Forty-six years after the English had settled at Jamestown (1607), Hollanders
founded a colony at Cape Town at the southern point of Africa. The African
colony was a half-way station on the sea route from Europe to India and was
generally used for this purpose until the opening of the Suez canal. Settled by
Hollanders, the colony was later strengthened by the arrival of Germans and by
French Huguenots (Protestants who were compelled to flee from France). French
Huguenots were mainly of Teutonic extraction, and the South African is, or was,
purely Teutonic in blood as were the American colonists from Holland and
England. The settlers were a people like unto ourselves, and it should be borne
in mind that in this chapter we are not dealing with an alien race. Differences
between the evolution of South Africa and that of the United States will have
been determined by isolation of the former or by local environment, not by
race. South Africa did not receive a bountiful supply of European immigration,
was deprived of a close cultural contact with Europe, and was given the task
under these limitations of perpetuating a civilization which was to be in daily
contact with the African Negro.
When the Dutch settled at the Cape, the southern extremity of the continent was
occupied by Hottentots and Bushmen. (These divisions of the Negro family are
represented in South Africa -- the dwarfish and brutish Bushmen; the Hottentot,
taller and lighter skinned than the Bushmen; and the Bantu, or large blacks
governed by a distinctly lighter colored aristocracy. Of the Bantu, the Zulu
and Kosa are best known to Europeans living apart from Africa. The Bantu
(Kaffirs) were not farther south than Natal, but were then, as they had been
for centuries, slowly pressing before them or exterminating the inhabitants of
that territory since known as Cape Colony. The white man, invading the
Hottentot lands from the south, eventually met the black man invading the
Hottentot lands from the north. The first armed contest between black and white
for possession of Hottentot territory did not occur until 1779, three years
after the war for American independence had begun. From this time, the country
was in constant disturbance, war following war for three quarters of a century.
England and Holland fought for sea supremacy, and England won. English forces
occupied Cape Town in 1795 and remained until 1803. They came again in 1806 and
remained as conquerors until 1814, in which year the colony was ceded to Great
Britain.
South Africans, for more than a century, have been in contact with the most
capable elements of the Negro race. The Negroes does not, as the Indian, resist
and perish; he submits and survives. The Indian has vanished before the Saxon
in North America; in South Africa there are one and one-half million whites and
six million blacks.
The Caucasian imparts his culture to colored races with whom he comes in
contact, and, by bridging the cultural chasm between the races, reduces the
visible evidence of his superiority. The artificial cultural elevation of the
colored races produces complicated political and social problems which tend to
amalgamate the races. Neither the colored beneficiaries of Caucasian culture,
the whites newly arrived in the colonies, nor the great reservoir of whites in the
homeland are able fully to appreciate that the culture of the colored is
borrowed or imposed. This lack of understanding will be seen to have worked
untold injury to South African civilization.
The Hollanders mixed somewhat with the Hottentot, but by the time of their
contact with the Kaffir they had declared miscegenation illegal. Such laws,
however, later became inoperative in some places, and, at a still later date,
have become imperfectly applied in all places, partly by reason of British
influence. The Dutch owned slaves at the time the colony was ceded to Great
Britain, and the British officials at first encouraged and profited by traffic
in slaves, but by 1830, the great British emancipation program was absorbing
the attention of that nation and dominating its colonial policy.
After encouraging traffic in slaves for more than two hundred years
(1562-1807) and accumulating much wealth by such traffic, the British, finding
the greatest slave market closed against them, (The United States as a legal
slave market ceased to exist in 1808. The constitutional provision setting this
date was enacted in 1787. Every effort in the British Parliament to abolish the
slave traffic failed until 1807 -- one year before the largest market was
closed against the slaver.) abolished the traffic, and, within a short while,
were clamoring for the freeing of the slaves, many of whom they had recently
sold to the colonials. This new move on the part of Britain led to great
indignation in the British colonies in Africa dn the West Indies, for the
doctrine of equality accompanied the doctrine of freedom. Freeing the slaves
would bankrupt the planters; equalization that equalization of the races would
destroy the supremacy of the whites upon whom the civilization depended (the whites
in all the colonies were greatly outnumbered by the colored) did not appeal to
the British at home, who, by this time, had worked themselves into a frenzy in
behalf of the Negro, whom they had sold to the colonies at great profit. Btu
the economic argument did influence Europe, for the various nations there
looked upon the colonies as territories to exploit and hesitated to lower their
productivity. The British government, impelled to immediate action by the
frenzied partisans for the Negro, appropriated a sum for partial payment to the
despoiled colonists. The amount set aside for South Africa was so small and had
to come by such devious methods, through the hands of British officials who had
lately taken over the colony, that some of the slave owners did not apply for
their share.
