South Africa; vol II. by Anthony Trollope - HTML preview

CHAPTER XVII.
 CONCLUSION.

I HAVE now finished my task and am writing my last chapter as I make my way home across the Bay of Biscay. It has been laborious enough but has been made very pleasant by the unvarying kindness of every one with whom I have come in contact. My thanks are specially due to those who have travelled with me or allowed me to travel with them. I have had the good fortune never to have been alone on the road,—and thus that which would otherwise have been inexpressibly tedious has been made pleasant. I must take this last opportunity of repeating here, what I have said more than once before, that my thanks in this respect are due to the Dutch as warmly as to the English. I am disposed to think that a wrong impression as to the so-called Dutch Boer of South Africa has become common at home. It has been imagined by some people,—I must acknowledge to have received such an impression myself,—that the Boer was a European who had retrograded from civilization, and had become savage, barbarous, and unkindly. There can be no greater mistake. The courtesies of life are as dear to him as to any European. The circumstances of his secluded life have made him unprogressive. It may, however, be that the same circumstances have maintained with him that hospitality for strangers and easy unobtrusive familiarity of manners, which the contests and rapidity of modern life have banished from us in Europe. The Dutch Boer, with all his roughness, is a gentleman in his manners from his head to his heels.

When a man has travelled through a country under beneficent auspices, and has had everything shewn to him and explained to him with frank courtesy, he seems to be almost guilty of a breach of hospitality if, on his coming away, he speaks otherwise than in glowing terms of the country where he has been so received. I know that I have left behind me friends in South Africa who, when they shall have read my book or shall hear how I have spoken of their Institutions, will be ill satisfied with me. I specially fear this in regard to the Cape Colony where I can go on all fours neither with the party in power who think that parliamentary forms of Government must be serviceable for South Africa, because they have been proved to be so for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; nor with those opposed to them who would fain keep the native races in subjection by military power. I would make the Kafir in all respects equal to the white man;—but I would give him no voting power till he is equal to the white man in education as in other things.

It will be brought against me as an accusation that I have made my enquiries and have written my book in a hurry. It has been done hurriedly. Day by day as I have travelled about the continent in the direction indicated in its pages I have written my book. The things which I have seen have been described within a few hours of my seeing them. The words that I have heard have been made available for what they were worth,—as far as it was within my power to do so,—before they were forgotten. A book so written must often be inaccurate; but it may possibly have something in it of freshness to atone for its inaccuracies. In writing such a book a man has for a time to fill himself exclusively with his subject,—to make every thought that he has South African for the time, to give all his energy to the work in hand, to talk about it, fight about it, think about it, write about it, and dream about it. This I have endeavoured to do, and here is the result. To spend five years in studying a country and then to come home and devote five more to writing a book about it, is altogether out of my way. The man who can do it will achieve much more than I shall. But had I ever attempted it in writing other books I should have failed worse than I have done. Had I thought of it in regard to South Africa my book would never have been written at all.

I fancy that I owe an apology to some whom I have answered rather shortly when they have scolded me for not making a longer stay in their own peculiar spots. “You have come to write a book about South Africa and you have no right to go away without devoting a day to my ——” sugar plantation, or distillery, or whatever the interesting enterprise may have been. “You have only been three days in our town and I don’t think you are doing us justice.” It has been hard to answer these accusations with a full explanation of all the facts,—including the special fact,—unimportant to all but one or two, that South Africa with all its charms is not so comfortable at my present age as the arm-chair in my own book room. But in truth the man who has an interesting enterprise of his own or who patriotically thinks that his own town only wants to be known to be recognized as a Paradise among municipalities would, if their power were as great as their zeal, render such a task as that I have undertaken altogether impossible. The consciousness of their own merit robs them of all sense of proportion. Such a one will acknowledge that South Africa is large;—but South Africa will not be as large to him as his own mill or his own Chamber of Commerce, and he will not believe that eyes seeing other than his eyes can be worthy of any credit. I know that I did not go to see this gentleman’s orchard as I half promised, or the other gentleman’s collection of photographs, and I here beg their pardons and pray them to remember how many things I had to see and how many miles I had to travel.

