Thoughts on South Africa — Part One: IV. The Wanderings of the Boer

THE WANDERINGS OF THE BOER

We have seen that, within a generation and a half from the landing of the Huguenots, they had intermarried and blended with the earlier settlers; and that their common language was the "Taal" (whether that language was a speech imported from some northern region, or a South African growth); that they were in possession of slaves, who planted and built for them; and that further, they were permeated by the conception that they were the chosen people of God; that South Africa was a personal bequest to themselves; that the aboriginal inhabitants of the land were the true Hittites, Perizzites and Jebusites, whom the God of the Jewish Scripture had ordered should be destroyed; and that they held, with an intensity of conviction which it is impossible for the nineteenth-century European fully to understand, that they were the very people to whom the threats and promises of the Jewish Scriptures were held out; and that, should they obey the commandments delivered unto them, their seed should become as the sand of the seashore for multitude, and they should inherit South Africa.

Settled on the beautiful Cape Peninsula, and in the lovely Western valleys, where the wild flowers bloom as nowhere else on the earth's surface; where the streams never fail, and the high mountains shut out the parching winds of the north, and where almost every plant known to civilized man will flourish; and where the few Hottentots and Bushmen who had inhabited the land having been easily exterminated or driven away, each man sat (not figuratively, but literally) under his own vine and his own fig-tree, enjoying the fruits thereof; it would be imagined that, at least for many generations, the descendants of the early settlers would have rested, cultivating and peopling their lands along the coast.

But it was not so.

The hand of the Dutch East India Company rested heavily on the people.

In some respects a fair government, and sometimes represented by able men, it yet, like all other kindred commercial despotisms, crushed the people where its own interests were concerned under an iron heel.

They might not trade nor barter with the natives, lest they should interfere with the Company's profits; they might not plant or sow as they wished;

coffee and spice were forbidden as interfering with the Company's monopoly in the East; the smallest details of daily life were regulated by an externally imposed law; and the people writhed.

It was not to be supposed that these folk, the sons of roving soldiers and sailors, or of men who had left their homes in search of religious freedom, or whose forbears in Holland in the sixteenth century resisted the Spaniard when his heel was on the flag of freedom in half the lands of Europe, and who, rather than allow him to fix his foot permanently on their soil, had turned the waters of the North Sea over lands and villages; it was not to be supposed that folk so descended, and who regarded South Africa as their peculiar inheritance, should submit to dictation and interference at the hand of any external government.

Again and again the most restless and independent of these men drew out the huge ox-wagon--South Africa's ship of the desert--and putting into it wife and children and such household goods as they possessed, they with their flocks and herds bade good-bye for ever to the beautiful valleys of the Boven-Land.

Sometimes they took their course northward over the high mountain ranges that separate the Western coast land from the vast Karoo plains; sometimes they kept north-east and along the coast; but wherever they went their aim was still the same--to escape beyond the region and rule of the old Dutch Government; and wherever they went, they went alone, and unaided by any organized government, their flint-lock guns their only means of defence, their rhinoceros-hide whips their one sceptre of rule.

And so began, one hundred and fifty years ago, that long "trek" of the Boer peoples northward and eastward, which to-day still goes on with unabated ardour and quiet persistency; and which in its ultimate essence is a search, not for riches, not for a land where mere political equality may be found; but for a world of absolute and untrammelled individual liberty; for a land where each white man shall reign, by a divine right inherent in his own person, over a territory absolutely his own; uninterfered with by the action of any external ruler, untrammelled by any foreign obligation--the Promised Land of Boer!

As a hundred years ago he stood on the banks of the Vaal and the Orange looking to the lands beyond, so to-day he stands on the banks of the Limpopo and Zambesi; and still looks northward.

[40] [40] This was written in the April of 1891, when large treks were being organized in the Free State and Transvaal.

* * * * * Often the early fore-trekkers moved due north and climbed the vast mountain ranges.

They saw when they reached their summits no descent on the other side, but the vast plains with their scant olive-coloured herbage and tumbled rocks.

