Chapter III: The Problem of Slavery (1)

There is yet one point to be noticed in the early condition of the Boer before we pass to his later history.

The forefathers of the Boer were slaveholders.

When the first white men arrived in South Africa it was inhabited by three distinct native peoples.

From the shores of Table Bay to the Orange River on the north, and from the Atlantic to the Maluti Mountains, over thousands of miles, were scattered two of these races, quite unlike and yet more nearly related to each other than to any other branch of the human family. The most important in number and the most widely spread of these people were the Hottentots, a small wiry folk, with yellow faces, black wool in little hard knobs on the head, protruding jaws, low foreheads, and small eyes. They were split up into endless tribelets, dispersed over all the western and central portions of South Africa. More or less loosely organized under chieftains, the same tribes inhabited permanently the same tracts of country; though they moved from point to point to find pasturage for their cattle in the dry and wet seasons, as the Boer did later. Their condition of civilization was not high compared with that of many other African peoples; they had large flocks and herds, on whose flesh and milk they lived, but they had little agriculture. Their round houses, made of slight wooden frames, with mats fastened over them, could at any moment be taken up and removed; and the little clothing they wore was of skins. But they were a versatile, excitable, lively, little folk, as their few remaining descendants are to-day; rather gentle than fierce, and very emotional; and loving dancing and song. They could fight if compelled, but preferred peace. Later they were found to make good fighters under European leaders, but they could not lead or organize themselves. Their senses were preternaturally keen, their perceptions quick, but they were incapable of bearing a long-continued intellectual or emotional strain. They are the eternal children of the human race. Their language, peculiar for the vast number of klicks it contained, formed by striking the tongue in different ways against the palate and teeth, was yet a fairly well organized form of speech, capable of expressing tolerably complex conceptions. It was certain of these Hottentot tribes, under their native chiefs, whom the first white settlers found inhabiting the shores of Table Bay and the slopes of the mountains; and it was these folk with whom they traded, and whom they ultimately fought and drove away.

Scattered among these Hottentot tribes throughout the whole western half of South Africa was found another and yet more interesting human variety, the astonishing little people known as the South African Bushmen. Akin in race and speech to the dwarf races found in Central Africa, they are lighter in colour, being a dirty browny-yellow, perhaps owing to the cooler climate of the south, which they have probably inhabited for countless ages, and in which they may have originally developed. So small in size are they that an adult Bushman is not larger than an ordinary European child of eleven; they have tiny wizened faces, the wool on their heads growing in little balls, with naked spaces between. The sex organs of the female differ materially in structure from those of any other human female; while round the skull is a curious indented line forming what is called by the Boers a double head; and their ears, as looked at from the back, seem to grow out on small pedestals. These people seem to resemble, not so much a race of children as a race caught in the very act of evolving into human form. Their language, full of klicks, while nearer to the Hottentot than to any other, is yet as remote from it as Sanscrit from French; showing merely that there must have been at some distant period a common origin; the language, like the person of the Bushman, seeming to represent a type from which the Hottentot may have developed in the course of countless ages, possibly by crossing with higher African races, such as the Bantu.

These small people had no fixed social organization; wandering about in hordes or as solitary individuals, without any settled habitations, they slept at night under the rocks or in wild-dog holes, or they made themselves a curious little wall of loose bushes raised up on the side from which the wind blew, and strangely like an animal's lair; and this they left again when the morning broke. They had no flocks or herds, and lived on the wild game, or, when that failed them, ate snakes, scorpions, insects, or offal, or visited the flocks of the Hottentots. They wore no clothing of any kind, and their weapons were bows and arrows, the strings of the bows being made from the sinews of wild animals, and the arrows tipped with sharpened bones or flint stones, poisoned with the juice of a bulb or dipped in the body of a poisonous caterpillar; and these formed their only property. They had no marriage ceremony, and no permanent sex relations, any man and woman cohabiting during pleasure; maternal feeling was at its lowest ebb, mothers readily forsaking their young or disposing of them for a trifle; and paternal feeling was naturally non-existent. Their language is said by those who have closely studied it to be so imperfect that the clear expression of even the very simplest ideas is difficult. They have no word for wife, for marriage, for nation; and their minds appear to be in the same simple condition as their language. The complex mental operations necessary for the maintenance of life under civilized conditions they have apparently no power of performing; no member of the race has in any known instance been taught to read or write, nor to grasp religious conceptions clearly, though great efforts have been made to instruct them.

At the same time they possess a curious imitative skill, and under shelving rocks and in caves all over South Africa their rude etchings and paintings of men and animals are found, animated by a crude life and vigour. Their powers of mimicry are enormous. We have known an old Bushman, living in a place where there were a dozen Europeans; the old man could by a few contortions of the face and figure represent each one, bringing out even their subtle peculiarities of appearance and of character, without uttering a word. When he had finished his performance he would generally burst into a wild dance of artistic joy, and ask for tobacco or brandy!

