Everywhere in South Africa, except in the Witwatersrand and Cape Town, the black people greatly outnumber the whites. In the Orange Free State they are nearly twice as numerous, in Cape Colony and the Transvaal more than thrice as numerous, in Natal ten times as numerous, while in the other territories, British, German, and Portuguese, the disproportion is very much greater, possibly some four or five millions of natives against nine or ten thousand Europeans. The total number of whites south of the Zambesi hardly reaches 750,000, while that of the blacks is roughly computed at from six to eight millions. At present, therefore, so far as numbers go, the country is a black man's country.
It may be thought that this preponderance of the natives is only natural in a region by far the larger part of which has been very recently occupied by Europeans, and that in time immigration and the natural growth of the white element will reduce the disproportion. This explanation, however, does not meet the facts. The black race is at present increasing at least as rapidly as the white. Unlike those true aborigines of the country, the Hottentots and Bushmen, who withered up and vanished away before the whites, the Kafirs, themselves apparently intruders from the North, have held their ground, not only in the wilder country where they have been unaffected by the European, but in the regions where he has conquered and ruled over them. They are more prolific than the whites, and their increase is not restrained by those prudential checks which tell upon civilised man, because, wants being few, subsistence in a warm climate with abundance of land is easy. Formerly two powerful forces kept down population:—war, in which no quarter was given and all the property of the vanquished was captured or destroyed, and the murders that went on at the pleasure of the chief, and usually through the agency of the witch-doctor. Now both these forces have been removed by the action of European government, which has stopped war and restrains the caprice of the chiefs. Relieved from these checks, the Kafirs of the south coast and of Basutoland, the regions in which observation has been easiest, are multiplying faster than the whites, and there is no reason why the same thing should not happen in other parts of the country. The number of the Fingoes, for instance (though they are no doubt an exceptionally thrifty and thriving tribe), is to-day ten times as great as it was fifty or sixty years ago. Here is a fact of serious import for the future. Two races, far removed from one another in civilization and mental condition, dwell side by side. Neither race is likely to extrude or absorb the other. What then will be their relations, and how will the difficulties be met to which their juxtaposition must give rise?
The Colonies of Britain over the world fall into two groups: those which have received the gift of self-government, and those which are governed from home through executive officials placed over each of them. Those of the latter class, called Crown Colonies, are all (with the insignificant exceptions of the Falkland Islands and Malta) within the tropics, and are all peopled chiefly by coloured races,—negroes, Indians, Malays, Polynesians, or Chinese,—with a small minority of whites. The self-governing Colonies, on the other hand, are all situated in the temperate zone, and are all, with one exception, peopled chiefly by Europeans. It is because they have a European population that they have been deemed fit to govern themselves, just as it is because the tropical Colonies have a predominantly coloured population that the supremacy of the Colonial Office and its local representatives is acquiesced in as fit and proper. Every one perceives that representative assemblies based on a democratic franchise, which are capable of governing Canada or Australia, would not succeed in the West Indies or Ceylon or Fiji.
The one exception to this broad division, the one case of self-governing communities in which the majority of the inhabitants are not of European stock, is to be found in South Africa. The general difficulty of adjusting the relations of a higher and a lower race, serious under every kind of government, here presents itself in the special form of the construction of a political system which, while democratic as regards one of the races, cannot safely be made democratic as regards the other. This difficulty, though new in the British empire, is not new in the Southern States of America, which have been struggling with it for years; and it is instructive to compare the experience of South Africa with that through which the Southern States have passed since the War of Secession.
Throughout South Africa—and for this purpose no distinction need be drawn between the two British Colonies and the two Boer Republics—the people of colour may be divided into two classes: the wild or tribal natives, who are, of course, by far the more numerous, and the tame or domesticated natives, among whom one may include, though they are not aborigines, but recent incomers, the East Indians of Natal and the Transvaal, as well as the comparatively few Malays of the Cape.
It will be convenient to deal with the two classes separately, and to begin with the semi-civilized or non-tribal natives, who have been for the longest period under white influences, and whose present relations with the whites indicate what the relations of the races are likely to be, for some time to come, in all parts of the country.
The non-tribal people of colour live in the Cape Colony, except the south-eastern parts (called Pondoland and Tembuland), in Natal, in the Orange Free State, and in the southern parts of the Transvaal. They consist of three stocks: (1) the so-called Cape boys, a mixed race formed by the intermarriage of Hottentots and Malays with the negro slaves brought in early days from the west coast, plus some small infusion of Dutch blood; (2) the Kafirs no longer living in native communities under their chiefs; and (3) the Indian immigrants who (together with a few Chinese) have recently come into Natal and the Transvaal, and number about 60,000, not counting in the indentured coolies who are to be sent back to India. There are no data for conjecturing the number of Cape boys and domesticated Kafirs, but it can hardly exceed 400,000.
