South Africans

“ The personal relations between England and South Africa become closer every year. You may find more South Africans in London to-day than ever before, and more visitors from home on the battlefields of Natal. This year a Transvaal team has competed at Bisley, with marked success, and the British Association has sailed en masse for Cape Town. ”

“ Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans.
I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all.
I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands. ”

“ Today the majority of South Africans, black and white, recognise that apartheid has no future. It has to be ended by our own decisive mass action in order to build peace and security. The mass campaign of defiance and other actions of our organisation and people can only culminate in the establishment of democracy. ”

“ The South Africans won’t go to seek her on the sea to fight her. They will simply wait for any and every army sent against them on land, and by various means, which comes to those fighting for liberty, will demolish those armies. They 264 will simply keep out of the way of the ironclads when necessary, and keep on holding the land for years if need be, until out of sheer weariness England shall grant them peace. This is should they have no further aid than their own people. ”

“ He seemed to see in imagination the future he was describing.
‘You have made out a very good case for your people as a nation, Steve, but what will you do with all the Englishmen in South Africa if it should become an Afrikander republic, as you seem to wish and hope? Will you drive them out of the country, or will you let them live an Uitlander race for ever here, as this Government is doing now? Will you exclude them from your future great South African nation?’
‘Decidedly not. We should be only too pleased to have them unite with us. ”

“ Recent history has brought South Africa very vividly before the eyes of English people, and it might, therefore, very well seem as though, of all parts of the Empire, the sub-continent would, now that peace is re-established, be the particular spot towards which colonization should naturally flow. This supposition is the more natural in that, for political reasons, British population is peculiarly to be desired. The land settlement of South Africa may therefore be said at the present time to interest all Britons perhaps more than any other individual Imperial scheme. ”

“ What a happy land in which to live South Africa would be if, instead of the present god of colour prejudice, we had some such confidence as is reposed in the blacks by the British authorities in East Africa and elsewhere. ”

“ It is no less true of South Africa than it is of the old countries of Europe that to understand the temper of the people, the working of their government, the nature of the political problems which they have to solve, one must know something of their history. ”

“ That is the honest course for them to adopt. Furthermore, I trust that White South Africa, especially those who boast loudest of British traditions, will remember that it is an inalienable right of a British subject, no matter in what part of the Empire he may be, to address his fellow-subjects on the momentous question of Government. ”

“ Is it desirable that the Empire should be able to produce its own equipment within its own limits? South Africa offers a great mineral and agricultural and pastoral country, richer in metals than Australia, more favoured in climate than Canada. Is the command of the sea important, and the possession of harbours and dockyards in all parts of the world? South Africa holds the key of the Southern Ocean, and forms, after Egypt, the second line of communication with India and the East. ”

“ Throughout South Africa, whether viewed as a whole or State against State, the races to-day are as nearly as possible equal in numbers. In Cape Colony there is a slight majority of Dutch inhabitants, in the Transvaal a slight majority of British. Natal, which, even after absorbing a large slice of the Transvaal, is still essentially British, balances the Orange River Colony, where there is an overwhelming population of Boers. ”

“ We may look for remarkable development in South Africa, whose promise is larger than that of any other part of the continent. Whatever may be said of some of the methods by which the British have enlarged their empire, their rule has blessed the barbarous peoples whose countries they have absorbed. The task of improving the few millions of blacks in South Africa, and of developing the large and in some respects wonderful resources of that region, will be greatly assisted by the incoming of hundreds of thousands of Europeans, bringing with them the arts and other blessings of civilization. ”

“ From every corner of South Africa—from the old Colony, the Free State, the Transvaal, from far Bechuanaland—they had come. You might see sun-scorched wanderers from the far interior, hunters, explorers, prospectors, and pioneers. Some had come to restore broken health; some to taste again the sweets of civilisation, to spend hard-won money ”

“ The rapid development of British interests in South Africa, the acquisition of territory in great part surrounding the South African Republic,—which was completely cut off from the sea by British and Portuguese territory,—and the growth of a large foreign population on the soil of the republic itself, could not fail to be a source of great annoyance to the Boers, who deeply mistrusted their new neighbors. ”

“ The chief charm of travel through a new country is the curiosity which the thought of its future inspires. In South Africa, a land singularly unlike any part of Europe or of North America, this curiosity is keenly felt by the visitor. When he begins to speculate on the future, his first question is, Will these wildernesses ever become peopled, as most of North America and a large part of Australia have now been peopled, and if so, what will be the character of the population? Will South Africa become one of the great producing or manufacturing countries of the world? ”

“ Again the Boers migrated, this time crossing the River Vaal, and founding a "Transvaal Republic."
In the history of the next thirty years we see not a vacillating, but rather a tentative policy, behind which was always an inflexible purpose to establish British rule in South Africa, peaceably, if possible, or by force, if compelled. The British Government was trying to bring to terms the most intractable race it had ever dealt with in all its colonizing experience. ”