In no instance has a member of this people been truly civilized. When confined in European houses and compelled to wear European clothing, they contract consumption and die. By the early settlers and the Hottentots they were supposed to be absolutely incapable of feeling, and the Boers, and even the Kaffirs, still regard them as only half-human, and probably descended from baboons.[24] They will bear resentment for long years with the persistency of many wild animals, but have also a curiously strong sense of gratitude, and are not incapable of powerful affection of a dog-like kind.

[24] This is a view we have heard seriously expressed by
some Kaffirs.

Some years ago we came into contact with a Bushboy, who had been procured from his mother for a bottle of brandy, and who was carefully tended in the hope of civilizing and rearing him. He, however, contracted consumption. On the day of his death, his mistress seeing what his state was, bade him lie down in the little box which was the only bed he could be induced to use. Half an hour after we discovered him in the yard cleaning the knives, with the struggle of death already in his face and the rattle in his throat. Asked why he had come, he shook his head and said he could not allow his mistress to have her dinner with an unpolished knife. We took him back to his box, and gave him a sugar-stick. He curled himself up; gave a look of unutterable gratitude and affection to his mistress, gave one suck at his sugar-stick, and died--like a small wild animal--but one capable of profound gratitude and affection.

These people have now almost disappeared; a few hordes in the North-West, and solitary individuals hanging about the pale of civilization, are all that is now left of them: but at the time of the arrival of the early settlers they formed a most important element in the population.

Wholly distinct from both these peoples, and yet more widely divided from them in appearance and social institutions than from the Indo-Europeans, is the third order of people whom the early settlers found in South Africa.

They filled the whole of the eastern side along the shores of the Indian Ocean, and are still to be found there in undiminished or even increasing numbers. Divided into two great branches, and these again being split up into endless tribes, they yet all belong to the great Bantu family. Unlike the little Hottentot, and the yet smaller Bushman, the Bantu is tall and dark, sometimes approaching in colour to the black of the Negro. Physically, he is finely proportioned and of unusual strength; his appearance suggesting a Negroid people with a cross of Arab blood; his traditions, customs, and certain words in his language, seeming to bear out this suggestion. Branches of this people are found as far north as Zanzibar. They differ from the West-coast Negro; and, in place of his child-like abandon, have a proud reserve, and an intensely self-conscious and reflective mental attitude. The language they speak is of a perfect construction, lending itself largely to figurative and poetical forms, yet capable of giving great precision to exact thought.

The two great branches into which they are divided are about as distinct from one another as are the Celtic and Teutonic branches of our own Indo-European family; the language of one half being as intelligible to the other as French is to the German. When analysed, the derivation of their speech from some common source is clear. Of the one branch, popularly known in the Colony as the "Kaffir,"[25] the Zulu and Matabele nations may perhaps be taken as the best examples at the present day.

[25] Kaffir: A loose term, derived from the Arabic, and
sometimes employed to signify all dark-skinned Africans,
but generally used in the Colony to designate this
particular branch of the Bantu people.

Of the other, or Chuana family, one of the best examples to be found is the Basuto, or Ma' Katees nation (so called from Ma' Katees, a warlike chieftainess who ninety years ago gathered a number of broken tribes under her rule and settled them among the Maluti Mountains in what is now Basutoland); or another, in the Bamangwato under their noteworthy chieftain Kama; a man whose persistent endeavour at the present day to enable his people to grasp the incoming tide of civilization, and to rise on its waves instead of being submerged by them, is unique in the history of savage peoples; his endeavour to preserve his tribe from the evils of civilization, till they are strong enough to grasp its benefits, constituting one of the most interesting social experiments which is being carried on anywhere on the earth's surface at the latter end of the nineteenth century. To this Chuana family belong also the Mashonas and other kindred tribes.

Closely as these branches of the Bantu family resemble each other in the eyes of a stranger, one who has lived among them and studied them will tell a Chuana from a Kaffir with as much ease as a keen observer will tell an Italian from an Englishman. Their difference in intellectual tendencies and social customs is as great as in language and appearance. The Chuana is more devoted to agriculture, more skilled in handicrafts, having been a skilful smelter of iron and builder of dams and walls long before the first arrival of the white man. He builds his house square, has a great love of property, is acquisitive and economical. He takes to modern civilization with an ease that is astonishing, and his desire for learning is intense. A white-headed Basuto man of seventy came to us once with a cow and a calf, the most prized of his earthly possessions, offering to give both if he could be taught to read, and went away in tears when told it was impossible. "Ah! it is because you do not wish me to be wise like the white man," he murmured bitterly.