These coloured people form the substratum of society in all the four States above mentioned. Some till the land for themselves, while others act as herdsmen or labourers for white farmers, or work at trades for white employers. They do the harder and rougher kinds of labour, especially of outdoor labour. Let me remind the reader of what has been incidentally observed before, and must now be insisted on as being the capital feature of South African life—the fact that all unskilled work is done by black people. In many parts of the country the climate is not too hot for men belonging to the north European races to work in the fields, for the sun's rays are generally tempered by a breeze, the nights are cool, and the dry air is invigorating. Had South Africa, like California or New South Wales, been colonized solely by white men, it would probably, like those countries, have to-day a white labouring population. But, unluckily, South Africa was colonized in the seventeenth century, when the importation of negro slaves was deemed the easiest means of securing cheap and abundant labour. From 1658 onward till, in 1834, slavery was abolished by the British Parliament, it was to slaves that the hardest and humblest kinds of work were allotted. The white people lost the habit of performing manual toil, and acquired the habit of despising it. No one would do for himself what he could get a black man to do for him. New settlers from Europe fell into the ways of the country, which suited their disinclination for physical exertion under a sun hotter than their own. Thus, when at last slavery was abolished, the custom of leaving menial or toilsome work to people of colour continued as strong as ever. It is as strong as ever to-day. The only considerable exception, that which was furnished by the German colonists who were planted in the eastern province after the Crimean War of 1854, has ceased to be an exception; for the children of those colonists have now, for the most part, sold or leased their allotments to Kafirs, who till the soil less efficiently than the sturdy old Germans did. The artisans who to-day come from Europe adopt the habits of the country in a few weeks or months. The English carpenter hires a native "boy" to carry his bag of tools for him; the English bricklayer has a native hodman to hand the bricks to him, which he proceeds to set; the Cornish or Australian miner directs the excavation of the seam and fixes the fuse which explodes the dynamite, but the work with the pickaxe is done by the Kafir. The herdsmen who drive the cattle or tend the sheep are Kafirs, acting under the orders of a white. Thus the coloured man is indispensable to the white man, and is brought into constant relations with him. He is deemed a necessary part of the economic machinery of the country, whether for mining or for manufacture, for tillage or for ranching.
But though the black people form the lowest stratum of society, they are not all in a position of personal dependence. A good many Kafirs, especially in the eastern province, own the small farms which they till, and many others are tenants, rendering to their landlord, like the métayers of France, a half of the produce by way of rent. Some few natives, especially near Cape Town, are even rich, and among the Indians of Natal a good many have thriven as shopkeepers. There is no reason to think that their present exclusion from trades requiring skill will continue. In 1894 there were Kafirs earning from five shillings to seven shillings and sixpence a day as riveters on an iron bridge then in course of construction. I was informed by a high railway official that many of them were quite fit to be drivers or stokers of locomotives, though white sentiment (which tolerates them as navvies or platelayers) made it inexpedient to place them in such positions. Many work as servants in stores, and are little more prone to petty thefts than are Europeans. They have dropped their old usages and adopted European habits, have substituted European clothes for the kaross of the wild or "red" Kafir, have lost their tribal attachments, usually speak Dutch, or even perhaps English, and to a considerable extent, especially in the western province and in the towns, have become Christians. The Indians are, of course, Mohammedans or heathens, the Malays (of whom there are only about 13,000), Mohammedans. The coloured people travel a good deal by rail, and are, especially the Kafirs, eager for instruction, which is provided for them only in the mission schools. Some will come from great distances to get taught, and those who can write are very fond of corresponding with one another. Taken as a whole, they are a quiet and orderly people, not given to crimes of violence, and less given (so far as I could gather) to pilfering than are the negroes of the Southern States of America. The stealing of stock from farms has greatly diminished. Assaults upon women, such as are frequent in those States, and have recently caused a hideous epidemic of lynching, are extremely rare; indeed, I heard of none, save one or two in Natal, where the natives are comparatively wild and the whites scattered thinly among them. So few Kafirs have yet received a good education, or tried to enter occupations requiring superior intelligence, that it is hardly possible to speak confidently of their capacity for the professions or the higher kinds of commerce; but judicious observers think they will in time show capacity, and tell you that their inferiority to white men lies less in mere intellectual ability than in power of will and steadiness of purpose. They are unstable, improvident, easily discouraged, easily led astray. When the morality of their old life, in which they were ruled by the will of their chief, the opinion of their fellows, and the traditional customs of the tribe, has been withdrawn from them, it may be long before any new set of principles can gain a like hold upon them.
