Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

"For we, to-day, O Oom and Tante, with our new-found mechanical inventions, and our accumulations of material goods, are like little children who have just been given a rattle, and who spring it, till it deafens themselves and every one else besides, and can hear nothing else. We are like little long-tailed monkeys, who having found a bag of sugar think that there is now nothing left in life but to sit round it and eat it till they die.

"We are like to the children of Israel, when they built themselves the golden calf and then danced about it, saying: 'Thou art the Lord our God, and there is none like unto thee! From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God, and thy years shall have no end!'—till a Moses, it may be, shall come, and smite it into powder: and of that powder, mingled with the waters of life, shall all the nations that worshipped drink, and they shall call it Marah. And then it may be that they will seek for a new God.

"We say it, well knowing the soft burst of laughter which will arise now to-day, when the door is not yet closed on the nineteenth century, and its ideals are yet dominating the men and women of the age—that the time may come when even men of the world, those who live in the present, who labour not for the future nor learn from the past, will recognize that man is a complex creature, and that material wealth satisfies only a moiety of his nature, and that material goods possessed in excess by one portion of the community and lacking wholly to the other, mean a condition of disease—that the time will come when men will profess it in order to be called sane; that the railway-train which brings the prostitute, the stock exchange, and the foes to the freedom of a people, into the heart of its land, had better for humanity have been the slowest ox-wagon crawling across the plains; and had it taken two million years to come, so much better for the nation and the world; that the value of a species of conveyance whether for men or goods depends entirely to mankind on the nature of what it brings; that even that Ark of the Covenant of the nineteenth century—a new railway run by a joint stock company—is worthy of adoration, or is not, entirely by the increased strength of body, width of sympathy, clearness of intellect and joy in life it tends to confer on the folks among whom it runs; that a submarine cable used to whisper lies from land to land, and stir up the hearts of people against people, and to urge on the powerful to attack the weak, is the devil's own tube and has a connection direct with Hell; that a daily paper, not based on an earnest determination to disseminate truth, is a cup of poison, sent round fresh every morning to debilitate the life of the people; that the man who from his place in the national assembly rises and states the increase in his nation's imports and exports as though he were describing its entire weal or woe, without consideration of the human suffering and degradation or joy and good it may have cost to produce them, or without calculation of the benefit or disease to be caused by their consumption—is a fool; that it is more disgrace to a land to have in it one hungry, work-crushed soul than to have no millionaire; when it shall be recognized that the greatest nation is not that which numbers most bodies, but most fully-grown free spirits, and fewest crushed and broken; that an empire over human flesh and lands, and not hearts, is an empire of disease; that a central power which cannot propel the blood of sympathy and a common fellowship to the remotest member of its group is on the path to cardiac failure and a sudden death.

"We know that thus to speak is to enter into the Holy of Holies of the nineteenth century, and therein to blaspheme. Nevertheless, O Oom and Tante, it is possible that the day is coming when the stock exchange and the share market, in which the men of this generation worship the Lord their God, may pass away as the gladiatorial shows of the Roman Empire and the rule of the Inquisition, so mighty and overpowering in their days, have passed: it may be that a new Telemachus will yet leap down into the arena where men traffic with the life-blood of the nations, and, torn to pieces by the howling crowd, it will yet be said by future generations, 'From that day there were held no more share markets after the old fashion!'

"For this nineteenth century is not the last century! Nor are its institutions the last institutions! Nor is its God the last God!

"Therefore, seeing that these things are so, O Oom and Tante, and that we know not what part of our nineteenth-century wares shall be consumed up as stubble, be cautious how you traffic with us. Do not barter your old seventeenth-century wares, poor and simple as they may be, for that which you may have to part with again the next day. The twentieth century is coming: and it may be that, before it has reached its close, it may be found nearer the seventeenth than the nineteenth.

"Remember the Jew smous's clock! There be many Jew smouses going up and down in this civilization of ours; and they deal in other things besides clocks. They will traffic with you for your land, your freedom, your independence, your very souls—for they hold that 'every man has his price!'—and they will give you in exchange that which will not wear—a gilt-lined robe, which, soon as you wear it, will eat the flesh of freedom from off your bones and lick up the blood of liberty within your veins. Therefore, beware how you deal with them! That little which you have, hold fast till you see what shall come to pass.

"The last Belshazzar's feast has not been held! Be careful that, when the finger appears writing on the wall, you be not found also sitting at that table.

"Hold fast a little while longer, we pray of you, by your old ideals, your old manners, your simple old-world life. We—South Africa—the world, have need of you!"

So, were it possible that our words should reach him, we would fain apostrophize our old-world Boer and his wife. For our fear indeed is, not that he will exhibit any incapacity for accepting nineteenth-century ideals, but that he may swallow them too readily; and that South Africa, whose backbone he forms, may also suffer from that curvature of the spine, brought on by an excessive addiction to luxury and an ill-distribution of wealth, from which certain other peoples are dying.