Afrikaner

“ Let the Dutch language have the place of honour in schools and homes.
Let alliances of marriage with the English be stamped as unpatriotic. [9]
Let every Afrikaner see that he is at all times well armed with the best possible weapons, and maintains the expert use of the rifle among young and old, so as to be ready when duty calls and the time is ripe for asserting the nation's rights and be rid of English thraldom.
Employ teachers only who are animated with truly patriotic sentiments. ”

“ Added to this, the young Boers in the Cape Colony, Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal have been encouraged to attain proficiency in rifle practice and competence in the field, ostensibly for the gratification of keeping up old traditions, but in reality to be prepared for the struggle against England meditated by the Afrikaner Bond. ”

“ There are plenty of respectable Boers in whose ears those expressions still tingle.
The man, who is no speaker, was, nevertheless, apt to grow warm and impressive, drawn out probably by interruptions and opposing views. The speeches terminated on one occasion by one of the party saying in violent Bond fashion: "The English hired the Zulus to massacre our people. They robbed us of Natal, and drove us from the Colonies. There can be no peace with them until we have our own. God helps them who help themselves. Whoever takes their part is against us and against every true Afrikaner." ”

“ These cannot possibly compete with the educated Hollanders in quest of good positions, nor are they taught any handicrafts, and the galling prospect is inevitable that they will have to content themselves with very humble stations in life, dependent even upon the more prosperous Uitlanders. No wonder these Boers fell an easy prey to the seductions and deceptive fallacies of the Afrikaner Bond doctrine of conquest, for dispossessing England of her Colonies, and to resume a free hand for expansion northwards as well. ”

“ But during the past twenty years public interest has by degrees been successfully aroused by the activities of the Afrikaner Bond; the former apathy and distaste to the consideration of public concerns have given place to a more lively identification even with politics, but the tendency of being swayed by men of influence of their own kind remains unchanged.
The Boers are great smokers—tobacco appears to have no hurtful effects whatever upon them, but seems rather to serve as a grateful sedative. ”

“ Quite other and more emphatic terms apply to the revolting sewerage such as the socialistic platform and other purulent nurseries for breeding wilful and hypocritical abettors, at so much a score, of misguided and treason-hatching Afrikanerdom. ”

“ The intolerance of the Boers, their arrogance, their ignorance, on which they prided themselves, all proclaimed them as unfit to rule over white or black people. Of late years had crept in an element of treachery and disloyalty, emanating from their jealousy of the English, which by degrees was bound to permeate the whole country, spreading southward to Cape Colony itself, till the idea of "Africa for the Dutch, and the English in the sea," would have been a war-cry that might have dazzled hundreds of to-day's so-called loyal colonists. ”

“ True, every white man born in civilized south Africa claims to be an Africander, but in the more restricted sense of the word it applies especially to the older colonists of the better classes. Some of these are found amongst the leading spirits of every township, often amongst leading officials. Dutch is the language spoken in their households, and the Boers regard them with an affection and respect which in the very nature of things could scarcely be accorded to the English settler, who comes amongst them a stranger and a foreigner at best. ”

“ The patriotic Boers of South Africa still dream of the day when the two Republics of the Orange and the Transvaal, at first connected by a common customs union, will be consolidated in a single 'African Holland,' possibly even in a broader confederacy, comprising all the Afrikanders from the Cape of Good Hope to the Zambesi. The Boer families, grouped in every town throughout South Africa, form, collectively, a single nationality, despite the accident of political frontiers. ”

“ Look at the map of South Africa, and there, in the very centre of the British possessions, like the stone in a peach, lies the great stretch of the two republics, a mighty domain for so small a people. How came they there? Who are these Teutonic folk who have burrowed so deeply into Africa? It is a twice-told tale, and yet it must be told once again if this story is to have even the most superficial of introductions. No one can know or appreciate the Boer who does not know his past, for he is what his past has made him. ”

“ Rhodesia, the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and Natal draw away from the Cape Colony a large number of enterprising Englishmen, and consequently the Boers, not being so enterprising, nor so very fond of running from one home to another unless a great political principal is at stake, prefer to stay on their farms and multiply there, whereas the English are all the time thinned down by those everlasting discoveries and developments in the north and north-east, so that they remain numerically inferior to the Dutch. ”

“ A Swiss missionary who has lived a great part of his life in South Africa, writes to me:—"The whole of South Africa is to blame in its treatment of the natives. Take the British merchant, the Boer and Dutch official, the German colonist, the French and Swiss trader,—there is no difference. The general feeling among these is against the coloured race being educated and evangelized.... Only what can and must be said is this, that the Laws of the English Colonies are just; those of the Boer States are the negation of every right, civil and religious, which the black man ought to have." ”

“ The Germans, with energy and with capital, have not the requisite practice in independent colonization, nor perhaps the taste for it. The South African Dutch Boers, who have within the last seventeen years been more than once on the point of occupying the country, are, with all their good qualities, a backward people, who, had they prevailed, would have done little more than squat here and there over the country with their cattle, and carry on an incessant desultory war with the natives. ”

“ And then gradually there stirred in her a warm remembrance of Africa, and of how she had always loved it, and a swift, unaccountable feeling of kinship with all the Britishers scattered far and wide who called some colony "home."
True, she was English born and English educated; but so also was she South African, for quite half her life had been passed in Johannesburg, and it was there that her actual home existed. And so, by slow imperceptible degrees, out of nowhere and without explanation, crept into her mind the sudden realisation of Africa's claim upon her. ”