That there should be little community of ideas, and by consequence little sympathy, between such a race and the whites is no more than any one would expect who elsewhere in the world has studied the phenomena which mark the contact of dissimilar peoples. But the traveller in South Africa is astonished at the strong feeling of dislike and contempt—one might almost say of hostility—which the bulk of the whites show to their black neighbours. He asks what can be the cause of it. It is not due, as in the Southern States of America, to political resentment, for there has been no sudden gift to former slaves of power over former masters. Neither is it sufficiently explained by the long conflicts with the south-coast Kafirs; for the respect felt for their bravery has tended to efface the recollection of their cruelties. Neither is it caused (except as respects the petty Indian traders) by the dislike of the poorer whites to the competition with them in industry of a class living in a much ruder way and willing to accept much lower wages. It seems to spring partly from the old feeling of contempt for the slaves, a feeling which has descended to a generation that has never seen slavery as an actual system; partly from physical aversion; partly from an incompatibility of character and temper, which makes the faults of the coloured man more offensive to the white than the (perhaps morally as grave) faults of members of his own white stock. Even between civilized peoples, such as Germans and Russians, or Spaniards and Frenchmen, there is a disposition to be unduly annoyed by traits and habits which are not so much culpable in themselves as distasteful to men constructed on different lines. This sense of annoyance is naturally more intense toward a race so widely removed from the modern European as the Kafirs are. Whoever has travelled among people of a race greatly weaker than his own must have sometimes been conscious of an impatience or irritation which arises when the native either fails to understand or neglects to obey the command given. The sense of his superior intelligence and energy of will produces in the European a sort of tyrannous spirit, which will not condescend to argue with the native, but overbears him by sheer force, and is prone to resort to physical coercion. Even just men, who have the deepest theoretical respect for human rights, are apt to be carried away by the consciousness of superior strength, and to become despotic, if not harsh. To escape this fault, a man must be either a saint or a sluggard. And the tendency to race enmity lies very deep in human nature. Perhaps it is a survival from the times when each race could maintain itself only by slaughtering its rivals.
The attitude of contempt I have mentioned may be noted in all classes, though it is strongest in those rough and thoughtless whites who plume themselves all the more upon their colour because they have little else to plume themselves upon, while among the more refined it is restrained by self-respect and by the sense that allowances must be made for a backward race. It is stronger among the Dutch than among the English, partly, perhaps, because the English wish to be unlike the Dutch in this as in many other respects. Yet one often hears that the Dutch get on better with their black servants than the English do, because they understand native character better, and are more familiar in their manners, the Englishman retaining his national stiffness. The laws of the Boer Republics are far more harsh than those of the English Colonies, and the Transvaal Boers have been always severe and cruel in their dealings with the natives. But the English also have done so many things to be deplored that it does not lie with them to cast stones at the Boers, and the mildness of colonial law is largely due to the influence of the home government, and to that recognition of the equal civil rights of all subjects which has long pervaded the common law of England. Only two sets of Europeans are free from reproach: the imperial officials, who have almost always sought to protect the natives, and the clergy, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, who have been the truest and most constant friends of the Hottentot and the Kafir, sometimes even carrying their zeal beyond what discretion could approve.
Deep and wide-spread as is the sentiment of aversion to the coloured people which I am describing, it must not be supposed that the latter are generally ill-treated. There is indeed a complete social separation. Intermarriage, though permitted by law in the British Colonies, is extremely rare, and illicit unions are uncommon. Sometimes the usual relations of employer and employed are reversed, and a white man enters the service of a prosperous Kafir. This makes no difference as respects their social intercourse, and I remember to have heard of a case in which the white workman stipulated that his employer should address him as "boss." Black children are very seldom admitted to schools used by white children; indeed, I doubt if the two colours are ever to be seen on the same benches, except at Lovedale and in one or two of the mission schools in Cape Town, to which, as charging very low fees, some of the poorest whites send their children. I heard of a wealthy coloured man at the Paarl, a Dutch town north of Cape Town, who complained that, though he paid a considerable sum in taxes, he was not permitted to send his daughter to any of the schools in the place. In the Protestant Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Methodist Churches, and of course among the Roman Catholics, blacks are admitted along with whites to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper; but this (so I was told) is not the case in the Dutch Reformed Church. An eminent and thoughtful ecclesiastic in Natal deplored to me the complete want of sympathy on the part of the white congregations with the black ones worshipping near them. It rarely, if ever, happens that a native, whatever his standing among his own people,—for to the white there is practically no difference between one black and another,—is received within a white man's house on any social occasion; indeed, he would seldom be permitted, save as a servant, to enter a private house, but would be received on the stoep (veranda). When Khama, the most important chief now left south of the Zambesi, a Christian and a man of high personal character, was in England in 1895, and was entertained at lunch by the Duke of Westminster and other persons of social eminence, the news of the reception given him excited annoyance and disgust among the whites in South Africa. I was told that at a garden-party given a few years ago by the wife of a white bishop, the appearance of a native clergyman caused many of the white guests to withdraw in dudgeon. Once when myself a guest at a mission station in Basutoland I was asked by my host whether I had any objection to his inviting to the family meal a native pastor who had been preaching to the native congregation. When I expressed surprise at the question, my host explained that race feeling was so strong among the colonists that it would be deemed improper, and indeed insulting, to make a black man sit down at the same table with a white guest, unless the express permission of the latter had been first obtained. But apart from this social disparagement, the native does not suffer much actual wrong. Now and then, on a remote farm, the employer will chastise his servant with a harshness he would not venture to apply to a white boy. A shocking case of the kind occurred a few years ago in the eastern province. A white farmer—an Englishman, not a Boer—flogged his Kafir servant so severely that the latter died; and when the culprit was put on his trial, and acquitted by a white jury, his white neighbours escorted him home with a band of music. More frequently, unscrupulous employers, especially on the frontiers of civilization, will try to defraud their native workmen, or will provoke them by ill-usage to run away before the day of payment arrives. But there are no lynchings, as in America, and the white judges and magistrates, if not always the juries, administer the law with impartiality.