The Kaffir branch, on the other hand, differs from the Chuana in being more warlike; agriculture is left much more to the women. The Kaffir is more proud, more sensitive, more inclined to dominate and rule than the Chuana. He has in full development all the virtues of the military type, but has perhaps fewer of those of the industrial. He is absolutely without fear, and faithful to his word when in his savage condition. The Chuana will fight in defence of his land or his beloved property; the Kaffir merely to maintain his own freedom and for the love of conquest. He prefers power to wealth, and independence to security. But when cultured he shows the same avidity for study as the Chuana.[26] In both his vices and his virtues he curiously resembles the Anglo-Saxon of the past.

[26] So considerable is the aptitude for abstract study
displayed by the Bantu, that there are cases in which even
Bantu females, preparing for the matriculation examination
of the Cape University, are found not to be inferior to the
average male Europeans sharing the same course of study.

At the time of the arrival of the white man all these Bantu peoples were organized (as they still are to-day wherever unbroken by the white man's power) into tribes, under chieftains to whom the whole people owed an absolute devotion, but who were largely aided in their deliberations by the older and leading men. They were in a state of civilization apparently much higher than that of the Britons at the time of the Roman Conquest, and more resembling that of the Saxons before the first introduction of Christianity. They had well-built round or square houses, kept sheep, goats, and cattle; their skin clothing and shields were often shaped with high art; and they had a complex agriculture, rich in grains and vegetables; they made serviceable and ornamental pottery, smelted iron, and their weapons and hoes were of marvellous workmanship, when the rude nature of their tools is considered. Their social feeling was, as it is at the present day when not destroyed by contact with Europeans, almost abnormally developed. The devotion of the tribe to its chief, and of the tribesmen to each other, and the intensity of their family feeling, can hardly be understood by those who have not lived among them. When a chief or headsman is arraigned, innocent men will often step in, blaming themselves to shield him. An interesting case of this kind occurred some years ago, when the headsman of a village being tried in a Colonial Court for a crime of which, by no possibility, could more than one man have been guilty, three of his men stood up, each declaring that he, and he alone, was the guilty person! The heaviest punishment that can be inflicted on a Bantu is to sever him from his family and social surroundings; death has, when compared to this, small torture for him.

Each Bantu tribe holds its land in common; re-apportioning it as the increase or diminution of its numbers may require. The doctrine that land can become the private property of one is a doctrine morally repugnant to the Bantu. The idea which to-day is beginning to haunt Europe, that, as the one possible salve for our social wounds and diseases, it might be well if the land should become again the property of the nation at large, is no ideal to the Bantu, but a realistic actuality. He finds it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile his sense of justice with any other form of tenure. And it is only painfully and slowly (and perhaps never quite successfully!) that under the pressure of autocratic European rule he is brought to allow that absolute, individual property in land may be consistent with right. It may be remarked in passing that if it be desired to deal justly with the South African native, it is as necessary to grasp this mental attitude of his with regard to the possession of land as in dealing with the Boer it is necessary never to forget his theocratic conception of his claim on South Africa, and his passionate affection for it.[27]

[27] "I cannot understand you," said a thoughtful Bantu to
us once; "a man can have his own cow and his own knife, but
land is for all."

The laws and traditions of all Bantu races are very complex, and, though orally transmitted from age to age, they are scrupulously observed. "It is our custom," ends all argument with the Bantu. Their etiquette in ordinary social life, before they have come in contact with the lower phases of civilization, seems often based on a higher sense of honour than that which governs the ordinary relations of Europeans. When one Kaffir approaches two who are talking he frequently stands still at some distance from them, and then comes nearer. When asked why he does this he replies: "Lest they should not see me coming, and I should overhear what they say."

In the division of labour women have the almost entire charge of agriculture and manufacture. House-building, pottery-making, the shaping of clothes and implements are left to them--and especially among the Kaffir branches, all agriculture is entirely in their hands. The men fight and hunt and make their weapons, and the young lads tend the cattle, leaving all other labour to the females.

It was by these three orders of native people that South Africa was inhabited when the first white men settled here. And, as we have seen, it was especially with the little, lively, child-like yellow-faced Hottentots, inhabiting the Cape Peninsula, that the newcomers came in contact. The white men had apparently received orders from the East India Company to treat the natives well, in order that they might be induced to trade; and at first it would seem that good feeling existed between the friendly little Hottentots and the white newcomers. The Hottentots gladly sold their cattle to the Company for brandy, beads, or knives; and the Company made vast profits by the trade.

Later, when the white men began to enclose the ground of the Peninsula, and ordered off the Hottentots with their cattle, the Hottentots (who, in common with most African races, can easily understand the sharing of lands, but little, or not at all, their exclusive possession by individuals) resented this exclusion from the lands on which for countless ages their forefathers had fed their cattle and built their huts.