That I have visited all European South Africa I cannot boast. The country is very large. We may say so large as to be at present limitless. We do not as yet at all know our own boundaries. But I visited the seat of Government in each district, and, beyond the Capitals, saw enough of the life and ways of each of them to justify me, I hope, in speaking of their condition and their prospects. I have also endeavoured to explain roughly the way in which each of these districts became what it now is. In doing this I have taken my facts partly from those who have gone before me in writing the history of South Africa,—whose names I have mentioned in my introductory chapter,—partly from official records, and partly from the words of those who witnessed and perhaps bore a share in the changes as they were made. The first thing an Englishman has to understand in the story of South Africa is the fact that the great and almost unnatural extension of our colonization,—unnatural when the small number of English emigrants who have gone there is considered,—has been produced by the continued desire of the Dutch farmers to take themselves out of the reach of English laws, and English feelings. The abolition of slavery was the great cause of this,—though not the only cause; and the abolition of slavery in British dominions is now only forty years old. Since that time Natal, the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and Griqualand West have sprung into existence, and they were all, in the first instance, peopled by sturdy Dutchmen running away from the to them disgusting savour of Exeter Hall. They would encounter anything, go anywhere, rather than submit to British philanthropy. Then we have run after them with our philanthropy in our hands,—with such results as I have endeavoured to depict in these pages.

This is the first thing that we shall have to understand,—but as the mind comes to dwell on the subject it will not be the chief thing. It must be the first naturally. To an Englishman the Cape of Good Hope, and Natal, and now the Transvaal are British Colonies,—with a British history, short or long. The way in which we became possessed of these and the manner in which they have been ruled; the trouble or the glory which have come to us from them; the success of them or the failure in affording homes for our ever-increasing population;—these are the questions which must affect us first. But when we learn that in those South African Colonies though we may not have succeeded in making homes for many English,—not even comparatively for many Europeans,—we have become the arbiters of the homes, the masters of the destinies, of millions of black men; when we recognize the fact that here we have imposed upon us the duty of civilizing, of training to the yoke of labour and releasing from the yoke of slavery a strong, vital, increasing and intelligent population; when this becomes plain to us, as I think it must become plain,—then we shall know that the chief thing to be regarded is our duty to the nations over which we have made ourselves the masters.

South Africa is a country of black men,—and not of white men. It has been so; it is so; and it will continue to be so. In this respect it is altogether unlike Australia, unlike the Canadas, and unlike New Zealand. And, as it is unlike them, so should it be to us a matter of much purer gratification than are those successful Colonies. There we have gone with our ploughs and with our brandy, with all the good and with all the evil which our civilization has produced, and throughout the lands the native races have perished by their contact with us. They have withered by commune with us as the weaker weedy grasses of Nature’s first planting wither and die wherever come the hardier plants, which science added to nature has produced. I am not among those who say that this has been caused by our cruelty. It has often been that we have struggled our very best to make our landing on a shore an unmixed blessing to those to whom we have come. In New Zealand we strove hard for this;—but in New Zealand the middle of the next century will probably hear of the existence of some solitary last Maori. It may be that this was necessary. All the evidence we have seems to show that it was so. But it is hardly the less sad because it was necessary. In Australia we have been successful. We are clothed with its wools. Our coffers are filled with its gold. Our brothers and our children are living there in bounteous plenty. But during the century that we have been there we have caused the entire population of a whole continent to perish. It is impossible to think of such prosperity without a dash of suffering, without a pang of remorse.

In South Africa it is not so. The tribes which before our coming were wont to destroy themselves in civil wars have doubled their population since we have turned their assagais to ploughshares. Thousands, ten thousands of them, are working for wages. Even beyond the realms which we call our own we have stopped the cruelties of the Chiefs and the no less fatal superstitions of the priests. The Kafir and the Zulu are free men, and understand altogether the privileges of their freedom. In one town of 18,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of them are now receiving 10s. a week each man, in addition to their diet. Here at any rate we have not come as a blighting poison to the races whom we have found in the country of our adoption. This I think ought to endear South Africa to us.

