Boer people

“ The chief care, concern and anxiety of the Boer is that a government of the people must not by any chance be established in Transvaal. It is the elementary principle of the Boer disposition and government, that there are no real "people" except Boers, who place the Hottentot, the Englishman, the Zulu and the Kaffir, the American, the German and the Frenchman on the same level. ”

“ In the early months of peace it was a common thing to come on a Boer family living in a hut of biscuit tins or a torn tent, with scanty rations and miserably ragged clothes. But those people, in most cases, set the little they had gladly before the stranger. The Boer, who will perjure himself deeply to save a shilling, will part with a pound’s worth of entertainment without a thought. ”

“ It was not unusual to hear Boers expressing undisguised gratitude, not merely for the natural gold deposits, but specially also that people had come to prospect and to invest capital, without which the wealth of the land would have remained unexploited and lain fallow. Harmony and cordiality were the proper outcome between foreigners and Boers. The influx of capital and of immigrants continued to increase, but not so the happy conditions. ”

“ The Boers are people whose hardihood, bravery, manliness, high spirit, marksmanship with the rifle, attachment to the soil, and content as farmers, fortified with solemn appreciation of religious duty, compel respect, but they are at fault in their attitude of determined obstruction of progress in the Dark Continent that is chiefly committed to the English. ”

“ A country the size of France, which could without difficulty accommodate a population of from eight to ten millions of industrious folk, is not large enough for the wants of a Boer people, numbering something under fifty thousand souls. ”

“ Put these animals on a bit of green veldt, and they do the rest themselves; they thrive and multiply, and enhance the position of their owner. But a plough! It means that he requires to take off his coat and stop doing nothing. The Boer would like to argue that if God had meant the soil to be disturbed by ploughs and such like, He would not have left the solution of this problem in the hands of mere inventors: He would have ordained a means whereby the soil would have of itself turned over once a year at springtime.
The Boers are a pastoral people—one can hardly say an agricultural people. ”

“ The Boers are all farmers, and, according to their own statements, a poverty-stricken people. They plead poverty before an English merchant because they fancy it will have the effect of reducing prices. Fortunately, the merchants possess rather an accurate knowledge of such customers, and in consequence they lose nothing. One would as soon believe the generality of Boers, as walk into the shaft of a coal mine. He has a reputation for lying, and he never brings discredit upon that reputation. ”

“ All these things I shall find in the Boers, and it is these things which destroy people to make an end of them in the country. The custom of the Boers has always been to cause people to be sold, and to-day they are still selling people. ”

“ They have been that sort of people from the start, and they will never change. They are used to waggons and oxen and sheep, and the waggons and oxen and sheep have got quite used to them. There is abundance of proof in the Dutch Republics to satisfy any ordinary person that a Boer, no matter if he can count his sovereigns by the million, would never dream of giving up his farm and turning country gentleman. ”

“ The Uitlanders of British, Australian, German and American extraction, inter-mixing with the Boers, would [Pg 94] soon have merged their national characteristics, and have become simply citizens of the South African Republic.
The Boers might have constructed a vast, wealthy and powerful State in which for generations to come, they would have held the supremacy. As a conquered people they will be compelled to accept the constitution they might have granted, and granted the more readily as they would have reaped the largest share of the benefits. ”

“ Again the Boers had to contend with the savages, wild beasts and starvation. Here they suffered terribly, hundreds of them died and hundreds of women and children were murdered by the savages. Yet they persevered and converted the desert into two of the richest and most flourishing little republics in the world. All this is as fresh as ever in the Boer memory, yet, after the late South African War, the English beg the Boers to forgive and forget. ”

“ There is an instinct in the South African which makes him conscious, in his dim, short-sighted way, that over against him there looms the passive, irreconcilable power of the black races. He is like a man carrying a lantern, with the shifting circle of light about him, and at its frontier the darkness pregnant with presences.
The Boer, learned in Kafir varieties, stared under puckered brows at the single figure passing below the kraals. ”

“ It has so happened, therefore, that the Boers, as the ruling and dominant class, have hopelessly failed to master or comprehend the new conditions with which they have been called upon to deal. They have not, as a body, shown either capacity or desire to treat the new developments with even a remote appreciation of their inherent value and inevitable trend. The Boer has simply set his back against the floodgates, apparently oblivious or indifferent to the fact that the hugely accumulating forces behind must one day burst every barrier he may choose to set up. ”

“ The Boers, not alluding to any political party such as the Afrikander Bond, or the Krugerites, or the Republicans of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, but judging by their general conduct and the tone of their public utterances, seem to have determined to keep Englishmen out of South Africa in order to maintain the balance of power in their own favour. Their whole action tends to that. Supposing the Cape Colony had a grievance against the British Empire, and chose to form a Republic of its own, it would be a Boer Republic, because the Boers are more numerous than the English. ”

“ His isolation, not only in a distant corner of the southern hemisphere, but in the great, wide, bare veldt over which his flocks and herds roam, has kept the Boer fast bound in the ideas and habits of a past age, and he shrinks from the contact of the keen restless modern man, with new arts of gain and new forms of pleasure, just as a Puritan farmer of Cromwell's day might shrink were he brought to life and forced to plunge into the current of modern London. ”

“ I will not declare that every Boer is a saint, or that every one is a model of cleanliness or virtue, but I make bold [11] to say that the majority of the Boers are not a fraction less moral, cleanly, or virtuous than the majority of Americans or Englishmen, albeit they may be less progressive and less handsome in appearance than we imagine ourselves to be. ”

