Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

To hold communion there with God."

—that which religious minds in all centuries and of all races have sought after, has been strangely forced on the African Boer by his silent solitary life amid vast man-unmodified aspects of nature. And with all that he may lack in other directions of knowledge and wisdom, of keenness and versatility, that which the conditions of his life had to teach him, he has learnt. Therefore, though his dogmatic theology is in no sense higher or different from that of others, his religion oftentimes lives when theirs is dead.

We are aware, it may be said, that all this is purely a misconception; that the man of unusual intellect seeks nature and solitude merely that his own large mental powers may unfold themselves unhindered; that what the saint, the philosopher, the poet, and the prophet find, they take with them; that to the mere bucolic mind the midnight sky studded with stars is but the covering of the plain where sheep feed; and that the most infinite sky over him when he off-saddles alone at midday in a vast plain is but that to which he looks up in order to find the time. But this is not so. The great analytical reasoner may find, labouring in his laboratory, the great thinker in his study, watching the processes of his own mind, may discover, that which the vast man-untouched processes of nature testify of; it is exactly on the simple purely receptive mind that the silence and solitude of vast unmodified natural surroundings have the most educative effect.

Driving on a hot summer's day in a cart across a great African plain, with the light pouring down on the brak bushes and karroo, till it seemed to shimmer out of them, the Boer who drove us was, as usual, silent. He was a man six feet in height, large-boned and powerful, with a still blue eye, an iron will, and indomitable persistency. Living in a remote part of the country, he seldom went to church more than once in the year, and could with great difficulty read a chapter in the Bible. During the years we had known him we had never heard him refer to anything more profound than his sheep and cattle, and the habits of tiger-leopards, upon which he was an authority. After driving about two hours, the horses' feet sinking into the sand and coming out again with a sucking sound, but no movement breaking the hot stillness, he looked round at us, with that peculiar shy glance which marks men who live much alone, and do not often try mentally to approach their fellow-men, and said slowly in the Taal: "There is something I have long wanted to ask you. You are learned. When you are alone in the veld like this, and the sun shines so on the bushes, does it ever seem to you that something speaks? It is not anything you hear with the ear, but it is as though you grew so small, so small, and the other so great. Then the little things at the house seem all nothing. Do you hear it, too—you who are so learned?"

We are aware of the guffaw of laughter which would greet such a statement from souls on the stock exchange, in drinking-bars and fashionable clubs, and perhaps the national assemblies where the representatives of civilized nations meet. This man, it would be said, had lived so much alone with nature that he had become a fool. If he had been fifteen years in the share market or the diplomatic service, and had lunched at his club and spent his evening at the theatre or the café chantant, he would never have felt himself or his affairs small, nor would he have perceived anything greater than himself. It will be said it was all ignorance and superstition.

We reply: "This may be so; but if it is, then burn your world's bibles, and destroy your world's temples, for that which the world's bibles were written to express and its temples built to symbolize is an 'ignorance and superstition.' Yet, before we accept your verdict finally, answer us these two things: Where were you and I eighty years ago? Where shall we be eighty years hence, when this throbbing hand that writes to-night is a handful of dust, and your mouth that smiles is quiet beneath six feet of earth? Answer these questions without 'ignorance and superstition,' and we, too, will allow that the man—who, in the presence of the vast life of nature which existed for ages before he was and will continue for millions after he has ceased to see, which waxes and wanes without regard of him or his ends—is a fool, when he feels himself less than a fine grain of sand in the mighty circle of that life in which we live and move and have our being and are continually sustained."

The day may come when, with changing conditions of life, the Boer will no more live in the presence of these large realities, and then his religion will be dead; whatever external form it may take.

It may be, that then he will have much of the learning of the schools, and his own material life will have become infinitely complex, and his knowledge how to govern the powers of nature for the gratification of his own instincts almost unlimited; he may have luxuries, comforts, amusements he knows not now—but it may not be so well with him.

It may be, the day will come when he shall rear for himself vast cities, and walk, with the kings that have been, upon their walls, crying, "Behold this is Babylon, my great city, which I have built"—and know not that the sands of the desert shall cover it, and the little shrew-mouse build her nest there.

And, if that day come, when the desert shall hold no more for him any burning bush, and no spot on earth be longer sacred to him; when, with increased external knowledge and material wealth, the little I grows always greater and greater for him, and the universe beyond less and less, then he will no longer fight so bravely on his kopjes or live so peacefully on his plains or fall asleep so quietly when the time comes to lie beneath the sand and bushes—and it will not be so well with him.