Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

In 1828 it was finally enacted that not only was the African Taal, though the only language of almost the entire people, not to be used in law courts and public documents, but even petitions written in that language were no longer to be received by the English Government; and a little later, men speaking their native language, in the land of their birth, were not allowed to sit on juries unless they could speak English, a language they had no facilities for acquiring. Other causes worked in the same direction towards the embitterment of the minds of the people against English rule. Even the most generous act recorded of our English race was a cause of fresh suffering and wrongs. In 1830 the English people, guided by its best element, voted a sum of twenty million pounds for the liberation of the slaves throughout the English colonies and possessions; and a portion of this sum it was determined to expend in buying and setting free the slaves in South Africa.

It is a curious exemplification of the absolute impossibility of guiding wisely, justly, or successfully the affairs of a nation six thousand miles distant, which has again and again been exemplified in the history of South Africa, that this plan miscarried. An intention, which leaves Europe a white-garbed bird of peace and justice, too often turns up, after its six thousand miles' passage across the ocean, a black-winged harbinger of war and death.

The intention of the English folk who voted the sum was generous; in reality, owing to the blundering of officials and the cunning and rapacity of speculators (already the poisoners of English rule in South Africa), all went wrong. Very little of the money voted ever reached the hands of the people for whom it was intended. Men and women who had been in affluence before were everywhere reduced to absolute beggary; and they had the additional irritation of knowing that, while they were supposed to have been generously dealt with, they had received nothing. When one remembers that the bitterest war of this century was waged, only forty years ago, between the English-speaking folk of America, when one half of the community endeavoured to compel the other to relinquish its slaves, it is a matter of astonishment that the slave-owners of the Cape Colony so quietly gave up their claims, claims which till that time had been recognized by every nation on earth as wholly just and defensible.

But that which most embittered the hearts of the colonists was the cold indifference with which they were treated by their rulers, and the consciousness that they were regarded as a subject and inferior race. It is this consciousness which among a high-spirited people forms the bitterest dreg to the cup of sorrow put to the lips of a people governed by aliens, and one for which no material advantage can atone. In the eastern parts of the Cape Colony the feeling of bitterness became so intense that about the year 1836 large numbers of individuals determined to leave for ever the Colony and the homes which they had created, and to move northward to the regions yet untouched by the white man, where they might form for themselves new homes, and raise an independent state. It is this movement that is known in South African history as "The Great Trek."

Under such leaders as Carel Johannes Trichard, Andries Potgieter (the man after whom the town of Potchefstroom in the Transvaal is called), Gerrit Maritz, and Piet Mauritz Retief (after whom the town of Pietermaritzburg in Natal is named), the people gathered themselves together in families, men, women, and children, and, selling their farms and movable property for whatever they could get, in-spanned their great ox-wagons, and, taking with them such of their flocks and herds as they could remove, left their birthland for ever, and moved northward, sometimes in large bodies amounting to two hundred souls. Crossing the Orange River, which was then the boundary of the Cape Colony and beyond which the British control did not extend, they entered the country, which is now the Orange Free State, and crossing the Caledon River moved still northward towards what is now the Transvaal. Most of these men came from the eastern and midland districts of the Colony, and were the descendants of the men who had already resisted the rule of the Chartered Dutch East India Company and endeavoured to found their own republic in the midlands; men in whom the self-governing republican instinct, inherited with their Dutch blood and sucked in with their mother's milk, was strong as probably in no other race on earth, unless it be the Swiss. With the exception of Piet Retief, few, if any, of them were from the old districts of the Western Province. Among those in Andries Potgieter's trek was one Casper Krüger, from the Colesberg district of the Cape Colony. He took with him all his family, among them a lad, just over ten years of age, later known as Paul Krüger, President of the South African Republic.

Fully to describe the sufferings, struggles, and wanderings of these people, before they succeeded in founding their republic in the Transvaal, would far exceed the limit we have set ourselves. But to understand the Boer of to-day and the problems of to-day we must very rapidly glance at the march of the fore-trekkers.

At the time of the Boer trek, the great power in central and eastern South Africa was the Zulu nation. Under their renowned chief Tchaka, one of the most remarkable military geniuses of history, possessing to the full the vices and virtues of his type, the small Zulu tribe had become a great nation, dominating over and treading down other native tribes and races. Killing the older men and women and absorbing the youths and maidens into his own people, as he conquered tribe after tribe, he had by his wonderful military discipline produced a vast army of warriors, before whom no native people could stand. In 1828, Tchaka was assassinated by his half-brother Dingaan, who, without sharing his genius, possessed his fault as a ruthless destroyer of men. At the time of the Great Trek, Dingaan ruled over the Zulu nation and its dependencies in Natal and Zululand. In the Transvaal, a division of the Zulus, which had broken from Tchaka under their celebrated warrior-chief Umsiligaas, had, under the name of the Matabele, founded a great warrior nation, moulded after the ideal of Tchaka; they devastated the lands and destroyed the native tribes which resisted their power. When the first party of the fore-trekkers under Potgieter arrived in the northern districts of the Free State, the native tribes there welcomed them as a possible assistance against the inroads of the powerful Matabele. The whole country was in those days filled with game to an almost inconceivable extent, and it was largely on the fruit of the gun that the fore-trekkers lived. In 1836 their first great conflict with the Matabele under Umsiligaas took place. The fore-trekkers had spread themselves out in small parties, camping with their wagons near the Vaal River, and the Matabele attacked them wherever they were found in small numbers.

Near what is now known as Erasmus Drift on the Vaal River, a small party in five waggons was suddenly surrounded and several of the Boers were killed. Barend Liebenberg's little party was taken by surprise, and six men, two women, and four children, with twelve native servants were destroyed, and three white children, a boy and two girls, carried away captive. The great Matabele army then rapidly advanced to where the main body of the emigrants had encamped at a spot now known as Vechtkop, about twenty miles from the present village of Heilbron, in the Free State. Paul Krüger, then a child, can still remember the preparations for defence, and relates how the wagons were drawn up in a square, mimosa branches cut down and dragged to the wagons, women and young children helping in the labour; and how these branches were tied together by chains to fill in the spaces between the fore and back wheels of the wagons to prevent the Matabele warriors from crawling up between them.

Early in the morning of the 2nd of October the vast army of Umsiligaas was reported as approaching. Commandant Sarel Cilliers, who commanded the laager, found that he had in all, including boys of twelve and fourteen, forty men with whom to meet the vast horde, and the women and girls were busy smelting lead to mould bullets for the old-fashioned guns.

Cilliers and thirty-two of his men rode out to meet the enemy upon the open plain, where Matabele were formed into great squares upon Tchaka's system, and sat upon the ground, each man with his shield before him, as was always done preparatory to a great attack.