Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

If it is said to us that our idea of the function of the English race is all very well, but in reality all that races seek is self-aggrandisement, we reply that we are fully aware of this tendency to the most blatant self aggrandisement in our people, but we know also other tendencies; and Washington, Lincoln, John Brown, Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, John Stuart Mill, Howe, Livingstone, Moffat, and the multitudes who harmonize with and follow them, are not less truly English. In every land where the English race is growing, in Australia, New Zealand, America, England and even South Africa, side by side with its less specialized elements we have this broad humanitarian element, as surely and unfailingly developed in every land, and on this we build our hope. This element, which we believe to be ultimately the dominant and vital element in our people, is animated entirely by one instinct and works to one end. We do not follow ultimately either the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes. Over our heads waves always a larger and wider flag, inscribed with that one word, "Freedom," which being fully interpreted means justice and liberty for all, or, being yet more simplified: Do unto all men as you would they should do unto you. Under that standard we range ourselves to conquer. We regard it as the true flag of our race, beneath which we are willing to die, but which, British, American, Australian, New Zealander or even South African, we are never willing to see fall. It is this English standard which alone we would see planted in every country of the earth. It is this unseen flag, waving over our heads, which stimulates us to persevere in our course; it is this which we believe constitutes the ultimate glory of the English people.

If we are asked how we can expect any folk ever to dominate in the world as a power everywhere spreading freedom and imparting its benefits to all, when in all the history of the past such a thing is not recorded of any people, we reply that it is useless to talk to us in Africa of what has been, as though it of necessity limited what shall be in the world of human growth. Outside our doors, even as we write and think, sits cowering the little human ape Bushman, and, when we turn from him to the Kaffir working in our kitchen and the bust of Shakespeare on the mantleshelf, we do not only hope and believe but we see physically before our material eyes the infinite growth of humanity, the unmeasurable power of change and the arrival of entirely new traits which is possible in the human creature. You may as well try to stop a great people on its line of growth by telling it that no people has ever done before what they are attempting to do, as you could stop the creative mind of a genius in its labour by telling it that work had never been done before. "Exactly so," replies the artist, "I know man has never seen the face I see and am trying to paint or the fact I see and am trying to record; that is my joy, I am doing an entirely new thing and through me humanity grows a little in a new direction."

It is exactly because we believe no nation on the earth has ever manifested just this desire, not only to be free, but to make free, that we are filled with an almost infinite hope as to our function and future. This is why we value it more highly than all the qualities we share with other peoples. It is our stroke of genius, our new contribution to human growth.

If we are asked how, looking round on the little world of South Africa to-day, we dare to entertain such lofty conceptions of the function and future of our race, we reply: "Yes, we dare." We are not blind to the self-seeking and injustice which surround us on every hand. We are not for a moment blind to the fact that sometimes, where we seem to be defending the Native, we are merely using him as a rod with which to strike our white brothers of another speech; we do not forget that English hands have in this country flogged men to death and that, because the man killed was of a dark race, we as an English community have not dared to do more than inflict a fine. We are aware how devoid of any consciousness of large racial function are a mass of our English-speaking folk and how completely devoid of any aim but that of self-betterment are numbers of our units; but, looking these facts directly in the face and allowing all they mean, we yet do not give up hope.

Is it absolutely nothing that in this country there are to be found men who, whether as judges or when serving on juries, are not only incorruptible before the forces of gold or personal interest but before the much more terrible corruption of racial prejudice and passion? Is it nothing that there are men among us in whose hands the most miserable feeble Bushman or Hottentot is as sure of rigid justice as though he were a royal prince or millionaire? Is it not something that there is throughout the length and breadth of the land hardly an Englishman who dares to use the power of a dominant people without making for himself a screen of lies, behind which to hide from his conscience when she comes to seek for him, that there is hardly a man or woman among us who dares to act to one of the subject races as they could not be acted to without first shielding themselves behind an excuse? Is it nothing that, poor as our rule is, at least while the people of England have still held rule in the land, the Native races have drawn to our standard, and at least, comparing us with others, have recognized that our flag meant justice and freedom for those who stood under it? Is it nothing that in the space of fifty years England has sent out to us at least once a man who in his capacity as ruler bent with an unfeigned solicitude over every element in our complex people and endeavoured to tighten the reins of sympathy between Englishman, Boer and Native, and to see, unblinded by that intense passion for their own people which all deep natures feel but which high natures control, the needs and the failings and the sufferings of each section and sought to remedy them? Is it nothing that, at least once, we have had an English ruler who possessed all passion for impartiality and humanity which characterizes a race fitted to rule over empires of varied peoples, and that among men more closely South African we have one who, though a Jew by name and descent, was an Englishman by language and education, through a long life consistently and without intermission sought to enforce practically the ideal of English rule as a great freeing impartial force? Is it nothing that, in addition to the names of such men as Sir George Grey and Saul Solomon upon our South African record, and with the story of such lives as Livingstone and Moffat mingled with that of our English occupancy of the country we have also the names of at least a few hundred individuals less known but following in their steps and animated by the same principle?

Have we not heard it said again and again by the Boer: "You Englishmen know no difference between one man and another; you treat a black man as if he was yourself"; and in that one saying have we not ground for hope?

But it may be asked us whether we do not see a possibility of our hopes for the English race and its future falling to the earth; we reply: "We do; we recognize that it is possible that we may not even kill out the black races of Africa but that, a seething and ignorant mass, they may live under us, at last infecting us and dragging us down to themselves; we know it is possible that our conception of the English race, as possessed of a vast fertilizing and liberating power which shall spread from it till it permeates the whole race, may be mistaken and the result of national egoism and mental refraction; we know that the twentieth century, instead of being, as we dream, the great blossoming time of the English race, as the fourth century before Jesus was of the Greek, may be the century of our decay; that the spread of the consciousness of the unity of all men and the importance of their individual freedom may be not for us to spread but for some other people; and that when we have shown the world how lucifer matches can be made for one penny the gross by girls who work for three shillings a week; and that, if you can make guns which discharge so many bullets a minute, you can bring down so many unarmed black men in a minute; and that, if a few men can gain a grant of the mineral wealth of half a continent, they can buy mistresses, palaces, titles, governments, and roll in gold as if it had been water—then our work will be done. We know that this is possible, and I suppose there are moments of horrible bitterness when to all of us it has seemed almost more than possible."

If it be asked us: Even if our view be true and the function and destiny of the English race be what we hope it, what after all is the use of our striving to bring it nearer; may we not in our individual action be mistaken, and, where we believe ourself to be helping a great race to walk in the path which shall serve all humanity, we are simply sacrificing ourselves to no purpose? we reply: "We know this. Under the sea millions of insects work, and, as the ages pass, they raise at last a bank that in time becomes an island on which great trees grow and the sun shines. The work of no one insect is necessary to the growth; the almost invisible speck of coral he makes may be broken off and crushed to powder, and the work yet grows; but by just such an infinite accretion of specks the island rises, and the wide instinct which compels all to contribute their part builds at last the island.

"So we work, only not quite unconsciously. If our individual addition be worthless and be broken off—well—we are obeying the deepest necessity of our being; we are working on in the only direction we know of, and, unlike our fellow insects of the sea, we, where we work, have dreams of the future land, not that will be, but that may be—and which we believe we are building."

A man far out at sea on a dark night, struggling with the waves in his small boat, sees far away a light he thinks to be the harbour light and strikes towards it; knowing he may be mistaken, and that long before daybreak man and boat may be engulfed, he still strikes towards it, labouring without certainty of ever reaching it but with unalterable will and determination, because it is the only light he sees.