Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

The complete failure to grasp this aspect of our South African problem leads to much of the inability in other lands to comprehend the South African situation as a whole.

Thus, it is often said, "Why should the speculator, monopolist, and millionaire loom so large in South African life? Why should he be so much more of a bugbear and threaten all free political and social institutions in South Africa in so much greater a degree than in other lands where he also exists?"

Our answer is, that, wherever in Europe or America the great millionaire and monopolist, Jewish or Christian, is found, with the pluto-aristocratic speculators and shareholders who draw their wealth through him, there also is found a great equipoise to their powers of exaction or aggression in the great more or less organized masses of the working classes. The limits are very sharply set, beyond which the greatest Jew or Christian speculators backed by the most powerful princes or plutocracy cannot go. We have no such counterpoise in South Africa. Owing to the difference of colour and race, our great labouring class dare not organize itself and use its strength; and we dare not organize and use it, for fear of awakening the baneful flames of racial antagonism. South Africa is the heaven of the Speculator, the Capitalist and Monopolist. Here, alone, the opposing forces which meet him in every European and civilized country do not exist.

The labour of resisting his endeavours to gain possession of the whole mineral and landed wealth of the country and its public works, and with them the exclusive control of the political machinery, lies with the necessarily small middle class section of the community, mainly farmers and small landed proprietors with a handful of skilled workmen. These have not only to act for themselves, but for the entire labouring class, which, on account of its difference in race and colour from the rest of the community, cannot act for itself.

Any one who has given thought to the study of modern social phenomena will understand at once how enormously our labour and racial problem, being interlaced in this way, complicates our whole social condition, and how almost helpless it throws South Africa into the hands of the Jew or Christian foreign speculator. Let us give a concrete example. In a town called Kimberley there is the richest diamond mine in the earth, once the property of South Africans and belonging to multitudes of them, but now fallen into the hands of a powerful syndicate of Jews, Englishmen, and others, who, with the exception of a couple of South Africans, all reside wholly or mainly out of South Africa, and whose power is so enormous that they are able, by a mere expression of their will, to return eight or ten men to the Cape Parliament, irrespective of the wishes of the community. The action of this powerful syndicate has long formed a source of disease and corruption in South African public and social life, and the question is often asked, why the working men and other inhabitants of Kimberley and such places as the company dominates submit to this dictation? It is not so, as is sometimes supposed, because the skilled workmen and overseers in the great company are inferior to their compatriots in Europe in their love of freedom or independence; for they are, on the whole, picked men, and many of them are strongly democratic and freedom-loving; it is certainly not because the inhabitants of Kimberley are more indifferent to their manhood, or more willing to deliver up their right to exercise the franchise into the hands of a small knot of Jews and Speculators than other men; but because the forces opposed to them are so overpowering compared to their own that they feel crushed.

Were the thousands of working men labouring in the mines white and not black, and could they freely combine with the skilled European overseers and the townsmen, the monopoly of the power would be snapped in twenty-four hours. They would refuse to go into compounds, they would demand higher wages and the right to spend them where they pleased, and to vote for their own representatives, and the power for evil of the great company would be broken.

But the bulk of the workmen being black, and any attempt to organize or combine them being at once met with the cry "Black-men combining," the handful of skilled English workmen and townsmen are powerless.

Our situation is very grave, and differs radically for the worse from that of all other lands where kindred problems have to be faced. We have nothing to fall back upon but the fierce and indomitable love of freedom in a certain section of our farming population.

If it should be possible for the international Speculator and Capitalist to carry out his dream, to break down the autonomy of the different African States, each one of which is a kind of redoubt behind which our African freedom is ensconsed, and, crushing us into one structureless whole, to introduce "a uniform native policy," dispossessing the natives wholly everywhere of their lands by means of labour, taxes and other devices, and bringing them down to the lowest wages on which life can be sustained; then, when we shall have inured the Bantu to the evils of our civilization, its drinking bars and its brothels, but have left him no means of attaining to the higher forms of knowledge or the fields of skilled labour, then we shall be left with a great, blind, stupefied Sampson in our midst who will assuredly some day stretch out his mighty much-wronged arms, and bring down upon our descendants the social structure which we are to-day with so much labour attempting to rear. Our gold and diamond mines may by that time be exhausted, and Jew and Speculator, and foreign Shareholder will long have carried off their gains and be here no more to feel the shock. Upon us whose portion of earth to inhabit this land is, and upon our descendants, will fall the blow.

This question of the relation between the foreign Speculator, Capitalist, and Shareholding class, and the black labouring class, is the very core within the core, and the kernel within the kernel, of the South African problem.