Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

A great crowd of people stood about, hoping and feeling convinced, even to the last moment, that a reprieve would come. Colonel Cuyler with three hundred soldiers guarded the scaffold from the people. The men asked to be allowed to sing a hymn before they mounted. Their voices were firm and clear. They appeared perfectly resigned. No reprieve came. There was a moment of awful silence in the crowd as the drop fell. But the scaffold was not strong enough to bear the weight of the bodies of the five powerful men; it broke, and the men, half strangled, were thrown to the earth. Then a wild and passionate cry arose from the people; wives, mothers, sisters, and relatives of the condemned men cried, as they rushed toward the gallows, that God Himself had intervened, and the men given back to them. It was not to be. As soon as they had recovered consciousness, the gallows were repaired and the men were forced to remount; the three hundred soldiers guarded the scaffold, and the work was done. A deep, low murmur is said to have risen from the crowd as it was completed.

The relations of the dead men asked for the bodies, but were refused; an order having been given that they should be buried under the gallows.[66] So came to an end the day of Slachter's Nek—the worst day's work for England that up to recent times has yet been done in South Africa. Certainly the Governor was within the letter of the law. Technically speaking, nations have recognized that any body of persons strong enough to resist by force the mastership over any strip of the earth's surface and over the individuals inhabiting it, may, if these individuals oppose the will of the stronger, be termed rebels, and if they seek to resist by force be hanged. But there are other modes of regarding life than the technical. England, without the consent of these men, had taken over their land nine years before—a land which they and their fathers, and not the Dutch Government or the East India Company, had won from the wilderness and peopled. They were a small section of the population, and they had taken no single life in all their uprising (it has not even been stated that the shots fired by Bezuidenhout and his wife grazed any of the Hottentots!)

Had Lord Charles Somerset exercised his prerogative and extended mercy to these five men, he would have done more to consolidate the English rule in South Africa than, had he been able to introduce two hundred thousand men, he would have been able to effect. In the lives of English soldiers alone, England has probably paid at the rate of over a thousand a head for each man hanged; and if she could that day have purchased the necks of those five Boers at ten millions each, they would have been cheaply bought.

It is a curious property of blood shed on the scaffold for political offences that it does not dry up.

Blood falling on the battlefield sinks into the earth; it may take a generation, or it may take two, or more, for it wholly to disappear, but it is marvellous how the memory of even the most bloody conflict, between equally armed foes, does, as generations pass, fade.

But blood shed on a scaffold is always fresh. The scaffold may be taken down, the bodies buried, but in the memory of the people it glows redder and redder, and with each generation it is new-shed; it sanctifies, sacrificially, the cause it marked. It may be questioned whether anywhere in the history of nations, blood, judicially shed for political purposes, whether the actual means were rifle-bullet, axe, rope, or the slow anguish of long imprisonment, has ever really aided the cause in which it was shed. It appears even quite possible that if Charles the First had been killed on the battlefield instead of being beheaded, there might have been no Restoration in England.

The African people dispersed quietly and went back to their farms; but the picture of Slachter's Nek was engraved in the national heart.

After this blunder, Lord Charles Somerset remained in Africa for some years. He was at last recalled, not on the ground of his treatment of the old inhabitants, but in answer to the complaints of a few newly arrived English colonists, by whom he was charged with corruption and oppression.

Burke had promised to move for his impeachment, but his wealth and rank protected him (he was an elder brother of the Lord Raglan afterwards so notorious for his conduct of the Crimean War), and he died at Brighton in the year 1831.

But his work lived on, and, in addition to other causes, helped to produce that bitterness in the hearts of South Africans which led to that important movement known in South African history as the Great Trek.