The Boer will pass away. In fifty years the plains of South Africa will know him no more. A mist gathers in the eye and a thickness in the throat when one realizes that the day will come when that figure which made for us so much of the charm and beauty of our African land will have passed away for ever! When no more will the great ox-wagon be drawn out to crawl slowly along the boundless plains, and Oom Piet sit on its front-box with his great felt-hat drawn low over his forehead, watching with keen still eye the wide veld, while Tante Annie looks out from behind him as they move forward on their long march in search of the Promised Land.
The little brown house on the plain, where the stranger met so stately and so kindly a welcome, and the young South African grew up between his parents' knees, loving South African plains and kopjes dearer than life—will have passed away for ever. It will have gone with the springbok and the koodoo and the eland and the lion, with all that made the charm and poetry of this South Africa of ours, that we have loved so. The old krantzes will still look down from the flat mountain-tops, and the blue sky stretch above all; but the Africa we have known will have gone for ever. Men will not know, then, what it was we loved so.
The Boer will pass away! He will pass away, not supplanted by the stranger and the alien, but by his own cultured, complex, many-sided, twentieth-century descendants.
If the men of that generation, bearing his blood in their veins, love freedom as he loved it and hold resolutely by the best attainable by them as he held by it, then the future of the great South African Nation, as far as its strain of Dutch blood is concerned, is assured.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ENGLISHMAN
In south Africa he bursts forth in all his multifarious shapes. Now he is the little liquor seller, braving full rivers and prohibitive legislation, with a wagon full of bad brandy made by the Boers, to sell to the natives and return to the Colony with a pile. Then he is a female missionary, buried in a remote native village to instruct heathen girls and women, with the enthusiasm of a St. Catherine. Over the way he is running guns and selling powder and shot which will be taken from the natives as soon as we have made our full gain in selling them. Now he is a cultured, sympathetic, freedom-loving man, talking humanity and consideration for the weaker classes; and then he is a Hart, tying up and flogging to death his black brothers. To sum him up, to say what he is and is not, would be as futile as to sum up the Jew: "We are anything, so please your worship; but we are a deal of that."
Probably no country in the world to-day gives more scope for individual action; therefore our extremes and intensities show themselves on a large scale. We are not weighted by traditions and the growths of an old society. If we speculate, pray, preach, or farm, we do it in our own fashion; the assertion which holds of one does not of another. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, one or two things may be postulated of us as a whole.
One is, that we in South Africa represent the modern nineteenth-century element, with high material development and complex wealth of ideas, as compared with the primitive savage and hardly less simple seventeenth-century Boer. Whatever is evil in modern civilization is ours, and also whatever is good.