As sweeping across these wide Colonial plains to-day, one looks out at them from the windows of the railway train, silent as they still lie, it is not easy to recall what they must have appeared in the eyes of those first-born white sons of South Africa whose wagons, moving slowly along, broke for the first time into these vast, silent plains.

Across each one some white man's eye looked for the first time, taking in the expanse, which till then only the Bushman had seen as he tracked his game, or the Hottentot as he travelled with his tribe; across each one of them some solitary wagon first crept, leaving the marks of its wheels deep in the red sand, which in all the ages of the past had been printed only by the feet of the antelope and the claw of the ostrich and lion, or the light tread of the Bushman and Hottentot--and the mark of those wheels made the first track of that road on which, later but surely, civilization with its colossal evils, and its infinite beneficial possibilities, was to follow.

At night, when they had drawn up their wagons beside some iron-stone kopje, or near the bed of a sloot[41] where there might be water in the sand, they heard the jackals howl about them (as you may still hear them at almost any farm in the Karoo, if in the night you will walk a mile or two from the house and sit down alone on the rocks) and the lion's roar, which for the span of more than a life has not been heard there now.

And in the morning, when they woke and peered out between the sails of the wagon, within a stone's throw they saw the springbok feeding with wildebeest[42] among them; and when the sun rose, and they stood up on the wagon-chest and scanned the plain, they rejoiced if they saw far off a vley[43] where their cattle might drink; and if they saw none, they looked about for any indication of those carefully concealed drinking-places of the little Bushman, so well covered with stones, lest the wild animals might tread them in, or strangers drink the water; if they found none, and digging in the sand of the river-beds yielded too little for their cattle, then they trekked on.

If they found enough, then they often stayed for awhile till the veld was brown and barren and the game gone and then they trekked again.

[41] Sloot = watercourse.

[42] Wildebeest = the gnu.

[43] Vley = depression with water.

Those were the days of hard living and hard fighting.

The white man depended mainly on his gun for food.

And when the little Bushman looked out from behind his rocks, he saw his game--all he had to live on--being killed, and the fountain which he or his fathers had found and made, and had used for ages, being appropriated by the white men.

The plains were not wide enough for both, and the new-come children of the desert fought with the old.

We have all sat listening in our childhood to the story of the fighting in those old days.

How sometimes the Boer coming suddenly on a group of Bushmen round their fire at night, fired and killed all he could.

If in the flight a baby were dropped and left behind, he said, "Shoot that too, if it lives it will be a Bushman or bear Bushmen."

On the other hand, when the little Bushman had his chance and found the Boer's wagon unprotected, the Boer sometimes saw a light across the plain, which was his blazing property; and when he came back would find the wagon cinders, and only the charred remains of his murdered wife and children.

It was a bitter, merciless fight, the little poisoned arrow shot from behind the rocks, as opposed to the great flint-lock gun.

The victory was inevitably with the flint-lock, but there may have been times when it almost seemed to lie with the arrow; it was a merciless primitive fight, but it seems to have been on the whole, compared to many modern battles, fair and even, and in the end the little Bushman vanished.

It, perhaps, was not _absolutely_ inevitable that all should have been as it was.

If these early fore-trekkers of our land had been Buddhas or Christs, or even George Eliots or Darwins or Livingstones, the story might have been different; but so, too, would the whole history of human life have been, had those gracious individualities, which now here and now there shoot forth on the highest branches of human life, constituted its undergrowth as well--if instead of being, as they are, merely the rare leaflets which show us what the whole growth may attain to when all have grown taller!

It is true that ordinary missionaries, Dutch, French, English, or German, have lived among these tiny folk for years, without suffering either injury or insult; but the fore-trekkers were not missionaries, nor thirsting to sacrifice themselves for the aborigines.

They were simply ordinary, good folk, rather above than below the common European average, who had their own ends to look after; and the Bushman, being what he was, a little human in embryo, determined to have his own way, the story could take its course in no other direction than that in which it did!

It is easy for _us_ sitting at ease in our study chairs to-day to condemn the attitude of the early white men, Dutch or English, towards him, and regret that they did not take a more scientific interest in this little half-developed child of South Africa.