As regards the provisions of the law, one must distinguish between the British Colonies and the Dutch Republics. In the former the ordinary civil rights of whites and blacks are precisely the same, though there exist certain police provisions which are applicable only to the latter. Cape Colony has a so-called "curfew law," requiring natives who are out of doors after dark to be provided with a pass—a law which is found oppressive by the best class of natives, educated and respectable men, though defended as necessary for public order, having regard to the large black population of the lower class, and their propensity to drink and petty offences. There are also certain "labour laws," applying to natives only, and particularly to those on agricultural locations, which are intended to check the disposition of Kafirs living on native reserves to become idle or to take to vagrancy. Doubtless there is a risk that people who have never acquired habits of steady industry—for the tribal Kafir leaves to his wives the cultivation of his plot of maize or sorghum—may relapse into a laziness hurtful to their own progress, seeing that a few weeks' labour is sufficient to provide all the food needed for a whole year. In the transition from one state of society to another exceptional legislation is needed, and a prima facie case for the so-called "Glen Grey Act" and similar laws may, therefore, be made out.
The friends of the natives whom I consulted on the subject, and one or two of the most educated and representative Kafirs themselves, did not seem to object to this Act in principle, though they criticized its methods and many of its details. But as all such laws are prompted not only by regard for the welfare of the Kafir, but also by the desire of the white colonist to get plenty of labour and to get it cheap, they are obviously open to abuse and require great care in their administration. The whole subject of native labour and native land tenure is an intricate and difficult one, which I have not space to discuss here, though I obtained a good deal of information regarding it. It is also an urgent one, for the population which occupies the native reserves is in some districts growing so fast that the agricultural land will soon cease to feed them, while the pasture is suffering from being overstocked. Most of my informants agreed in thinking that the control of the British magistrate over the management of lands in reservations was better than that of the native headman, and ought to be extended, and that the tenure of farms by individual natives outside the reservations ought to be actively encouraged. They deemed this a step forward in civilization; and they also held that it is necessary to prevent native allotments, even when held by individuals, from being sold to white men, conceiving that without such a prohibition the whites will in course of time oust the natives from the ownership of all the best land.
One law specially applicable to natives has been found most valuable in Natal, as well as in the territories of the Chartered Company, and ought to be enacted in Cape Colony also, viz., an absolute prohibition of the sale to them of intoxicating spirits. The spirits made for their consumption are rough and fiery, much more deleterious than European whisky or brandy or hollands. Unfortunately, the interests of the winegrowers and distillers in the Colony have hitherto proved strong enough to defeat the bills introduced for this purpose by the friends of the natives. Though some people maintain that the Dutch and anti-native party resist this much-needed measure because they desire through strong drink to weaken and keep down the natives, I do not believe in the existence of any such diabolical motive. Commercial self-interest, or rather a foolish and short-sighted view of self-interest,—for in the long run the welfare of the natives is also the welfare of the whites,—sufficiently accounts for their conduct; but it is a slur on the generally judicious policy of the Colonial Legislature.
