Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

BLACKS AND WHITES

Everywhere in South Africa, except in the Witwatersrand and Cape Town, the black people greatly outnumber the whites. In the Orange Free State they are nearly twice as numerous, in Cape Colony and the Transvaal more than thrice as numerous, in Natal ten times as numerous, while in the other territories, British, German, and Portuguese, the disproportion is very much greater, possibly some four or five millions of natives against nine or ten thousand Europeans. The total number of whites south of the Zambesi hardly reaches 750,000, while that of the blacks is roughly computed at from six to eight millions. At present, therefore, so far as numbers go, the country is a black man's country.

It may be thought that this preponderance of the natives is only natural in a region by far the larger part of which has been very recently occupied by Europeans, and that in time immigration and the natural growth of the white element will reduce the disproportion. This explanation, however, does not meet the facts. The black race is at present increasing at least as rapidly as the white. Unlike those true aborigines of the country, the Hottentots and Bushmen, who withered up and vanished away before the whites, the Kafirs, themselves apparently intruders from the North, have held their ground, not only in the wilder country where they have been unaffected by the European, but in the regions where he has conquered and ruled over them. They are more prolific than the whites, and their increase is not restrained by those prudential checks which tell upon civilised man, because, wants being few, subsistence in a warm climate with abundance of land is easy. Formerly two powerful forces kept down population:—war, in which no quarter was given and all the property of the vanquished was captured or destroyed, and the murders that went on at the pleasure of the chief, and usually through the agency of the witch-doctor. Now both these forces have been removed by the action of European government, which has stopped war and restrains the caprice of the chiefs. Relieved from these checks, the Kafirs of the south coast and of Basutoland, the regions in which observation has been easiest, are multiplying faster than the whites, and there is no reason why the same thing should not happen in other parts of the country. The number of the Fingoes, for instance (though they are no doubt an exceptionally thrifty and thriving tribe), is to-day ten times as great as it was fifty or sixty years ago. Here is a fact of serious import for the future. Two races, far removed from one another in civilization and mental condition, dwell side by side. Neither race is likely to extrude or absorb the other. What then will be their relations, and how will the difficulties be met to which their juxtaposition must give rise?

The Colonies of Britain over the world fall into two groups: those which have received the gift of self-government, and those which are governed from home through executive officials placed over each of them. Those of the latter class, called Crown Colonies, are all (with the insignificant exceptions of the Falkland Islands and Malta) within the tropics, and are all peopled chiefly by coloured races,—negroes, Indians, Malays, Polynesians, or Chinese,—with a small minority of whites. The self-governing Colonies, on the other hand, are all situated in the temperate zone, and are all, with one exception, peopled chiefly by Europeans. It is because they have a European population that they have been deemed fit to govern themselves, just as it is because the tropical Colonies have a predominantly coloured population that the supremacy of the Colonial Office and its local representatives is acquiesced in as fit and proper. Every one perceives that representative assemblies based on a democratic franchise, which are capable of governing Canada or Australia, would not succeed in the West Indies or Ceylon or Fiji.

The one exception to this broad division, the one case of self-governing communities in which the majority of the inhabitants are not of European stock, is to be found in South Africa. The general difficulty of adjusting the relations of a higher and a lower race, serious under every kind of government, here presents itself in the special form of the construction of a political system which, while democratic as regards one of the races, cannot safely be made democratic as regards the other. This difficulty, though new in the British empire, is not new in the Southern States of America, which have been struggling with it for years; and it is instructive to compare the experience of South Africa with that through which the Southern States have passed since the War of Secession.

Throughout South Africa—and for this purpose no distinction need be drawn between the two British Colonies and the two Boer Republics—the people of colour may be divided into two classes: the wild or tribal natives, who are, of course, by far the more numerous, and the tame or domesticated natives, among whom one may include, though they are not aborigines, but recent incomers, the East Indians of Natal and the Transvaal, as well as the comparatively few Malays of the Cape.

It will be convenient to deal with the two classes separately, and to begin with the semi-civilized or non-tribal natives, who have been for the longest period under white influences, and whose present relations with the whites indicate what the relations of the races are likely to be, for some time to come, in all parts of the country.

The non-tribal people of colour live in the Cape Colony, except the south-eastern parts (called Pondoland and Tembuland), in Natal, in the Orange Free State, and in the southern parts of the Transvaal. They consist of three stocks: (1) the so-called Cape boys, a mixed race formed by the intermarriage of Hottentots and Malays with the negro slaves brought in early days from the west coast, plus some small infusion of Dutch blood; (2) the Kafirs no longer living in native communities under their chiefs; and (3) the Indian immigrants who (together with a few Chinese) have recently come into Natal and the Transvaal, and number about 60,000, not counting in the indentured coolies who are to be sent back to India. There are no data for conjecturing the number of Cape boys and domesticated Kafirs, but it can hardly exceed 400,000.

