Impressions of South Africa Part 15

The material progress of the people has been aided by the enactment of stringent laws against the sale of white men's intoxicating liquors, though some of the chiefs show but a poor example of obedience to these laws, the enforcement of which is rendered difficult by the illicit sale which goes on along the frontiers where Basutoland touches the Free State and the eastern part of Cape Colony. The old native arts and industries decline as European goods become cheaper, and industrial training has now become one of the needs of the people. It is an encouraging sign that, under the auspices of Lerothodi, a sum of 3,184 sterling was collected from the tribe in 1895-6, for the foundation of an inst.i.tution to give such training. The receipts from import duties have so much increased that the contribution of 18,000 paid by Cape Colony is now annually reduced by nearly 12,000, and the hut tax, of ten s.h.i.+llings per hut, now easily and promptly collected, amounts to 23,000 a year, leaving a surplus, out of which 1,300 is paid to the Cape. Basutoland is within the South African Customs Union.

These facts are encouraging. They show that, so far, the experiment of leaving a native race to advance in their own way, under their own chiefs, but carefully supervised by imperial officers, has proved successful. A warlike, unstable, and turbulent, although intelligent people, while increasing fast in wealth and material comfort, has also become more peaceful and orderly, and by the abandonment of its more repulsive customs is pa.s.sing from savagery to a state of semi-civilization. Still the situation has its anxieties. The very prosperity of the country has drawn into it a larger population than the arable and pastoral land may prove able to support. The Free State people are not friendly to it, and many politicians in Cape Colony would like to recover it for the Colony, while many white adventurers would like to prospect for mines, or to oust the natives from the best lands.

The natives themselves are armed, and being liable, like all natives, to sudden fits of unreason, may conceivably be led into disorders which would involve a war and the regular conquest of the country. The firmness as well as the conciliatory tactfulness which the first Commissioner, Sir Marshal Clarke, and his successor, the present Acting Commissioner, have shown, has. .h.i.therto averted these dangers, and has inspired the people with a belief in the good will of the British Government. If the progress of recent years can be maintained for thirty years more, the risk of trouble will have almost disappeared, for by that time a new generation, unused to war, will have grown up. Whoever feels for the native and cares for his future must wish a fair chance for the experiment that is now being tried in Basutoland, of letting him develop in his own way, s.h.i.+elded from the rude pressure of the whites.

[Footnote 67: The word "Ba Sot'ho" is in strictness used for the people, "Se Sot'ho" for the language, "Le Sot'ho" for the country: but in English it is more convenient to apply "Basuto" to all three.]

[Footnote 68: Gungunhana however had a sort of council of chiefs and confidential advisers which he called together at intervals, and which bore some resemblance to the Homeric Boule and to the earliest form of our own Curia Regis.]

PART IV

_SOME SOUTH AFRICAN QUESTIONS_

CHAPTER XXI

BLACKS AND WHITES

Everywhere in South Africa, except in the Wit.w.a.tersrand 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 cla.s.s, 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 a.s.semblies 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.ses: 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 cla.s.ses 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 st.u.r.dy 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 metayers 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 s.h.i.+llings to seven s.h.i.+llings 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 p.r.o.ne to petty thefts than are Europeans. They have dropped their old usages and adopted European habits, have subst.i.tuted 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. a.s.saults 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 compet.i.tion with them in industry of a cla.s.s 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 p.r.o.ne 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 att.i.tude of contempt I have mentioned may be noted in all cla.s.ses, 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 wors.h.i.+pping 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 pa.s.s--a law which is found oppressive by the best cla.s.s of natives, educated and respectable men, though defended as necessary for public order, having regard to the large black population of the lower cla.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 owners.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.s, 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 const.i.tuencies. Accordingly, an Act was pa.s.sed in 1892, establis.h.i.+ng a combined educational and property qualification--that is to say, the owners.h.i.+p 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 ma.s.s 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 Const.i.tution 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 pa.s.sing, in 1896, of an Act which will practically debar these immigrants from political rights, as coming from a country in which no representative inst.i.tutions 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, dest.i.tute 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 ent.i.tled 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 mult.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 Bechua.n.a.land 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 a.s.sistance 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 Wit.w.a.tersrand 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 Bechua.n.a.land, 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-s.h.i.+lling gold piece has become known, and to-day pa.s.ses current in villages where no white man has yet been seen, even beyond the Zambesi, on the sh.o.r.es 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 a.s.similated to the two British Colonies, are those through which railways have been or are now being constructed--Bechua.n.a.land, 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 pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 superst.i.tions will survive), and will become, in name at least, Christians. Thus they will form to a far greater extent than now a h.o.m.ogeneous ma.s.s pervaded by the same ideas and customs.

While thus const.i.tuting 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 a.s.sumed 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 (a.s.suming 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 h.o.m.ogeneous, 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 att.i.tude 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 canva.s.sed, 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 pa.s.s 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.

[Footnote 69: The Boers are a genuinely religious people, but they have forgotten 1 Cor. xii. 13, Gal. iii. 28, and Col. iii. 11. Many nations have been inspired by the Old Testament, but few indeed are the instances in which any has paid regard to the New.]