In the two Dutch Republics the English principle of equal civil rights for white and black finds no place. One of the motives which induced the Boers of 1836 to trek out of the Colony was their disgust at the establishment of such equality by the British Government. The Grondwet (fundamental law) of the Transvaal Republic declared, in 1858, and declares to-day, that "the people will suffer no equality of whites and blacks, either in state or in church."[69] Democratic Republics are not necessarily respectful of what used to be called human rights, and neither the "principles of 1789" nor those of the American Declaration of Independence find recognition among the Boers. Both in the Transvaal and in the Orange Free State a native is forbidden to hold land, and is not permitted to travel anywhere without a pass, in default of which he may be detained. (In the Free State, however, the sale of intoxicants to him is forbidden, and a somewhat similar law, long demanded by the mine-owners, has very recently been enacted in the Transvaal.) Nor can a native serve on a jury, whereas in Cape Colony he is legally qualified, and sometimes is empanelled. The whites may object to his presence, but a large-minded and strong-minded judge can manage to overcome their reluctance. For a good while after they settled in the Transvaal the Boers had a system of apprenticing Kafir children which was with difficulty distinguishable from predial serfdom: and though they have constantly denied that they sanctioned either the kidnapping of children or the treatment of the apprentices as slaves, there is reason to think that in some parts of the country these abuses did for a time exist. It seems clear, however, that no such practices are now legal.
Political rights have, of course, never been held by persons of colour in either of the Dutch Republics, nor has it ever been proposed to grant them. Boer public opinion would scout such an idea, for it reproaches the people of Cape Colony now with being "governed by black men," because the electoral franchise is there enjoyed by a few persons of colour. In the two Colonies the history of the matter is as follows. When representative government was established, and the electoral franchise conferred upon the colonists in 1853, no colour-line was drawn; and from that time onward black people have voted, though of course not very many were qualified under the law to vote. Some years ago, however, the whites, and the Dutch party in particular, became uneasy at the strength of the coloured element, though it did not vote solid, had no coloured leaders, and was important only in a very few constituencies. Accordingly, an Act was passed in 1892, establishing a combined educational and property qualification—that is to say, the ownership of a house or other building of the value of £75 or upwards, or the being in receipt of a salary of £50 per annum, with the ability to sign one's name and write one's address and occupation This Act, which did not apply to those already registered in any particular district and claiming to be re-registered therein, is expected to keep down the number of coloured voters; and as it applies to whites also there is no inequality of treatment. Tribal Kafirs have, of course, never had the franchise at all. Neither the natives—the most substantial and best educated among whom possess the qualifications required—nor their friends complain of this law, which may be defended on the ground that, while admitting those people of colour whose intelligence fits them for the exercise of political power, it excludes a large mass whose ignorance and indifference to public questions would make them the victims of rich and unscrupulous candidates. It is, perhaps, less open to objection than some of the attempts recently made in the Southern States of America to evade the provisions of the amendments to the Federal Constitution under which negroes obtained the suffrage. In Natal nearly all the Kafirs live under native law, and have thus been outside the representative system; but the Governor has power to admit a Kafir to the suffrage, and this has been done in a few instances. As stated in Chapter XVIII, the rapid increase of Indian immigrants in that Colony alarmed the whites, and led to the passing, in 1896, of an Act which will practically debar these immigrants from political rights, as coming from a country in which no representative institutions exist. Thus Natal also has managed to exclude coloured people without making colour the nominal ground of disability. I need hardly say that whoever has the suffrage is also eligible for election to the Legislature. No person of colour is now, however, a member of either chamber in either Colony.
It is easy for people in Europe, who have had no experience of the presence among them of a semi-civilized race, destitute of the ideas and habits which lie at the basis of free government, to condemn the action of these Colonies in seeking to preserve a decisive electoral majority for the whites. But any one who has studied the question on the spot, and especially any one who has seen the evils which in America have followed the grant of the suffrage to persons unfit for it, will form a more charitable judgment. It is indeed impolitic to exclude people merely on the score of their race. There are among the educated Kafirs and Indians persons quite as capable as the average man of European stock, and it is wholesome that the white, too apt to despise his coloured neighbour, should be made to feel this, and that the educated coloured man should have some weight in the community as an elector, and should be entitled to call on his representative to listen to and express the demands he may make on behalf of his own race. As the number of educated and property-holding natives increases, they will naturally come to form a larger element in the electorate, and will be a useful one. But to toss the gift of political power into the lap of a multitude of persons who are not only ignorant, but in mind children rather than men, is not to confer a boon, but to inflict an injury. So far as I could judge, this is the view of the most sensible natives in Cape Colony itself, and of the missionaries also, who have been the steadiest friends of their race. What is especially desirable is to safeguard the private rights of the native, and to secure for him his due share of the land, by retaining which he will retain a measure of independence. The less he is thrown into the whirlpool of party politics the better.
Let me again repeat that there is at present no serious friction between the black and the white people in South Africa. Though the attitude of most of the whites—there are, of course, many exceptions—is contemptuous, unfriendly, and even suspicious, the black man accepts the superiority of the white as part of the order of nature. He is too low down, too completely severed from the white, to feel indignant. Even the few educated natives are too well aware of the gulf that divides their own people from the European to resent, except in specially aggravated cases, the attitude of the latter. Each race goes its own way and lives its own life.