The South African felt keenly the loss occasioned by this semi-confiscation
of his property, but neither in South Africa nor in the West Indies did the
colonials offer effective resistance. They were angered, but not incited to
revolt. However, there was a program in preparation in white England, which was
soon to be enforced in her colonies, and which aroused the colonials to the
highest pitch of desperation.
The colonies had no sooner acquiesced in the abolition of slavery at their
cost than they were confronted by the policy of compulsory equalization of
blacks and whites. The abolition doctrine of freeing the slaves at the slave
owners' cost had angered the colonials; the negrophisist doctrine of compulsory
equalization of whites with blacks drove the colonials to despair. The West
Indies threatened revolt, but the blacks were innumerable and the mighty
British nation was back of them. Some whites migrated from the West Indies, but
this by no means deterred the British government.
In South Africa, however, there was possibility of escape. Beyond the coast
lay the interior to which British authority did not extend. This land was
possessed by hostile savages and was cut off from communication with
civilization. But the Saxon has never submitted willingly to equalization with
the Negro; and as the settled lands near the coast were being overrun with
British religious fanatics who had been caught up into the seventh heaven of
mad negrophilism, there remained but one alternative; to submit to the powerful
British government or seek freedom and race purity in the savage interior. Like
the slave-owning South in the United States, only a small portion of the whites
in South Africa owned slaves. (In 1860, less than one-fifth of the Southerners
were slave owners).
The owners of ninety-eight per cent of the slaves remained in Cape Colony.
Slave owners represented the wealth of a colony. Equalizing the whites with the
blacks affected the poorer whites to a greater degree than the wealthier. It is
the former who come into competition with the blacks.
The voortrekkers, then, were non-slave-owning whites fleeing from British
negrophilism which threatened their race and culture. They were an austere,
hard praying, hard fighting, type of Saxon who had acquiesced in the British
occupation of the colony and in the British emancipation of their slaves, but
were fleeing before the British policy of reducing them to the status of the
Negro. With rifle and ax, herds and wagons, colonists descended from
Hollanders, Huguenots, Germans, English, Scotch and Irish wound their way
slowly, first, north by est, going into Natal. The emigrants had no more than
settled down when they were again confronted by the British who, coming by sea,
dispossessed them. From Natal the hunted emigrants turned northward and, by
agreement with the Negroes of the present territories of the Transvaal and
Orange Free State, occupied these lands. The Zulus, now at the height of their
power, sought to dispossess the white man and destroy him as they had the
Hottenton, Bushmen, and the Bantu tribes which had resisted their onset.
The white colonists promised protection to the tribes into whose country
they had come; promised to protect them from the terrible Zulu warriors, who
knew neither pity nor remorse. Southward were their former homes, and
inducements were given the voortrekkers to return, for their leaving was a
financial loss to the British. Famine and pestilence depleted their numerical
strength. Beyond them were the innumerable hosts of the triumphant and
all-powerful Zulus, the best physique and the most terrible warriors that the
Negro race has produced. Would they return and submit to their race and
institutions being submerged by the madness of Britain, or would they contest
for the privilege of remaining white and worshiping God according to their own
consciences? On the coast, British missionaries, believing themselves to be the
sole custodians of the Gospel, had arrived and begun to marry Negroes. The
missionaries were founding co-racial schools and forbidding the word
"color" to be used in these schools. Missionaries were parading white
and black children upon the streets, causing them to carry banners with the
inscription "ex uno sanguine" (of one blood). The colony itself
fell under the influence of the missionaries. These strange custodians of the
Gospel caused to be recalled colonial governors who would not accede to their
program of equalizing the Caucasian with the Negro. England was seething with
"philanthropy," a philanthropy which was concerned almost wholly with
the blacks, not the whites. In vain did the colonists still residing in Cape
Colony call upon the mother country for redress. In vain did English settlers
at Grahamstown, newly arrived from England, attempt to explain to the English
at home that civilization itself was imperiled.
