J. O. Burke.
Native Life in South Africa, before and since the European War and the Boer Rebellion. By Solomon T. Plaatje. P.S. King and Son, Ltd., London, 1916. Pp. 352.
Mr. Plaatje is a South African native, educated near Barkly West at a mission school. He later studied languages and served as an interpreter for important officials such as Duke of Connaught and Mr. Chamberlain. He later rose to a position of some importance in the Department of Native Affairs. He once edited a paper called Koranta ea Becoana. He is now the editor of the Tsala ea Batho (the People's Friend). Although treating of questions concerning the oppression of his people, his writings have been marked by moderation and common sense. He is not an agitator, not a firebrand, and can, therefore, be read with profit. Rather resenting the power of the uneducated chiefs who rule by virtue of their birth alone, Mr. Plaatje belongs to a new school of thought. He is making a new appeal for the native.
Mr. Plaatje modestly disclaims any pretension to literary merit. He is merely giving a "sincere narrative of a melancholy situation, in which, with all its shortcomings," he "has endeavored to describe the difficulties of South African natives under a very strange law, so as most readily to be understood by the sympathetic reader." The author had access to sources from which he obtained the facts presented. He has made personal observations in the Transvaal, Orange Free State and the Province of the Cape of Good Hope. He used other facts collected by Attorney Msimang of Johannesburg. Organizing these facts, Mr. Plaatje shows how the native has been maltreated and debased so as to be considered a pariah of society in his own native land. In the struggle between right and wrong, the latter has triumphed, culminating in such an evil as the Native Land Act, an effort at class legislation, the worst sort of discrimination and segregation in land tenure.
One would have difficulty in believing that such barbarities could be practiced within the British Empire, were it not for the fact that Mr. Plaatje not only quotes from the act in extenso but quotes also from the debates in the Colonial Parliament to show that the intention of the legislators was to restrict the native to their reservations or to servitude among the white population to placate the extreme Dutch Party in South Africa. In other words, the Colonial Parliament took the position of Mr. J.G. Keyter, the member for Ficksburg, who said: "They should tell the native, as the Free State told him, that it was white man's country, that he was not going to be allowed to buy land there or hire land there, and that if he wanted to be there, he must be in service." The author is thankful for the assistance given the natives by the British, but contends that the fortunes of the former should not have been committed to the hands of the Dutch Republicans without adequate safeguards.
The work will doubtless be successful as an appeal to the court of public opinion, as it is intended. The case is ably and seriously put and is supported by adequate evidence to warrant the author's conclusions as to the enormity of the crimes against the natives. In making this bold agitation for economic equality, this book may materially influence future events in South Africa and in England. It will doubtless lead British statesmen to conclude that the imperial power cannot dissociate itself from the responsibility for native affairs. The writer will attract attention too because of the novelty in that this work is the product of the brains of an intelligent native, who can think and express himself well on public questions. It will be surprising to those Englishmen who have hitherto treated the natives altogether as an uneducated mass incapable of thinking and will certainly excite sympathy among those who believe in the principles of liberty and justice.
The Danish West Indies under Company Rule, 1671-1754. With a Supplementary Chapter, 1755-1917. By Waldemar Westergaard, Assistant Professor of History at Pomona College. Introduction by H. Morse Stephens. Macmillan Company, New York, 1917. Pp. 359.
This work is the history of a company of Danish merchants desiring to avail themselves of the commercial opportunities of the New World. The work was undertaken prior to the recent negotiations of the United States for the purchase of the islands. It is the result of an attempt to "identify and appraise" a number of official and other papers found in the Bancroft Collection at the University of California. The study of these documents led to further research in the Danish libraries and archives, especially the archives of the Danish West India and Guinea Company. The work then becomes a treatise on the rise and fall of a great corporation with business as its objective rather than the sketch of a mere colony. It has a number of helpful maps and illustrations.