There was much bitter feeling, and finally there was war. The little Hottentots were exterminated or driven back; and the white men settled down peacefully on the beautiful Cape Peninsula, and in the fruitful valleys beyond.

Then it was that the white men began to look about for slaves to till their ground and build their houses, as was everywhere the manner of seventeenth-century colonists. But it was not among the native races of South Africa that they found what they were in search of.

It is a curious little fact, and one which it may be forgiven to the South African, if he, having so little else in the past history of his peoples to be proud of, gloats over for a moment, that of all the races which, within the range of historic record, have inhabited South Africa, not one of them has lent itself readily and completely to the uses of slavery! Be it the effect of our climate, with its curious tendency to excite and exhilarate the nervous system, be it the reflex action of our scenery with its vast untamed features, breeding in us an intense consciousness of individuality and a rebellion against all restrictions, or be it merely a coincidence, this remains certain: that Boer, Bantu, Bushman, Hottentot, or Englishman--not one of us has been of the stuff of which serviceable slaves are made! This characteristic is the one bond that unites our otherwise discordant nationalities. We do not easily bow our wills at the dictation of another, nor are we readily shaped into mere beasts of burden.

The little Bushman when we pressed him hard could creep away among his stones, and die; leaving nothing behind him but his little arrowheads beside the fountains and his bits of pictures on the rocks and stones, to show how he too was once on the path to become human. And our little Tottie could laugh and dodge and play at working, till he also has vanished, leaving only a few Half-caste descendants, soon to fade away after him. And our Bantu, still with us and increasing in numbers, sets his broad back persistently against compulsion to perform unremunerated labour, his strong social and tribal feeling making him hard to crush. In truth our early fellow countrymen were and are as little fitted to play the part of the dumb instruments of labour as the South African Boer or the South African Englishman of to-day.

That little door, which nature always leaves ajar that the meanest of her creatures who will may go out by it, and escape--where the voice of the oppressor is heard no more--that little door we all of us know how to enter if need be, rather than lay aside the "I will" that makes the man. If we know nothing else, at least we all of us know how to die.

It would have been as easy for the early Boers to catch and convert into beasts of draught the kudus and springbucks, who kick up our African dust into your face, and are off with the wind, as to turn into profitable beasts of burden our little, artistic Bushmen, or our dancing Hottentots; and our warlike Zulu Bantus from the East Coast would hardly have been more acceptable as domestic slaves than a leash of African lions. Then, as now, when submissive slaves are desired in South Africa, they have to be imported: we do not breed them.

The folk whom the early settlers procured as slaves, were mainly negroes from the east and west coast of Central Africa; a people who, combined with a great deal of muscular power, and a charming gift of devotion to others, exhibit a weakness of will, and an absence of individuality, which in all ages has fitted them to inflict the evils of slavery on the more dominant races. With these were Madagascan and other Eastern folk, with more individuality, who, we are told, gave their owners much trouble.

These captive people were brought in ships to South Africa, and on their arrival portioned out among the early settlers. It was by the hands of these folks that the walls of the old Dutch houses, whose thickness we still so much admire, were raised, and it was they who planted the long lines of oak avenue and vineyard which still stretch mile after mile across our land.

It is sometimes thrown into the teeth of the Boer, as an accusation which sets him on a completely lower platform than that on which his English fellow-citizen stands, that his fathers were slave-owners. That this should be so is, indeed, remarkable; not only when we reflect that most of those ships which brought the first slaves to South Africa were the property of Englishmen and manned and officered by English seamen; but when we further reflect that, if the houses and avenues of the Cape Peninsula are often the work of slaves, the yet fairer homes and the easeful leisure of certain cultured English men and women at the present day are the result of their fathers' traffic in black flesh. And it is yet more remarkable that the fact of a slave-owning ancestry should ever be thrown in the face of the Boer when we reflect that it is not forty years since the leading branch of the Anglo-Saxon people found no other means of removing the institution from among themselves than by rending their national life well-nigh to fragments.

Slavery is, in truth, a condition so common in the very early stages of social growth, and when it occurs in those stages is generally so comparatively innoxious that it may almost be regarded as a natural if not quite healthy concomitant of early social development. When the primitive master and his slave live in like huts, share like food, and are engaged in like occupations, slavery is slavery in nothing but name. It is exactly in proportion as a society has attained to a high intellectual and material development that the institution exhibits its most malignant features; causing an arrest of both moral and material progress in any highly cultured and civilized society in the midst of which it is found.

Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it abnormally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.