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.
When, perhaps in the twenty-first century, the native population has reached the point of progress we have been imagining, the position may be for both races a grave or even a perilous one, if the feeling and behaviour of the whites continue to be what they are now. The present contented acquiescence of the coloured people in the dominance of the whites, and the absence of resentment at the contempt displayed toward them, cannot be expected from a people whose inferiority, though still real, will be much less palpable. And if trouble comes, the preponderance of numbers on the black side may make it more serious than it could be in the United States, where the Southern whites are the outmost fringe of an enormous white nation. These anxieties are little felt, these problems are little canvassed, in South Africa, for things which will not happen in our time or in the time of our children are for most of us as though they would never happen; and we have become so accustomed to see the unexpected come to pass as to forget that where undoubted natural causes are at work—causes whose working history has examined and verified—a result may be practically certain, uncertain as may be the time when and the precise form in which it will arrive.
There are, however, some thoughtful men in the Colonies who see the magnitude of the issues involved in this native problem. They hold, so far as I could gather their views, that the three chief things to be done now are to save the natives from intoxicating liquor, which injures them even more than it does the whites, to enact good land laws, which shall keep them from flocking as a loafing proletariate into the towns, as well as just labour laws, and to give them much better opportunities than they now have of industrial education. Manual training and the habit of steady industry are quite as much needed as book education, a conclusion at which the friends of the American negro have also arrived. Beyond this the main thing to be done seems to be to soften the feelings of the average white and to mend his manners. At present he considers the native to exist solely for his own benefit. He is harsh or gentle according to his own temper; but whether harsh or gentle, he is apt to think of the black man much as he thinks of an ox, and to ignore a native's rights when they are inconvenient to himself.
Could he be got to feel more kindly toward the native, and to treat him, if not as an equal, which he is not, yet as a child, the social aspect of the problem—and it is the not least serious aspect—would be completely altered.
The strength and vitality of a race, and its power of holding its own in the world, depend less on the quickness of its intelligence than on the solidity of its character. Its character depends upon the moral ideas which govern its life, and on the habits in which those ideas take shape; and these, in their turn, depend very largely upon the conceptions which the race has formed of religion, and on the influence that religion has over it. This is especially true of peoples in the earlier stages of civilization. Their social virtues, the beliefs and principles which hold them together and influence their conduct, rest upon and are shaped by their beliefs regarding the invisible world and its forces. Races in which religious ideas are vague and feeble seldom attain to a vigorous national life, because they want one of the most effective bonds of cohesion and some of the strongest motives that rule conduct. It may doubtless be said that the religion of a people is as much an effect as a cause, or, in other words, that the finer or poorer quality of a race is seen in the sort of religion it makes for itself, the higher races producing nobler religious ideas and more impressive mythologies, just as they produce richer and more expressive languages. Nevertheless, it remains true that a religion, once formed, becomes a potent factor in the future strength and progress of a people. Now the religious ideas of the Bantu races, as of other negroes, have been scanty, poor, and unfruitful. And accordingly, one cannot meditate upon their condition and endeavour to forecast their progress without giving some thought to the influence which better ideas, and especially those embodied in Christianity, may have upon them.
Neither the Kafirs nor the Hottentots have had a religion in our sense of the word. They had no deities, no priesthood, no regular forms of worship. They were, when Europeans discovered them, still in the stage in which most, if not all, primitive races would seem to have once been—that of fearing and seeking to propitiate nature spirits and the ghosts of the dead, a form of superstition in which there was scarcely a trace of morality. Hence the first task of the missionaries who came among them was to create a religious sense, to give them the conception of an omnipotent spiritual power outside natural objects and above man, and to make them regard this power as the source of moral ideas and the author of moral commands. To do this has been a difficult task.
Besides this constructive work, which was less needed in some other more advanced heathen races, the missionaries had also a destructive work to do. Though the Kafirs had no religion, they had a multitude of superstitious rites and usages closely intertwined with the whole of their life and with what one may call their political system. These usages were so repugnant to Christian morality, and often to common decency, that it became necessary to attack them and to require the convert to renounce them altogether. Renunciation, however, meant a severance from the life of the tribe, contempt and displeasure from the tribesmen, and possibly the loss of tribal rights. These were evils which it required courage and conviction to face, nor had the missionary any temporal benefits to offer by way of compensation. There was, however, very little direct persecution, because there were no gods who would be incensed, and the witch-doctors were less formidable opponents than a regular priesthood would have been. The chiefs were often friendly, for they recognized the value of missionary knowledge and counsel. Even the ferocious Mosilikatze showed kindness to Robert Moffat, and Livingstone complained far more of the Boers than he ever did of Kafir enemies. Lo Bengula protected the missionaries: Gungunhana listened, and made his chiefs listen, to their discourses, though his nearest approach to conversion was his expression of detestation for Judas Iscariot. But it rarely befell that a chief himself accepted Christianity, which would have meant, among other things, the departure of all his wives but one, and possibly the loss of his hold upon his tribe. All these things being considered, it need excite no surprise that the Gospel should have made comparatively little progress among the wild or tribal Kafirs.
