Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

It is healthy, in that it is in harmony with his whole mental and material condition.

We who are habituated to living in societies in a state of rapid growth and development, in which as a result certain individuals under the stimulus of new conditions attain to the highest stage of psychic development, while others remain in the most primitive; and who possess, bound up in one body social, persons in a hundred different stages of culture; we, who are accustomed to feel that the harmonizing of our institutions and manners with the needs of our enormously varied social units constitutes an always pressing and almost overpowering difficulty, and who are accustomed to feel this above all in matters of sex—we find it difficult to conceive of the existence of a society which has no social problems, and, above all, no sex problems—yet this is very nearly the state of the primitive Boer.

One may live beside him for years, and watch his social life, without the thought ever occurring, "Ah! were but the sexual condition of these folk altered, were their traditions and modes of action with regard to sex but more in harmony with the need and thoughts of at least the best part of the community, how healthful would be their condition!" That unlovely confusion which prevails in our civilized life, where sham institutions, too high for one-half of our folk, overlay institutions too savage to see daylight, and the sex relations, which should be the joy of a people, form often the diseased and painful side of the national life—and the perception of which haunts one hourly, as one walks the streets of our great cities, or watches the life of our drawing-rooms or alleys—does not exist in the simple uniform condition of the South African Boer.

In our hurly-burly societies, in which the brothel with its female outcasts and the male prostitutes whose gold supports it are found side by side with men and women to whom sex relationships are already sacramental; in which a large mass of the community are still in that stage in which marriage itself is contracted mainly as the result of an arithmetical calculation, while, to another large and always growing section, it is a union based upon, and mainly consisting of, a psychic union, whose spontaneity constitutes its strength:—we in such societies are compelled hourly to discuss, if not audibly at least in our own minds, the right and wrong, the usefulness and non-usefulness of the sexual laws and customs of our societies; and we seek in vain to reduce them to a uniformity suitable to the wants of all. To us, as individuals and as societies, life presents itself as a series of problems, which have to be worked out and solved, if solved at all, by the individual for himself during the course of his life, and by our societies as wholes in the course of generations; and this is above all true with regard to matters of sex. For the Boer, on the other hand, in his quiescent and unchanging social condition, there is no such difficulty. With him, where generation has succeeded generation without being exposed to the action of any new forces, and where almost identical mental and material conditions have been brought to bear on every member of the society, there is of necessity almost absolute social homogeneity—and with homogeneity an absence of all those varied conditions which perplex us.

What was good for the Boer's father is generally good for himself, what is good for one man in his society is generally good for another; tradition, the enforcing of which for many of us is simply an endeavour to fit a child's shoe on a man's foot, or to force the fare of a cannibal down the throat of a civilized man—tradition is his safe and sure guide, and what all the folk about him do is also generally the right and wise thing for himself. Above all, on matters of sex he has no doubts, no difficulties, no perplexities: his curious little courtships, his matter of fact but rational and honourable marriages, his monetary institutions as they bear on sex, are all admirably suited to his mental and emotional condition; and without altering his intellectual outlook and his physical surroundings it would be impossible to improve on them.

If it be objected that our nineteenth-century disorganization on sexual matters, with its consequent enormous accumulation of suffering and friction, is but an indication of our active growth and the rapid development taking place at a hundred points in our social system—we fully allow it.

But it remains true that that harmony between the sexual institutions of a society and the highest wants and ideals of all its members, which constitutes the condition of perfect health, is known in the little Boer society (as it is in that of many other simple and stationary people)—and it is not known in nineteenth-century communities, though it may, and probably will, be to those of a later age. Sex and sex relationships are no more the causes of gigantic suffering and social evil among the Boers than food is the cause of colossal suffering to a man who gets the kind he needs.

Whenever the stationary condition of such a society as that of the primitive Boer is broken up, and he begins to grow, dislocation on sex matters must occur, with its consequent suffering, before he can attain to a new plane; but it must be allowed that the absence of this suffering and dislocation is one of the great advantages of his present condition.

Further, as we have said, the Boer's system of relations in matters of sex is just.

We know of few social conditions in which the duties and enjoyments of life are so equally divided between the sexes, none in which they are more so.