Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

It is by standing firmly and serenely by our own highest traditions of development, it is by wisely and generously seeking to understand him, and in the end by infecting him with all that is best and greatest in ourselves, not by selling our birthright for a mess of pottage, that the great and royal union of the two South African stems will be effected. It is not by the reckless bartering, on either side, of that which our convictions hold as best that any ennobling cementing between us can ever take place.

The seventeenth-century Boer has hardly less, perhaps much more, to teach us than we to teach him; let us each hold by our own till we have convinced and enlightened each other.

The one great lesson of a broad humanity, and the rights of man as man, which, amid fields of war, the European family has learnt in the last two hundred years, and which we, without any inherent virtue, have learnt from our fathers and imbibed from the life about us, we have to teach him. It is our contribution to the solution of the problem of our land; amid all the noise and hurry and fœtid decay which underlies much of our nineteenth-century civilization this knowledge is our great gain, and to betray ourselves on this matter is to rob our fellows of almost the only truly great and noble attribute we have to bring to our union, to which he brings much.

For the child of the seventeenth century, if he will but be true to his traditions and convictions, has much to bring to the union and to transmit to the people of the future. The seventeenth century, too, has its message for the nineteenth, a message which it needs not less than the seventeenth the nineteenth.

In the whirl and din of our material advancement, in the fierce struggle for external gains and progress, there is a side of life we have well nigh forgotten, and the Boer on his solitary South African plains has saved up a tradition we have forgotten and for need of which we may yet die. To a curious extent Boer and Englishman, if they will be faithful to their profoundest convictions, seem fitted to complete and complement each other's growth and make possible a people rarer than either might have produced alone.

While we bring to the Boer the doctrine of a higher humanity, the external literary culture which enlarges the power of the man, he has his own lessons for us. While we have set gold on a pedestal and dance till we are drunk around it like the Israelites about their calf, the Boer, nurtured in his primitive solitude, still knows there are things our god cannot give us, and that material luxury and wealth are not the beginning and end of life, that the man is not greater because his name can stir three millions in the bank, that the cut of a coat is an accident, and that a man sees God as nearly face to face from the front box of his wagon as from the steps of a queen's palace.

A broad, simple conception of human life and its relations, without varnish or finesse, is, if he remains true, his contribution. And if through what is still, in many houses, the impenetrable wall of the Taal, our cry could reach him, we would adjure him, "Hou maar vas, Oom Piet; hou maar vas, Tant' Annie! We have one great lesson to teach you, but you have more to teach us! We will not pander to the one weak spot in your soul, where the trouble and conflict of ages and of tradition has made a gangrene; but, if we hold out firmly and teach you our lesson, teach us yours. Do not let yourself be blinded and misled. All is not gold that glitters. Our trains and our large houses and our grand French clothes, they are all very well; but the greatest men the world ever knew trod the sand with bare feet or rode upon an ass; and a train is better than an ox-wagon only when it carries better men; rapid movement is an advantage only when we move towards beauty and truth; all motion is not advance, all change is not development, and a train full of soldiers bent upon an inhuman attack is a more ghastly sight than a squad of Indians with their scalping knives and arrows on their prairie horses, in so far as the one mode of progression is more effective than the other. The size of our houses and the labour of a thousand weary hands upon our walls do not necessarily give us the happiness you would think. Believe us, the kiss of the man on the lips of the woman he loves, and the joy of the mother over her babe, can be as intense in the little house your own hands built as in a mansion raised and decorated by the hands of others. When a man accumulates too much about him he gets buried under it. Our French clothes are very well; but do you know that in forty years time your portly figure in its black skirt and white kappie, if painted as they are to-day, would seem to the men of that time more things of beauty than the misproportioned productions of the fashions of the day. Hold but fast, Tant' Annie! Under that capacious waist of yours lie sleeping the ancestors of heroes of a larger, freer mould than would ever have sprung from you if the iron band of fashion had compressed you to a point. Hou maar vas! We have need of your simplicity to save us from the disease of our artificiality, we have need of your faith in the value of things that cannot be bought and sold, to save us from the terrible scepticism that is creeping over us, that perhaps there is nothing worth living for but success, and that success means wealth. Hou maar vas, Tant' Annie! Hou maar vas, Oom Piet! And if we will faithfully teach you our lesson and you will teach us yours, the day will come when we will build up between us a people of whom the world will not be ashamed. We will try to heal you of the disease that exists in your condition; we look to you to save us from the disease that battens on ours."

The question of the relation of Englishman and Boer differs from the question of the relation between Caucasian and African races in this, that, while our problem of relation to the Boer tends to simplify and finally to dissolve itself as the mere result of the course of time, the question of the relation of African and European races does not so tend to dissolve and solve itself.

When any two peoples inhabiting one country are so physically related that they have a powerful sexual attraction for each other, and that individuals brought face to face are unconscious of racial difference, the problem of union can be one of great moment, but cannot be one of permanent difficulty. Wait, do nothing, and in time, literally and not figuratively, love finds out the way, smoothes away difficulties, and makes of the two races one. Where races are so far removed that they are more or less sexually repellant to one another, that not difference of speech and training divide them, but marked differences of physical and mental conformation, of colour and build, then, if these two races are obliged to inhabit the same territory, the difficulty of arranging for their happy and useful interaction becomes steadily greater as time passes, and does not tend to solve itself.

All thoughtful trainers of young children are aware that there are certain faults or defects extremely troublesome and unpleasant for the moment, but over which no wise elder ever seriously troubles themselves; they are aware that time will heal these things and of necessity do away with them; while there are faults, for the moment far less inconvenient, which every wise trainer regards as of infinite import because they are exactly those which tend to grow with years, and the teacher or parent who should devote all his energies to training down the boisterous noise and roughness of childhood which must naturally cure themselves with adolescence, and regarded with indifference the germs of selfishness or cruelty, which tend to ripen only with adult years, would be universally regarded as unfit for his labour.