Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

When the Boer army arrived at Umgungunhlovo, Dingaan's kraal, they found still the bodies of their sixty-six comrades, which after eighteen months were yet untouched by beasts of prey, though dried and decayed. In Retief's leathern bag was found the paper signed with Dingaan's cross, giving them permission to inhabit the land of Natal, from the Drakensberg to the sea at Durban, from the Tugela River to the Umzimvobu.

In this land the Boers now settled down to plant their new Republic. At Pietermaritzburg, named after their dead leader, they built the church, standing to this day, which they had vowed to their God if He enabled them to conquer Dingaan; and they planted their seat of government there. But it was not long before the English Government at the Cape Colony, many hundred miles away, became uneasy at the success of the Boer in realizing his dream of founding an independent state, and there was issued a proclamation stating that Natal was henceforth to become a British territory; and soldiers were despatched to Natal to support this claim.

We know of few pages in the history of our English imperial expansion which fill us with more shame than this. We had already more land in the Colony than we could people, and these folk, at the cost of much life, had travelled far to find freedom from our rule. After a war, the most even and the most justifiable of all those of which South African history has any record between a black race and a white, the fore-trekkers had saved themselves from Dingaan's power; and when they had set about the realization of their dream and the foundation of their little republic, we stepped in. We had the ships, and the men, and the money, and we crushed their dream—for the moment.

At Durban, the seaport of the Republic, there was some sharp fighting between the soldiers we sent and the Republicans, but in their infant state the Republicans were wholly unable to compete in numbers or arms with the forces we could put in the field.

When the Commissioner sent by the English authorities to annex the land arrived at Pietermaritzburg, there were bitter and stormy scenes. Most of the inhabitants absolutely refused to remain under British rule. There was a mass meeting of women, whose leader, the ancient wife of Erasmus Smit, the old fore-trekkers' preacher, addressed the Commissioner for two hours,[68] painting a picture of all they had suffered in founding their new state and of the injustice done in robbing them of it.

At the end of the meeting, the women passed an unanimous resolution that rather than submit to English rule they would leave the land which, with so much blood and anguish, they had won. "We go across these mountains to freedom or to death," said the old woman, pointing toward the Drakensberg Mountains, which, through the names of Laing's Nek and Amajuba, have since become known to all the world.

Over these mountains almost the whole population of Natal passed, leaving only about three hundred families, the ancestors of the present ten thousand Boer inhabitants of Natal.

Those who passed over the Drakensberg Mountains joined the bodies of fore-trekkers who had remained on the north side of the mountains, and entered into that great region where no British flag had yet ever waved, which no Englishman had ever dreamed of claiming, and which was left almost desolate and uninhabited as the result of Mosilikatzi's[69] raids. Here they founded their republic, known as the Transvaal or South African Republic.

By the Sand River Convention, ratified by Sir George Cathcart in 1852, it was agreed that the English Government should not follow them into the territories north of the Vaal River; that their independence should be recognized; and that there should be no attempt on the part of the British Government to interfere with their government or management of their own affairs.

The most interesting point with regard to the South African Boer is his astonishing gift for forming new societies, and, as it were, instinctively creating for himself a new social structure, under whatever conditions he may find himself.