Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

The history of this Dutch settlement presents a singular contrast to that of the Portuguese. During the first quarter of a century the few settlers kept themselves within the narrow limits of the Cape peninsula. In 1680 an outlying agricultural community was planted at Stellenbosch, twenty-five miles from Cape Town, but not till the end of the century was the first range of mountains crossed. Meantime the population began to grow. In 1658 the first slaves were introduced,—West African negroes,—a deplorable step, which has had the result of making the South African whites averse to open-air manual work and of practically condemning South Africa to be a country of black labour. Shortly afterwards the Company began to bring in Asiatic convicts, mostly Mohammedan Malays, from its territories in the East Indian Archipelago. These men intermarried with the female slaves, and to a less extent with Hottentot women, and from them a mixed coloured race has sprung up, which forms a large part of the population of Cape Town and the neighbouring districts. The influx of these inferior elements was balanced by the arrival in 1689 of about three hundred French Huguenots, a part of those who had taken refuge in Holland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. They were persons of a high stamp, more intelligent and educated than most of the previous settlers had been, and they brought with them a strong attachment to their Protestant faith and a love of liberty. From them many of the best colonial families are sprung. At first they clung to their language, and sought to form a distinct religious community; but they were ultimately compelled to join the Dutch Reformed Church, and the use of French was forbidden in official documents or religious services. Before the middle of the eighteenth century that language had disappeared, and the newcomers had practically amalgamated with their Dutch neighbours. The Company's government was impartially intolerant, and did not until 1780 permit the establishment of a Lutheran church, although many German Lutherans had settled in the country.

From the time when the settlers began to spread out from the coast into the dry lands of the interior a great change came upon them, and what we now call the distinctive South African type of character and habits began to appear. The first immigrants were not, like some of the English settlers in Virginia, men of good social position in their own country, attached to it by many ties, nor, like the English settlers in the New England colonies, men of good education and serious temper, seeking the freedom to worship God in their own way. They came from the humbler classes, and partly because they had few home ties, partly because the voyage to Holland was so long that communication with it was difficult, they maintained little connection with the mother country and soon lost their feeling for it. The Huguenot immigrants were more cultivated, and socially superior to the rude adventurers who had formed the bulk of the Dutch settlers, but they had of course no home country to look to. France had cast them out; Holland was alien in blood and speech. So it befell that of all the colonists that Europe had sent forth since the voyage of Columbus, the South African whites were those who soonest lost their bond with Europe, and were the first set of emigrants to feel themselves a new people, whose true home lay in the new land they had adopted. Thus early in South African annals were the foundations laid of what we now call the Africander sentiment—a sentiment which has become one of the main factors in the history of the country.

