Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

In preceding chapters I have endeavoured to present a picture of South Africa as it stands to-day, and to sketch the leading events that have made its political conditions what they are. Now, in bringing the book to a close, I desire to add a few reflections on the forces which have been at work, and to attempt the more hazardous task of conjecturing how those forces are likely to operate in the future.

The progress of the country, and the peculiar form which its problems have taken, are the resultant of three causes. One of these is the character which nature has impressed upon it. Of this I have already spoken ([Chapter VI]), pointing out how the high interior plateau, with its dry and healthy climate, determined the main line of European advance and secured the predominance, not of the race which first discovered the country, but of the race which approached it, far later in time, from its best side. It is also in this physical character that one must seek the explanation of the remarkably slow progress of the country in wealth and population. South Africa began to be occupied by white men earlier than any part of the American continent. The first Dutch settlement was but little posterior to those English settlements in North America which have grown into a nation of seventy-seven millions of people, and nearly a century and a half prior to the first English settlements in Australia. It is the unhealthiness of the east coast and the dryness of the rest of the country that are mainly accountable for this tardy growth—a growth which might have been still more tardy but for the political causes that drove the Boers into the far interior. And again, it is the physical configuration of the country that has made it, and is likely to keep it, one country. This is a point of cardinal importance. Though divided into two British Colonies, with several other pieces of British territory, and two Boer Republics, the habitable parts of South Africa form one community, all the parts of which must stand or fall together. The great plateau is crossed by no lines of physical demarcation all the way from the Zambesi to the Hex River (some fifty miles north-east of Cape Town), and the coast regions are closely bound by economic ties to the plateau, which through them touches the outer world. Popular speech which talks of South Africa as one whole is scientifically right.

The two other causes that have ruled the fortunes and guided the development of the country have been the qualities and relations of the races that inhabit it, and the character of the Government which has sought from afar to control the relations of those races. These deserve to be more fully considered.

English statesmen have for more than fifty years been accustomed to say that of all the Colonies of Great Britain none has given to the mother country so much disquiet and anxiety as South Africa has done. This is another way of expressing the fact which strikes the traveller—that no other British Colony has compressed so much exciting history into the last sixty or seventy years. The reason is undoubtedly to be found in the circumstance that South Africa has had two sets of race questions to deal with: questions between the whites and the aborigines, questions between the Dutch and the English. It is this latter set of questions that have been the main thread of South African annals. Why have they proved so troublesome? Why are they so troublesome to-day, when we ought to be able to look at them with a vision enlarged and a temper mellowed by wide experience? Partly from an element inherent in all race questions. They are not questions that can be settled on pure business lines, by an adjustment of the material interests of the parties concerned. They involve sentiment, and thus, like questions of religion, touch the deeper springs of emotion. And they spring from, or are involved with, incompatibilities of character which prevent the men of either stock from fully understanding, and therefore fully trusting, the men of the other. Suspicion, if not positive aversion, makes it difficult for two races to work together, even where the political arrangements that govern their relations are just and reasonable. But something may also be ascribed to certain malign accidents which blasted the prospect, once fair, of a friendly fusion between the Dutch and the English peoples that seemed eminently fit to be fused. The British annexation of Cape Colony occurred at an unfortunate time. Had it happened thirty years earlier no difficulties would have arisen over the natives and slavery, because at that time the new philanthropy had not begun to influence English opinion or the British Government. Had it happened in later days, when steam had given quicker and more frequent ocean communication, Britain and the Colony would each have better known what the other thought and wished, and the errors that alienated the Boers might never have been committed. The period which followed the annexation was precisely the period in which the differences between English feeling and colonial feeling were most marked and most likely to lead to misunderstanding and conflict.

For there has been in the antagonism of the Boers and the English far more than the jealousy of two races. There has been a collision of two types of civilisation, one belonging to the nineteenth century, the other to the seventeenth. His isolation, not only in a distant corner of the southern hemisphere, but in the great, wide, bare veldt over which his flocks and herds roam, has kept the Boer fast bound in the ideas and habits of a past age, and he shrinks from the contact of the keen restless modern man, with new arts of gain and new forms of pleasure, just as a Puritan farmer of Cromwell's day might shrink were he brought to life and forced to plunge into the current of modern London. Had the Boers been of English stock, but subjected to the same conditions as those which kept the seventeenth century alive in the country behind the Cape, they too would have resisted the new ways of the new rulers; but their identity of race and speech with those rulers would have abridged the struggle. It is the fact that the old Cape settlers had a language of their own, and a sense of blood-kinship to hold them together that has enabled the Dutch element to remain cohesive, and given them an Afrikander patriotism of their own—a patriotism which is not Dutch, for they care nothing for the traditions of Holland, but purely Africander.

