Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

We think of the great race of earth, which shall be in the future, not as composed of English blood with all the beauty and strength of other races and peoples excluded; but rather we figure it as a great temple reared up of material of every size and colour, from marble and alabaster to ebony and starred porphyry, but in which every stone and doorpost shall be cemented with the freedom that is the gift of our people. We look for the future growth of England not as the result of the merciless slaughter of mankind or the use of force, but because, as time passes and we become freer ourselves, we shall spread our freedom wherever our foot touches, and whoever is trampled, oppressed or feeble on earth will gather to us and grow up under our shelter to strength; we look for the spread of our language, not because it is of necessity the finest and most complex and expressive instrument of thought, though, after our instinct for freedom, it is the noblest outgrowth of our race, having perchance not the music of the Italian, the exact brilliance of the French, the ready power of expressing deep and powerful emotion of the German, or the multiple advantages of other forms of speech, yet, like some great and complex organ with understops and pipes which skilfully managed may produce almost any effect, being fitted to equal and perhaps surpass any language in its breadth of power,[81] but because in this tongue will be preached the most valuable lesson humanity has yet to learn; because, wherever a people has come into contact with it, it has meant for them freedom and advance.

There is an old saying that a slave cannot breathe in the air of England because the moment his foot touches the shore he is freed. We look for an enlargement of this old parable in the future. We look for the time when it shall be said: "Slavery, injustice, the oppression of the weak by the strong, cannot exist in any land where an Englishman breathes; the moment his foot touches a shore, they pass away before him." And in this will lie the Englishman's power to dominate and his claim to immortality.

In the great nation that shall govern and cover the whole earth there may be found not one pure-blooded Englishman, any more than there is to-day one Greek or Roman on earth. He will as little be found in three hundred years' time in London or New York, as in Pekin or Yokohama. But what was great in him we believe will have encircled the globe; and English freedom will extend from Greenland to Borneo when the Englishman shall have melted into something larger.

We know that this consummation is not inevitable or certain; dreams as large as this have been dreamed by races before and come to nought. We are not unaware that to carry this conquest out the English race must first free itself before it can consciously or unconsciously accomplish its missionary enterprise. During the last years there seems a pause in the generous outflow of English inspiration, and, where we appear to be bent on suppressing a slave trade, it will be manifest to the least observant looker-on that our Government is merely making that project a shield for financial and national aggressions. The truth is that all English-speaking countries are in the throes of a great effort demanding not less of the vital energies of our people in England, America and the Colonies than the old internal struggles which resulted in the freedom of Barons as opposed to the Monarchy, the freedom of the men of the middle class as opposed to the hereditary powers. What the future of the English race will be depends on the result of that conflict. If it results as we who share in its struggles believe, it will show the world when the strife is over, for the first time, a perfectly free land in which the superficial differences of sex and class shall be sunk in the greater personality of the human creature, in which every creature from its birth shall stand free and untrammelled and the inequalities between men shall not be those of artificial construction but of inherent deficiencies or powers; in which a new aristocracy shall be formed out of the great labour of the head or hand and not of those of great possessions, of those who give much to their fellows and not those who receive; when the child will be told to take off his hat and bow to the labourer who for sixty years has worked in the field for the community, or has thought for it in his chamber, and not to the woman who lies back in her carriage, consuming and having consumed without return the labour of hundreds, or the man who, in the gambling of the roulette table, the stock exchange or the share market, has made his millions. It may be that the arrest in our outward efforts to extend our freedom and humanity's may be the result of this internal trouble and that when, before the race is exhibited for the first time in the history of the globe an absolutely free civilized people in which the individuality of the male and female, the powerful and the weak, are respected, we shall take up our work with renewed ardour, and, almost whether we will or no, the freedom we have attained for ourselves will infect all the race and constitute us its leaders. This may be; this is what there is some promise of ultimately being—but it may also not be. We may have become so much degraded by the ideal of existence which has been held before us, that the strife of our women and masses, which now seems an ennobling strife for more and nobler fields of labour, shall degenerate into a demoralizing strife after universal inaction and that our ideal as a race will be what is now merely the ideal of a class, existence on the labour of others without exertion—and then the English race will be degraded, as many have been before it, and the Russian, the Japanese and even the Kaffir must lead the world's people in their march; we cannot. We do not pretend there are not certain signs which suggest the possibility of ultimate failure, and make us fear for it. In a country like South Africa we see that, where the English and in truth any branch of the white race comes into contact with a more primitive dark, there is a hideous tendency at once to degenerate. We will not work. The most feeble and unrichly brained man or woman who could be worth their keep to humanity and perhaps as richly productive as a hand worker, but never as anything else, refuses the one order of labour he is fit for, and prefers a hideous dependency on society, which in Africa is ultimately a dependence on the dark races, rather than to undertake the one form of labour for which nature has fitted him. We see a hideous tendency to leave all the work of life to the dark races; for the moment this seems to leave us free for higher efforts, but as time passes surely it will enervate; like a rotten aristocracy we shall die out, and the hands which for generations have made our roads, planted and reaped our fields, built our houses and tended our children, will at last be united to the brains that make the laws and govern the land, and we shall fade away. That the day may be far distant does not make less clear and painful the first symptoms of the disease of which all great conquering nations of the past have ultimately died. Again our hope, that the English working man and the woman when freed will impart their gain to all the world and so rule over life, is belied at least by two symptoms—that the man who is trying to free himself from the tyranny of class still does in certain instances strive fiercely to maintain that of sex, and that, as he gains or thinks he is gaining his own freedom, he strives jealously to exclude men who are not of his blood from sharing it. These are perhaps the two ugliest symptoms in the modern movement; and if it means anything but the action of a man who, nearly drowned, wrings the hands of his fellow off him and throws him back into the water, only that he may be able to gain the shore and return with a rope for his fellow—it is the most hopeless symptom that has appeared in our social growth for many years. In South Africa, where our national English greed for speedy wealth without exertion has made us, not satisfied with the dark labour of the country, introduce yet more from Asia, then when they have served us and filled our pockets, we attempt to refuse them the rights of citizens and labourers, the English love of freedom and fair play does not seem growing. There are countless other symptoms which give us cause for consideration and most anxious doubt. We are going to spread freedom and justice over the earth, but in Africa at present our doom seems to be to drag its natural wealth from its bowels, and to expend it in intensifying the luxury of the old world. We prefer, as a great South African millionaire once said, "the land to the Natives," and for a time that part of us which seeks to rule over nations and permeate the peoples seems silenced by that part of us which desires to fill its hands with the fruits of the land and the labour of its people—and then desires nothing more.