The British government had forbidden retaliation upon the Negro tribes who,
now finding no effective resistance, were overrunning the borders, murdering
the whites and looting the plantations. When the whites pleaded with the mother
country for the privilege of avenging murders and depredations committed by the
powerful and ever predacious Zulu-Kosa clans, the suffering and imperiled
colonial whites were denied protection and forbidden to take measures to
protect themselves. A colonial secretary (Lord Glenelg) impatiently replied
that the Kaffirs were innocent and unoffending creatures and if they were
treated properly by the whites, they would cease their invasions. But these
merciless warriors had already destroyed a million people of their own race.
England was mad, drunk with the cocksureness that she alone was custodian of
the Christian religion and that the Christian religion taught equality of
races. English missionaries informed the English at home that the whites were
fleeing from the coast because of their desire to preserve the institution of
slavery in the interior, that it was the disgruntled ex-slave-owner fleeing
from the righteousness of British Christianity. This was false. We have seen
that the owners of ninety-eight per cent of the slaves did not leave Cape
Colony. The English settlers at Grahamstown knew this; and as the emigrant
farmers passed on their way to the north, the English settlers presented the
Boer leader with a Bible. On receipt of this gift, the emigrants prayed, as was
their wont, and continued their journey into the interior. (The situation in
South Africa was much like that in the United States during the Reconstruction.
The Southerners, liek their kindred in South Africa, submitted, in good faith,
to emancipation of their slaves, but opposed the enforced equalization of the
races.
The soldiers of Cromwell and the Puritans of New England were not made of
sterner fiber than the voortrekkers (first emigrants) of South Africa. The
first could not have prayed more; they did not dare as much. The voortrekkers
foresaw that Cape Colony was to become mongrelized. They foresaw that the
whites there were to sink ever lower into the Hottentot-Kaffir bog. They visualized
the future and determined to perpetuate their race in a land where they could
survive as a white people. With racial corruption behind them and the dreaded
Zulu before them, thy opposed the Zulu. Their leaders were deceived by Zulu
treachery and slain. Battle followed battle. Camps composed of women and
children were surprised by savages professing friendship, and Saxon women
fought Zulu warriors as their distant mothers had fought the cohorts of Rome.
Other emigrants came to the rescue, and upon the ground where their leaders
had been slain and where their women had died, the remnants of the first
migration, and those who had come to their assistance, swore to avenge the fate
of their fallen comrades. Professing desire to sell land to the whites, the
Zulus had murdered those whom they had persuaded to come to their kraals to
effect the purchase; then the black warriors had hurried to the unsuspecting
camps of the women and children, murdering them. This perfidy on the part of
the blacks aroused the berserker in the whites. The black warriors knew no
mercy, they should receive none. They outnumbered the emigrants one hundred to
one, but the whites were mounted and possessed firearms.
The Zulus, armed with assagai and shield, true to their war-like tradition,
would attempt encircling movements, their line perfectly drilled in close
formation. (The Zulu drill was an adaptation from that of the English army. An
exiled Zulu prince while in Cape Town observed the English maneuvers. He
secured a horse (they were unknown in Zululand) and retunred to his country,
The horse proved such a curiosity that its owner was restored to favor. With
the hiss of the snake from the throats of thousands of warriors, the blacks
charged the whites time and again. The voortrekkers, riding out of range of the
arrows, fired and reloaded and again fired with that true aim which the
American colonial knew and which made the killing of an antelope at six hundred
years an unmentioned feat by the early settlers of South Africa.
It was the culture of the white man in the possession of a few whites that
rendered them triumphant over innumerable opponents of a colored race. The Zulu
died, but he did not kill, his courage fled and his power and influence waned.
Victory was gained and peace secured by a handful of whites in armed contest
with the most formidable armies the Negro race has ever organized. Peace was
secured, not alone for the whites but for the vastly more numerous Negro
peoples whom the Zulus were exterminating, and these oppressed Negroes rejoiced
in the coming of the Caucasians.