“ English statesmen have for more than fifty years been accustomed to say that of all the Colonies of Great Britain none has given to the mother country so much disquiet and anxiety as South Africa has done. ”

“ The story of South Africa, since the British gained a footing there, is marked by many a dark spot of misfortune and disaster that we would gladly forget. When Britain, in 1806, took possession of the Cape, the country was occupied by Boers, Hottentots, and Kaffirs. The building up of a British state, with such conflicting elements, has been a work of extreme difficulty, which has put the best qualities of the British race to a severe test, and much of the work still remains to be done. ”

“ It is also in this physical character that one must seek the explanation of the remarkably slow progress of the country in wealth and population. South Africa began to be occupied by white men earlier than any part of the American continent. The first Dutch settlement was but little posterior to those English settlements in North America which have grown into a nation of seventy-seven millions of people, and nearly a century and a half prior to the [Pg 453] first English settlements in Australia. ”

“ The South African Federation.In the end we won, and peace was signed in 1902; a ‘Federation’ of all the South African colonies with a central Parliament at Capetown has recently been concluded, and the hatred between British and Dutch is now almost a thing of the past. South Africa owes its recent prosperity more to the discovery of great gold and diamond mines than to agriculture; but almost anything can be grown there. ”

“ South Africa is a very serious matter indeed. I am told the Dutch colonists within the Cape will remain loyal; but our reputation as an invincible race suffers with all the natives. And then the European East, nothing at present can look blacker, and all because of passionate words and hatred. ”

“ Nine tenths of the population of the Cape Colony and Natal are Afrikanders. Those Afrikanders would have seen that THEIR TIME HAD ARRIVED. No more need be said, except that a united South Africa would have been realized at last, and a Republican united South Africa. Of course, there are those who will call this reasoning all moonshine. There are those who call England’s isolation glorious. There are those who consider England capable of fighting the united world, and still being victorious. ”

“ The South African Republic, or the Transvaal, was founded some sixty or seventy years ago by Boer farmers from Cape Colony, who, being dissatisfied with British rule and its interference with them and their peculiar notions as to slavery, sought to establish an independent state for themselves where they might without hindrance carry out their ideas as they pleased. They, in fact, sought liberty {69} to make the natives their slaves. ”

“ This is due not merely to the absence of certain causes of strife, but also to the temper of the people, and their thin dispersion over a vast territory. In large town populations excitement grows by the sympathy of numbers, but South Africa has only five or six towns in which a public meeting of even three hundred citizens could be gathered. The Dutch are tardy, cautious and reserved. The doggedness of their ancestors who resisted Philip II. of Spain lives in them still. ”

“ Herman Nel’s words leapt suddenly to his mind: “A country belongs to the people who live in it.” South Africa belonged to the South African. The British Empire could not, did not desire to, dispute that.
She turned aside and went to the window and stood there, her air a little drooping as though she were weary, her eyes travelling listlessly across the shining wonder of dew-drenched sunlit veld. ”

“ But assuming, as most men, perhaps too hastily, do assume, that this sudden development is desirable, the English are the people most likely to carry it out effectively, and the strong and strenuous man who, with little encouragement from the government of his country, founded the British South Africa Company and acquired these territories for his countrymen, took one of the most fateful steps that statesman or conqueror has ever taken in the African continent. ”

“ Although the facts we have been considering suggest the view that the white population of South Africa will be very small when compared with that of the North American or Australasian Colonies, they also suggest that the whites will in South Africa hold the position of an aristocracy, and may draw from that position some of the advantages which belong to those who are occupied only on the higher kinds of work, and have fuller opportunities for intellectual cultivation than the mass of manual labourers enjoy. ”

“ Everything considered, South Africa is a country of big things—big pay, big prices, big opportunities, big [Pg 247] obstacles, big resources, big rewards—and she needs young men to help her fight her battles and solve her problems. ”

“ Thus, step by step, the colonies and states of South Africa would be drawn closer to each other and gradually prepared for the realization of the bright ideal that smiles upon us in the future, a United South Africa. ”

“ What the acquisition of this vast country means is as yet scarcely apparent to the great majority of Englishmen, perhaps to none who are not acquainted with the history of South Africa during the present century, or who have not watched the giant strides which have taken place in its development during the last twenty years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The rough Cornish miner, who is looking out with surprised eyes at our new South African world to-day, may yet give to us our greatest statesmen and noblest leader. The great African nation of the future will have its foundations laid on stones from many lands. Even to the Coolie and the Chinaman, so he comes among us, we personally should say: Stretch forth the hand of brotherhood. We may not desire him, we may not intentionally bring him among us, but, so he comes to remain with us, let South Africa be home to him. ”

“ And while all creation stands aghast beside the gaping graves, by rivers of blood, mourning with us the loss of some of the greatest Englishmen that ever lived, South Africa, having constituted herself the only vandal State, possesses sufficient incompassion to celebrate the protection conferred on her by the British Fleet and devote her God-given security to an orgy of tyranny over those hapless coloured subjects of the King, whom the Union constitution has placed in the hollow of her hands. ”