Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

Yet such often appears to be our action in South Africa. To render smooth our trivial and momentary difficulty with the Boer, which time will inevitably remove and smooth out, we are willing to complicate and make more difficult a problem which in thirty years' time Boer and Englishman's descendants will alike have to face in its huge proportions.

Every step in civilization, in education, in approach to the European, which the African makes, will render the problem more difficult, not necessarily more easy, of solution.

What we consider the attitude of the Englishman in South Africa should be to the alien, and especially the African, races beneath him, depends mainly on the view we take of his nature and his world-wide functions in the unfolding of human life on the globe generally.

There are four views on this matter.

Firstly, that of the average Englishman who has no view in the matter at all, who eats, sleeps, begets children, and accumulates as little or as much wealth as he is able without ever reflecting that he forms part of a great people, or considering the future of the organism of which he is part. The views of these persons, by the vis inertiæ that they impart to the whole body of which they form part, are not without their powerful practical influence on the actual condition and action of the race.

There is a second view, held with more or less clearness or mental confusion, but with a great deal of vivacity and sometimes emotion, by a large number of Englishmen.

It is difficult to represent with justice and exactitude ideas that are held somewhat vaguely and with varying degrees of intensity by the individuals holding them, but we believe we most accurately sum up the views of this party by stating that they more or less vaguely hold that the whole world was made for the Englishman, much as in our childhood we were taught that the sun and stars were created to give light to the earth, which probably came into existence a few trillion years after many of the youngest of these. This party has a very vague but vigorously held conviction that at some time or in some way, which they do not specify, the English inhabitants of the British Isles invented all that is known as modern civilization; we have never heard it directly asserted that literature, art, science, and religion took their rise on the globe eight or nine hundred years ago in Britain, but it is tacitly assumed that it was so, if any logical structure is to be placed on the assertions made; in right of this inherent superiority over all earth's people, the same party assumes, still with a certain vagueness but with intense warmth, that the English race is destined ultimately to possess the whole planet and people it. How this is to be done—whether all earth's multifarious peoples, compared with whom the Englishmen on this earth are to-day but a handful, are to be exterminated by means of fire, of sword, of poison, or simply by infection with the diseases of our civilization, with our liquor and kindred institutions—is not often, perhaps ever, clearly stated. The strength of this party lies not in clear and lucid thought, but rather in somewhat florid assertion which, questioned, leads quickly to irritation and warm blood.[77]

He takes it as understood that the Englishman is to dominate and populate the entire globe, and the descension to the questions of how and when, and the grounds for the desirability of such an occurrence, he regards as unpatriotic and childish.

This theory, in its most developed form, may be described as the upas-tree theory, which regards the inhabitants of the British Isles as a kind of growth which is bound to kill out and destroy by its mere existence all the other infinitely complex interesting forms of human life on all earth's vast continents, and to exist alone monarch over a bared earth, like a colossal upas-tree under whose shadow or among whose branches, according to the old fable, it was impossible for plant to flower or beast or bird to breathe.

Impossible and repulsive as this conception would appear to many minds, there is no doubt that, held more or less constantly or vaguely, it does colour the actions and thought of large numbers of folk and is a force to be reckoned with.