The British Colonial Office never forgave the colonists who fled to escape
the British Negro policy. Now followed three quarters of a century of
relentless persecution of these emigrants. Through missionary influence,
treaties whereby the emigrants were privileged to receive arms and ammunition
from the coast were disregarded by the British authorities, and the colonists
were left to the mercy of the Zulu. Already the British government had headed
off the emigrants when they had settled in Natal. Now that they were settled in
the Transvaal and the Free State, they had scarcely made themselves secure when
upon them again came the mighty empire. An empire which at this period had a
greater regard for the welfare of the black than for the welfare of the white.
Gladstone spoke with shame of the world's greatest empire persecuting the
world's weakest republics and promised redress, but when his party came to
power it was not expedient to carry out his pre-election promise.
Three times the armies of the empire invaded the territories of the small
republics. The republics, driven to desperation, resisted the tyranny of the
whites with the same energy they had shown in their contest with the Blacks.
British policy was ever vacillating. Having occupied the Free State and the
inhabitants there having accepted the rule which it was impossible for fifteen
thousand farmers to resist, the British, after suffering reverses at the hands
of the now powerful Basuto nation, which, through missionary influence, had
been established to cut off the emigrants from civilization, suddenly abandoned
the farmers to the tender care of the triumphant Mosesh (the founder of the
Basuto nation). After repulsing the British and concluding a satisfactory peace
with them, Mosesh turned in terrible wrath upon the white farmers whom Britain
had subdued and then abandoned.
Now follows a great glory and then a great humiliation which every Saxon
must feel when contemplating the events. The farmers defeated the Basuto. In a
two years' war they struggled alone with this nation, which was now armed with
the white man's buns. Dutch cavalry rode with resistless energy through the
Basuto country destroying inhabitants and food supplies. Black warriors who had
recently held their own with British forces were driven to their mountain
recesses; and cowering in pass and peak that had never known a white invader,
the Basuto chief who had essayed to destroy the white settlements recognized
defeat. The Dutch prepared to storm Thaba Bosigo (an almost inaccessible hill;
the Basuto citadel) and destroy the savage danger which British negrophilism
had established and which to this day is the most serious menace to South
African civilization. The defeated and trembling Negro power, in extremity,
appealed to the British, their late foes, for aid against the farmers whom they
had attempted to destroy; appealed to white Britain for aid against the white
republic and received the aid. At the request of the Negroes, Great Britain
took them "under the broad folds of the British flag" and warned the
Boers to desist, for the Basuto were not British subjects. This ended the war
and preserved the Basuto for a menace to the white occupation of South Africa.
The empire's tyranny over the small republics was justified in its every
step by an appeal to negrophilism. The British posed before the world as
protectors of the natives. Heartless cruelty to the whites was explained as
justifiable in that it promoted the welfare of the blacks. The voortrekkers
were not slave owners on the coast and had made a solemn engagement not to
establish slavery in the interior. Yet Britain pursued these settlers, bullied
them into submission, abandoned them to innumerable blacks, came again and
deprived them of their liberty, and again abandoned them. The world was insane
with negrophilism, and any tyranny over these small republics was justified by
an assertion of interest of the Negroes. This subterfuge was maintained even to
the days of Rhodes, when the British, in accord with Rhodes' ideal of painting
as much of the map of Africa "British red" as possible and keeping a
trade route open to the interior, dispossessed the Transvaal Boers of
Stellaland and Goshen and the Free State Boers of the diamond fields.
The discovery of diamonds in the Free State and gold in the Transvaal led to
political complications which resulted in the Boer War (1898-1902), in which
the Boers, after a heroic struggle, were compelled to submit to British
numbers.
How much the British missionary and Colonial Office have changed since the
days of negrophilism! South African civilization lives in a new world of
thought and hope. Missionaries have ceased teaching equality of races and have
turned their efforts toward bettering the natives' morals and developing them
as agriculturists and artisans. But what could be more ironical than the
practical results of the teaching of the South African missionaries? The
missionary undoubtedly intended to prove himself a benefit to the colony. He did
not understand a race question; that it could not be settled as long as the
races dwelt together.