It certainly cannot be said of the African Boer that he continued to maintain this institution when he had reached a higher stage of development than that at which other European nations have forsaken it. Though in point of time he maintained it later than some, yet it cannot be asserted by any one who has considered the matter that it was more at variance with his intellectual and emotional standpoint, and therefore more immoral, that the African Boer should have kept slaves in South Africa seventy years ago than that the Greek of the time of Pericles, or the Roman of Cicero's day, should have done so. And it certainly was far less at discord with his intellectual and moral condition than with that of the highly-cultured and enlightened Anglo-Saxons who in America and Jamaica have continued to support and fight for the institution within the memory of this generation. In truth, we must allow that the full-fledged institution was less at discord with the moral and intellectual condition of the Boer than are to-day at variance with our own those lineal descendants of slavery, the disabilities attaching to sex or class, which in our most civilized societies still exist.

It is then not surprising, though much to be regretted, that two hundred years ago the Boer sought to become, and did become, a slave-holder.

If it be asked, "Was slavery, as carried out at the Cape, of a more or less vindictive nature than as carried on among other civilized nations?" the reply can only be that slavery among civilized folk is a disease so monotonous in its symptoms that whether we study its story as inlaid on the mud tablets of ruined Chaldean cities, or as described in Greek or Roman literature, or view its image in such stone picture as that which Sennacherib, King of Assyria, caused to be made (and which to-day hangs on the walls of the British Museum for him who wills to see); or whether, on the other hand, we examine it as described in the nineteenth-century novel, or sit in the evening beside the old Boer grandmother, as, with her feet on her stove, she describes the remembrance of her far-off youth--the story is one, and its details monotonously unvarying.

Old white men and women are still living in South Africa who can remember how, in their early days, they saw men with guns out in the beautiful woods at Newlands hunting runaway slaves. They can tell you what a mistress once did when a slave became pregnant by her master; and there are stories about hot ovens--such stories as the story of Dirk, whose master seduced his wife, and Dirk bitterly resented it. "And one day," says the narrator, "we children saw Dirk taken across the yard to the wine house; we heard he was to be flogged. For some days after we fancied we heard noises in the cellar. One night, in the moonlight, we heard something, and got up and looked out; and we saw something slipped across the yard by three men. We children dared say nothing, because my grandfather never let anyone remark about the slaves; but we were sure it was Dirk's body." There is nothing new in these stories; they are as old as the times of the Romans and Chaldeans, and older than the ruin of Nineveh which they preceded. They would be echoed by the walls of half the out-buildings still standing in Jamaica and Cuba, had they the power of speech. To pretend we have never heard them before is hypocrisy; to be surprised at them is folly; to imply that they are peculiar to South Africa and the outcome of the abnormal structure of the Boer soul is a lie.

Old black men and women are still living in South Africa who remember how, as little children, they were playing on a beach in a hot land, where there were tall, straight trees that do not grow in South Africa, and how white men came and took them away. They remember the names of some of their playmates; and the "yellow food" that they used to eat, they say it does not grow here. If you look at their backs, from their necks to below their thighs they have white stripes which have been there for sixty or seventy years, and with which they will go to their graves. Neither in this is there anything peculiarly South African.

No more were these people always submissive. Sometimes the human in them woke. Especially the Madagascar slaves got tired, and tried to run away. "They are a most evil-disposed people," says an old German writer, "and have always only one thought, and that is, _to escape_." "They fear nothing so that they may be free of their masters."

These people looked up at Table Mountain, and at our blue African sky, and our veld with its sage-green bushes, all the world that for the rest of us has meant freedom, and which for them meant despair, and their one idea was to flee. They did not know the land across the mountains, but singly or in parties they were always running away. They were caught and brought back, and flogged or broken on the wheel, says the old Chronicle; they hardly ever escaped.

There are times to-day, riding across the plains in the direction of Hottentots Holland, when the vision of these creatures creeping across the veld in search of freedom comes suddenly to one; and a curious feeling rises. We are not in that band that rides booted and spurred across the plain, looking out to right and left and talking loud. We are in the little group cowering behind the milk bushes; we are looking out with furtive, bloodshot eyes, to see how the masters ride! We--we--are there;--we are no more conscious of our identity with the dominant race. Over a million years of diverse evolution white man clasps dark again--and we are one, as we cower behind the bushes; the black and the white.

But slavery in South Africa, as elsewhere, did not always show its misshapen and deformed side; there were cases in which as men grew up they learnt to feel gently to the hands that had tended them in early infancy, and showed kindness; and kindness begat gratitude, and gratitude begat love--and the circle of human beatitude was complete. In certain rare instances the words master and slave came to mean not user and used, but giver and lover, and human nature was justified in the lowest of her kinships.

If it were, however, made absolutely compulsory on us to pass a relative judgment on slavery as it existed at the Cape or elsewhere among civilized nations, we should say that probably it was less touched by humanizing and elevating conditions than was the case occasionally where, as among the Greeks and Romans, it existed among men of the same colour, and often of the same race and intellectual standing; but that the Boer, being, though not more gentle when roused, yet naturally of a somewhat more pacific nature than the Spaniard or Englishman, it is highly probable that slavery at the Cape was of a much _less_, than more, ferocious nature than elsewhere, where an Aryan people has enslaved a dark one.