It has been preached to them for nearly a century, by German (chiefly, I think, Moravian) and French, as well as by English, Scottish, and American missionaries. At present there are not a few British societies and denominations in the field. The French Protestants have done some excellent work, especially in Basutoland, and have also stations near the east coast and on the Upper Zambesi. There are also French Roman Catholic missions, mostly in the hands of Jesuit fathers, many of whom are men of learning and ability. Between the Roman Catholics, the Protestant Episcopalians (Church of England), and the missionaries of the English Nonconformists and Scottish or French Presbyterians there is little intercourse and no co-operation. Here, as in other mission fields, this absence of intercourse and sympathy puzzles the native. I was told of an English (Protestant Episcopal) clergyman who made it one of his prime objects to warn the Kafirs against attending the services of the French Protestant missionaries, whom he apparently regarded as outside the pale of the true Church. In the Boer Republics there are fewer missions in proportion to the number of natives than in British territories; but no district, except the deserts of the west, seems to be wholly unprovided for, and in some cases stations have been pushed far beyond the limits of European administration, as, for instance, among the Barotse, who dwell north of the Upper Zambesi. The native congregations are usually small, and the careers of the converts not always satisfactory. This is so natural that it is odd to find Europeans, and most conspicuously those whose own life is not a model of Christian morality, continually growling and sneering at the missionaries because their converts do not all turn out saints. The savage is unstable in character, and baptism does not necessarily extinguish either his old habits or the hold which native superstitions have upon him. It is in this instability of his will, and his proneness to yield to drink or some other temptation, rather than in his intellect, that the weakness of the savage lies. And a man with hundreds of generations of savagery behind him is still, and must be, in many respects a savage, even though he reads and writes, and wears European clothes, and possibly even a white necktie. The Kafirs are not such bad Christians as the Frankish warriors were for two or three generations after the conversion of Clovis. We must wait for several generations before we can judge fairly of the influence of his new religion upon the mind of a Kafir whose ancestors had no religion at all, and were ruled by the lowest forms of superstition.
These facts are better recognized by the missionaries to-day than they were sixty years ago, and they have in consequence made some changes in their methods. They are no longer so anxious to baptize, or so apt to reckon success by the number of their converts. They are more cautious in ordaining native pastors. The aid of such pastors is indispensable, but the importance of the example which the native preacher or teacher sets makes it necessary to be careful in selection. The dogma of the equality of the black man and the white, which was warmly insisted on in the old days, and often roused the wrath of the Boers, has now been silently dropped. It was a dogma wholesome to inculcate so far as equality of protection was concerned, but its wider application led the early philanthropists of South Africa, as it led their excellent contemporaries, the Abolitionists of America, to some strange conclusions. Perceiving that other influences ought to go hand in hand with religion in helping the natives forward, the missionaries now devote themselves more than formerly to secular instruction, and endeavour to train the people to habits of industry. The work of education is indeed entirely in their hands. Special mention is due to one admirable institution, that which was founded by the Free Church of Scotland at Lovedale, in the Eastern Province, not far from King William's Town, nearly fifty years ago. Conducted on wholly non-sectarian lines, it receives coloured people, together with some whites, not only from the Colony, but from all parts of Africa—there are even Galla boys from the borders of Abyssinia in it—and gives an excellent education, fitting young men and women not only for the native ministry, but for the professions: and it is admitted even by those who are least friendly to missionary work to have rendered immense services to the natives. I visited it, and was greatly struck by the tone and spirit which seemed to pervade it, a spirit whose results are seen in the character and careers of many among its graduates. A race in the present condition of the Kafirs needs nothing more than the creation of a body of intelligent and educated persons of its own blood, who are able to enter into the difficulties of their humbler kinsfolk and guide them wisely. Dr. Stewart, who has directed the institution for many years, possesses that best kind of missionary temperament, in which a hopeful spirit and an inexhaustible sympathy are balanced by Scottish shrewdness and a cool judgment.