To the thinking man of to-day he is a link with the past of our race; a living prehistoric record; his speech, his scheme of social life, his physical structure, are a volume in human history, beside which the most hoary manuscript in China or India is modern; and the oldest relics of Greece and Rome are things of to-day.

It is easy for _us_ to feel tender over his little paintings when suddenly we come across them among the rocks; the artist in us recognizes across the chasm of a million centuries of development its little kinsman.

Something in us nods back to him across the years:--"I know why you did that, little brother: I do it too--another way, pen or pencil or stone, it doesn't matter which.

You call it an ox: I call it truth.

We both paint what we see, the likest we can!

They never know why we do it.

Did you look at your oxen and your zebras and your ostriches, and feel that you must and you must, till you painted or etched them?

Take my hand, brother manikin!"

Ring round head, ears on pedestals, his very vital organs differing from the rest of his race--yet, as one sits under the shelving rocks at the top of some African mountain, the wall behind one covered with his crude little pictures, the pigments of which are hardly faded through the long ages of exposure, and, as one looks out over the great shimmering expanse of mountain and valleys beneath, one feels that that spirit which is spread abroad over existence concentrated itself in those little folk who climbed among the rocks; and that that which built the Parthenon and raised St. Peter's, and carved the statues of Michael Angelo in the Medici Chapel, and which moves in every great work of man, moved here also.

That that Spirit of Life which, incarnate in humanity, seeks to recreate existence as it beholds it, and which we call art, worked through that small monkey hand too!

And that shelving cave on the African mountain becomes for us a temple, in which first the hand of humanity raised itself quiveringly in the worship of the true and of the beautiful.

And when in the valley below we come suddenly across a little arrow-head beside some old drinking-fountain, or find a spot where his flints and empty mussel-shells lie thick among the soil on the bank of a sloot where for this many hundred years now no mussels have been, a curious thrill of interest comes to us: we feel as would an adult who in middle life should come suddenly across the shoes and toys he had used in earliest childhood, carefully laid up together.

And we sit down and dig out the shells and flints with our fingers and the warm afternoon sunshine shimmers over us, as it did over some old first mother of humanity when she sat there cracking shells.

And we touch with our hands the old race days, that at other times are hardly realizable by us.

For us it is easy to feel all this.

It is easier yet for the fair European woman, as she lounges in her drawing-room in Europe, to regard as very heinous the conduct of men and women who destroyed and hated a race of small aborigines.

But if, from behind some tapestry-covered armchair in the corner, a small, wizened, yellow face were to look out now, and a little naked arm guided an arrow, tipped with barbed bone dipped in poison, at her heart, the cry of the human preserving itself would surely arise;

Jeames would be called up, the policeman with his baton would appear, and if there were a pistol in the house, it would be called into requisition!

The little prehistoric record would lie dead upon the Persian carpet.

To indulge in philanthropic sentiment is a luxury easily to be enjoyed by the idle and luxurious; to share in generous action towards weaker peoples is a possibility only to those who have sternly set out on the path of self-obliteration; and he who indulges most of the first knows sometimes least of the last.

When the fore-trekker mother lay awake at night in her wagon with her baby at her breast, she listened with strained intensity to hear if there were not a stealthy step approaching, or for the sound of the loosening of the oxen tied to the wagon, on whose continued possession the lives of her husband and children depended.

When the children went out to play during the day, she bade them anxiously to keep near at hand; and as she sat alone in the heat when her husband had gone out hunting, she scanned the kopjes to see if there were not a little dark figure moving on them.

To her he was no record of the past, but an awful actuality of the present; and the stern pressure of the primitive necessities of life, which in their extremest form have impelled civilized, shipwrecked men, when starving, to feed on each other's flesh, stepped in and made brotherly love impossible.

The Boer fought hard and the Bushman hard; they gave and they asked no quarter; neither can I see that we have any reason to be ashamed of either of our South Africans.

St. Francis of Assisi preached to the little fishes: we eat them.

But the man who eats fish can hardly be blamed, seeing that the eating of fishes is all but universal among the human race!

