Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

Whoever reviews the whole South African policy of the British Government during the ninety-three years that have elapsed since 1806 cannot but admit that many errors were committed. Many precious opportunities for establishing British authority on a secure basis were lost. Many things were done imperfectly, and therefore had to be done over and over again, which it would have been cheaper as well as wiser to have finished off at once. Many steps, prudent in themselves, and dictated by excellent motives, were taken at a moment and in a way which made them misunderstood and resisted. Reflecting on these mistakes, one sometimes wonders that the country was not lost altogether to Britain, and thinks of the saying of the old Swiss statesman: Hominum negligentia, Dei providentia, regitur Helvetia. It may nevertheless be truly said for the British Government that it almost always sought to act justly, and that such advances as it made were not dictated by an aggressive spirit, but (with few exceptions) compelled by the necessities of the case. And it must not be forgotten that, as all home governments err in their control of Colonies—Spain, Portugal, and France have certainly erred in their day far more fatally than England—so many of the errors which now most startle us in the annals of South Africa were all but inevitable, because the wisest man could not have foreseen the course which things have in fact taken. Who ever tries to look at the events of sixty, thirty, or even twenty years ago with the eyes of those times, and remembers that Colonial ministers in England had to consider not only what they thought best, but what they could get the uninstructed public opinion of their own country to accept, will be more indulgent than the colonists are in their judgment of past mistakes. For instance, it is apt to be forgotten that the Cape was not occupied with a view to the establishment of a European Colony, in our present sense of the word. The Dutch took it that they might plant a cabbage-garden; the English took it that they might have a naval station and half-way house to India. Not till our own time did people begin to think of it as capable of supporting a great civilised community and furnishing a new market for British goods; not till 1869 was it known as a region whence great wealth might be drawn. Hence Britain, which during the first half of this century was busy in conquering India, in colonising Australasia, and in setting things to rights in Canada, never cared to bend her energies to the development of South Africa, then a less promising field for those energies, spent no more money on it than she could help, and sought to avoid the acquisition of new territory, because that meant new troubles and new outlays.

The views of colonial policy which prevailed in England down till about 1870 were very different from those which most of us now hold. The statesmen of the last generation accepted that consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii which, according to Tacitus, Augustus held sound for an empire less scattered than is that of Britain; they thought that Britain had already more territory than she could hope to develop and (in the long run) to govern; and they therefore sought to limit rather than increase her responsibilities. And they believed, reasoning somewhat too hastily from the revolt of the North American Colonies, that as soon as the new English communities to which self-government had been or was in due course to be granted, reached a certain level of wealth and population they would demand and receive their independence. That the fruit would fall off the old tree as soon as it was ripe was the favourite metaphor employed to convey what nearly all publicists took to be an obvious truth. No one stated it so trenchantly as Disraeli when he wrote: "These wretched Colonies will all be independent too in a few years, and are a millstone round our necks;" but the dogma was generally accepted by politicians belonging to both the great parties in the state. Those, moreover, were days in which economy and retrenchment were popular cries in England, and when it was deemed the duty of a statesman to reduce as far as possible the burdens of the people. Expenditure on colonial wars and on the administration of half-settled districts was odious to the prudent and thrifty contemporaries or disciples of Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden. Accordingly, the chief aim of British statesmen from 1830 till 1870 was to arrest the tide of British advance, to acquire as little territory as possible, to leave restless natives and emigrant Boers entirely to themselves. Desperate efforts were made to stop the Kafir wars. We can now see that the tendency—one may almost call it a law of nature—which everywhere over the world has tempted or forced a strong civilised power to go on conquering the savage or half-civilised peoples on its borders, the process that has carried the English all over India and brought the Russians from the Volga to the Pamirs in one direction and to the mouth of the Amur in another, was certain to compel the British Government to subdue and annex one Kafir tribe after another until either a desert or the territory of some other civilised State was reached. But fifty years ago this was not clearly perceived; so the process, which might have inflicted less suffering if it had been steadily and swiftly carried through, went on slowly and to the constant annoyance of statesmen at home.

