Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

The old race-feud attitude of the farming population, whether Dutch or English, toward the native, embittered by the memory and tradition of old wars and early struggles, will tend to die out, and even now is softened by personal relations; the attitude of the employer towards his civilized native domestic has in it little that is detrimental to either, and suggests in itself no great coming evil. But the financial attitude is one which will increase in its importance and in the virulence of its evil effects with every year that passes. The small cloud upon the horizon, to-day no bigger than a man's hand, will in forty years have overspread the whole of our African sky, unless some great and at present unforeseen revolution should occur. It is upon the skill with which white man and black man combine to avert the threatened evil, that the fate of Africa in the middle of next century will depend. It may be easy to break down and demoralize our great, and at present noble, Bantu races; but it may be very hard ever to build them up again.

For the moment the men holding the purely financial attitude towards the native happen mainly to be English or Jewish foreigners; but there is really nothing racial in this attitude. Were the Hollander or the Italian head of a great gold-mining, railway-building, or diamond syndicate, there is not the very slightest reason to suppose that he would regard the native South African less purely as a "commercial asset" than his brother, the English financier, does.

The more profoundly one studies the question of the relations of the white man to the black in South Africa, the more clear it becomes that the determining factor in that relation is something far other and deeper than the mere fact that the white man belongs to this or that European variety.

Fourthly, and finally:—There is the attitude of a body of persons, small in number, of no invariable occupation, sex, nationality or creed, but gathered from every part of the white community. So small in number is this body of persons holding this attitude, that again and again have men and women belonging to it felt inclined to draw aside, and in bitterness of spirit to cry with the ancient Hebrew at the door of his cave: "I, only I, am left." Yet this body has never been wholly extinct in South Africa, and, we believe, never will be. As we hope later to deal exhaustively with the aims and attitude of this section, it is not now necessary to do more than passingly to glance at them.

This attitude cannot be better summed up than by saying that it is the extreme antithesis to the financial attitude. The man compelled by his mental organization to take this view is of necessity obliged to regard the native not merely as a means to an end, but as an end in himself. Consistently with his whole view of life, he cannot regard the native merely as a "commercial asset"; he is compelled to apply to him the categorical imperative: "Deal with thy fellow man as, wert thou in his place, thou wouldst have him deal with thee." He does not write up as the motto which is to govern all the relations of black men with white: "Cheap labour," but rather: "Noblesse oblige." He is compelled always to see before him the moral fact that, if the native be his equal in mental power and moral vigour, his place is beside him; but, if the African native be not his equal in mental power and moral vigour, then there rests upon him the mighty obligation of all strength towards weakness, of all wisdom towards ignorance, of the God towards the man: "Rank confers obligation."

To the man holding this view the African native always presents himself as the little dark brother of the great family-human, who stands looking wistfully through the open door into the great hall of the nineteenth-century civilization in which we fair-skinned Aryans disport ourselves; and we are compelled to go to the door and say: "Come in, little brother, come in; there are many better things out there in the open where you have been than we have here; yet, if you must enter, give us your hand, and we will try to show you what in this great carnival of ours is best, and what most to fear. Walk in, little brother, this hall was built for the sons of the children of man."

It is manifest that men holding such a view must ever be in deadly conflict with men holding the financial view. The future of South Africa depends largely on the result of this struggle. If the financial attitude predominate absolutely, and the native be dispossessed of his land by wars and the skilfully devised legislation, which, breaking up his tribal tenure everywhere, throws him and his lands entirely into the hands of the financial speculator, and if low wages at the same time deprive him of the means of education, he must become a helot, having no stake in the general welfare of the land of his birth—always its menace, and at length its downfall.

If the other attitude prevail to any large extent, and the men holding it are strong enough to set their mark on legislation and institutions, the native may morally and intellectually survive the shock (as he certainly will physically) of sudden transplantation from his moral and social atmosphere into ours. He may grasp what is great in our civilization along with its evils and may yet become the most valuable element and the ablest defender of a social organization in which he has much at stake. But even were this not so, the stern demands of human obligation towards human would yet compel an uncompromising justice towards him.

It will be obvious, to any person skilled in the study of human nature, that persons, compelled by their mental organization to assume this attitude towards the African native races, are not of necessity of any particular European race, sex, or social condition. In the past some of the men who have the most courageously and persistently upheld this attitude have been Englishmen. More notable than all was Sir George Grey, most gifted and most farseeing of all the Colonial Governors whom England has ever sent out, a man of whose type it would appear a country can only produce once in a century. There has also been Sir William Porter, a great Irishman, whose name still recalls noble ideals and generous performance to South African hearts, and who during his stay exemplified the fact that the greatest gift which the old European lands can send the new is one of their great sons, a man with a heart large enough to be able to wrap itself about the people and institutions and things in a new world, and, through loving, to comprehend them. Another man who in the past has been noted for this attitude was Saul Solomon, a man of brilliant gifts, said to be of Jewish extraction, who through a long life amid endless difficulties fought an heroic battle and never fell from the side of justice and generosity towards the African native, and who has left a permanent mark on the legislation of South Africa.

On the other hand, were we called upon at the present day to mention the names of two public men who might be counted always to make their stand and raise their voice where any action of injustice or repression towards the native was concerned, we should give the names of two men of purely Boer extraction, with no drop of English blood in their veins. If during the coming century South Africa is to be preserved from that doom which we sometimes see hovering in the dim future before her; if her native races are to be transformed from dumb brooding enemies, borne within her bosom, to citizens who shall be the joy and strength of her commonwealth, it will not be through the action of Dutchmen or Englishmen alone; but of brave souls irrespective of all descent—"God's-Dutchman" and "God's-Englishman"—hand in hand.