Nor was this all. When the comparatively small area of fertile land which could be cultivated without irrigation had been taken up, the keeping of cattle suggested itself as an easy means of livelihood. The pasture, however, was so thin that it was necessary to graze the cattle over wide stretches of ground, and the farther they went into the interior the scantier was the pasture and the larger therefore did the area of land become over which a farmer let his oxen or sheep run. This process of extending cattle-farms—if farms they can be called—over the interior was materially accelerated through the destruction of the nearer Hottentot tribes by the frightful outbreak of smallpox which begun in A.D. 1713, followed by another not less virulent in 1755. The Europeans suffered severely from it, the negroes, slave and free, still more, but the Hottentots most of all. In fact, it cleared them away from all the southern and western parts of the Colony and left these regions open to Europeans. Only the Bushmen remained, whose more solitary life gave them comparative immunity from contagion. Thus from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and during the whole of it, there was a constant dispersion of settlers from the old nucleus into the circumjacent wilderness. They were required to pay a sum amounting to five pounds a year for the use of three thousand morgen (a little more than six thousand acres) of grazing ground, and were accustomed at certain seasons to drive their herds up into the deserts of the Karroo for a change of feed, just after the time when the summer rains stimulate the scrubby vegetation of that desert region. These settlers led a lonely and almost nomadic life. Much of their time was passed in their tent-waggons, in which, with their wives and children, they followed the cattle from spot to spot where the pasture was best. They became excellent marksmen and expert in the pursuit of wild beasts. Some made a living by elephant-hunting in the wilderness, and those who tended cattle learned to face the lion. They were much molested by the Bushmen, whose stealthy attacks and poisoned arrows made them dangerous enemies, and they carried on with the latter a constant war, in which no quarter was given. Thus there developed among them that courage, self-reliance, and passion for independence which are characteristic of the frontiersman everywhere, coupled with a love of solitude and isolation which the conditions of western America did not produce. For in western America the numbers and ferocity of the Red Indians, and those resources of the land which encouraged the formation of agricultural and timber-producing communities, made villages follow the march of discovery and conquest, while in pastoral Africa villages were few and extremely small. Isolation and the wild life these ranchmen led soon told upon their habits. The children grew up ignorant; the women, as was natural where slaves were employed, lost the neat and cleanly ways of their Dutch ancestors; the men were rude, bigoted, indifferent to the comforts and graces of life. But they retained their religious earnestness, carrying their Bibles and the practice of daily family worship with them in their wanderings; and they retained also a passion for freedom which the government vainly endeavoured to restrain. Though magistrates, called landdrosts, were placed in a few of the outlying stations, with assessors taken from the people, called heemraden, to assist them in administering justice, it was found impossible to maintain control over the wandering cattle-men, who from their habit of "trekking" from place to place were called Trek Boers.[19] The only organization that brought them together was that which their ceaseless strife with the Bushmen enjoined. Being all accustomed to the use of arms, they formed war-parties, which from time to time attacked and rooted out the Bushmen from a disturbed area; and the government recognized these military needs and methods by appointing field-commandants to each district, and subordinate officers, called field-cornets, to each sub-district. These functionaries have become the basis of the system of local government among the South African Dutch, and the war-bands, called commandos, have played a great part in the subsequent military history of the country.

The eastward progress of expansion presently brought the settlers into contact with more formidable foes in the Bantu tribes, who dwelt beyond the Great Fish River. In 1779 some Kafir clans of the Kosa race crossed that river and drove off the cattle off the farmers to the west of it, and a war, the first of many fiercely fought Kafir wars, followed, which ended in the victory of the colonists.

All this while the Colony had been ruled by the Dutch East India Company through a governor and council, appointed by the directors in Holland, and responsible to them only—a system roughly similar to that which the English established in India during the eighteenth century. The administration was better or worse according to the character and capacity of the governor for the time being, but it was on the whole unpopular with the colonists, not merely because they were excluded from all share in it (except to some small extent in the courts of justice), but also because the Company kept in its own hands a monopoly of the trade, and managed trade with a view to its own commercial interests rather than to those of the community. Thus discontent grew, and this discontent was one of the causes which led to the dispersion of the people into the wilderness, whose remoteness secured to them a practical freedom. In 1779 disaffection had been so much stimulated by the maladministration of a weak governor, and by the news of the revolt of the American colonies against Great Britain, that delegates were sent to Holland to demand redress for their commercial and other grievances, as well as a share in the government of the Colony. The Company was by this time in financial straits, and less powerful with the States-general of the Netherlands than it had formerly been. Long negotiations followed, reforms were promised, and at last, in 1792, two commissioners were sent out to investigate and frame measures of reform. The measures they promulgated were, however, deemed inadequate by the more ardent spirits, and by those especially who dwelt in the outlying districts, where the government had exerted, and could exert, little control. In 1795, first at Graaf-Reinet and then at Swellendam, the people rose in revolt, not, as they stated, against the mother country, but against the Company. They turned out the landdrosts, and set up miniature republics, each with a representative assembly.

It would not have been difficult for the government to have reduced these risings by cutting off supplies of food. But now South Africa was suddenly swept into the great whirlpool of European politics, and events were at hand which made these petty local movements insignificant, save in so far as they were evidences of the independent spirit of the people.

