Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

The Greek has art and philosophy, the Jew religion, the Roman high civil organization; each nation and people of the past throws in its offering to the collection of humanity's common possessions. Even the Bushman, if we will keep him a little longer, will creep up and drop in his mite, if it be only by the light with which when, well studied, he will illumine the past, and the hope he gives us of the future of the race when we see what it has already risen from—but the Englishman puts in, I think, the noblest gift of all.

It is a rash hand that dares to lift itself to set the crown on its own head, yet more on that of its own nation; but I believe that, in virtue of this one quality and lacking so much else, we stand to-day the first race on earth, and that we dare to thank the fate that we are Englishmen.

We are not unaware of the objection that may be raised. All Englishmen have not this love, nor does our past or present history always exemplify it. All Greeks were not philosophers; they poisoned Socrates. All Jews are not religious geniuses; they drove Moses half mad, hanged Jesus and excommunicated Spinoza. Yet the one is the most philosophic and the other the most religious people that ever existed. It is not by the attitude of the lower mass (lower in development, however high in wealth or authority) that a people can be measured or compared with others; the most developed and highest growths must be compared as, when we seek to classify plants, we compare their flowers, not their roots. We know that the mass of our people allow and have allowed that love of wealth and luxury, which is the national disease of our people, to sap all other considerations. We know that for years we, the great apostles of freedom, were the slave dealers and breeders of the world, that thousands of folk among us have to-day their wealth, power, culture and freedom from material cares, because their fathers' ships were loaded with men and women between the decks, one half to die there of heat and filth, the others sold at a lordly profit. We too have had our thumbscrews, our dungeons, our wars for lust of gain and power. We know that for years our sugar, cotton and coffee were wrung out of men's hands by the application of Englishmen's whips to their backs—but this too we know, that a time came when, as in times past, the leading section of the nation rose and did away with thumbscrews and dungeons and Star Chambers, so again it rose and declared the trade at an end; so too we know the world saw what it had never seen before (but what may be hoped will be seen many times again in different forms), part of a branch of the English speaking people, dominated by English ideas arise and pour out its blood like water, not for its own freedom, not for the freedom of its kind, but for a despised, scorned and feeble people. Some nations have set their slaves free, but only an English race speaking the English tongue and imbued with English ideals has shed its blood for them! This is a new thing under the sun. Many things have happened, but this never happened before. It is a new era. We know, none so well, how stained is our African record; we know with what envious eyes the government of English Ahabs eyes the patrimony of black Naboths and takes it, if necessary, after bearing false witness against Naboth; we know how Englishmen have crossed this continent and left behind them a trail of slime and gore such as few Arabic slave caravans leave; but we know that, with hearts full of soft concern for its inhabitants, and all the tenderness of strength and wisdom, Englishmen have trodden this continent and laboured among its lowest people; not Livingstone alone but a great corps of lesser unrecorded Livingstones whose names will be forgotten, but the fruits of whose lives will abide. And it was in South Africa that the English nation, when, in 1833, they voted twenty millions for the emancipation of slaves, expended over one million in buying freedom for the black man and Half-caste; and at the same time was promulgated in South Africa, by the will of the English people, the Magna Charta of the black man, which put, in the eye of the law, every free man, Hottentot or Kaffir, throughout the country, on the same level as the white.

In India our rule has been largely one of greed and self-seeking; we know that at Cawnpore, when an army of brave men, in making a last heroic stand for national freedom, killed a handful of white women and children, we, to be revenged on them, fell into inhuman and fiendish barbarities, which, if practised to-day by Boers or Kaffirs or by Frenchmen attacking Englishmen, would in our eyes brand them for ever as creatures beneath the human; we are silent about those horrors when with the fiendish savagery, not of Christians but of wild beasts, we made man after man, before we shot him, kneel down and lick up blood, so that to the horror of death might be added the horror of the fear of eternal damnation. I know no place in human history where barbarities more hellish are recorded, and when in drawing-rooms delicate-lipped women sing of Brave Havelock and his Highlanders, we see suddenly the sheen of the blood of a people fighting on their own soil for the freedom of their race, and we wish the delicate ladies could find something else to sing of.

