Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

The condition of the wild or tribal Kafirs can be much more shortly described, for they have as yet entered into few relations with the whites. They are in many different grades of civilisation, from the Basutos, an industrious and settled population, among whom Christianity has made great progress, to the fierce Matabili of the north, and the Tongas of the east coast, who remain complete savages. There are probably six millions of Kafirs living under their chiefs south of the Zambesi, many of them entirely unaffected by Europeans, with not even a white magistrate or a native commissioner to collect hut-tax; and besides these there are the Korannas (akin to the Bushmen) and Namaquas (akin to the Hottentots) of the desert country between Bechuanaland and the Atlantic. In many of the districts where a regular British or Boer Government has been established, the tribal natives are now settled in regular locations, where the land is reserved from the intrusion of Europeans. Here they live under their chiefs in the old way (see [Chapter X]), and in the remoter districts continue to practise their old ceremonies. In Cape Colony and Natal, however, in both of which Colonies there are hundreds of thousands of tribal Kafirs, the more offensive of these ceremonies are now forbidden by the Government. Nowhere is anything done for their education, except by the missionaries, who, however, receive some little assistance from the two Colonial Governments. The ancient rites and beliefs gradually decay wherever the whites come, and, except beyond the Zambesi, intertribal wars and raids have now practically ceased. Yet the tribal hatreds survive. Not long ago the Zulus and the Kosa Kafirs employed as platelayers on the Cape Government Railway fought fiercely with each other. One powerful influence is telling upon them, even where they live uncontrolled by any white government. The diamond-mines at Kimberley, the gold-mines in the Witwatersrand and in various parts of Mashonaland and Matabililand, offer large wages for native labour, and cannot (except at Kimberley) obtain as much native labour as they need. Accordingly a steady though still insufficient stream of Kafirs sets towards these mining centres, not only from Basutoland, Natal, and Bechuanaland, but also from the Portuguese territories, where the Shangans live, and from the banks of the Zambesi. Most of the workmen remain for a few weeks or months only, and return home when they have earned as much money as will purchase two oxen, heretofore the usual price of a wife. They are paid in English coin, and thus the English twenty-shilling gold piece has become known, and to-day passes current in villages where no white man has yet been seen, even beyond the Zambesi, on the shores of Lake Bangweolo. With the use of coin there will come in time a desire for European goods, which, in its turn, will draw more labour toward the mines, and perhaps at last create even among the home-keeping Kafirs a disposition to till the land or raise cattle for sale. The destruction of cattle by the murrain which has been raging over the country may accelerate this change. Already wandering traders and gold-prospectors traverse regions beyond the border of civilization; and to keep these people, who are often reckless and lawless, from injuring the natives and provoking them to take vengeance on the next white man who comes their way, is one of the greatest difficulties of the British Government, a difficulty aggravated by the absence in nearly all cases of sufficient legal evidence—for all over South Africa native evidence is seldom received against a white man. The regions in which white influence is now most active, and which will most quickly become assimilated to the two British Colonies, are those through which railways have been or are now being constructed—Bechuanaland, Matabililand, and Mashonaland. Should the mines in these countries turn out well, and means be found for replacing by new stock the cattle that have perished, these regions may in fifteen or twenty years possess a considerable population of non-tribal and semi-civilised natives. Within the next half-century it is probable that, at least in the British territories as far as the Zambesi, as well as in the Transvaal and Swaziland, the power of the chiefs will have practically vanished and the natives be in a position similar to that which they now hold in Natal and the greater part of Cape Colony; that is to say, they will either dwell among the whites under the ordinary law, or will be occupying reservations under the control of a European magistrate, their old land customs having been mostly superseded and their heathen rites forbidden or disused.

The position which the whites and the blacks hold toward one another in South Africa is sufficiently similar to that of the two races in the Southern States of America to make a short comparison between the two cases instructive. There are no doubt many differences. In the United States the Southern negroes are strangers and therefore isolated, with no such reserve of black people behind them as the Kafirs have in the rest of the African continent. In South Africa it is the whites who are new-comers and isolated, and they are numerically inferior to the blacks, not, as in America, in a few particular areas (the three States of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana), but all over the country. In the whole United States the whites are to the blacks as ten to one; in Africa south of the Zambesi it is the blacks who are ten to one to the whites. Or if we compare the four South African Colonies and Republics with the fifteen old slave States, the blacks are in the former nearly four times as numerous as the whites, and the whites in the latter twice as numerous as the blacks. In point of natural capacity and force of character the Bantu races are at least equal, probably superior, to the negroes brought from Africa to North America, most of whom seem to have come from the Guinea coasts. But in point of education and in habits of industry the American negroes are far ahead of the South African; for the latter have not been subjected to the industrial training of nearly two centuries of plantation life or domestic service, while comparatively few have had any industrial contact with white workmen, or any stimulation like that which the grant of the suffrage after the War of Secession has exercised upon a large section of the American negroes, even in places where they have not been permitted to turn their legal rights to practical account. The American negroes are, moreover, all nominally Christians; the South African Kafirs nearly all heathens. Yet, after allowing for these and other minor points of contrast, the broad fact remains that in both countries we see two races in very different stages of civilisation dwelling side by side, yet not mingling nor likely to mingle. In both countries one race rules over the other. The stronger despises and dislikes the weaker; the weaker submits patiently to the stronger. But the weaker makes in education and in property a progress which will some day bring it much nearer to the stronger than it is now.

