The two South African Colonies have not yet had time to develop new and distinctive types of life and character. Though Cape Colony is nearly as old as Massachusetts or Virginia, it has been less than a century under British rule, and the two diverse elements in its population have not yet become blent into any one type that can be said to belong to the people as a whole. One must therefore describe these elements separately. The Dutch are almost all country folk, and the country folk are (in Cape Colony) mostly Dutch. Some, especially near Cape Town, are agriculturists, but many more are ranchmen or sheep-masters. They are a slow, quiet, well-meaning hospitable people, extremely conservative in their opinions as well as their habits, very sparing, because they have little ready money, very suspicious, because afraid of being out-witted by the English traders, and many of them so old-fashioned in their theory of the universe as to object to legislation against sheep scab, because they regard it as a visitation of Providence, to be combated only by repentance and not by ordinary human means. The women are usually ill-educated and often unattractive; but they have strong characters. Nothing was more remarkable in the wars of the emigrant Boers against the Kafirs than the courage and devotion which the women displayed. That love of cleanliness for which their kinsfolk in Holland are famous has vanished under the conditions of a settler's life and the practice of using negro servants, and they are now apt to be slatternly. These country folk live in a simple, old-fashioned way, loving solitude and isolation, yet very hospitable, and enjoying the rare occasions on which they meet for festivities at one another's farmhouses. Such meetings are almost their only recreations, for hunting is less attainable now that the larger game has disappeared, and they care nothing for the intellectual pleasures of reading or art or music. Education is beginning to spread among them, but it has not yet done much to quicken their minds or give them new interests. The population is so extremely thin, the towns so few and so small, that it is not surprising that a people who came out from the least educated strata of society in Holland should, under the difficult conditions of a settler's life, have remained at a low level of mental culture. They would probably have been still more backward, and have produced fewer men of ability, but for the infusion of French Huguenot blood, which still proclaims itself in the names of some of the leading families.
Compared to the Dutch, the English are recent immigrants. They have all arrived within the present century, and few of them can point to grandfathers born in South Africa. Partly for this reason, partly from their desire to be unlike the Dutch, they have remained markedly English, both in their speech, in their ideas, and, so far as the differences of climate permit, in their way of life. Nevertheless, they have been affected by the Dutch. They have taken from the latter the aversion to field labour, the contempt for the blacks, the tendency to prefer large pastoral farms to agriculture, and, in some districts, a rather sleepy and easy-going temperament. Even in Mashonaland I was told that the English ranchmen were apt to fall into the habits of their Boer neighbours. They form the large majority of the town population, for not only the seaports, but also such inland places as Graham's Town, King William's Town, and Kimberley are quite English, and nearly all the commerce and finance of the country are in their hands. They have more enterprise than the Dutch, and are much less antiquated in their ideas, so it is to them that the profits of the new mining ventures have chiefly fallen, so far as these have not been appropriated by keener and more ingenious adventurers from Europe, mostly of Semitic stock.
There has been hardly any Irish immigration; and though one meets many Scotchmen among the bankers and merchants, the Scottish element seems smaller than in Ontario or most of the Australasian Colonies. Many settlers have come from Germany, but these have now become blended with the English. There are no better colonists than the Germans; and indeed the Europeans whom the last ninety years have brought have been mostly of excellent stocks, superior to the mid-European races that have lately inundated the United States.
Though the English and the Dutch form distinct social elements which are not yet fused, and though these elements are now politically opposed, there is no social antagonism between the races. The Englishman will deride the slowness of the Dutchman, the Dutchman may distrust the adroitness or fear the activity of the Englishman, but neither dislikes nor avoids the other. Neither enjoys, or even pretends to, any social superiority, and hence neither objects to marry his son or his daughter to a member of the other race. Both are, as a rule, in fairly easy circumstances; that is to say, nearly everybody has enough, and till lately hardly anybody had more than enough. Within the last few years, however, two changes have come. The diamond mines and the gold-mines have given vast riches to a small number of persons, some half-dozen or less of whom continue to live in the Colony, while the others have returned to Europe. These great fortunes are a disturbing element, giving an undue influence to their possessors, and exciting the envy or emulation of the multitude. The other change is the growth of a class of people resembling the "mean whites" of the Southern States of America, loafers and other lazy or shiftless fellows who hang about and will not take to any regular work. I heard them described and deplored as a new phenomenon, but gather that they are not yet numerous. Their appearance, it is to be feared, is the natural result of that contempt for hard unskilled labour which the existence of slavery inspired in the whites; and they may hereafter constitute, as they now do in the Southern States of America, the section of the population specially hostile to the negro, and therefore dangerous to the whole community.