--if only he does not pretend that while he eats he preaches to them!

This has never been the Boer's attitude towards any aboriginal race.

He may consume it off the face of the earth; but he has never told it he does it for its benefit.

He talks no cant.

We condemn the Boer for his ruthless extermination of this little race;

but to-day, we of culture and refinement, who are under no pressure of life and death, do nothing to preserve the scant relics of the race.

The last of this folk are now passing away from us, together with those infinitely beautiful and curious creatures, which made for ages the South African plains the richest on earth, in that rarest and most delightful of all beauties, the beauty of complex and varied forms of life.

Over them the humanity of future ages may weep; but they will never be restored to vary and glorify the globe, or to throw light on the mystery of sentient growth.

We, as civilized men, must recognize that the extinction of a species of beast, and yet more a species of man, is an order of Vandalism compared with which the destruction of Greek marbles by barbarians, or of classical manuscripts by the Christians, were trifles; for it is within the range of a remote possibility that again among mankind some race may arise which shall produce such statues as those of Phidias, or that the human brain may yet again blossom forth into the wisdom and beauty incarnate in the burnt books; but a race of living things, once destroyed, is gone for ever--it reappears on earth no more.

We are conscious that we are murdering the heritage of unborn generations; yet we take no step to stay the destruction.

The money which one fashionable woman spends on dresses from Worth;

the jewels and cut flowers one woman purchases for self-indulgence would save a race!

Lands might be obtained, and such conditions be instituted, for a lesser sum, as might enable an expiring race to survive.

And the money and labour expended on the murder and maintenance of a few miserable foxes in a land and among a people who say they have emerged from barbarism, would send down to future ages all the incalculable living wealth of South Africa.

While we are unwilling to deny ourselves our lowest pleasures for this purpose, is it wise that we condemn, with delicate humanity and lofty pride, the simple fore-trekker, who, rather than die and see wife and children die, cleared out a small human race before him?

It is probable that more enlightened ages will regard with far more sympathy the Boer who, having shot a pile of bucks, stood with his wife and sons busily cutting them up into biltong, that they might have the wherewithal to live, than that cultured savage who, to gratify a small vanity and boast of a big bag, slaughters the last of a race;

and contemplates, as a Bushman might do, the heads fastened on his dining-room wall, with a pride that might only be justified had he created instead of destroyed them.

This at least is certain, that the Bushman fared no worse in the hands of the Boer than he would have done in those of the average settlers of any other race who go out to people and organize new countries inhabited by aboriginal peoples.

And while we, the natives of modern Europe, are contented to leave this, the most stupendous, the most difficult, and the most honourable of all the labours which a nation can perform, to any hands that are willing to undertake it; while we send out, not our wisest and best to civilize and elevate and plant the tree of European life among simple peoples, but oftenest the most unfit among our race--the worthless son who cannot study, and who will not labour; the man who even in the much simpler and less important function of a citizenship in an old established society has been a failure--while again and again we send out these men to perform our highest national functions it will still remain a truth, that the old Boer fore-trekker has nothing to be ashamed of when his record as a civilizing and elevating power is compared with ours.

We shall return later, and then shall deal at length with this question of the relations of the European towards the original inhabitants of South Africa, and glance at those points wherein our attitude differs from that of the first white settlers; and we shall then glance at the causes which have led to this difference.

But, as far as the Bushman is concerned, it may now be unqualifiedly stated that he tends to disappear as certainly under the heel of the Englishman as that of the fore-trekker, and only a little, if at all, slower.

Neither does it appear that our languid and more showy methods must be much more pleasant to him than theirs--simpler and more direct.

When a primitive man wants breakfast, he takes a sheep, kneels upon it, holds it between his legs, and cuts its throat; he skins it, and taking a slice out of it, fries it on the coals for breakfast.

We also demand not less imperatively cutlets for our breakfast; but we manage it another way.

We procure an individual some way off to kill the beast and another out of sight to cook it; we have a paper frill put round the bone to disguise it, and set a pot of flowers straight before us to look at while we eat it--but to the sheep--to the sheep--it can make little difference which way it is eaten!

