Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

"There are books, O Oom and Tante, other than the one great book which you took into the wilderness with you; books which so widen the soul of the man who makes them his that he might, when dying, well thank the power behind life that he had been made man, and lived to read them: but, do not believe that they are the products of any trade demand, or have any relation with the wealth and luxury of the modern world. Rich men may buy them and bind them in vellum, and put them in their libraries; but that gives them no hold upon them. In simplicity, and often in solitude and in poverty, the great souls of earth have secreted that immortal honey of thought on which the soul of humanity feeds. And whether it be the wisdom of the great Greek who lay in the Agora in his coarse mantle, instructing without pay the youth of Athens; or the vision of the Puritan Englishman which visited him in poverty, blindness, and old age; or the immortal dream of the Italian exile; or the deathless trill, sweeter than the song of his nightingales, of the young English apothecary who died in Rome; or the philosophy of the great German who lived for thirty years in a little house in the little street of a little German town, desiring no more; or the human cry from the heart of the Scotch ploughman; or the sweet musings of the modern American who communed with his God at Concord for many years—there is no message of beauty or wisdom which it has been given to the soul of men to propound for its fellows, for which luxury or material complexity of life were necessary. There is no message of wisdom which has ever been uttered which you may not as well absorb, seated on the kopje behind your square mud-house, as in the velvet armchair of a duke's palace, with lackeys waiting your commands and the spoils of the universe gathered round you. Two narrow shelves of dingily-bound books will contain more of the world's true intellectual pabulum than a man has time in sixty years to absorb and make his own; and he who at the door of his hut in the veld has spelt out the book of Job and the chants of Isaiah, till he knows them by heart, may have a firmer hold on the world's loftiest literature than if he had hired a librarian to tend his ten thousand costly volumes. Let no man deceive you, O Oom and Tante, nor make you believe that literature is a grand thing, only to be enjoyed by men eating several courses at dinner and dwelling in capacious houses, nor that it can only be produced by men who have consumed thousands of pounds of the world's labour. The world's literature has been produced in simplicity and in poverty, and often in suffering; and that which was good enough for the men who wrote, is good enough for the men who would absorb it. They lie, Tante, they lie, Oom, who tell you that literature is dependant on luxury, or the material complexity of life, for its existence, or is in any way related to it. It is from the barren heath, not from the drawing-room carpet, however many coloured, that the wild bee extracts its honey.

"Even that knowledge of the conditions of existence which governs the relation of matter with matter, and which yields what is called scientific knowledge, and in a manner seems to mark what is called modern civilization, has yet no causative relation with the greater part of its material phenomena. It does not depend in any way upon the enormous amount of material luxury and wealth concentrated in a few hands which marks our material civilization. It was the Chaldean shepherd watching his flocks at night under a sky as clear and white-studded with stars as that which bends over the Karroo, who first noted the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies. It was the chemist labouring amid the painful fumes of his laboratory with hands as stained by contact with matter as are your sons' to-day when they come in from shearing who first discovered those combinations of atom with the atom, and the reactions of substance on substance, which are letting us slowly a little way into the secret of nature's workshop. It is the mathematician, oblivious of all externals, pondering year after year in his dingy study, with his outlandish garb, who masters at last those laws of relation, the knowledge of which gives to man half his mastery over matter. It is not even the man with the padded shoulders and gilt ornaments upon his dress, who boasts so loudly to you of the superiority of his nineteenth-century weapons of death, who ever made one of them, or even understands how they were made: nor does he always know how to use them! It is not the gaudily dressed man or woman who travels in the first-class compartment of an express train, and looks with wondering contempt at the slow-rolling old ox-wagon which your grandfathers made, who ever made or comprehends one crank or one piston in all that wonderful creation of human labour and thought in which they are luxuriously borne along; or who could invent or shape even the round solid wheel of a primitive donkey-cart. These wondrous material objects have been the outcome of the work of the labouring brains of the ages, and of the toil of hard-handed mechanics more roughly clothed and simply fed than you who have toiled beneath the earth, and in the fetid workshops, that those things might be. Our little long-tailed African monkey of the bush, if he should see one of his captured brothers, gorgeously arrayed and dancing on a barrel-organ, might well think what a wonderful brain his brother must have, and how much superior to himself he must be in mechanical skill to have made all these things. But in truth we know he made neither the clothes he wears, nor the organ: nor can he even turn the handle; he only dances to the music another makes. It is the little wild monkey out in the woods who has to find food for himself, to know which nuts to eat and where to find them, and who can choose his own pool to drink and dabble his hands in, who has to exercise brain and arm. It is not the jackdaw with the peacock's feathers tied on to his tail, who flaunts them round so overpoweringly, on whom they ever grew.