From 1757, when the battle of Plassey was fought, the English power in India had been rapidly growing, and the Cape, which they had not cared to acquire in 1620, had now become in their eyes a station of capital importance. When war broke out between Britain and Holland in 1781, the English had attempted to seize the Colony, but retired when they found a strong French force prepared to aid the Dutch in its defence. Now they were again at war with Holland, which, over-run by the armies of revolutionary France, had become the Batavian Republic. In 1795 an English expedition, bearing orders from the Stadholder of the Netherlands, then a refugee in England, requiring the Company's officers to admit them, landed at Simon's Bay, and after some slight resistance obliged Cape Town and its castle to capitulate. Within a few months the insurgents at Swellendam and Graaf-Reinet submitted, and British troops held the Colony till 1802, when it was restored to the Batavian Republic on the conclusion of the peace of Amiens. Next year, however, war broke out afresh; and the English government, feeling the extreme importance, in the great struggle which they were waging with Napoleon, of possessing a naval stronghold as a half-way house to India, resolved again to occupy the Cape. In 1806 a strong force was landed in Table Bay, and after one engagement the Dutch capitulated. In 1814 the English occupation was turned into permanent sovereignty by a formal cession of the Colony on the part of the then restored Stadholder, who received for it and certain Dutch possessions in South America the sum of £6,000,000.

The European population of the Colony, which was thus finally transferred to the rule of a foreign though a cognate nation, consisted in 1806 of about 27,000 persons, mostly of Dutch, with a smaller number of German or French descent. They had some 30,000 black slaves, and of the aboriginal Hottentots about 17,000 remained. Nearly all spoke Dutch, or rather the rude local dialect into which the Dutch of the original settlers (said to have been largely Frieslanders), had degenerated. The descendants of the Huguenots had long since lost their French.

No people find it agreeable to be handed over to the government of a different race, and the British administration in the Colony in those days was, though restrained by the general principles of English law, necessarily autocratic, because representative institutions had never existed at the Cape. Still things promised well for the peace and ultimate fusion of the Dutch and English races. They were branches of the same Low-German stock, separated by fourteen hundred years of separate history, but similar in the fundamental bases of their respective characters. Both were attached to liberty, and the British had indeed enjoyed at home a much fuller measure of it than had the Dutch in the settled parts of the Colony. Both professed the Protestant religion, and the Dutch were less tolerant toward Roman Catholics than the English. The two languages retained so much resemblance that it was easy for an Englishman to learn Dutch and for a Dutchman to learn English. An observer might have predicted that the two peoples would soon, by intercourse and by intermarriage, melt into one, as Dutch and English had done in New York. For a time it seemed as if this would certainly come to pass. The first two British governors were men of high character, whose administration gave little ground for complaint to the old inhabitants. The Company's restrictions on trade had been abolished, and many reforms were introduced by the new rulers. Schools were founded, the administration of justice was reorganised under new courts, the breed of cattle and horses was improved, the slave-trade was forbidden, and missions to the natives were largely developed. Meanwhile local institutions were scarcely altered, and the official use of the Dutch language was maintained. The Roman-Dutch law, which had been in force under the Company's rule, was permitted to remain, and it is to-day the common law of all the British colonies and territories, as well as of the Boer Republics, in South Africa. Intermarriage began, and the social relations of the few English who had come in after 1806, with the many Dutch were friendly. In 1820 the British government sent out about five thousand emigrants from England and Scotland, who settled in the thinly occupied country round Algoa Bay on the eastern border of the Colony; and from that time on there was a steady, though never copious, influx of British settlers, through whose presence the use of the English language increased, together with a smaller influx of Germans, who soon lost their national individuality and came to speak either English or the local Dutch.

Before long, however, this fair promise of peace and union was overclouded, and the causes which checked the fusion of the races in the Colony, and created two Dutch Republics beyond its limits, have had such momentous results that they need to be clearly stated.