He was told that only the actual murderer of David Janssen (if apprehended) was to be put to death; that cattle equal in amount to the cattle stolen were to be recovered, but only from the actual robbers; and that "Harry," if necessary, should be sent to prison at Batavia. But he was not otherwise to molest or injure the offending Hottentots. Excellent advice, and such as we should expect from the countrymen of Grotius in their most prosperous era. But unfortunately it was quite impossible for Van Riebeck, with his handful of soldiers and sailors, planted at the extremity of the great barbaric continent of Africa, to think of putting it into effect. He replied that he had no means of identifying the individual wrong-doers, and that the institution of private property was unknown among the Hottentots. The only method by which the individual could be punished was by punishing the tribe, and he therefore proposed to capture the tribe and their cattle. But this was a course of action which was repugnant to the Directors' sense of justice. It aroused, besides, a vision of reinforcements ordered from Batavia, and of disbursements quite disproportionate to the practical utility of the Cape station as an item in the system of the Company. In vain Van Riebeck urged that a large body of slaves and ten or twelve hundred head of cattle would be a great addition to the resources of the settlement. The Chamber of Seventeen refused to sanction the proposals of the commander, and, as its own were impracticable, nothing was done. The Beechranger tribe escaped with impunity, and the Hottentots, as a whole, were emboldened to make fresh attacks upon the European settlers.
The Afrikander stock.
This simple narrative is a lantern that sheds a ray of light upon an obscure subject. Two points are noticeable in the attitude of the home authority. First, there is its inability to grasp the local conditions; and second, the underlying assumption that a moral judgment based upon the conditions of the home country, if valid, must be equally valid in South Africa. By the time that the home authority had become Downing Street instead of the peripatetic Chamber of Seventeen, the field of mischievous action over which these misconceptions operated had become enlarged. The natives were there, as before; but, in addition to the natives, there had grown up a population of European descent, some thirty thousand in number, whose manner of life and standards of thought and conduct were scarcely more intelligible to the British, or indeed to the European mind, than those of the yellow-skinned Hottentot or the brown-skinned Kafir. A century and a half of the Dutch East India Company's government—a government "in all things political purely despotic, in all things commercial purely monopolist"—had produced a people unlike any other European community on the face of the earth. Of the small original stock from which the South African Dutch are descended, one-quarter were Huguenot refugees from France, an appreciable section were German, and the institution of slavery had added to this admixture the inevitable strain of non-Aryan blood. But this racial change was by no means all that separated the European population in the Cape Colony from the Dutch of Holland. A more potent agency had been at work. The corner-stone of the policy of the Dutch East India Company was the determination to debar the settlers from all intercourse—social, intellectual, commercial, and political—with their kinsmen in Europe. One fact will suffice to show how perfectly this object was attained. Incredible as it may seem, it is the case that at the end of the eighteenth century no printing-press was to be found in the Cape Colony, nor had this community of twenty thousand Europeans the means of knowing the nature of the laws and regulations of the Government by which it was ruled. So long and complete an isolation from European civilisation produced a result which is as remarkable in itself as it is significant to the student of South African history. This phenomenon was the existence, in the nineteenth century, of a community of European blood whose moral and intellectual standards were those of the seventeenth.
The nationality difficulty.
Our dip into the early history of South Africa is not purposeless. It does not, of course, explain the failure of British administration; but it brings us into touch with circumstances that were bound to make the task of governing the Cape Colony—a task finally undertaken by England in 1806—one of peculiar difficulty. The native population was strange, but the European population was even more strange and abnormal. If we had been left to deal with the native population alone we should have experienced no serious difficulty in rendering them harmless neighbours, and have been able to choose our own time for entering upon the responsibilities involved in the administration of their territories. But, coming second on the field, we were bound to modify our native policy to suit the conditions of a preexisting relationship between the white and black races that was not of our creation, and one, moreover, that was in many respects repugnant to British ideas of justice. Nor was this all. The old European population, which should have been, naturally, our ally and fellow-worker in the task of native administration, gradually changed from its original position of a subject nationality to that of a political rival; and, as such, openly bid against us for the mastership of the native African tribes.
Now when two statesmen are pitted against each other, of whom one is a man whose methods of attack are limited by nineteenth-century ideas, while the morality of the other, being that of the seventeenth century, permits him greater freedom of action, it is obvious that the first will be at a disadvantage. And this would be the case more than ever if the nineteenth-century statesman was under the impression that his political antagonist was a man whose code of morals was identical with his own. When once he had learnt that the moral standard of the other was lower than, or different from, his own, he would of course make allowance for the circumstance, and he would then be able to contest the position with him upon equal terms. But until he had grasped this fact he would be at a disadvantage.
Generally speaking, the representatives of the British Government, both Governors and High Commissioners, soon learnt that neither the natives nor the Dutch population could be dealt with on the same footing as a Western European. But the British Government cannot be said to have thoroughly learnt the same lesson until, in almost the last week of the nineteenth century, the three successive defeats of Stormberg, Magersfontein, and Colenso aroused it to a knowledge of the fact that we had been within an ace of losing South Africa. Many, indeed, would question whether even now the lesson had been thoroughly learnt. But, however this may be, it is certain that throughout the nineteenth century the Home Government wished to treat both the natives and the Dutch in South Africa on a basis of British ideas; and that by so doing it constantly found itself in conflict with its own local representatives, who knew that the only hope of success lay in dealing with both alike on a basis of South African ideas.
As the result of this chronic inability of British statesmen to understand South Africa, it follows that the most instructive manner of regarding our administration of that country during the nineteenth century is to get a clear conception of the successive divergences of opinion between the home and the local authorities.
At the very outset of British administration—during the temporary occupation of the Cape from 1795 to 1808—we find a theoretically perfect policy laid down for the guidance of the early English Governors in their treatment of the Boers, or Dutch frontier farmers. It is just as admirable, in its way, as were the instructions for the treatment of the Hottentots furnished by the Directors of the Dutch East India Company to Van Riebeck. In a despatch of July, 1800, the third Duke of Portland, who was then acting as Secretary for the Colonies, writes:
Non-interference.