We still do our unclean work, but we do it by proxy.

And it may be questioned whether what we gain in refinement we have not lost in sincerity.

The Boer cleared the land of the wild beasts and savages as expeditiously as he could.

But they were not his main difficulty, as we have seen.

On those arid, sparsely vegetated up-country plains, water and food for his flocks varied with the time of years, and sometimes were not to be found at all.

It was seldom desirable or even possible, in those days when artificial reservoirs or springs were unknown, to remain more than a few months on one spot.

So when the bushes were eaten, and the water began to dry up, he spanned in his ox-wagon and moved away with his flocks and herds in search of fresh pastures.

Or, if he had no flocks and herds and lived by the chase alone, he moved yet oftener, following the droves of the springbok and hartebeest[44] as they themselves trekked in search of fresh pasture.

He built no house, or, if he raised a temporary shelter, it was composed of a few cross-parts thatched with bushes, resembling a high-pitched roof placed on the ground; but his real home was his wagon.

[44] Hartebeest = an antelope.

With a constant tendency to go northward and north-east these men moved slowly on; visiting for the first time plain after plain in the karoo and grass-veld, and piloting their huge canvas-sailed wagons across the infinite expanses of sand and rock, as their sailor forefathers a few generations earlier had piloted their ships across the sea.

In many cases for generations this wandering life was continued.

Men were born, grew up, grew old, and died, who knew no home but the ox-wagon, and had no conception of human life but as a perpetual moving onward.

Even at the present day there are still to be found a few of these men, hunters and nomads, whose fathers and forefathers also led this wandering life.

They are generally large-limbed, large-handed men, powerfully built, but somewhat loosely, and a little slouching about the shoulders; often with long, straggling, yellowish-brown beards.

[45] [45] There seems some tendency in South African climate and conditions of life to produce this physical type, as it is often closely approximated to by the descendants of British settlers.

The South Africans as a whole appear to be larger, and not quite so closely knit as the European folk.

They are generally somewhat silent of tongue, their blue or grey-blue eyes often dull as though not fully awakened, but starting into keenness and life when they catch the glimpse of a springbok across the plain or a korhaan on wing overhead; and striking forth sparks of fire when you mention to them the benefits of taxation and a foreign government--as the flint-lock guns of their forebears struck fire, when the old flints hit the steels.

These men, whose mothers brought them forth kneeling upon the red sand amid the bushes at the wagon-side, under the blue African sky, with little more aid than the wild buck receives when she bows herself to bring forth her desert young--women who knew nothing of the tinsel and luxuries of life, who were content to bake their children's bread in some scooped-out anthill, and who, when for months or years there was no bread, fed their households with the wild buck's flesh, which they had prepared with their own hands; who, in time of danger, stood side by side with their husbands and sons, and when the enemy attacked, again and again, were found kneeling on the front box of the wagons, reloading the guns, and urging on sons and husbands to resistance and even death, as their Teutonic ancestresses had done in Germanic forests eighteen hundred years before--these men, born of such women, and whose first view of life was of the red sands and wide skies of an African plain; who, before they could speak, watched with half-comprehending eyes the loading of guns and the capture of game, and who, long before they were adult, could track the wild beast and mark the path of strayed cattle by the smallest sign upon the sand; who, when they travelled alone, needed nothing but a few strips of dried flesh, or a lump of unleavened bread stuffed into their bags, and a saddle on which at night to rest their heads as they slept under the stars; to whom every South African bird and beast was familiar; for whom every plant had its name, and every change in the atmosphere or the earth its understood significance; to whom every new South African plain on which they entered was a fresh home; and who, when they died, were put under the red sand, on which they first saw the light, and left in the plain with a pile of stones over them in the mighty solitude they had never feared while alive--these men, and the women who bore them, possessed South Africa as no white man has ever possessed it, and as no white man ever will, save it be here and there a stray poet or artist.

They possessed it as the wild beasts and the savages whom they dispossessed had possessed it; they grew out of it; it shaped their lives and conditioned their individuality.