It was the same as regards the great plateau and the Boer emigrants who dwelt there. Not from any sympathy with their love of independence, but because she did not want the trouble of pursuing and governing them and the wide lands they were spread over, England resolved to abandon the interior to them. In 1852 and 1854 she made a supreme effort to check her own onward career, first by recognizing the independence of the Transvaal emigrants whose allegiance she had theretofore claimed, then by actually renouncing her rights to the Orange River Sovereignty, and to those within it who desired to continue her subjects. What more could a thrifty and cautious and conscientious country do? Nevertheless, these good resolutions had to be reconsidered, these self-denying principles foregone. Circumstances were too strong for the Colonial Office. In 1869 it accepted the protectorate of Basutoland. In 1871 it yielded to the temptation of the diamond-fields, and took Griqualand West. Soon after it made a treaty with Khama, which gave the British a foothold in Bechuanaland. In 1877 it annexed the Transvaal. By that time the old ideas were beginning to pass away, and to be replaced by new views of the mission and destiny of Britain. The wish of the British Government to stand still had been combated all along by powerful inducements to move on. The colonists always pressed for an advance of the frontier. The Governor usually pressed for it. The home government was itself haunted by a fear that if it abandoned positions of vantage its successors might afterwards have reason to rue the abandonment. These were the considerations that drove British statesmen to the most momentous forward steps that were taken. Two things, and two only, were really vital to British interests—the control of the coasts, and the control of an open road to the north. Accordingly, the two decisive steps were the occupation of Natal in 1842-3, which shut off the Boers from the sea, and the taking of Griqualand West in 1871 (followed by the taking of southern Bechuanaland in 1884), which secured between the Transvaal on the one side and the Kalahari Desert on the other a free access to the great northern plateau.

The tide of English opinion began to turn about 1870, and since then it has run with increasing force in the direction of what is called imperialism, and has indeed in some cases brought about annexations that are likely to prove unprofitable, because the territory acquired is too hot and unhealthy to be fit for British settlement. The strides of advance made in 1884-5 and 1890 have been as bold and large as those of earlier days were timid and halting; and the last expiring struggles of the old policy were seen in 1884, when Lord Derby, who belonged to the departing school, yielded a new convention to the importunity of the Transvaal Boers and allowed Germany to establish herself in Damaraland. But it is due to Britain, which has been accused, and so far as regards South Africa unjustly accused (down to 1896), of aggressive aims, to recall the fact that she strove for many years to restrict her dominion, and did not cease from her efforts until long experience had shown that it was hard to maintain the old policy, and until the advent on the scene of other European powers, whom it was thought prudent to keep at a distance from her own settled territories, impelled her to join in that general scramble for Africa which has been so strange a feature of the last two decades.

There have been moments, even since the occupation of two points so important as Basutoland (in 1869) and Griqualand West (in 1871) when it has seemed possible that South Africa might become Dutch rather than English, such is the tenacity of that race, and so deep are the roots which its language has struck. With the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold-fields, drawing a new body of English immigrants into the country, that possibility seems to have passed away. The process of territorial distribution is in South Africa now complete. Every Colony and State has become limited by boundaries defined in treaties. Every native tribe has now some legal white superior, and no native tribe remains any longer formidable. The old race questions have passed, or are passing, into new phases. But they will be at least as difficult in their new forms as in their old ones. I will devote the few remaining pages of this book to a short consideration of them and of the other problems affecting the future of South Africa with which they are involved.