Their local position as half-nomadic inhabitants of a wide interior gave a peculiar character to that struggle between the mother country and her colonists which has arisen more than once in British history. They were so few and so poor, as compared with the people of the thirteen Colonies of the North American coast in 1776, that it was useless for them to rebel and fight for independence, as those Colonies had done. On the other hand, they were not, like the French of lower Canada, rooted in the soil as agriculturists. Hence a middle course between rebellion and submission offered itself. That course was secession. They renounced not only their political allegiance, but even the very lands where they dwelt, seeking the protection of the desert as other emigrants before them had sought that of the ocean. Thus again, and more completely, isolated since 1836, the emigrant Boers, and especially those of the Transvaal, have been able to retain their old ways for sixty years longer, and have grown more anti-English than ever. On the other hand, the English of the Colony, whose English sentiment was quickened by these events, have remained more thoroughly English than those of most British Colonies, and have never conceived the idea of severing their own connection with the mother country.

That the emigrant Boers became republicans was due rather to circumstance than to conscious purpose. A monarch they could not have, because there was no one designated for the place, as well as because they had the instinct of general disobedience. But for a long time they tried to rub along with no more government or leadership than the needs of war required. Seldom has any people been so little influenced by abstract political ideas, yet seldom has a people enjoyed so perfect an opportunity of trying political experiments and testing the theories of political philosophers. But the Boers were, and are still, a strictly practical people. Their houses give them cover from sun and rain, but nothing more; there is little comfort and no elegance. So their institutions were the fewest and simplest under which men have ever governed themselves. It is therefore no theoretical attachment to democracy that has helped the Boers to resist the English; it is merely the wish to be left alone, and a stubbornness of will that made independence seem more desirable the more it was threatened.

Even this admirable stubbornness would hardly have carried them through but for the dispersion over vast spaces. That dispersion, while it retarded their political growth and social progress, made them hard to reach or to conquer. The British Government despaired of over-taking and surrounding them, for they were scattered like antelopes over the lonely veldt, and there was a still vaster and equally lonely veldt behind them into which they could retire. To pursue them seemed a wild-goose chase, and a costly one, in which there was much to spend and little to gain. Thus their weakness has proved their strength, and the more settled they become in the future, the less can they hope to escape the influences they have so long resisted.

But for the maintenance of the sentiment of Boer nationality by the two Boer Republics, the antagonism of Dutch and English in Cape Colony would have ere now died out, for there has been little or nothing in colonial politics to sustain it. The interests of the farmers of both stocks are identical, their rights are in all respects the same, and the British Government has been perfectly impartial. The Boers in the Colony are good citizens and loyal subjects. It is only the character of the country and the conditions of their pastoral life that have retarded their social fusion with the English, as it is only the passions aroused by the strife of Boers and Englishmen in the Transvaal that evoked in 1881, and again evoked in 1896, a political opposition between the races. Fortunately, the sentiments of the Dutch have possessed a safe outlet in the colonial Parliament. The wisdom of the policy which gave responsible government has been signally vindicated; for, as constitutional means have existed for influencing the British Government, feelings which might otherwise have found vent in a revolt or a second secession have been diverted into a safe channel.

The other set of race troubles, those between white settlers and the aborigines of the land have been graver in South Africa than any which European governments have had to face in any other new country. The Red Men of North America, splendidly as they fought, never seriously checked the advance of the whites. The revolts of the aborigines in Peru and Central America were easily suppressed. The once warlike Maoris of New Zealand have, under the better methods of the last twenty-five years, become quiet and tolerably contented. Even the French in Algeria had not so long a strife to maintain with the Moorish and Kabyle tribes as the Dutch and English had with the natives at the Cape. The south-coast Kafirs far outnumbered the whites, were full of courage, had a rough and thickly wooded country to defend, and were so ignorant as never to know when they were beaten. A more intelligent race might have sooner abandoned the contest. The melancholy chapter of native wars seems to be now all but closed, except perhaps in the far north. These wars, however, did much to retard the progress of South Africa and to give it a bad name. They deterred many an English farmer from emigrating thither in the years between 1810 and 1870. They annoyed and puzzled the home government, and made it think the Colony a worthless possession, whence little profit or credit was to be drawn in return for the unending military expenditure. And they gave the colonists ground for complaints, sometimes just, sometimes unjust, against the home government, which was constantly accused of parsimony, of shortsightedness, of vacillation, of sentimental weakness, in sending out too few troops, in refusing to annex fresh territory, in patching up a hollow peace, in granting too easy terms to the natives.