But it must at the same time tell us that South Africa is a black country and not a white one;—that the important person in South Africa is the Kafir and the Zulu, the Bechuana and the Hottentot;—not the Dutchman or the Englishman. On the subject of population I have already shewn that the information at my command is a little confused. Such confusion cannot be avoided when only estimates are made. But if I take credit for 340,000 white people in South Africa, I certainly claim as many as the country holds;—and I am probably within the mark if I say that our direct influence extends over 3,000,000 of Natives. What is the number of British subjects cannot even be estimated, because we do not know our Transvaal limits. There are also whole tribes to the North-West, in Bechuanaland, Damaraland, and Namaqualand anxious to be annexed but not yet annexed. To all those we owe the duty of protection, and all of them before long will be British subjects. As in India or Ceylon, where the people are a coloured people, Asiatic and not European, it is our first duty to govern them so that they may prosper, to defend them from ill-usage, to teach them what we know ourselves, to make them free, so in South Africa it is our chief duty to do the same thing for the Natives there. The white man is the master, and the master can generally protect himself. He can avail himself of the laws, and will always have so many points in his favour that a paternal government need not be much harassed on his account. Compared with the Native he is numerically but one to ten. But in strength, influence, and capacity he has ten to one the best of it.

What is our duty to the Kafir or Zulu? There are so many views of our duty! One believes that we have done the important thing if we teach him to sing hymns. Another would give him back,—say a tenth of the land that has been taken away from him, and then leave him. A third, the most confident of them all, thinks that everything hangs on “a rod of iron,”—between which and slavery the distance is very narrow. The rod of iron generally means compelled work, the amount of wages to be settled by the judgment of the master. A fourth would give him a franchise and let him vote for a Member of Parliament,—which of course includes the privilege of becoming a Member of Parliament, and of becoming Prime Minister if he can get enough of his own class to back him.

I am afraid that I cannot agree altogether with any of these four. The hymns, which as I speak of them include all religious teaching, have as yet gone but a very little way. Something has been done,—that something having shewn itself rather in a little book-learning than in amelioration of conduct as the result of comprehended Christianity. But the work will progress. In its way it is good, though the good done is so little commensurate with the missionary labour given and the missionary money spent!

The land scheme,—the giving up of locations to the people,—is good also to some extent if it be unmixed with such missionary attempts as some which I have attempted to describe as existing in the western province of the Cape Colony. There is a certain justice in it, and it enables the people to fall gradually into the way of working for wages. It has on the other hand the counterbalancing tendency of teaching the people to think that they can live idle on their own land,—as used to be the case with the Irishmen who held a couple of acres of ground.

“The iron rod” is to me abominable. It means always some other treatment for the coloured man than that which is given to the white man. There can be no good done till the two stand before the law exactly on the same ground. The “iron-rodder” desires to get work out of the black man;—and so do I, and so does every friend of the black man. The question is how the work shall be got out of them. “Make him work,” says the iron-rodder. “There he is, idle, fat as a pig on stolen mutton, and doing nothing; with thews and sinews by which I could be made so comfortable, if only I could use them.” “But how are you entitled to his work?” is the answer readiest at hand. “Because he steals my cattle,” says the iron-rodder, generally with a very limited amount of truth and less of logic. Because his cattle have been stolen once or twice he would subject the whole race to slavery,—unconscious that the slave’s work, if he could get it, would in the long run be very much less profitable to him than the free labour by which, in spite of all his assertions to the contrary, he does till his land, and herd his cattle, and shear his sheep and garner his wealth.