All this we recognize, and we are willing to look the facts fully, if not unblushingly, in the face; but when all has been seen and said, this also must be allowed: that, though we have set our feet on the land over a hundred years, there are as many or more people of the aboriginal races in the land than when we came, and, if we should pass away from them to-morrow, all we shall have left them as our main legacy will be a certain knowledge of our language and laws, and they would not be a less free, rather a more free, people than when we found them. We have not been to them at least the upas-tree, killing out the race from beneath us, and if at times we have been conquerors and oppressors, and if more often we have made blunders, this one thing is certain, that perhaps not the majority of us, certainly not all of us, yet still a certain body of us, have meant well by them. We have meant to aid and raise them, to put them on an equality with ourselves, and the thought they were being crushed or murdered would be a blow to the most earnest sensibilities of our natures.

It may be replied: "Yes, that is your English cant; you alone of all people in the world have always a psalm in your mouth as you crunch the bones of your enemies, and, while you are putting the bread of the poor and needy in your own jaws, your eyes are turned upwards."

And this is to a certain extent true. Cant lies across our national character as a hideous deformity, peculiar to ourselves. As we have one virtue, so we also have this vice which is ours and ours alone; but is it not the shadow of that very virtue? The disease which is an indication of its opposite? There are times when our heart sickens that we are English, and the meanest and most brutal nation seems great when we compare its attitude with that greasy whine of affected sanctity and humanity with which, often as individuals and continuously as a people, we try to gloss over our acts of greed, injustice and self-seeking.

The Boer, if he wishes to annex a Native territory, says: "The damned Kaffir; I'll take his land from him and divide it among my children." The Frenchman says, if he wishes to possess a territory: "I shall take it for the glory of France and keep it for her honour." And this is noble, direct and manly, if perhaps cruel and unjust.

But the Englishman speaks not so. When he desires an adjoining Native territory, he sighs, and folds his hands; he says: "It's a very sad thing the way these Natives go on! They believe in witches and kill them. I really can't let this go on! It's my duty to interfere. I can't let these poor benighted people go on so!" He says nothing about the coal mines he wants to work in their country or the rich nature of their lands of which he has already got vast grants; so he turns on the Maxim guns, and he kills a few thousands to save the ten witches; and witchcraft is put an end to—but he has the lands and mines, and dishomed and beaten Natives work them for him. How much nobler is the Boer's attitude is obvious. When we want a territory on a larger scale we do not say we are stronger than those people, let us go and kill them and take command of the land for the glory of the Englishman and the benefit of his trade.[79] We first send some Englishmen there till the people, knowing our character and that where one locust comes there come others, grow a little restive and show some displeasure at our fore-runners; then we draw ourselves together and say: "It is our duty to defend innocent men and women trusting to us who have ventured into a strange land" (how and why they came there we don't inquire), and so we draw out our guns in the name of a wronged humanity—and so conquer a new land; or we encourage our citizens to buy shares in a commercial enterprise, lend money may be, and then say: "It is our duty to take the management of its finance, and eventually of its government, because it is our duty not to allow innocent speculators to suffer." Whether the folk in the land will suffer we leave out of view for the moment, but we dwell on that great duty—till the land is ours. In the history of the world there was never a people whose record of relations with other peoples showed so hideous a record of falsehood and self-deception; other peoples have lied to each other; but that immeasurably more hideous lie, the lie told to oneself, has not been common. And we carry this hideous attitude into the relations of private life; it is the distinctive mark of the lower type of Englishwoman (often one of culture and philanthropic and religious inclinations) that she cannot speak the truth to herself, much less to others, with regard to her motives and actions. When she envies another and seeks to win her friend or lover from her, she does not, with the frank wild truth of the Italian or French woman, say: "I will undermine their friendship. I hate her. She has done me no harm but I will triumph over her." She says to herself: "It is my duty to show that man what that woman is," and so, in the performance of her duty, she saves her conscience and attains her end. We cannot look fairly or frankly at our people in their private or public capacity without allowing that that is our deformed feature, our hideous and unique characteristic.

But what does it mean when we come to analyse it? Is it not simply that deference which the less developed and more brutalized part of our nation, aye, and of the separate individual himself, pays to the higher? Is it not that the English nation and English individual, bent on an act of injustice at variance with the most deep-lying conviction of its nature, is obliged to gloss it over or it could not attain its end?