South Africa: Briton Versus Boer
I
SOUTH AFRICA has been called a ‘Two Miles an Hour Country.’ Its early history was made on springless wagons, behind countless spans of oxen, trekking, generation after generation, into the veldt.
Two miles an hour is excessive speed for an ox wagon. I discovered that during a week’s visit with an American friend in an out-of-the-way corner of Africa. My host had an automobile. But roads were only in the making, and his garage was four hours and a half of hard travel from his house— four hours and a half, that is, by ox wagon; nine miles as a geographer would reckon it.
We did the distance behind two spans of oxen through a fog of red dust. Our teams required a driver for each ox, and a pilot in addition, who broke trail for us and pulled, rather uselessly, on a thin leather strap tied to the horns of the lead oxen. The road was a succession of ruts and stumps and forest shrubbery. A canopy, built for a sunshade, was brought crashing down on us by the limb of a tree before we had gone a quarter of a mile. We bounced and jolted over the landscape like an army tank. But always at two miles an hour.
There is progress in South Africa.
But gold and diamonds, labor unions and chambers of commerce, mark only the pace of the cities. Beyond electricity and paved streets, the ox wagon is still supreme. Progress there is ponderous, clumsy, rough, and never more rapid than the dust-clouded caravans of its settlers. However its influence may be waning before the rise of modern industrial centres, much of the foundation of modern South Africa has been laid in this back-veldt country of the ox wagon.
In the back veldt it is the Boer who rules. The society, which is of his making, is patriarchal, and like a patriarch he dominates it. His religion is more of the law than the prophets. The justice which he metes out is harsh, but Scriptural. And when he can no longer rule his strip of ‘blue’ the Boer inspans his oxen again and treks through the sand and the heat to some farther hinterland. That, at any rate, is the past in South Africa. If the present has invaded his realm with trains and tractors, the Boer scorns the tractors, rides on the trains, and still moves, in spirit, with the oxcarts.
To-day’s history in South Africa is being made out of a conflict between town and country; between the pace of the back veldt and the pace of the cities. And that struggle, when the lines are drawn, finds the back-veldt Boer in contest with the Briton for the domination of the Union: the Briton hustling for trade; the Boer never hustling, with no mind for trade, desiring to be left alone, with elbowroom.
There have been those in South Africa who dreamed of union between the two. Cecil Rhodes dreamed and blundered. General Botha dreamed and sacrificed. Jan Christian Smuts, in his tangled old house at Doornkloof, still dreams, and he too has sacrificed. And the stuff for these dreams was real enough. English troops were hardly welcomed by the Dutch when they landed in Table Bay in 1806 and possessed the land. But once British authority was established in South Africa the ultimate fusion of the two peoples, as Dutch and English were fused in New York, was confidently expected. The race history of both was rooted in the same Low-German stock. Both loved freedom and fought for it with spirit. Both professed Protestantism, and the language differences were so insignificant that an Englishman soon acquired Dutch and a Dutchman quickly learned English. Moreover England, benefiting perhaps by disastrous blunders in the New World, retained the Roman-Dutch law already in force, established the Dutch language as official, altered few of the established institutions, and initiated an administration that was genuinely beneficent.
But fusion did not result. The character of the South African Dutchman contained elements which could not amalgamate. He was a farmer, — the word ‘Boer’ means ‘farmer,’ — as different from the Hollanders who came with Van Riebeck in 1652 as South Africa is vaster than the Holland from which they came. Hospitality was his greatest virtue, but distances were so great between farms that neighbors, in the ordinary sense, did not exist. Town life, where intercourse with the British would have been possible, was utterly unknown to him and shunned for the lonely freedom of the bush. He loved liberty, but understood it only in terms of solitude. When the British came they neither understood him nor left him alone.
After the first decade of British administration, official wisdom seems to have run its course and a new policy was inaugurated in the Cape. There were readjustments in the local selfgovernment and a subsequent reduction of the rights of the citizens. English was substituted for Dutch as the official language. Worst of all, from the point of view of the Dutch settler, the British Government suddenly appeared as the aggressive sponsor of the native, and, in 1834, abolished slavery in the Colony.