One of the greatest among the difficulties which confront the missionaries is to know how to deal with polygamy, a practice deeply rooted in Kafir life. A visitor from Europe is at first surprised to find how seriously they regard it, and asks whether the example of the worthies of the Old Testament does not make it hard for them to refuse baptism to the native who seeks it, though he has more than one wife. The clergy of the Church of England, however, and those of the French Protestant Church—and I think other missionaries also—are unanimous in holding that, although they may properly admit a polygamist as a catechumen, they should not baptize such a one; and they say that the native pastors hold this view even more strongly than they do themselves. Polygamy is so bound up with heathen customs, and exerts, in their view, so entirely baneful an influence upon native society, that it must be at all hazards resisted and condemned.[70] One is reminded of the Neoplatonic philosophers, the last professors of the Platonic academy at Athens, who in the sixth century of our era sought an asylum from Christian persecution at the court of Chosroes Anurshirwan, in Persia. They forced themselves to tolerate the other usages of the people among whom they came, but polygamy was too much for them, and rather than dwell among those who practised it, they returned to the unfriendly soil of the Roman Empire.
The missionaries, and especially those of the London Missionary Society, played at one time a much more prominent part in politics than they now sustain. Within and on the borders of Cape Colony they were, for the first sixty years of the present century, the leading champions of the natives, and as they enjoyed the support of an active body of opinion in England and Scotland, they had much influence in Parliament and with the Colonial Office. Outside the Colony they were often the principal advisers of the native chiefs (as their brethren were at the same time in the islands of the Pacific), and held a place not unlike that of the bishops in Gaul in the fifth century of our era. Since, in advocating the cause of the natives, they had often to complain of the behaviour of the whites, and since, whenever a chief came into collision with the emigrant Boers or with colonial frontiersmen, they became the channel by which the chief stated his case to the British Government, they incurred the bitter hostility of the emigrant Boers and some dislike even in the Colony. To this old cause much of the unpopularity that still attaches to them seems due. Unpopular they certainly are. They are reproached with the paucity of their converts, and that by white men whose own treatment of the Kafirs might well make the white man's religion odious to a native. They are also accused of abusing their position to enrich themselves by trade with the Kafirs. This abuse has sometimes occurred, and clearly ought to be checked by the home societies. But probably it does not disgust the wandering white trader any more than the fact that the missionary often warns the native against the exorbitant prices which the trader demands for his goods. They are blamed for making the converted Kafir uppish, and telling him that he is as good as a white man, an offence which has no doubt been often committed. A graver allegation, to which Mr. Theal has given some countenance in his historical writings, is that they used to bring groundless or exaggerated charges against the Boer farmers, and always sided with the natives, whatever the merits of the case. I do not venture to pronounce on the truth of this allegation, which it would take much time and labour to sift. As there have been some few missionaries whose demeanour was not creditable to their profession, so there have doubtless been instances in which partisan ardour betrayed them into exaggerations. But whosoever remembers that but for the missionaries the natives would have lacked all local protection, and that it was only through the missionaries that news of injustice or cruelty practised on a native could reach the ears of the British Government, will look leniently on the errors of honest zeal, and will rejoice that ministers of religion were found to champion the cause of the weaker race and keep the home Government alive to a sense of one of its first duties.
Notwithstanding the slowness of the progress hitherto made, the extinction of heathenism in South Africa may be deemed certain, and certain at no distant date. There is here no ancient and highly organized system of beliefs and doctrines, such as Hinduism and Islam are in India, to resist the solvent power which European civilisation exerts. In forty years there will probably be no more pagan rites practised in Cape Colony. In eighty years there will be none in Matabililand, or perhaps even sooner, if the gold-reefs turn out well; for though a mining-camp is not a school of Christianity, it is a destroyer of paganism. Already I found, in traversing Mashonaland, that the poor ghosts were ceasing to receive their wonted offerings of native beer.
What will happen when heathenism and the tribal system have vanished away? Such morality, such principles of manly conduct as the natives now have, are bound up with their ghost-worship and still more with their tribal system, which prescribes loyalty to the chief, courage in war, devotion to the interests of the tribe or clan. When these principles have disappeared along with the tribal organization, some other principles, some other standard of duty and precepts of conduct, ought to be at hand to replace them. Where are such precepts to be found, and whence are the motives and emotions to be drawn which will give the new precepts a power to command the will? Although the Kafirs have shown rather less aptitude for assimilating Christian teaching than some other savage races have done, there is nothing in the experience of the missions to discourage the hope that such teaching may come to prevail among them, and that through it each generation may show a slight moral advance upon that which has gone before. As the profession of Christianity will create a certain link between the Kafirs and their rulers which may soften the asperity which the relations of the two races now wear, so its doctrines will in time give them a standard of conduct similar to that accepted among the whites, and an ideal which will influence the superior minds among them. So much may certainly be said: that the Gospel and the mission schools are at present the most truly civilizing influences which work upon the natives, and that upon these influences, more than on any other agency, does the progress of the coloured race depend.
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.