Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

These trivial facts are not wholly without interest as showing the possible mental attitude of the members of one society towards each other if divided by race; and they will, I think, serve to show that whatever sympathy I have felt with my fellow South Africans of other races is not the result of early bias or training.

I remember it as often a subject of thought within myself at this time, why God had made us, the English, so superior to all other races, and, while feeling it was very nice to belong to the best people on earth, having yet a vague feeling that it was not quite just of God to have made us so much better than all the other nations. I have only to return to the experiences of my early infancy to know what the most fully developed Jingoism means.

Later on, my feeling for the Boer changed, as did, later yet, my feeling towards the native races; but this was not the result of any training, but simply of an increased knowledge.

When I was six years old, on a long journey from one part of South Africa to another, our wagon outspanned at a Boer's farm and we spent a day and a night there. I must often have visited a Boer farm-house before, but this visit made a curiously deep impression on me, from which I date the beginning of that consciousness of a certain political charm about the Boer and his life, which has never left me. The orange trees before the door, the first I had ever seen, with their sweet-scented leaves; the great clean, bare "voorhuis" (front room) with its mud floors and its chairs and sofa with reimpje[2] seats; the good old mother with her good-natured smile, sitting in her elbow chair, with her coffee table at her side and her feet on a stove; the little shy children, who, as I could not speak Dutch nor they English, brought me silently their little toys and patchwork to look at and who were so anxious to be friendly (some of these children are now, I believe, languishing as political prisoners in English prisons!); the strange cool stillness of the air next morning when we rose at dawn to continue our journey; the bleating of the sheep in the kraals, where the farmer's sons had already gone to count them out; the great blue mountain behind the house, with the still deep blue shadow beneath the krantzes[3] on its top; and the farm-house becoming a small white speck with the orange trees before the door as our wagon crept away in the early light—all this made a profound impression on me; and I am conscious that I began to feel even then that charm which the still, free, simple life of the Boer on his land has since had for me.

Living in another part of Africa, three years later, it was my duty every morning to go to a Boer farm-house, about a mile off, to fetch milk. Not more pleasant in my memory is the scent of the quince hedges I had to pass, or the rushing between its stepping-stones of the river I had to cross, than of the little daub-and-wattle house of two rooms, with its mud floors and green windows, with the good old mother, very stout, sitting always in her elbow-chair beside the little coffee-table however early I came, and the great buxom daughters bustling about, while the little bare-foot children ran off to the kraal with my pail to fill it. They were the poorest class of by-woners (persons who have no land of their own and live on the land of others), and the little front room with its mud floor was often very full of flies in the summer, but the African sunshine fell across the floor from one open door to the other; and the good old mother used to make me sit on the stove at her feet, and smiled good-temperedly at my shy attempts to answer her questions in Dutch, of which I could at that time speak only a few broken words; and sometimes she gave me a carnation or a bit of pietercillie from her garden. The little house with its inhabitants were all objects of interest and sympathy to me. But I am not at all sure that, small shy person that I was, I did not even then still regard myself as a person belonging to a quite superior race, surveying them as it were from a height with sympathetic interest.

It was at this time that I began to study the history of the Boers and the story of Slachters Nek, of the valiant stand made by Bezuidenhout's wife; and the sufferings and wrongs of the old Fore-trekkers were often in my thoughts. I was convinced that, had I lived at the time of Slachters Nek, I would have saved the lives of those five men, even at the risk of my own; I would have gone to the Governor, I would have moved heaven and earth, I would have been a kind of Paladin redressing the wrongs of the Boer, and I almost regretted that I had not been born in those dark times that I might have lived for, and if necessary have died for, him. But still I did not really know the Boer; he was only a far-off object of pity and sympathy.

It was some years later that I was first thrown into close personal contact with the South African Boer.

For five years I lived among them as a teacher on their farms, sometimes among the more cultured, and sometimes among the more primitive but not one whit less lovable and intelligent, class. Sometimes for eighteen months I did not see an English face and was brought into the closest mental contact with them which is possible—the mental contact between teacher and taught. Watching them in all the vicissitudes of life, from birth to marriage and death, I learnt to love the Boer, but more, I learnt to admire him. I learnt that in the African Boer we have one of the most intellectually virile and dominant races the world has seen; a people who beneath a calm and almost stolid surface hide the intensest passions and the most indomitable resolution. Among the peoples of Europe I have been thrown into contact with, the Swiss and the Tyrolese of remote Alpine villages most resemble the African Boer; but there is a certain quiet but high-spirited indomitableness and an unlimited power of self-control which is characteristic of the average Boer man and above all the average Boer woman, which I have not met with in an equal degree in any other races, though individuals in all races may be found possessing it, and certain Boers of course have it not.

It has been asked me more than once, on what ground I based the statement made before the present war began, in papers futilely written in the hope of preventing it, that, if England made war on the Republics, she would have to send out at least one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers to attack these small states, and that even then there was a possibility that the red African mier-kat might ultimately creep back into its hole in the red African earth, torn and bleeding, but alive—it has been asked how I came to form this opinion, when military authorities, keen financiers and politicians held that at most twenty thousand soldiers and a few months would see the Republics crushed.

To this I have only one answer. I based my statement on my knowledge of the character of the Boer men, but above all of the Boer women. The measure of its women is ultimately the measure of any people's strength and resistile power. With the mother of the Gracchi, the Roman Republic in its might and vitality: with the effete Roman woman of a later period, the decadent Empire. The heart of the Boer woman is the true citadel of her people; and while that remains unbroken, though every city be taken and every village and farm-house burnt, the people is yet to crush.