They owed nothing to the men of the country, and everything to the inanimate nature about them!

The civilization they had carried away with them from their homes in the West, they may slightly have lost; but they gained a knowledge as real as it was intimate of the land of their adoption.

Nor is it probable that South Africa has lost by this return to a condition of almost primitive simplicity on the part of a section of her white inhabitants.

As it is necessary that the artist or thinker who is to instruct mankind should not live too far from the unmodified life of nature, if he is to accomplish work that shall have in it the deathless elements of truth and virility; so it seems to be a law of existence that the most dominant and powerful races, if they desire to keep their virility, cannot remove themselves too far and too long from the primitive conditions of life.

As the great individual is seldom found more than three generations removed from ancestors who wrought with their hands and lived in the open air, so the most powerful races seldom survive more than a few centuries of the enervation of an artificial life.

As the physical body becomes toneless and weakened, so also the intellectual life grows thin; and it is as necessary for the nation, as for the individual who would recuperate, to return again and again, and, lying flat on the bosom of our common mother, to suck direct from the breast of nature the milk of life, which, drawn through long artificial channels, tends to become thin and ceases to nourish.

Most great conquering peoples have been within hail of the nomads' encampment; and all great nations at the time when they have attained their greatness were largely agricultural or pastoral.

The city kills.

(It is, of course, hardly necessary to state that we have no intention of signifying that vast cities or the civilization which they represent have any instantaneous effect on national life, and still less that statistical tables would prove the death-rate higher in the town than country.

These things have no bearing on the decline and fall of nations, which must slowly and gradually decay from within before the moment of their catastrophic fall can arrive.

It is this decay which is promoted by the artificial conditions of life in that high condition of material civilization, of which vast cities, with their abject squalor, their squandered wealth, and their wide departure from the natural conditions of life, are at once the symptom and the cause; and it is a vulgar commonplace, that were the city not recruited from the more primitive country it would be depopulated in six generations.

Vast and gorgeous cities have always heralded and accompanied the falls of great peoples; and the ruins of Nineveh, Babylon, Rome, and the vast fallen cities of India and Greece, are the graves under which a brave, simple, and mighty people were buried while the walls yet stood.

It would be almost as rational to inquire in the case of a man habitually over-eating and drinking himself, and who, taking no exercise, dies at fifty of gout and diseased liver, what hour of inaction, or which mouthful of meat or drink was it which produced his death, as to assert that because no detail of a given system of civilization is directly and instantly destructive to national or individual life, morally and physically, that therefore the whole system is not slowly but surely so.

On the other hand, is there any reason to suppose that the emasculation and degradation of human creatures, which has always taken place whenever a high state of material civilization has been reached, is an absolutely inevitable concomitant of all complex material civilization, for all time?

Must the story of history for ever repeat itself?

Is it possible that the human intelligence, with its marvellous powers of forethought and analysis, shall at some time be able so to comprehend its own condition and to shape human life, that the benefits of a material civilization shall be grasped, while the emasculation and disintegration _which have always accompanied it_ shall be escaped?

We have been compelled here to insert this perfunctory note on a subject so wide and vital that it ill lends itself to perfunctory treatment, to avoid misconception, till later we return to deal more carefully with this subject.

) "The Scythians," says the old Greek historian, speaking of some of the wandering tribes who at a later date were to overrun and subvert the ancient civilizations, "the Scythians, in regard to one of the greatest of human matters, have struck out a path cleverer than any I know--for when men have neither walls nor established cities, but are all house-carriers and horsemen, living not from the plough, but from cattle and having their dwellings in wagons--how can they be otherwise than unattackable and impracticable to meddle with?"

Like the Scythians, our dwellers in wagons have indeed remained "impracticable to meddle with"; and they will undoubtedly enrich, not only their immediate descendants, but the blended South African race of the future, with the strain of their wild nature-impregnated blood.

[46] [46] (Footnote added in 1901. ) This passage was written ten years ago, and printed as it stands five years ago.

It possibly throws some light on the success of the Republicans in the conflict with the British Empire to-day.