The Boers resented bitterly every infringement of their traditions. Many of them, in fact, shrugged their shoulders at the British overlord and moved out beyond the reach of his authority. But the abolition of slavery and the confusion that resulted were intolerable. There had been other treks. Now came the Great Trek. Rumors of good grazing lands had come down from the unexplored north, and into this region the exodus began. By day, long winding lines of wagons with a cloud of dust billowing over them; by night, clusters of camp fires in the bush, suppers of maize and biltong, evening prayers.
More than a little of the bitterness of the back-veldt Boer of the present toward the Englishman dates from the Great Trek, from the sacrifices and the suffering that it involved, the bitter heat of the karoo, the sickness that ran among women and children, the ceaseless skirmishing with Bushmen, the war with Mosilikatze and his Matabele. And more than a little of the uncompromising nationalism that dominates the present Boer Government of the Union finds its source in the traditions of that epic time when Dutch pioneers conquered the vast territory that lay between the Orange and the Limpopo rivers and set up a government there of their own fashioning.
But still the British interfered. They sought by devious methods to reclaim the territories of these vortrekkers for the Empire. But in 1880 the last vestiges of Britain’s authority were destroyed at the battle of Majuba Hill, and the Transvaal Republic was proclaimed. There were six years of comparative security, and then, in 1886, a gold reef was discovered on the Witwatersrand; prospectors poured in to profane the veldt, and hostility to the British found new support. A decade later came the Jameson Raid, when Rhodes, irked by the limits which Paul Kruger — Oom Paul, President of the Transvaal Republic— placed upon Britain’s African dominions, permitted a freebooting expedition against the authority of the Boers. And, the Raid failing, the Boer War followed, and final annexation by Great Britain of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Thus, again, British ambition thwarted the dreams of the vortrekkers.
For that last chapter the Dutch of South Africa, despite such notable converts to English rule as Smuts and Botha, will not soon forgive Great Britain. Life in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State — before the British came — was paced to suit the Boers, as it had been in the Cape — before the British came. Oom Paul, four times President, governed from his front porch and welcomed there any who came that way, rich and poor, wise and foolish; and served them coffee after the custom of the veldt. Authority came from the bush and was administered on behalf of the back veldt. Settlers, who had come by ox wagon and for certain definite reasons, founded the country. And Paul Kruger, himself a vortrekker, governed along lines that those pioneers approved and at a pace that they could understand.
There were towns in the Transvaal before Johannesburg, but they were small and unimportant. Town dwellers, who finally made up a clear majority of the population, received little consideration from the Government and had an even smaller share in the governing. The back-veldt Boer then, as now, looked upon the towns with dislike and the transactions that centred there with genuine suspicion. That, doubtless, accounts for the fact that in South Africa to-day — even in Johannesburg — Dutch business interests are very limited: Dutch names seldom appear in the management of big industries or in the lists of bank directorates. British money and British management dominate the commerce of the Union. And the dislike of the Boer for the town and for the British is increased by this obvious relationship between the two.
II
The realm of the typical Boer is still the back veldt. And though the British destroyed the nation that he fashioned, and gave him an equality of privilege which he had always denied to the English who settled in his land, they did not restore the authority of the frontier. Far from it. The pace of South Africa to-day is not that of the Boer. It is a British pace and much faster than two miles an hour. The British, moreover, still stand sponsor for the native against the traditional Dutch policy of repression. British ideals are built into the government, and the government itself is built into the British Empire. Thus the back-veldt Boer, although he signed the Act of Union, is not content. He is no more content, in fact, than he was a century ago when the exodus from the Cape began. Oom Paul Kruger is still his patron saint. The Transvaal, in the early days of the Republic, is his ideal dominion. And since a Great Trek is no longer possible the Boer, obstinate, unchanging, set upon a freedom of his own making, has turned again against British domination, this time with the weapons of politics.