“ It was not from the ranks of the Boers that men came who were capable of making the Transvaal an arsenal of military power, a close corporation of clever financial government, the head of the great Afrikander movement of the past decade, a force of organized strength for the destruction of British rule in South Africa, and a diplomatic factor at the capitals of Europe. The Boers were, and are, simply the instruments of clever adventurers from Holland. ”

“ The distance from a roadway, is, in Boer eyes, of no great account, and, as a rule, the farther from human habitation the Dutch farmer can get the better he is pleased. As for the forbidding aspect of the kloof, the stolid, unimaginative Boer would be little troubled on that score; he has no eye whatever for picturesque or scenic effect, and will plant himself as readily upon the treeless wastes of the Orange Free State, or the most stony, barren mountain-side of the Old Colony, as in the most beautiful and wooded country that South Africa can give him. ”

“ The power of a Boer over his sons and daughters is most unlimited, and he is the hardest and cruellest of masters to the unfortunate natives whom he keeps in slavery under the title of indentured apprentices, and whose lives he regards as of no more importance than those of his sheep, and as of infinitely less consequence than those of his horses or even of his dogs. To the unhappy natives the taking over of the Transvaal by England had been a blessing of the highest kind. ”

“ Rid the Transvaal of the incubus of its corrupt and incapable government, give it a well-considered constitution and supervision, and the Boer, though he can never rise very high among white races, will in the next generation be a very different man from what his circumstances have hitherto made him. ”

“ There is, of course, a better class of South African Dutchmen than the Boer of the veldt. But it is limited in number, outside of Cape Colony, and the latter constitutes the really important subject for consideration. For some of his qualities the Boer cannot be seriously blamed. Surliness of manner, uncouthness in appearance, aversion to strangers, ignorance of the outer world, religious superstition, are all matters in which he does not stand alone, and which are the natural products of an isolated life. ”

“ That with good government and under more civilized conditions, they are capable of better things is undoubted. Among the Boers of Natal (especially in the Umvoti District) , of the Cape Colony, and even of certain districts of the Free State, I have met many Boers, who, though of a rather low order of intellect, and incapable of any achievements in the higher departments of our mental life, were in all other respects as high-toned, upright and courteous gentlemen as anyone would desire to meet. ”

“ From then onwards, as old colonists have so often told me, the Boers brought up the younger generation in the belief that the "Roinek" [1] was a coward, and in consequence their arrogance in the country districts became wellnigh intolerable, while at the Cape the Bond party grew so strong it bid fair to elbow out the English altogether. Now, while the country is still young, the fair prospect opens out of Briton and Boer living in amity and peace together, and mutually supplying, in the government of their vast inheritance, such elements as are wanting in the character of each. ”

“ In much the same way, with all the facts staring them in the face, there are men in England, some of them of high position and character, who urge the righteousness of the Boer cause, and with tongue and pen paint our national iniquity in hues black as ink and red as blood. ”

“ But in his relations and contact with the native races and real owners of the soil, the Dutch Boer seems to lose all sense of reason and justice, and to remember only those early and blood-stained annals of pioneering, when the white man and the black neither gave nor asked for quarter in their struggle for supremacy in the land. ”

“ As the years passed on other families joined them, settlements grew rapidly, and with these villages came the various amenities of social and civilized life. But the Boer seemed to catch from the wandering savages around him something of the spirit of their roaming life, and in this he was encouraged by the nature of his occupation and by the Government regulations, which simply charged him rental for three thousand acres of grazing ground without confining him to any specific location. ”

“ Therefore, as the Boers would tell you, they are obliged to take them by force.”
“You are joking with us, sir, are you not?” said George.
“Indeed I am not. They think that not only is it fair and right that the natives should work without pay for them, but that it is their duty to oblige them so to work.”
“On what possible grounds, Mr Baylen?”
“Because they are an inferior race, over whom the Boers have a natural right. This is no pretence. They really think so. The Boers are, after their fashion, a very religious people. ”

“ We have, as I have endeavoured to show you, two Boer republics adjacent to one another, and only sparsely populated. South of them are Cape Colony and Natal, also populated by Dutchmen and blood relations of the Boers, while amongst them are many British settlers.
“I have told you how our neighbours dealt with their native servants. Now that they had been given their independence they were free to do as they liked, save that slavery would not have been permitted. But, to the Boer, native labour is everything. ”

“ There were Englishmen in the land before the war, as there are Englishmen to-day, whose word to the Boer mind was an inviolable oath.
So far I have described the average Boer failings with all the unsympathetic plainness which a hostile observer could desire. But there is a very different side to which it is pleasant to turn. If he has the countryman’s faults strongly developed, he has also in a high degree the country virtues. Simplicity is not an unmixed blessing; but it is the mother of certain fine qualities, which are apt to be lost sight of by a sophisticated world. ”

“ No doubt the Boer farmers are concerned in their settlement too. But, then, they are not always allowed by their leaders to have a clear vision of their true interest; and, to do them justice, they would often be ready, even if they saw it, to sacrifice it to their political creed. ”

“ By way of the Orange River and Vaal, the Boers emigrated from the Cape Colony, and in the process they drove the Matabele to the North, across the Limpopo, setting them against the Makalakas. Just as the American farmer had driven the Red Indian West before him under the impact of capitalist economy, so the Boer drove the Negro to the North. ”