Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

I have been blamed for an excessive love of the race, and an unwillingness to see its faults: but I hardly think this is true.

The Boer has to the full the defects of his qualities; that scintillating intellectual brilliance and versatility, so common and so charming in the Frenchman and the Irishman, the Boer, even when highly cultured, seldom has: he is deep and strong rather than broad and brilliant: indomitable when he does act, it takes much to rouse him into action; he is slow and often heavy. And the Boer race has its Judases, as all other races have; nor do I know of a more sorrowful sight than the descendant of the old Boer, speaking English often with so foreign an accent as to be laughable, yet playing the part of the extreme Anglo-Saxon; losing thereby the charms of the Boer without attaining to the magnificent virtues which are characteristic of the best Englishman. But these persons are fortunately rare; and behind them lies the great, solid, self-respecting mass of the Dutch South African people.

I do not appraise, as has been said, the Boer as higher or more valuable than other human varieties. A dogmatic statement as to the respective values of human varieties, or even of races, has always appeared to me, since I passed out of my infantile state of ignorance, as impossible. Each race has its virtues and the deficiencies which are complemental to its virtues, and the loss of any one race would be to me the falling of a star from the human galaxy.

When one travels in Italy and sees its harmoniously featured people, and views that plastic art which the Italian alone has given the world in many of its noblest forms, and realizes the vast debt under which all the world rests to the Italian race for its influence on the fourteenth-century renaissance, and remembers the list of the mighty dead from Michael Angelo to Dante, one so considering the land and its people is inclined to say that it would be well to barter any folk to preserve Italy and her gifts to humanity. But when one crosses the Alps and enters quaint German villages with their simple folk and treads on the soil which was the birth-land of the Goethes and Kants and Beethovens and Luthers, who are the world's wealth as well as Germany's, when one considers that vast army of intellectual labourers who have made the name German synonymous with the search after knowledge and truth for truth's sake; when one walks through the Rhine provinces with their sunshine, their vines, and their music, and their stalwart men and fair-faced women, with their German truth of heart, then it may be forgiven one who has any German blood in his veins if he feels inclined to seize a flag as children do and walk about waving it and crying, "I am a German! This is my Fatherland!"

But should one cross the Rhine and live among that folk on the other side, so old in their civilization, so keenly alive, who have suffered in the search for freedom, and are so capable of abandoning all for a lofty ideal; when one considers Paris, that queen among the cities in beauty and in tragedy, her people scintillating with intellect and an opalescent life always varying, then one is inclined to say, "Take all, but leave us France, the right eye of the world!"

And yet, should one cross to little Switzerland and little Holland, where one knows one stands on ground made sacred in past ages as the battle-ground where mighty empires which sought to crush freedom were repelled, and studies that virile folk, one is inclined to exclaim, "There would be nothing more grand than to belong to one of these small heroic great peoples," and one thanks the gods they have existed.

Yet, further, if one turns to the northern peninsulas where in their greatest purity are to be found our fair northern races, and where the sons of the Sea Kings seem to have retained into these later times among their fjords and frozen forests much of the charm and freshness which we dream of as belonging to our own old northern ancestors, a charm which lives for ever in their great northern Saga, the loftiest song of battle and the deepest of the love of man and woman that the world has heard, one is not surprised that sons of Scandinavia send out into the world to-day works of genius which conquer its thought as their forefathers conquered the bodies of the men of the ancient world; one feels that, were the Scandinavian race obliterated, a northern aurora would have faded.[4]

While, if one turns one's eyes to the great northland in whose people Europe and Asia mingle, and studies their strangely virile and intense literature and their characters, in which the lion and the lamb are so strangely blended, and men willing to die rather than exercise any form of force towards their fellows are found side by side with those who know of no governing power but the knout; when one watches this great, strange, strong, gentle, fierce folk, so yet unexhausted, one is strangely drawn towards it and compelled to recognize that the Russian is not merely physically but intellectually one of the mighty modifying forces of the future.

So, if one crosses the sea to the little island of fogs and mists, it may be forgiven to one who has its people's blood in his veins, if, having well studied its people in their past and their present, their heights and their depths, he should say, as the Jew has a right to say of his nation—"If we are the worst of humanity, we are also of its best!" For, like the Jew, if we English have sordid racial vices we have magnificent virtues; and we resemble him in this, that those very vices which most mark our national character and by which we are known throughout the earth, are the very qualities of which our greatest men and our noblest elements are the negation. As the Jew, marked everywhere by his devotion to material gain and the thirst for wealth, has yet, in his loftiest men of genius, realized the height of spirituality and the negation of all subjection to the sensuous; so we—the English folk, known throughout the world for our greed of power and pelf, and as tending always to cloak our self-seeking from our own eyes and from that of the world with a mantle of assumed virtue: a tendency which has made the name of England synonymous with hypocrisy and perfidy throughout the world—yet possess, in our greatest men and our ethically developed class, a body of individuals whose lives and ideals are a superb opposition to these qualities. Beside the sordid gold-seeker, financial speculator, land grabber and buccaneer, stand our Shelley and our Milton; beside the millions who use philanthropy as a means of self-gratification and a cloak to greed and ambition, are thousands with whom it is a heroic reality. Without any national prejudice may one not say that no people in the world ever possessed a section more determined to see things nakedly as they are, and, whether personally or nationally, to prefer justice to self-interest, than a section of our English people? Have there ever been statesmen in any land who have more fearlessly denounced injustice and oppression, not merely when exercised towards their own nation but by it, than Burke and Chatham when they raised their voices to oppose George the Third supported by the bulk of the English nation in their attempt to crush freedom in America? If no nation has more misrepresented, neglected and persecuted its sons of light, no nation has had more of them to persecute. If Dante's dream were a reality, mayhap we should find in that lowest hell, among the sad multitudes walking round continually with iron weights upon their heads, that every third man was an Englishman; but we should also scale to no heaven so high that in the highest circle among the brightest spirits we should not find the sons and daughters of the damp little isle. If ten righteous would have saved a city once, shall not a nation be saved by ten millions? Shall it not be counted for righteousness to our stock-jobbers and priests and politicians, who, tongue buried in cheek, talk of spreading Christianity and enlightenment, when he means exploitation and destruction, that he belongs to a race thousands of whose men and women do sincerely desire those things which he affects? When the great Jew raised over his native city his mighty cry of—"O Jerusalem"—was it not proved by that very cry itself that sons of light were born even in her degenerate bosom? Was it not something that she gave birth to the prophets whom she killed and stoned?

It may be allowed any man who has English blood in his veins to feel that he can never fall in the gulf of insincerity and egoism but he shall have millions of his fellow countrymen about him, but also that there are no heights of sincerity and humanity towards which he may aspire which thousands of his race have not attained; that he belongs to a branch of the human race which, if it has given birth to some of the most sordid and crumpled of human blooms, has also borne on it the fairest of fruit.