Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

I do not think, simple as such a book is, it need be necessarily quite without interest for any but the writer.

I myself should like to know, apart from what the learned historians have to say, and apart from the views of passing travellers who have lived a few years in the country, and who therefore have never seen its life below the surface—I should like to know just what one ordinary Chinaman feels and thinks, or does not feel and think, with regard to his native land at the end of the nineteenth century. I should like to know just what he sincerely thinks of its pig-tails and its tea plantations, what he feels to its scenery on the banks of the Yangtsekiang, and in its northern mountain regions, and exactly how its pagodas, and its Mongolian dynasty, and the position of its women, and its flowers, and even its stiff gardens, strike him. I should be interested to know just what he feels towards its complex peoples, and the foreigners; what he hopes for its future, and how he regards its past. His views might not always be correct, perhaps not often, but as long as they were sincerely his, set down to please no one and to grieve no one, but because they were his, they would have a certain interest for me. It would be the picture of only one John Chinaman—what he thought and felt towards his land, a purely personal document, but it might have a certain value!

Whatever value attaches to this little book is of this kind only. It is a personal document.

Had I the health to carry out my plans and to write somewhat in detail of what I think and feel with regard to our English folk in Africa, and above all of our Natives and their problems and difficulties, the little book might have had a certain rotundity; now it is a broken segment only. Nor should I publish it now were it not at the request of many friends; for I am unable adequately to revise even this segment.

There is also one insignificant matter I should like to notice. It has been said I love the African Boer. That is true. But it has been given as a reason for my doing so that I share his blood, and that is not true. One could not belong to a more virile folk, but I have no drop of Dutch blood.

My father was a South German, born in Würtemberg, who studied at Basel, and when only twenty-one years old came to London, where he married my mother, of purely English blood; and together with her came to Africa as a missionary about the year 1836.[1] My training was exclusively and strongly English. I did not begin learning any other language till I was eight and have never gained the complete mastery of any other. It is my mother speech and England is my mother land.

Neither do I owe it to early training that I value my fellow South Africans of Dutch descent. I started in life with as much insular prejudice and racial pride as it is given to any citizen who has never left the little Northern Island to possess. I cannot remember ever being exactly instructed in these matters by any one, rather, I suppose, I imbibed my view as boys coming to a town where there are two rival schools imbibe a prejudice towards the boys of the other school, without ever being definitely instructed on the matter. I cannot remember a time when I was not profoundly convinced of the superiority of the English, their government and their manners, over all other peoples.

One of my earliest memories is of walking up and down on the rocks behind the little Mission House in which I was born and making believe that I was Queen Victoria and that all the world belonged to me. That being the case, I ordered all the black people in South Africa to be collected and put into the desert of Sahara, and a wall built across Africa shutting it off; I then ordained that any black person returning south of that line should have his head cut off. I did not wish to make slaves of them, but I wished to put them where I need never see them, because I considered them ugly. I do not remember planning that Dutch South Africans should be put across the wall, but my objection to them was only a little less.

I cannot have been more than four years old when a Boer family outspanned their ox-wagon on the veld near our mission house. As I was walking past it a little girl of about my own age, wearing, like myself, a great white cotton kapje, climbed off the trap at the back of the wagon and came towards me holding out her hand. In it was a little fistful of dark-brown sugar, a treat to up-country children in the wilds where sweetmeats were rare. She held it out to me without saying a word. I was too polite to refuse to take it, but, as soon as I had gone a few steps, I opened my hand behind me and let it drop. To have eaten sugar that had been in the hand of a Boer child would have been absolutely impossible to me. Often, in later years, I have seen those two small figures standing there in the African afternoon sunshine in their great white kapjes, as in a way allegoric of the whole relation between the Anglo-Saxon and the Boer in South Africa.

It was about the same time that a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, but a Scotchman by descent, came to spend a night at our station. The accommodation of an up-country mission house is limited, and I had to give him up my bed. On the night following when bedtime came I inquired if fresh sheets had been put on my bed; on being told they had not and that the clergyman had only slept in them one night and I might well use them, I absolutely refused to get in. Nothing, I said, would ever induce me to sleep between sheets a Dutchman had slept between. It was in vain it was protested he was not a Dutchman though called a Dutch minister; I was resolute and passed the night on the outside of the quilt.