If a more minute and exact history of what slavery really was in South Africa be required, it will perhaps be found best recorded by each of us in our hearts. If in those lowest moments which come, if rarely, to each human soul, when the primitive man wakes, and hatred and passion, aided by self-interest, fight for the mastery within us; if at these moments the most developed among us will turn our gaze inwards, and imagine that the object of our hatred or desire lies in our hand, unshielded from us by any fear of reprisals, unguarded from us by that mighty wall, which long ages of contact with our brethren has built up in the human heart round the rights of our equals--if we imagine that the wall reared by conscience does not in this case exist, hedging our fellows from us, that early training has convinced us that he lives for _us_, and that the primal law of his moral being in submission to _our_ will--we shall then have a clearer picture of what slavery really was in South Africa and elsewhere than any pen can paint. We shall understand, as none can make us, why it is that humanity, as she creeps on her upward path, is slowly but surely withdrawing herself from all remnants of those institutions which are based on the conviction that it may be well for one man to dominate another for his own ends.

The causes and evils of slavery are not to be studied in South Africa or America, but among the shadows within our own hearts. And this much-talked-of slavery in South Africa was but what you and I, and the man over the way would have made it had we lived in South Africa two hundred years ago.

Slavery in its legal form was extinguished at the Cape about the year 1834. The English Government, who had at that time taken over the Colony, purchased and liberated all the slaves at the cost of £1,247,000. Official slavery passed away; but it left, as always, its indelible marks on the dominant race who had suffered from it. We shall deal later with its intellectual and emotional reaction on South Africa. We have now only time to consider one of its large legacies.

Slavery bequeathed to the Boer, and to South Africa mainly through him, its large Half-caste population: a population which constitutes at once the most painful, the most complex, and--if any social problem were insoluble in the presence of human energy and sympathy, we might add--the most insoluble portion of our South African national problem.

The bulk of that Half-caste population which to-day fills our Western towns and throngs upon our Western farms, and which is found scattered over the whole of South Africa, arose originally and mainly as the result of sexual intercourse between the Boer and his imported slaves; and also with such aboriginal Hottentots or Bushmen, as he obtained possession of.[28]

[28] There are a few Half-castes now in South Africa who
are results of the union of Englishmen with the Boer
Half-castes who are the result of slavery; and even a few
who are the result of the union of Englishmen, principally
soldiers, with the aboriginal natives. But the mass of
Half-castes were in existence seventy years ago when
the English first began to people the country. It need
hardly be said that the preponderance of Half-castes who
owe their origin to the Boer in no way indicates any
superiority in the matter of sexual self-respect on the
part of the English. There exists at the present day in
our seaport towns, under the ægis of the English flag,
and legislated for by the English Government, a traffic
between English soldiers and sailors and the lowest class
of Half-caste women, more anti-social, and, if it be
possible, more degrading than any relation between the
ancient slave-holders and their female slaves. Yet, as the
women concerned in this traffic belong very largely to
that unhappy class, not one in fifty of whom is fruitful,
and whose children, when such are born, generally die in
infancy, there is no very great effect produced on the
population of the country; the thousands of Half-castes
born every year being mainly the result of unions between
Half-castes. It should be well borne in mind, in dealing
with this subject, that so rapid is the rate of human
increase under even tolerably favourable conditions, that
four Half-castes born two hundred years ago, might easily
be the progenitors of at least two hundred Half-castes at
the present day, without any further admixture of European
blood.

In the early records of the Colony we find that out of every four children born to slave-mothers three were at one time the children of white men and masters. Only nineteen years ago there died in the Colony an old white man who left behind him forty Half-caste descendants--grandchildren and others--and whose standard saying in his early days is reported to have been: "When I want a smart slave, then I beget him!"

It may be remarked that no particular turpitude can be attributed to the action of the Boer in this matter. English, Dutch-Huguenot, or Spaniard, our Indo-European pride of race and our vaunted self-respect have always failed to save our breed where Aryan males have become absolutely possessed of even the most loathsome or degraded females of non-Aryan peoples. That our pride should have the strength to save our blood is the dream of the future, not a realization of the past.

As long as slavery continued at the Cape this mixture of Boer and black men went on.

Into the absorbingly interesting question of Half-castism as looked at from the scientific standpoint, it is not possible for us now fully to enter. This one thing is certain, that to the question, "What are the exact physiological, intellectual, and moral results which arise from the admixture of Aryan with Negroid or other non-Aryan races?" science has as yet no really definite answer to give. The whole question--one of the most vital and wide-reaching of those which lie before the human intellect for solution in the ages to come--is yet one the very hem of whose skirt science has not begun to raise.