To an Englishman or American who knows how rapidly his language has become the language of commerce over the world; how it has almost extinguished the ancient Celtic tongues in Scotland and Ireland; how quickly in the United States it has driven Spanish out of the South West, and has come to be spoken by the German, Scandinavian, and Slavonic immigrants whom that country receives, it is surprising to find that Dutch holds its ground stubbornly in South Africa. It is still the ordinary language of probably one-half of the people of Cape Colony (although most of these can speak some English) and of three-fourths of those in the Orange Free State, though of a minority in Natal. Englishmen settling in the interior usually learn it for the sake of talking to their Dutch neighbours, who are slow to learn English; and English children learn it from the coloured people, for the coloured people talk it far more generally than they do English; in fact, when a native (except in one of the coast towns) speaks a European tongue, that tongue is sure to be Dutch. Good observers told me that although an increasing number of the Africanders (i.e., colonists born in Africa) of Dutch origin now understand English, the hold of Dutch is so strong that it will probably continue to be spoken in the Colony for two generations at least. Though one must call it Dutch, it differs widely from the cultivated Dutch of Holland, having not only preserved some features of that language as spoken two centuries ago, but having adopted many Kafir or Hottentot words, and having become vulgarized into a dialect called the Taal, which is almost incapable of expressing abstract thought or being a vehicle for any ideas beyond those of daily life. In fact, many of the Boers, especially in the Transvaal, cannot understand a modern Dutch book, hardly even an Amsterdam newspaper. This defect might give English a great advantage if the Boers wished to express abstract ideas. But they have not this wish, for they have no abstract ideas to express. They are a people who live in the concrete.
The rise of great fortunes, which I have noted, has been too recent and too exceptional a phenomenon to have affected the generally tranquil and even tenor of South African social life. Among both Dutch and English months and years flow smoothly on. Few new immigrants enter the rural districts or the smaller towns; few new enterprises are started; few ambitions or excitements stir the minds of the people. The Witwatersrand gold-field is, of course, a startling exception, but it is an exception which tends to perpetuate the rule, for, by drawing off the more eager and restless spirits, it has left the older parts of both the Colonies more placid than ever. The general equality of conditions has produced a freedom from assumption on the one hand, and from servility on the other, and, indeed, a general absence of snobbishness, which is quite refreshing to the European visitor. Manners are simple, and being simple, they are good. If there is less polish than in some countries, there is an unaffected heartiness and kindliness. The Dutch have a sense of personal dignity which respects the dignity of their fellows, and which expresses itself in direct and natural forms of address. An experienced observer dilated to me on the high level of decorum maintained in the Cape Parliament, where scenes of disorder are, I believe, unknown, and violent language is rare. One expects to find in all Colonies a sense of equality and an element of sans gêne in social intercourse. But one usually finds also more roughness and more of an off-hand, impatient way of treating strangers than is visible in South Africa. This may be partly due to the fact that people are not in such a hurry as they are in most new countries. They have plenty of time for everything. The climate disinclines them to active exertion. There is little immigration. Trade, except in the four seaports,[71] is not brisk, and even there it is not brisk in the American sense of the word. The slackness of the black population, which has to be employed for the harder kinds of work, reacts upon the white employer. I have visited no new English-speaking country where one so little felt the strain and stress of modern life. This feature of South African society, though it implies a slow material development, is very agreeable to the visitor, and I doubt if it be really an injury to the ultimate progress of the country. In most parts of North America, possibly in Australia also, industrial development has been too rapid, and has induced a nervous excitability and eager restlessness of temper from which South Africa is free. Of course, in saying this, I except always the mining districts, and especially the Witwatersrand, which is to the full as restless and as active as San Francisco or Melbourne.
The comparative ease of life disposes the English part of the population to athletic sports, which are pursued with almost as much avidity as in Australia. Even one who thinks that in England the passion for them has gone beyond all reasonable limits, and has become a serious injury to education and to the taste for intellectual pleasures, may find in the character of the climate a justification for the devotion to cricket, in particular, which strikes him in South Africa. Now that the wild animals have become scarce, hunting cannot be pursued as it once was, and young people would have little incitement to physical exertion in the open air did not the English love of cricket flourish in the schools and colleges. Long may it flourish!
The social conditions I have been describing are evidently unfavourable to the development of literature or science or art. Art has scarcely begun to exist. Science is represented only by a few naturalists in Government employment, and by some intelligent amateur observers. Researches in electricity or chemistry or biology require nowadays a somewhat elaborate apparatus, with which few private persons could provide themselves, and which are here possessed only by one or two public institutions. English and American writers have hitherto supplied the intellectual needs of the people, and the established reputation of writers in those countries makes competition difficult to a new colonial author. The towns are too small, and their inhabitants too much occupied in commerce to create groups of highly educated people, capable of polishing, whetting, and stimulating one another's intellects. There are few large libraries, and no fully equipped university to train young men in history or philosophy or economics or theology. Accordingly, few books are composed or published, and, so far as I know, only three South African writers have caught the ear of the European public. One of these was Robert Pringle, a Scotchman, whose poems, written sixty or seventy years ago, possess considerable merit, and one of which, beginning with the line,
Afar in the desert I love to ride,
remains the most striking picture of South African nature in those early days when the wilderness was still filled with wild creatures. Another, Miss Olive Schreiner (now Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner), has attained deserved fame. A third, Mr. Scully, is less known in England, but his little volume of Kafir Tales is marked by much graphic power and shows insight into native character.