The social and political troubles which the juxtaposition of the two races has caused in North America, and which have induced many Americans to wish that it were possible to transport the whole seven millions of Southern negroes back to the Niger or the Congo, have as yet scarcely shown themselves in South Africa. Neither in the British Colonies nor in the Boer Republics is there any cause for present apprehension. The coloured people are submissive and not resentful. They have, moreover, a certain number of friends and advocates in the legislatures of the Colonies, and a certain amount of public opinion, the opinion of the best part of the community, disposed to protect them. Nevertheless, no traveller can study the colour problem in South Africa without anxiety—anxiety, not for the present, but for the future, a future in which the seeds that are now being sown will have sprung up and grown to maturity.

What is the future of the Kafirs likely to be? Though a writer may prophesy with an easy mind when he knows that the truth or error of the prophecy will not be tested till long after he has himself quitted the world, still it is right to make the usual apologies for venturing to prophesy at all. These apologies being taken as made, let us consider what is likely to come to pass in South Africa.

The Kafirs will stay where they are and form the bulk of the population all over South Africa. Some sanguine men think they will move off to the hotter north, as in America the centre of negro population has shifted southward toward the Gulf of Mexico. This is improbable, because the South African white seems resolved to rely upon natives for all the harder and rougher kinds of labour, not to add that, although the European can thrive and work, the Kafir is more truly the child of the soil and of the climate. And not only will he stay, but, to all appearances, he will increase faster than does the white man.

The Kafirs, now divided into many tribes and speaking many languages and dialects, will lose their present tribal organization, their languages, their distinctive habits. Whether some sort of native lingua Franca will spring up, or whether they will all come to speak English, is doubtful; but probably in the long run English will prevail and become the common speech of the southern half of the continent. They will also lose their heathenism (though many superstitions will survive), and will become, in name at least, Christians. Thus they will form to a far greater extent than now a homogeneous mass pervaded by the same ideas and customs.

While thus constituting one vast black community, they will probably remain as sharply marked off from the whites as they are to-day. That there will be no intermarriage may safely be assumed from the fact that mixture of blood has greatly diminished since the days of slavery, just as it has diminished in the Southern States of America. White opinion universally condemns it, and rightly, for as things are now the white race would lose more by the admixture than the coloured race would gain.

The Kafirs will be far more generally educated than they are now, and will have developed a much higher intelligence. That they will remain inferior to the whites in all intellectual pursuits and in most handicrafts may be concluded from American experience; but they will doubtless be able to compete with white men in many trades, will to some extent enter the professions, will acquire property, and (assuming the law to remain as at present) will form a much larger part, though probably for a very long time a minority, of the electorate. From among them there will doubtless arise men fit to lead them for social and political purposes. A talent for public speaking is already remarked as one of their gifts.

Thus the day will arrive when South Africa will see itself filled by a large coloured population, tolerably homogeneous, using the same language, having forgotten its ancient tribal feuds, and not, like the people of India, divided by caste or by the mutual hatred of Hindus and Mussulmans. Most of this population will be poor, and it may, unless successive Colonies are led off to the more thinly peopled parts of Africa, tread hard upon the means of subsistence which the land offers; I say the land, for the mines—or at least the gold-mines—will have been exhausted long before the day we are contemplating arrives.

When will that day arrive? Probably not for at least a century, possibly not for two centuries. Fast as the world moves in our time, it must take several generations to develop a race so backward as the Kafirs. Many political changes may occur before then; but political changes are not likely to make much difference to a process like this, which goes on under natural laws—laws that will continue to work, whatever may happen to the Boers, and whatever may be the future relations of the Colonies to the mother country. It is only some great change in human thought and feeling, or some undreamt-of discovery in the physical world, that can be imagined as likely to affect the progress of the natives and the attitude of the whites toward them.