Then comes the question of the franchise. He who would give the black man a vote is generally the black man’s most advanced friend, the direct enemy of the iron-rodder, and is to be found in London rather than in South Africa. To such a one I would say certainly let the black man have the franchise on the same terms as the white man. In broadening or curtailing the privilege of voting there should be no expressed reference to colour. The word should not appear in any Act of any Parliament by which the franchise is regulated. If it be so expressed there cannot be that equality before the law without which we cannot divest ourselves of the sin of selfish ascendancy. But the franchise may be so regulated that the black man cannot enjoy it till he has qualified himself,—as the white man at any rate ought to qualify himself. Exclusion of this nature was intended when the existing law of the Cape Colony was passed. A man cannot vote till he has become a fixed resident, and shall be earning 10s. a week wages and his diet. When this scale was fixed it was imagined that it would exclude all but a very small number of Kafirs. But a few years has so improved the condition of the Kafirs that many thousands are now earning the wages necessary for a qualification. “Then by all means let them vote,” will say the friend of the Negro in Exeter Hall or the House of Commons,—perhaps without giving quite time enough to calculating the result. Does this friend of the Negro in his heart think that the black man is fit to assume political ascendancy over the white;—or that the white man would remain in South Africa and endure it? The white man would not remain, and if the white man were gone, the black man would return to his savagery. Very much has been done;—quite as much probably as we have a right to expect from the time which has been employed. But the black man is not yet civilized in South Africa and, with a few exceptions, is not fit for political power. The safeguard against the possible evil of which I have spoken is the idea that the Kafir is not as yet awake to the meaning of political power and therefore will not exercise the privilege of voting when it is given to him. It may be so at present, but I do not relish the political security which is to come, not from the absence of danger but from the assumed ignorance of those who might be dangerous. An understanding of the nature of the privilege will come before fitness for its exercise;—and then there may be danger. Thus we are driven back to the great question whether a country is fit for parliamentary institutions in which the body of the population is unfit for the privilege of voting.

Our duty to the Kafir of course is to civilize him,—so to treat him that as years roll on he will manifestly be the better for our coming to his land. I do not think that missionaries will do this, or fractions of land,—little Kafrarias, as it may be, separated off for their uses. The present position of Kreli and his Galekas who were to have dwelt in peace on their own territory across the Kei, is proof of this. The iron rod certainly will not do it. Nor will the franchise. But equality of law, equality of treatment, will do it;—and, I am glad to say, has already gone far towards doing it. The Kafir can make his own contract for his own labour the same as a white man;—can leave his job of work or take it as independently as the white workman;—but not more so. Encouraged by this treatment he is travelling hither and thither in quest of work, and is quickly learning that order and those wants which together make the only sure road to civilization.

The stranger in South Africa will constantly be told that the coloured man will not work, and that this is the one insuperable cause by which the progress of the country is impeded. It will be the first word whispered into his ear when he arrives, and the last assurance hurled after him as he leaves the coast. And yet during his whole sojourn in the country he will see all the work of the world around him done by the hands of coloured people. It will be so in Capetown far away from the Kafirs. It will be so on the homesteads of the Dutch in the western province. It will be so in the thriving commercial towns of the eastern province. From one end of Natal to the other he will find that all the work is done by Zulus. It will be the same in the Transvaal and the same even in the Orange Free State. Even there whenever work is done for wages it is done by coloured hands. When he gets to the Diamond Fields, he will find the mines swarming with black labour. And yet he will be told that the “nigger” will not work!

The meaning of the assertion is this;—that the “nigger” cannot be made to work whether he will or no. He will work for a day or two, perhaps a week or two, at a rate of wages sufficient to supply his wants for double the time, and will then decline, with a smile, to work any longer just then,—let the employer’s need be what it may. Now the employer has old European ideas in his head, even though he may have been born in the Colony. The poor rural labourer in England must work. He cannot live for four days on the wages of two. If he were to decline there would be the poor house, the Guardians, and all the horrors of Bumbledom before him. He therefore must work. And that “must,” which is known to exist as to the labouring Englishman and labouring Frenchman, creates a feeling that a similar necessity should coerce the Kafir. Doubtless it will come to be so. It is one of the penalties of civilization,—a penalty, or, shall we say, a blessing. But, till it does come, it cannot be assumed,—without a retrogression to slavery. Men in South Africa, the employers of much labour and the would-be employers of more, talk of the English vagrancy laws,—alleging that these Kafirs are vagrants, and should be treated as vagrants would be treated in England;—as though the law in England compelled any man to work who had means of living without work. The law in England will not make the Duke of —— work; nor will it make Hodge work if Hodge has 2s. a day of his own to live on and behaves himself.