"Let no man deceive you, O Oom and Tante; it is not the men and women revelling in a surfeit of the material products of the labour of others, and scorning you because you have them not, who ever made the very material civilization they boast of. It is not the people scorning your little simple work and life, who could do even that which you can do. It is not the woman lolling back in her double-springed carriage who has the knowledge or invention or perseverance to originate or manufacture one of all those endless materials which cling about her; it was the Hindoo with a cotton cloth about his loins toiling at his loom for twopence a day who made the diaphanous muslin she wears; and the loom on which it was woven and the thread of which it is made were invented by his swarthy-skinned ancestors generations ago. The fairy frill upon her petticoat was sewn on by a needle-girl between snatches of weak tea and bread and butter and fits of coughing. It is not the general, gorgeous in gold lace and trappings, who could make even the jacket he wears; the fine steel dust from the sword at his side cost the life of the man who made it; it is the general's to sport, nothing more. It is out of the labour of hands grimed and hard as yours, and the toils of brains more weary than yours have ever been, that this material civilization is built up. If you accept it for you and yours, know what it is you are accepting. Do not mistake the cat that laps the milk for the cow that gave it. When you open a wild bees' nest and find inside a Death's-head moth, you are never fool enough to believe it had anything to do with the making of the honey: you know it is there to feed and—destroy. O Oom, O Tante, do not mistake the Death's-head moths of our civilization for the makers of its honey, or for the honey itself.

"Art, literature, science, the mastery over material conditions, whatsoever there is in this nineteenth-century civilization that strengthens the arm, or widens the heart, and broadens the intellect, and makes fuller the joy of life—extract it and make it yours.

"In our nineteenth-century civilization there is a little kernel of things rare and good and great, that have come down to us through the centuries, and that brave souls of labour have added their little quota of matter to even in our day. If you must crack the nut of our nineteenth-century civilization, we pray of you eat only this little kernel and throw away the great painted shell. For God's sake, do not try to eat the shell and throw away the kernel.

"You know, O my Oom and Tante, that, when the Jew smouses go round the country selling their goods, they sometimes sell to you clocks that glitter like gold; and you give for them your best sheep and oxen. But, when you take them to be tested by the town jeweller, you find they are not gold, but tin, gilt with brass; and they will not go.

"There is much, O Oom and Tante, in our civilization that is like to the Jew smous's clock! We warn you, be careful how you exchange your good old African wares for our modern merchandise. There is much brummagem about.

"For, believe us, Oom and Tante, there are some of us who have travelled the world round; we have seen and handled this thing, called nineteenth-century civilization. We have lived in vast cities, a few unconsidered streets in which contain as many souls as your whole land. We have seen half their population labouring continually without sunlight or fresh air, and, by a labour that knows no end, producing material things they never touch. We have seen white-faced children, who shall be the thinking, labouring, fighting men and women when we shall be in our graves, suck their white crusts dipped in tea, and look up at us with famished eyes: we have seen old men, after a long life of toil with no fireside to sit by, creep into the cold shadow of the workhouse, to die there. And we have seen also other sides of nineteenth-century civilization. We have been in the houses that are palaces, which all the world labours to make full and fair; we have pierced to their centres, and found there fair women surrounded by all earth yields, wearing silks which the Indian made for twopence a day, with which he bought a handful of rice and melted butter to keep him alive, and laces bending over which human eyes grew dim, and beside them in delicate cups stood tea which Tamil women near their hour of labour may have plucked with quivering fingers; and they have sat up on their sofas and looked at us with weary eyes, and asked, 'Is life worth living?' We have watched the fevered faces of men in the world's great stock exchanges, till pity seized us, and we could have cried: 'Is there no antifebrile that will slow this pulse and give these souls rest and peace?' We have stood at Monte Carlo, and seen prince and millionaire throw down coin as though it were not the life-blood of the peoples. We have seen lock-hospitals and the men and women that are in them, and also those who fill it but never come there; we have seen the parade, where human slaughter hides the dirt and ugliness of its trade behind plumes and gilt: we have seen the ballroom and the regal procession. We have seen, on the other hand, what is fair and beautiful in art and wonderful in science; we have seen brave and rare spirits, even amid the rush and dross of our civilization, walking peacefully on their own lofty little path, absorbing little, and imparting much. Yet, believe us, that in the still night we lie awake, and all that we have seen rises up as in a picture before us,—from Ratcliffe Highway with its drunken sailors and hopeless women, to Monte Carlo with its princes and prostitutes; from the Champs Elysées to the Karoo; from Grosvenor Square to Bethnal Green,—there yet rises up no picture of life more healthful and full of promise for the future, more satisfying to the whole nature of man on earth, than yours in the wide plains of South Africa. We know all its deficiencies, its lack of a certain variety, the absence of certain brilliant elements which the human spirit may feed on elsewhere; and, yet, it rises up before us as something wholly strong, and virile, and full of promise. There are even times when we have felt we would rather be the little naked Kaffir children who play, fat and shining, with the kids on your kraal walls in the African sunshine than be most of the modern men and women we have known; for the life is more than meat and the body than raiment.

"Hold fast, Tante! Hold fast, Oom! You have much to lose. Be careful how you exchange it. Cling to your old manners, your old faiths, your free, strong lives, till you know what you are bartering them for.

"Tante, dear Tante, be not too anxious to change your old, straight, black skirt for the never-ceasing vagaries of modern fashion, that sap at the life of the modern woman as an open running tumour saps at the strength of a body. Do not be too anxious to change, for a pile of gauze or straw and textile flowers, that old black kappie of yours, that has shielded you for so many generations from the African sun and the African winds, in peace and in war, on kopje and on plain.