To obtain any really exact knowledge on the subject it would be necessary to carry on extensive experiments: to obtain large numbers of individuals of pure Aryan blood, of non-Aryan blood, and of mixed blood, and placing them in exactly identical conditions (not merely materially, but morally and emotionally), to exclude from them the knowledge of any tradition or history which might modify their development. If this were done it would then be possible, if the numbers were large enough to exclude individual variations, to determine exactly in how far the mixed creature was better, worse, different from, or like to either parent species. As, however, the human race is not likely to undertake such experiment during the next millennium, and as we have at present no such exact knowledge of the conditions which govern the laws of inheritance as would enable us to deduce the nature of offspring from the study of the two parent forms (our knowledge even with regard to animals being purely empirical on this point), we are obliged to fall back on cruder and less scientific methods.

We are compelled, in the first place, to study the vulgar verdict, which rough, ungeneralized human experience has recorded, and to see in how far any other evidence we can obtain sustains or opposes it. The universality and unanimity of the popular verdict on the Half-caste is remarkable. The Half-caste, it is asserted in every country where he is known, whether it be in America, Asia, or Africa, and whether his ancestors be English and Negroid, Spanish and Indian, or Boer and Hottentot--the Half-caste is by nature anti-social. It is always asserted that he possesses the vices of both parent races and the virtues of neither; that he is born especially with a tendency to be a liar, cowardly, licentious, and without self-respect. "You may catch a jackal among the bushes, but not a Half-caste when he doubles," says the Indian. "God made the white man, perhaps he made the black; but the devil made the Half-caste," says the South American. "The devil sits behind the ears of a Half-and-half," says the Boer proverb. "Who the white man is we know; and who we are we know," says the black Bantu to his Half-caste fellow-servant; "but what are you? Half-monkey whom no one can believe!" "The Half-caste as he creeps out of his mother's womb is a born liar," says the Colonial Englishman; "he is never a man."

This unanimity of verdict demands our attention. Like the old faith that the earth was stationary and the sun moved round her, it would not be universally received were there not some specious appearances in its favour, though it need contain no necessary truth. Mankind is easily duped, but not without an adequate show of reason. In South Africa the truth of the assertion of the inherent depravity of Half-castes seems on the surface borne out to the full by facts. Three-fourths of the prostitutes who fill our brothels and lock-hospitals are "coloured," or Half-caste; only the remaining fourth are of pure breed.[29] In the smaller criminal cases tried in our Magistrates' Courts, the "coloured-man" figures out of all proportion to the pure-blooded Europeans, Bantus, or Malays. If you pass a gang of convicts clanking in their chains, you will find the number of tawny faces exceeds those pure white or black in a manner not warranted by their proportional numbers in the community.

[29] Except in Johannesburg.

On the whole, there can be no doubt as to the superficial appearance of strong anti-sociality on his part; the only debate which can arise in the mind being, as to whether this anti-sociality is inherent and the direct result of the mixture of bloods, or is an accident, dependent on external and changeable conditions.

In early childhood we remember to have heard a sapient old lady remark that she had always noticed that orphan and adopted children, as born, were differently constituted from all others; you might take them from their birth and bring them up with your own: they never turn out the same! It has since often occurred to us that the fallacy underlying that old lady's induction, and patent even to a childish intelligence, might, in a more complex form, underlie the dictum with regard to the Half-caste. As the old lady overlooked the fact that, while _materially_ the position of the adopted child might resemble that of her own, _emotionally_, and therefore eventually _morally_, its training was wholly unlike. That a child brought up in a home which it feels its own by right, and surrounded from infancy by the yearning affection born of parental instinct, has a moral training differing by at least three-fourths from that of a child who grows up always doubtful of its own standing, and looking out with fierce and bitter eyes into a world which has no welcome for it: so it has always appeared to us that a Half-caste, even in a state in which he is politically on the same footing as his fellow-citizens, must find a something in his emotional relations with the world about him which would account for his assuming a lower social attitude, without any necessity of appealing to a theory of inborn depravity.