This cry as to labour and the want of labour, is in truth a question of wages. A farmer in England will too often feel that the little profit of his farm is being carried away by that extra 2s. a week which the state of the labour market compels him to pay to his workmen. The rise of wages among the coloured people in South Africa has been much quicker than it ever was in England. In parts of Natal a Zulu may still be hired for his diet of Indian corn and 7s. a month. In Kafraria, about King Williamstown, men were earning 2s. 6d. a day when I was there. I have seen coloured labourers earning 4s. 6d. a day for the simple duty of washing wool. All this has to equalize itself, and while it is doing so, of course there is difficulty. The white man thinks that the solution of the difficulty should be left to him. It is disparaging to his pride that the black man should be so far master of the situation as to be able to fix his own wages.

In the meantime, however, the matter is fixed. The work is done by black men. They plough, they reap; they herd and shear the sheep; they drive the oxen; they load the waggons; they carry the bricks; they draw the water; they hew the wood; they brush the clothes; they clean the boots; they run the posts; they make the roads; they wait at table; they cook the food; they wash the wool; they press the grapes; they kill the beef and mutton; they dig the gardens; they plaster the walls; they feed the horses;—and they find the diamonds. A South African farmer and a South African wool grower and a South African shopkeeper will all boast that South Africa is a productive country. If it be so she is productive altogether by means of black labour.

Another allegation very common in the mouth of the “iron-rodders” is that the Kafir—steals. “A nasty beastly thief that will never leave your cattle alone.” The eastern province Cape Colony farmer seems to think that he of all men ought to be made exempt by some special law from the predatory iniquities of his neighbours. I fear the Kafir does occasionally steal sheep and cattle. Up in the Diamond Fields he steals diamonds,—the diamonds, that is, which he himself finds. The accusations which I have heard against Kafirs, as to stealing, begin and end here. It is certainly the case that a man used to the ways of the country will leave his money and his jewelry about among Kafirs, with a perfect sense of security, who will lock up everything with the greatest care when some loafing European is seen about. I remember well how I was warned to be careful about my bag at the little Inn in Natal, because a few British soldiers had quartered themselves for the night in front of the house. The Innkeeper was an Englishman, and probably knew what he was talking about.

The Kafirs ought not to steal cattle. So much may be admitted. And if everything was as it ought to be there would be no thieves in London. But perhaps of all dishonest raids the most natural is that made by a Savage on beasts which are running on the hills which used to belong to his fathers. Wealth to him is represented by cattle, and the wealth of his tribe all came from its land. To drive cattle has to his mind none of the meanness of stealing. How long is it since the same feeling prevailed among Englishmen and Scotchmen living on the borders? It is much the same in regard to diamonds. They are found in the ground, and why should not the treasures of the ground be as free to the Kafir as to his employer? I am using the Kafir’s argument;—not my own. I know, as does my reader, and as do the angry white men in South Africa, that the Kafir has contracted for wages to give up what he finds to his employer. I know that the employer has paid for a license to use the bit of land, and that the Kafir has not. I know that a proper understanding as to meum and tuum would prevent the Kafir from secreting the little stone between his toes. But there is much of this which the Kafir cannot yet have learned. Taking the honesty and the dishonesty of the Kafir together, we shall find that it is the former which is remarkable.