Reasons have been given in a preceding chapter for the conclusion that both the white and the black races are likely to hold their ground over all the country, and that the black race will continue to be the more numerous. Assuming the conditions of agriculture to remain what they are at present, and assuming that the causes which now discourage the establishment of large manufacturing industries do not pass away, there will probably be for the next seventy years a large white population on the gold-field and at the chief seaports, and only a small white population over the rest of the country. Even should irrigation be largely introduced, it would be carried on chiefly by black labourers. Even should low wages or the discovery of larger and better deposits of iron and coal stimulate the development of great manufacturing industries, still it is a black rather than a white population that would be therewith increased. Various causes may be imagined which would raise or reduce the birth-rate and the infant death-rate among the natives, so that one cannot feel sure that the existing proportion between them and the whites will be maintained. But if we regard the question from the point of view of labour, and take the natives to represent that part of the community which in Europe does the harder and less skilled kinds of work, both in country and in town, it may be concluded that they will continue to form the majority even where they live among the white people, without taking account of those areas where they, and they alone, are settled on the land. It is, however, impossible to conjecture how large the majority will be.

The Kafirs, as has been already suggested, will gradually lose their tribal organisation and come to live like Europeans, under European law. They will become more generally educated, and will learn skilled handicrafts; many—perhaps, in the long run, all—will speak English. They will eventually cease to be heathens, even if they do not all become Christians. This process of Europeanisation will spread from south to north, and may probably not be complete in the north—at any rate, in the German and Portuguese parts of the north—till the end of the next century. But long before that time the natives will in many places have begun to compete (as indeed a few already do) with the whites in some kinds of well-paid labour. They will also, being better educated and better paid, have become less submissive than they are now, and a larger number of them will enjoy the suffrage.

What will be the relations of the two races when these things have come about, say within two or three generations? Consider what the position will then be. Two races will be living on the same ground, in close and constant economic relations, both those of employment and those of competition, speaking the same language and obeying the same laws, differing, no doubt, in strength of intelligence and will, yet with many members of the weaker race superior as individual men to many members of the stronger. And these two races, separated by the repulsion of physical differences, will have no social intercourse, no mixture of blood, but will each form a nation by itself for all purposes save those of industry and perhaps of politics. There will, no doubt, be the nexus of industrial interest, for the white employer will need the labour of the blacks. But even in countries where no race differences intervene, the industrial nexus does not prevent bitter class hatreds and labour wars.

That such a state of things will arrive is rendered probable not only by the phenomena to be observed to-day in South Africa, but by the experience of the Southern States of the American Union, where almost exactly what I have described has come to pass, with the addition that the inferior race has in theory the same political rights as the superior. How will the relations of two races so living together be adjusted? The experience of the Southern States is too short to throw much light on this problem. It is, however, a painful experience in many respects, and it causes the gravest anxieties for the future. Similar anxieties must press upon the mind of any one who in South Africa looks sixty or eighty years forward; and they are not diminished by the fact that in South Africa the inferior race is far more numerous than the superior. But although the position I have outlined seems destined to arrive, it is still so distant that we can no more predict the particular form its difficulties will take than the mariner can describe the rocks and trees upon an island whose blue mountains he begins to descry on the dim horizon. Whatever those difficulties may be, they will be less formidable if the whites realize, before the coloured people have begun to feel a sense of wrong, that their own future is bound up with that of the natives, and that the true interests of both races are in the long run the same.

Although the facts we have been considering suggest the view that the white population of South Africa will be very small when compared with that of the North American or Australasian Colonies, they also suggest that the whites will in South Africa hold the position of an aristocracy, and may draw from that position some of the advantages which belong to those who are occupied only on the higher kinds of work, and have fuller opportunities for intellectual cultivation than the mass of manual labourers enjoy. A large part of the whites will lead a country life, directing the field work or the ranching of their servants. Those who dwell in the towns will be merchants or employers of labour or highly skilled artisans, corresponding generally to the upper and middle strata of society in North America or Australia, but probably with a smaller percentage of exceptionally wealthy men. There is, of course, the danger that a class may spring up composed of men unfit for the higher kinds of work, and yet too lazy or too proud to work with their hands; and some observers already discover signs of the appearance of such a class. If its growth can be averted the conditions for the progress and happiness of the white race in South Africa seem favourable; and we are approaching an age of the world when the quality of a population will be more important than its quantity.