The social position of the South African Half-caste has been peculiar. He has originated in almost all cases, not from the union of average individuals of the two races uniting under average conditions, but as the result of a sexual union between the most helpless and enslaved females of the dark race and the most recklessly dominant males of the white. He has risen from a union not only devoid of the intellectual sympathy and kinship between man and woman which translates the relation of sex from the sphere of the crudely physical to that of the æsthetic and intellectual; but even that lower utilitarian element was wanting to this union which exists wherever men and women of the same race, and moderately respecting each other, unite permanently for the purpose of producing offspring and sharing the material burdens of life. The Half-caste came into the world as the result of the most undifferentiated sex instinct. He saw the first light usually in the back room of the slaves' compound, or in the hut across the yard, and entered a world in which there was no place prepared for him. To his father he was the broken wineglass left from last night's feast or as the remembrance of last year's sin--a thing one would rather forget--or, at best, he was a useful tool. To his master's wife, if there were one, he was an object of loathing (of that curious loathing, known perhaps only to the Aryan woman, who sees the blood that flows in her children's veins, flow also beneath the dark skin of an alien race; unless, indeed, it be shared by the dark man, when he sees on his wife's arm a child that is not of his colour); his mother had often a black husband or lover of her own; and the Half-caste crept about the backyard of its father's house, and in and out of the slave cells, and as it grew, it learnt that it belonged neither wholly to the black group who ate their food in the kitchen doorway, nor to the white, in the great dining-hall. When full consciousness came to him, half he despised the black flesh about him, with the instinct of a white man's son; and half, he hated, with the passion of the black woman's child, the folk in the large house.

He belonged to neither--the very breast he had sucked was not of the same colour as himself. But it was not even the fact that he was born into a society in which there was no appointed station for him, and no class with which he was wholly at one, that constituted the forefront of his wrong and suffering.

The true key to the Half-caste's position lay in the past, as it still lies to-day, in the fact, that he is _not at harmony within himself_. He alone of all living creatures despises his own blood. "I could bite my own arm," a coloured girl once said in our presence, "when I see how black it is. My father was a white man!" The Half-caste alone of all created things is at war within his own individuality. The white man loves the white man incarnate in him, and the black man loves the black. We are each of us our own ideal. The black may envy the white his power or his knowledge, but he admires himself most. "You say the devil is black! But I picture him a white man with blue eyes and yellow hair," said to us a Bantu once. "I have a great sorrow," said an intelligent native preacher. "I know that the Lord Jesus Christ was a white man, yet I could not pray to Him and love Him as I do if I did not picture Him as black and with wool like myself."

Of that divine contentment with his own inalienable personality which lies at the root of all the heroic and half the social virtues, the Half-caste can know little. If it were possible for him with red-hot pincers to draw out every ounce of flesh that was black man's, and leave only the white, in most cases he would do it. That race which would accept him he despises; and the race he aspires to refuses him.

So the first Half-caste arose: a creature without a family, without a nationality, without a stable kind, with which it might feel itself allied, and whose ideals it might accept.

As time has passed in South Africa the slave has been set free, the Half-caste has multiplied, and now forms a more or less distinct section of society, and so, to a certain extent, his position has improved on that of his first progenitor. He may now marry legally with one of his own more or less uncertain type; he may have his home; and his children are his own. Nevertheless, socially his position remains much what it was. Without nationality, traditions, or racial ideals, his position is even to-day not analogous in South Africa with that of any folk of pure-bred race. For even the Bantu, till we have utterly broken him under the wheels of our civilization, grows up with a solid social matrix about him, which inevitably results in a social training from which the Half-caste is excluded. Even when severed from that tribal organization with which all his most heroic virtues are connected, and subjected under the feet of a dominant race which does not understand him, and which he does not understand, the position of the ordinary Colonial Bantu is not identical with that of the Half-caste. We may not ourselves much more value him, and his chances of cultivating social affections and virtues may seem small as regards ourselves. But let the despised Kaffir leave you and go home; once in his hut, surrounded by his wives, his children, and his friends, he sits there a man among men. He is in a society which has its own stern traditional social standards and ideals, by living up to which he may still become an object of admiration and respect to his fellows, and, above all, to himself. His ideals and traditions may not be ours, but they form no less the basis of an invaluable discipline in social feeling. His tribe may be broken up, but he still feels himself an integral part of a great people, up to whose standard he is bound to live, and in whose eyes, as in his own, he is one of the goodliest and completest creatures on God's earth. Until we have robbed him entirely of this sense of racial unity and of racial self-respect he is not morally on the same footing as the Half-caste.

If I go into my kitchen in the early morning on my farm, and find the Kaffir herd lighting his pipe at the kitchen fire while he waits for his rations--if anxious to find out his tribe I ask him whether he belongs to this or that tribe, naming the wrong one, he starts to his feet, his eyes flashing and his shoulders drawn back, "I am Tambook oprecht!" he replies proudly. ("I am a pure-blooded Tambookie.") An ancient Greek or a modern Englishman, when proclaiming his unity with his nation, could not thrill with greater emotion than this menial of my kitchen. And I know that that fountain of social virtue, which on occasions may well out into a Marathon or a Thermopylæ, is strong in him; that beyond the narrow interests of the personal life for him, as much as for me, there exists a great human entity to which he is bound by the bonds of honour and love.

The Englishman will swear to you on the word of an Englishman, and the Bantu on the word of the Bantu, but no Half-caste ever yet swore on the honour of a Half-caste. The world would break into cackling laughter did he do so: "The _honour_ of a _Half-caste_!"