands to resistance and even death, as their Teutonic ancestresses had done in Germanic forests eighteen hundred years before—these men, born of such women, and whose first view of life was of the red sands and wide skies of an African plain; who, before they could speak, watched with half-comprehending eyes the loading of guns and the capture of game, and who, long before they were adult, could track the wild beast and mark the path of strayed cattle by the smallest sign upon the sand; who, when they travelled alone, needed nothing but a few strips of dried flesh, or a lump of unleavened bread stuffed into their bags, and a saddle on which at night to rest their heads as they slept under the stars; to whom every South African bird and beast was familiar; for whom every plant had its name, and every change in the atmosphere or the earth its understood significance; to whom every new South African plain on which they entered was a fresh home; and who, when they died, were put under the red sand, on which they first saw the light, and left in the plain with a pile of stones over them in the mighty solitude they had never feared while alive—these men, and the women who bore them, possessed South Africa as no white man has ever possessed it, and as no white man ever will, save it be here and there a stray poet or artist. They possessed it as the wild beasts and the savages whom they dispossessed had possessed it; they grew out of it; it shaped their lives and conditioned their individuality. They owed nothing to the men of the country, and everything to the inanimate nature about them! The civilization they had carried away with them from their homes in the West, they may slightly have lost; but they gained a knowledge as real as it was intimate of the land of their adoption.

Nor is it probable that South Africa has lost by this return to a condition of almost primitive simplicity on the part of a section of her white inhabitants. As it is necessary that the artist or thinker who is to instruct mankind should not live too far from the unmodified life of nature, if he is to accomplish work that shall have in it the deathless elements of truth and virility; so it seems to be a law of existence that the most dominant and powerful races, if they desire to keep their virility, cannot remove themselves too far and too long from the primitive conditions of life. As the great individual is seldom found more than three generations removed from ancestors who wrought with their hands and lived in the open air, so the most powerful races seldom survive more than a few centuries of the enervation of an artificial life. As the physical body becomes toneless and weakened, so also the intellectual life grows thin; and it is as necessary for the nation, as for the individual who would recuperate, to return again and again, and, lying flat on the bosom of our common mother, to suck direct from the breast of nature the milk of life, which, drawn through long artificial channels, tends to become thin and ceases to nourish. Most great conquering peoples have been within hail of the nomads' encampment; and all great nations at the time when they have attained their greatness were largely agricultural or pastoral. The city kills.

(It is, of course, hardly necessary to state that we have no intention of signifying that vast cities or the civilization which they represent have any instantaneous effect on national life, and still less that statistical tables would prove the death-rate higher in the town than country. These things have no bearing on the decline and fall of nations, which must slowly and gradually decay from within before the moment of their catastrophic fall can arrive. It is this decay which is promoted by the artificial conditions of life in that high condition of material civilization, of which vast cities, with their abject squalor, their squandered wealth, and their wide departure from the natural conditions of life, are at once the symptom and the cause; and it is a vulgar commonplace, that were the city not recruited from the more primitive country it would be depopulated in six generations. Vast and gorgeous cities have always heralded and accompanied the falls of great peoples; and the ruins of Nineveh, Babylon, Rome, and the vast fallen cities of India and Greece, are the graves under which a brave, simple, and mighty people were buried while the walls yet stood. It would be almost as rational to inquire in the case of a man habitually over-eating and drinking himself, and who, taking no exercise, dies at fifty of gout and diseased liver, what hour of inaction, or which mouthful of meat or drink was it which produced his death, as to assert that because no detail of a given system of civilization is directly and instantly destructive to national or individual life, morally and physically, that therefore the whole system is not slowly but surely so. On the other hand, is there any reason to suppose that the emasculation and degradation of human creatures, which has always taken place whenever a high state of material civilization has been reached, is an absolutely inevitable concomitant of all complex material civilization, for all time? Must the story of history for ever repeat itself? Is it possible that the human intelligence, with its marvellous powers of forethought and analysis, shall at some time be able so to comprehend its own condition and to shape human life, that the benefits of a material civilization shall be grasped, while the emasculation and disintegration which have always accompanied it shall be escaped? We have been compelled here to insert this perfunctory note on a subject so wide and vital that it ill lends itself to perfunctory treatment, to avoid misconception, till later we return to deal more carefully with this subject.)

"The Scythians," says the old Greek historian, speaking of some of the wandering tribes who at a later date were to overrun and subvert the ancient civilizations, "the Scythians, in regard to one of the greatest of human matters, have struck out a path cleverer than any I know—for when men have neither walls nor established cities, but are all house-carriers and horsemen, living not from the plough, but from cattle and having their dwellings in wagons—how can they be otherwise than unattackable and impracticable to meddle with?" Like the Scythians, our dwellers in wagons have indeed remained "impracticable to meddle with"; and they will undoubtedly enrich, not only their immediate descendants, but the blended South African race of the future, with the strain of their wild nature-impregnated blood.[46]