“ The Dutch settlers held the old Biblical notions about slavery, and they resented fiercely the law of 1833 emancipating all slaves throughout the colony in 1834. The Boers at once determined to 'trek,' to leave the colony which was under the jurisdiction of the English law, and find in the South African wilderness, where no human law prevailed, food for their flocks, and the pastoral freedom of Jacob and of Abraham. The Boers would live their own lives in their own way. ”

“ That the Imperial Government, after conquering the Boers, handed back to them their old Republics, and a nice little present in the shape of the Cape Colony and Natal — the two English Colonies. That the Boers are now ousting the Englishmen from the public service, and when they have finished with them, they will make a law declaring it a crime for a Native to live in South Africa, unless he is a servant in the employ of a Boer, and that from this it will be just one step to complete slavery. ”

“ The native question is one of the most prominent and difficult ones to deal with in South Africa. The great preponderance of the native over the white races, and the different theories of treating them prevalent between the English and Dutch, render it one of the most perplexing problems to solve. The wisest and most experienced people, with whom I have communicated on the subject are of opinion that the natives are so far behind us in civilisation that they must be regarded as mere children. ”

“ Gentle Reader, I have written this story in the English language—a language learned by me, as a foreign language, for the chief purpose of placing before the English reading public a true and faithful version of the character and life of an Afrikander. So many libels and false stories have of late been spread in England and all over the world about the Boers by enemies of the people inhabiting the Colonies and States of South Africa, that I could not resist the temptation to write something in which the truth and nothing but the truth would be told. ”

“ Possessing for two centuries no book except the Bible, the South African Dutch communities, Afrikanders as they call them- selves, are fond of comparing their lot with that of the " chosen people." Going forth, like the Jews, in search of a "promised land," they never for a moment doubted that the native populations were specially created for their benefit. ”

“ Though accurate statistics of the proportion of English and Dutch-speaking inhabitants in the various South African states cannot be obtained, it is probable that in British and Dutch South Africa there were, in 1899, 400,000 Englishmen or men of English descent, 500,000 Dutch, and 3,500,000 Indians, Malays, Hottentots, and natives of the various Kaffir tribes. In Cape Colony and the Orange Free State of the white races the Dutch preponderated; in the Transvaal, Natal, and Rhodesia, the British. ”

“ The men who planned and brought the Union into being have had to pick their steps with care, and more than once their ingenuity has been taxed to the utmost to avoid the outcropping of racial jealousies and enmities. The white population of South Africa, you should understand, consists of three classes: the Boers, which means simply “tillers of the soil,” and which is the name applied by the South African Dutch to themselves; the Colonials, or British immigrants, most of whom have come out with the intention of returning to England as soon as they have made their fortunes ”

“ But at the time it sounded parlous to think that anything could interrupt the calm of the tolerant British colonists and egg them against their Dutch rulers, who call them foreign adventurers. Nor could we conceive of any reason why the Boers, who have now more freedom than they ever dreamt of possessing under their own flag, including the right to partially enslave the blacks, should suddenly rise up against the English, whose money and brains are ever at the beck and call of the Dutch! ”

“ Yet further from us on the same side stand our oldest white fellow South Africans; who were, many, not of English blood originally, though among that body of early white settlers, men who preceded us in South Africa by three centuries, were a few with English names, and though by intermarriage Dutch and English South Africans are daily and hourly blending, the bulk of these folk were Dutchmen from Holland and Friesland, with a few Swedes, Germans and Danes, and later was intermingled with them a strong strain of Huguenot blood from France. ”

“ Owing to the unprogressive character of the purely Boer communities and to the rapid expansion of the English-speaking peoples by natural increase, by direct immigration, and by the assimilation of the Boers themselves, the future 'South African Dominion' can, in any case, never be an 'African Holland.' Whenever the present political divisions are merged in one State, that State must sooner or later constitute an 'African England,' whether consolidated under the suzerainty of Great Britain or on the basis of absolute political autonomy. ”

“ Such were the words of President Burgers when addressing a crowd of sympathizers on his way towards the Transvaal Republic. And they were true; for excepting some English settlements, isolated and relatively small, south Africa is peopled by but one white race, of mingled French and Dutch descent, having in common the same language, habits, and religion, and being by perpetual intermarriage all brothers, cousins, or near kinsmen — the Boers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of similar ancestry, and often of near kindred to the Boers, but of better education and relatively better birth, are the Africanders who hail from Capetown and the western districts, and who form the professional classes, the leading merchants, and the gentry of the colonial born. ”

“ Yet if theory distinguishes between Briton and Boer, or Englishman and Africander, Nature does not, and you find that the mingling of the races is a practical principle acted on regularly wherever the races are brought together. We may congratulate ourselves that this is so. The mixed race will be a magnificent one, with the size, courage, and tenacity of the Dutch, and the gentleness, bravery, and power of government and of cohesion of the Britisher. ”

“ I became familiar with their grievances—their unfair taxation; no education for their children except in Dutch; no representation in Parliament—and this in a population in which, at that time, the English and Afrikanders at Johannesburg and in the surrounding districts outnumbered the Dutch in the proportion of about 6 to 1. They laid stress on the fact that neither the Boers nor their children were, or desired to become, miners, and, further, that for the enormous sums spent on developing and working the mines no proper security existed. ”