The formation of the Nationalist Party, which is the Boer party, was inevitable, made so by the traditions and the bitterness of the last one hundred years. General Botha, the first Premier of the Union, made an heroic attempt at political fusion in the South African Party. General Smuts has held steadfastly to the same purpose, though under greater difficulties. But a vast majority of the Boers who could not fuse racially were not fitted for political fusion. At their rural gatherings they preached an anti-British gospel and waited a leader. And in 1912 General Hertzog — who had helped to draft the Act of Union four years before, but remained more Boer than British — was exiled from the South African Party largely because of his antiimperialism; went, temporarily, into political exile, and returned with an ill-organized following which he called the Nationalist Party, and which today is governing the Union.
It is a common saying among South Africans that the Dutchman takes naturally to politics and that all Dutchmen are politicians. There is much basis for that statement. The backveldt Boer never fails to vote and he will ride many miles to a political meeting. But in 1912, when General Hertzog withdrew from the Government, the Dutch had not as yet learned to think or act together politically. They resented the extent to which British-Dutch amity was officially proclaimed and they knew just how far such proclamations missed the truth. Their opposition to the newly established order, however, was sporadic. But in General Hertzog the Boers found a leader, a man as clearly ordained as Oom Paul Kruger had been. It now remained for them to unite and to follow union with the establishment of their gospel as the dominant force in the political life of South Africa.
One factor, beside the political, entered into the situation to make this undertaking less difficult. The Nationalists found ready support among the representatives of organized religion. In the back veldt, in fact, where the control of the Dutch Reformed Church is undisputed, it is the jprcdikant, rather than the officeholder, who is the political dictator. His support is the first requisite to rural political success, for the electoral instructions of the preacher to the people of the parish are inviolable. In this community of the rural Church, hostility to the British was already exceedingly bitter. The Church had begun to lose its hold upon its youth, many of whom no longer accepted its doctrines or observed its commandments. The Continental Sabbath and Continental morals, in general, were said to have invaded the country, and the young people were being drawn away from the faith of their fathers into all manner of worldliness. For this the British, because they were believed to represent the spirit of modern Europe, were held accountable. The Nationalist Party, therefore, was welcomed as an agent whereby British influence might be uprooted and the power of the Church restored.
III
General Hertzog, from a political point of view, recognized his opportunity and did not blunder. Conciliation and understanding, as party principles, already had sponsors, more gifted than successful. General Hertzog knew there was only one basis upon which a Dutch party could possibly succeed. He accepted that basis and came preaching the old doctrines of back-veldt nationalism to the Boers. His lieutenants, much more than he, did not hesitate to capitalize every echo of anti-British sentiment and to stir up, for their own support, every ancient bitterness. That the Boers were able, in twelve years, to succeed to the government of the Union, even at the expense of an alliance with Labor in a Pact Ministry, is indicative of the extent to which British authority still irks the Dutch population. Hertzog’s tactics were successful, eminently so. But once employed, and the dreams of Rhodes and Botha and Smuts — statesmen’s dreams — went glimmering.
And now, after two years of Dutch control, British South Africa has become aware of that fact and is alarmed. Even the British, in 1924, received the Nationalist Party government with a measure of cordiality. Since its formation the Union had been governed by South African Party ministries and by none other. Politics, as a result, grew tedious. A change of authority was welcome. But so great a change was not expected, either by the British or by many of the more moderate Boers.
For, once in office, the Nationalists set themselves, with zeal, to two closely allied tasks. In the first place, they introduced a policy—‘Dutchifying’ is the popular word for it — aimed to break the British mould in which the Union had been formed; to reshape life in South Africa in Dutch design and refound an Independent South African Republic. Further, they maintained throughout the country an unremittent campaign of radical nationalism of the same bitter sort which first mobilized the support of the back veldt and alone gave promise of an increase of strength sufficient to keep them in power.