All this we see and see clearly. That a tree is full of buds does not prove that there will ever be fruit; that a child moves beneath its mother's heart is no certain promise that there will ever be a man; and, seeing clearly many conditions which may check its progress and even symptoms of conditions which may ultimately terminate its existence, nevertheless, while the buds are on the tree, we do not fail to dig and water, and, while the child is in the womb, we do not cease to prepare for its coming because of the possibility of its abortion.

To those of us who take this view of conditions, functions, difficulties and possible future of the English race, it is not very difficult to determine what in the little South African world our relations and course of conduct towards the black man and the alien races should be. The man who holds to the upas-tree function of the English race and the possibility and desirability of our exterminating and using entirely for our own advantage all the peoples of earth is not more confident as to what his line of action should be than we. Nay, we believe we are a little more confident, because we believe there lies in every Englishman, behind his philistinism and jingoism, something that makes the upas-tree line of action a little difficult to him.

We are not unaware of the difficulties and complexities of our position in this country, but upon all matters small and large we know our course. We are asked sometimes: "Well, but what do you intend this country to be, a black man's country or a white?" We reply we intend nothing. If the black man cannot labour or bear the strain and stress of complex civilized life, he will pass away. We need not degrade and injure ourself by killing him; if we cannot work here, then in time, wholly or in part, the white man will pass away; and the one best fitted to the land will likely survive—but this we are determined to do: we will make it a free man's country. Whether the ultimate race of this country be black, white or brown, we intend it to be a race permeated with the English doctrine of the equal right of each human to himself, and the duty of all to defend the freedom of it.

If it be suggested to us that the Natives of the land are ignorant, we have the reply to make that we are here to teach them all we know if they will learn—if they will not, they must fall.

If it be asked whether we think them our equals, we would reply: Certainly in love of happiness and their own lives—perhaps not in some other directions; but we are here to endeavour to raise them as far as it is possible; we are determined to make them a seed-ground in which to sow all that is greatest and best in ourselves.

If it be asked whether we are negrophiles, we reply: "No—we are trying to be but we are not yet. The white man in us yet loves the white as the black man loves the black. It would be a lie to say that we love the black man, if by that is meant that we love him as we love the white. But we are resolved to deal with justice and mercy towards him. We will treat him as if we loved him: and in time the love may come. When you pick up a lost child in the streets covered only with rags and black with dust, you have first to take it home and wash and dress it and then you want to kiss it. When we have dealt with the dark man for long years with justice and mercy and taught him all we know, we shall perhaps be able to look deep into each other's eyes and smile: as parent and child."