These coloured people form the substratum of society in all the four States above mentioned. Some till the land for themselves, while others act as herdsmen or labourers for white farmers, or work at trades for white employers. They do the harder and rougher kinds of labour, especially of outdoor labour. Let me remind the reader of what has been incidentally observed before, and must now be insisted on as being the capital feature of South African life—the fact that all unskilled work is done by black people. In many parts of the country the climate is not too hot for men belonging to the north European races to work in the fields, for the sun's rays are generally tempered by a breeze, the nights are cool, and the dry air is invigorating. Had South Africa, like California or New South Wales, been colonized solely by white men, it would probably, like those countries, have to-day a white labouring population. But, unluckily, South Africa was colonized in the seventeenth century, when the importation of negro slaves was deemed the easiest means of securing cheap and abundant labour. From 1658 onward till, in 1834, slavery was abolished by the British Parliament, it was to slaves that the hardest and humblest kinds of work were allotted. The white people lost the habit of performing manual toil, and acquired the habit of despising it. No one would do for himself what he could get a black man to do for him. New settlers from Europe fell into the ways of the country, which suited their disinclination for physical exertion under a sun hotter than their own. Thus, when at last slavery was abolished, the custom of leaving menial or toilsome work to people of colour continued as strong as ever. It is as strong as ever to-day. The only considerable exception, that which was furnished by the German colonists who were planted in the eastern province after the Crimean War of 1854, has ceased to be an exception; for the children of those colonists have now, for the most part, sold or leased their allotments to Kafirs, who till the soil less efficiently than the sturdy old Germans did. The artisans who to-day come from Europe adopt the habits of the country in a few weeks or months. The English carpenter hires a native "boy" to carry his bag of tools for him; the English bricklayer has a native hodman to hand the bricks to him, which he proceeds to set; the Cornish or Australian miner directs the excavation of the seam and fixes the fuse which explodes the dynamite, but the work with the pickaxe is done by the Kafir. The herdsmen who drive the cattle or tend the sheep are Kafirs, acting under the orders of a white. Thus the coloured man is indispensable to the white man, and is brought into constant relations with him. He is deemed a necessary part of the economic machinery of the country, whether for mining or for manufacture, for tillage or for ranching.

But though the black people form the lowest stratum of society, they are not all in a position of personal dependence. A good many Kafirs, especially in the eastern province, own the small farms which they till, and many others are tenants, rendering to their landlord, like the métayers of France, a half of the produce by way of rent. Some few natives, especially near Cape Town, are even rich, and among the Indians of Natal a good many have thriven as shopkeepers. There is no reason to think that their present exclusion from trades requiring skill will continue. In 1894 there were Kafirs earning from five shillings to seven shillings and sixpence a day as riveters on an iron bridge then in course of construction. I was informed by a high railway official that many of them were quite fit to be drivers or stokers of locomotives, though white sentiment (which tolerates them as navvies or platelayers) made it inexpedient to place them in such positions. Many work as servants in stores, and are little more prone to petty thefts than are Europeans. They have dropped their old usages and adopted European habits, have substituted European clothes for the kaross of the wild or "red" Kafir, have lost their tribal attachments, usually speak Dutch, or even perhaps English, and to a considerable extent, especially in the western province and in the towns, have become Christians. The Indians are, of course, Mohammedans or heathens, the Malays (of whom there are only about 13,000), Mohammedans. The coloured people travel a good deal by rail, and are, especially the Kafirs, eager for instruction, which is provided for them only in the mission schools. Some will come from great distances to get taught, and those who can write are very fond of corresponding with one another. Taken as a whole, they are a quiet and orderly people, not given to crimes of violence, and less given (so far as I could gather) to pilfering than are the negroes of the Southern States of America. The stealing of stock from farms has greatly diminished. Assaults upon women, such as are frequent in those States, and have recently caused a hideous epidemic of lynching, are extremely rare; indeed, I heard of none, save one or two in Natal, where the natives are comparatively wild and the whites scattered thinly among them. So few Kafirs have yet received a good education, or tried to enter occupations requiring superior intelligence, that it is hardly possible to speak confidently of their capacity for the professions or the higher kinds of commerce; but judicious observers think they will in time show capacity, and tell you that their inferiority to white men lies less in mere intellectual ability than in power of will and steadiness of purpose. They are unstable, improvident, easily discouraged, easily led astray. When the morality of their old life, in which they were ruled by the will of their chief, the opinion of their fellows, and the traditional customs of the tribe, has been withdrawn from them, it may be long before any new set of principles can gain a like hold upon them.