Having seen the fallacy of teaching the Negro that he was the equal of the
Caucasian, the missionary turned to what he believed to be the real solution of
the race problem; he expended his energies in teaching the mixbreed and the
Negro to become efficient agriculturists and skilled artisans, with the result
that the native, with his low standard of living, is able to compete
successfully with the white farmer and skilled laborer and drive these latter
lower and lower int he economic scale. Yet it is upon the whites that
civilization depends. Missionary teaching will make the native more capable of
competing with the whites and forcing these form the country, but it will not
and cannot make the Negro less or more than he is racially.
The British Parliament after due deliberation, passed the Act of Union,
which constitutes the Union of South Africa a self-governing colony on a par
with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Act of Union is far removed in
spirit from the negrophilism that brought turmoil and disaster in its wake. The
new constitution settles the question as to which race is to rule South Africa;
it limits seats in the national Parliament to "British subjects of
European descent." The only division of South Africa was on the matter of
denying the Negro the privilege of becoming senators for the Cape and Natal
provinces. Mr. Barnes, a Labor member of the House of Commons, offered an
amendment which would have destroyed the color line in politics. The amendment
was defeated by 155 votes to 55. (Read the chapter "Union
Accomplished" in T.R. Cana's South Africa from the Great Trek to the
Union.)
With he exception of the mongrel province of the Cape of Good Hope (the
province belies its name), the government is in the hands of the Caucasian.
Here negropolisim had done its work; the future is dark. Cape Colony, the land
of the "tar brush;" Cape Town the "coffee-colored capital,"
is to be considered in separate class from Natal, the Free State, and the
Transvaal. The missionary taught the races that they were of one blood. In cape
Colony it cannot be claimed that the teaching of the missionary has been
without practical result. "The Gospel according to Exeter Hall" has
had its perfect work in and about Cape Town. Surely the mixbreeds of the
province of the Cape of Good Hope are ample testimony to the influence of the
ignorant, Negro-loving British missionary, whose chief effect upon the colony
was to bring it to irretrievable disaster. When we behold the results from
miscegenation in Latin America and South Africa, what white American is
disturbed by the impotent rantings of a neurotic negrophilist who condemns the
American whites for holding aloof from the American Negro? See The Negro in
the New World, by Sir Harry Johnston.) Also, H.G. Wells finds fault with
the white Americans for their social exclusion of the American mixbreeds,
"who are of their own blood." That such a writer as Wells should at
this late date be an apostle of miscegenation is evidence that the Negro
problem has ramifications beyond the Negro race.
The Britain that persecuted the emigrant farmers startled the political
world with its leniency to them when they finally recognized British authority.
Within a short while they were constituted with full citizenship in a
government in which their numbers gave to them the possibility of control of
the Union. English and Boer will coalesce, and form this standpoint there is
every hope for the future. But the Negro problem hangs low over the struggling
civilization, and the forces that exist and that are to be intensified, if
unchecked, will "Egyptianize" the south of the continent as similar
influences in past ages eliminated the cultural factor in the north of the
continent.
The whites in South Africa are to all effects an aristocracy. There the
economic system has unavoidably allotted to the black and to the white
particular and well defined activities. There are more white men that
"white men's jobs," and the overflow of the white laboring class is
leaving the Union if it has means so to do. Skilled labor, the erstwhile
province of the white laboring class, is rapidly being appropriated by the ever
increasing mixbreed elements. Negrophilism prevented laws against whites
marrying blacks in those portions long under British control, and through
British influence, seriously interfered with the effective operation of such
laws in the Transvaal and Free State. Cape Colony has more than half a million
of these mixbreeds, and there is no "color line" in this, the home
and the result of triumphant negrophilism.