The great question of the day in England as to the countries which I have just visited is that of Confederation. The Permissive Bill which was passed last Session,—1877,—entitles me to say that it is the opinion of the Government at home that such Confederation should be consummated in South Africa within the next three or four years. Then there arise two questions,—whether it is practicable, and if practicable whether it is expedient. I myself with such weak voice as I possess have advocated Australian Confederation. I have greatly rejoiced at Canadian Confederation. My sympathies were in favour of West Indian Confederation. I left England hoping that I might advocate South African Confederation. But, alas, I have come to think it inexpedient,—and, if expedient, still impracticable. A Confederation of States implies some identity of interests. In any coming together of Colonies under one flag, one Colony must have an ascendancy. Population will give this, and wealth,—and the position of the chosen capital. It clearly was so in Canada. In South Africa that preponderance would certainly be with the Cape Colony. I cannot conceive any capital to be possible other than Capetown. Then arises the question whether the other provinces of South Africa can improve their condition by identifying themselves with the Cape Colony. They who know Natal will I think agree with me that Natal will never consent to send ten legislators to a Congress at Capetown where they would be wholly inefficient to prevent the carrying of measures agreeable to the Constitution of the Cape Colony but averse to its own theory of Government. I have described the franchise of the Cape Colony. I am well aware that Confederation would not compel one State to adopt the same franchise as another. But Natal will never willingly put herself into the same boat with a Colony in which the negro vote may in a few years become predominant over the white. In Natal there are 320,000 coloured people to 20,000 white. She might still exclude the coloured man from her own hustings as she does now; but she will hardly allow her own poor ten members of a common Congress to be annihilated by the votes of members who may not improbably be returned by coloured persons, and who may not impossibly be coloured persons themselves.

With the Transvaal the Government at home may do as it pleases. At the present moment it is altogether at the disposal of the Crown. If the Cape Colony would consent to take it the Transvaal can be annexed to-morrow without any ceremony of Confederation. The Cape Colony would in the first place probably desire to be secured from any repayment of the debts of the late Republic. This would not be Confederation, though in this way the Cape Colony, which will soon have swallowed up Griqualand West, would be enabled to walk round the Free State. But the Boers of the Transvaal would, if consulted, be as little inclined to submit themselves to the coloured political influence of the Cape as would the people of Natal. What should they do in a Parliament of which they do not understand the language? Therefore I think Confederation to be inexpedient.

But though the Cape Colony were to walk round the Free State so as to join the Transvaal,—though it were even to walk on and reach the Eastern Sea by including Natal,—still it would only have gone round the Free State and not have absorbed it. I understand that Confederation without the Free State would not be thought sufficiently complete to answer the purpose of the Colonial Office at home. And as I think that the Free State will not confederate, for reasons which I have given when writing about the Free State, I think that Confederation is impracticable.

It is again the great question of coloured races,—the question which must dominate all other questions in South Africa. Confederation of adjacent Colonies may be very good for white men who can rule themselves, and yet not suit the condition of territories in which coloured men have to be ruled under circumstances which may be essentially different in different States.

Looking back at our dominion over South Africa which has now lasted for nearly three quarters of a century I think that we have cause for national pride. We have on the whole been honest and humane, and the errors into which we have fallen have not been greater than the extreme difficulty of the situation has made, if not necessary, at any rate natural. When we examine the operations of different Governors as they have succeeded each other, and read the varying instructions with which those Governors have been primed from the Colonial Office, it is impossible not to see that the peculiar bias of one Secretary of State succeeding to that of another has produced vacillations. There has been a want of what I have once before ventured to call “official tradition.” The intention of Great Britain as to her Colonies as expressed by Parliament has not been made sufficiently plain for the guidance of the Colonial Office. This shewed itself perhaps more signally than elsewhere in Lord Glenelg’s condemnation of Sir Benjamin D’Urban at the close of the third Kafir war in 1835, when he enunciated a policy which was not compatible with the maintenance of British authority in South Africa,—which had to be speedily revoked,—but which could not be revoked till every Kafir had been taught that England, across the seas, was afraid of him. Again I think that by vacillating policy we foolishly forced upon the Dutch the necessity of creating Republics, first across the Vaal and then between the Vaal and the Orange, when, but a short time before, we had refused them permission to do the same thing in Natal. I myself think that there should have been no Republic;—that in the Transvaal, and in the Orange State, as in Natal, we should have recognized the necessity of providing Government for