The political parties, seeking party control of the Union government, are in
eager scramble to secure the seats in Parliament dominated by the
"Cape" half-castes. Even the Labor Party, with its vaunted
Caucasianism, has yielded to the necessities of practical politics, deserted
its Caucasian colors, and seeks the mixbreed vote. At Germiston, in the
Transvaal, the writer asked a Labor orator what policy his party proposed with
regard tot he color problem. Opportunity for questioning had been offered, and
the query was proper for the occasion. The Labor orator replied that, in the
opinion of the native, the writer was a colored man. The orator was then asked
for his opinion as a leader of a party which sought to control the European
civilization in South Africa, "who is a colored man; the Caucasian, or the
mixbreeds of Cape Colony, who are partly Negro?" The query disturbed him
greatly; he refused to give his opinion or to further discuss the matter. The
Labor Party wants the colored vote of Cape Colony, the Unionists want the
colored vote, the Nationalists were profiting by the colored vote and purposed
to keep it. The seats in the Union Parliament dominated by the mixbreeds of the
south are sufficient, by their influence alone, to nullify the constitutional
ideal which is expressed in the constitutional reservation of parliamentary
seats to "British subjects of European descent."
Now that the government is in the keeping of the local whites, we may expect
to see decisive efforts to preserve the Caucasian and his institutions. Already
the new government has enacted a radial measure to see prevent the native from
spreading to those districts where there is hope of implanting a population
wholly white. Areas of land have been set aside by Parliament to which the
native may not go; other areas have been delimited to which the white may not
move. This colossal scheme of segregation is not surpassed in extent or intent
by any effort on the part of the white man to keep the white race white, save
in Australia, where the immigration laws forbid that any colored individual
shall come as a settler. Australia has dedicated an entire continent to the
white race and its institutions forever.
The British Empire, which led the Saxon world in promulgating the theory of
equality of races, is now leading the entire world in giving effective sanction
to the theory of inequality of races. This, of course, applies to the white
British. The British self-governing colonies are making herculean efforts to
remedy the disastrous policies of the so-called "philanthropists" of
the past century. The British Government, notwithstanding the overwhelming colored
population of the British Empire, has sanctioned every effort on the part of
the self-governing units of the empire to preserve the territory of these units
for the white man and his posterity. Historians of the future will recognize
the segregation of races within the British Empire to have been the chief
factor in perpetuating British civilization in many parts of the world.
Disastrous competition with colored labor leads some South African whites to
forsake their native land and seek those countries where the remuneration paid
for labor is based upon Caucasian standards of living. The greater number,
however, cannot leave, and these are sinking to the Negro level. Government is
striving vainly to stay the economic pressure of the black, which is degrading
the white. But it is through amalgamation of the white and colored races of
South Africa that the civilization is to pass into its decline. We living in
America do not realize the terrible inroads that miscegenation is making in
other countries. America has had its negrophilism, but it was mild in
comparison with that of South Africa. America has had the lust of the
sub-normal white to contend with, but this has never been as unbridled or as
universal as in other portions of the world where the white race is in contact
with the colored. America has been protected by laws against miscegenation and
by a fortunate Federal Constitution, which rendered impossible the nullifying
of these laws by Congress save through constitutional amendment, which could
not have been secured even at the period when the nations gave political
equalization to the Negro.
Then let us not too readily point the finger of contempt at mulatto Cape
Colony (Provice of Cape of Good Hope.) and cry "unclean." The white
race there has not willingly suffered its impurity. Hybridization is the
legitimate heir of negrophilism, and equalization of races was imposed upon
Cape Colony by the mother country. There are many whites in the south of Africa
who are descended from the white colonials. This Caucasian strain has remained
white for three centuries, but the future is before them. Can they avoid the
ever extending miscegenation whcih encircles them? Without the institution of a
rigid color line and its rigid, if need be, its cruel, enforcement. South Africa
is doomed. The color line and a bountiful European immigration will preserve
the civilization. Immigration without the color line will lengthen Caucasian
supremacy, but will not perpetuate the civilization.
(Read The History of South Africa, by George M. Theal (4 volumes); British
Across the Seas, by Sir H.H. Johnston; South Africa from the Great Trek
to the Union, by T. R. Cana; Impressions of South Africa, by James
Bruyce; The Settlement After the War, by M.J. Farrelly; Matabeleland,
by Capt Charles L. Norris Newman; What I Think of South Africa, by
Stewart Chamberlain. The historical incidents referred to in this volume may be
verified by reference to these writers. British writers themselves are foremost
in showing British mistakes in dealing with colored races, and it has seemed
preferable to utilize their criticisms rather than rely wholly upon the
author's impressions during a prolonged local study of various British
colonies.)