In this second undertaking the Nationalists have flooded South Africa with an unparalleled deluge of speeches. I know of no country in the world where, with no general elections in sight, there is so much and such bitter political speechmaking. Clause four of the Nationalist Party Constitution calls for the ‘sovereign’ freedom of South Africa, and that clause the party spokesmen have taken for their text. It is given variations, many of them not altogether dignified, but the meaning is unvaried. The back-veldt Boer, as a result, is more than ever a Nationalist, convinced beyond dispute that the Nationalist Party provides the agency whereby British influence will be checked and South Africa, dissociated from the Empire, transformed into a republic — a neighborly, slow-moving republic like that of Oom Paul Kruger.
The first task, too, was carried forward with expedition. It is, in fact, the legislative programme of the Nationalist Government much more than the speeches of its ministers that has alarmed British and Anglo-Dutch South Africa. A multitude of radical measures — they hark back to the policies of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State—have been introduced into Parliament and many of them passed. To the Briton these measures appear significant chiefly because they represent, to him, definite steps toward secession from the Empire.
Great Britain’s liberal policy toward the natives, which had been adopted by previous Union governments, but was always resented by the more ignorant Boers, was speedily repudiated. The Nationalists, with Labor aid, passed the Color Bar Bill, which definitely bars the native from entering the ranks of skilled labor regardless of his ability, experience, or training. They turned upon the Indians, with whom General Smuts had worked out an amicable agreement, and proposed the Urban Areas Act, which will bring about the complete economic and social segregation of the 160,000 Asiatics in the Union.
It has been decreed, moreover, that the Dutch language shall be learned by all civil servants regardless of their position, length of service, or the degree of probability that the language will ever be used. Officials who are unwilling or unable to learn Afrikaans are dismissed. Natal, the stronghold of British sentiment in the Union, has been flooded with Dutch officials. During the two years of the present government the increase in the voting Dutch population of that province has been more than 100 per cent.
The three-per-cent preferential tariff which has existed between South Africa and Great Britain has been abolished. And most extreme of all measures, from the point of view of the Englishman, the Nationalists have proposed — action is now pending—to substitute a new emblem for the Union Jack as the official South African flag.
The probability that this measure will become a law at the next session of the Union Parliament has stirred the country as no other development since the Union, with the possible exception of the rebellion in 1914 when a large uprising of Boers offered organized resistance to the pledge of aid which General Botha and General Smuts had given to Great Britain. The Flag Bill, in fact, is widely regarded as a political step toward the same end for which the rebellion of 1914 was organized: the severance of Empire connections and the establishment of a republic.
General Hertzog, since his is a minority government maintained with the support of Labor, has pledged that there will be no move for complete independence until a majority of the people, at the polls, declare that they desire it. But General Hertzog has not denied his allegiance to the Nationalist constitution, which demands independence; nor have his acts in office been such as to reassure the Englishman and the Anglo-Dutchman who prize the dominion status. The leadership of the Nationalist Party, moreover, is not altogether in the hands of General Hertzog. Those who with him dominate the party include the most radical of anti-British politicians, among them being several who were convicted of high treason in 1914 and were subsequently pardoned. These lieutenants have been much less cautious than their nominal chief. They have accepted the dictum of Tielman Roos, the present Minister of Justice, and have preached throughout the land, ‘South Africa first and alone.’ And Mr. Roos, who is the high priest of anti-British Republicanism, was recently hailed, in typical Nationalist language, with the toast: ‘The Republic is not dead. It will come in God’s good time. Mr. Roos is its pioneer; he will be its first president.’
IV
To this doctrine of Republicanism, however, the British in South Africa will never submit. Thus it happens that every new step, however mincing, toward that end increases British hostility toward the present régime, and in particular to the back-veldt interests for which that régime is mouthpiece. And in progressive communities, like Natal, where the British greatly predominate, it is a settled conviction that any overt move toward secession from the Empire will be met with a counter move of secession from the Union.
With the British in this stand are the natives, those of them who are aware at all of political developments. The natives are under no delusions about the Dutch, particularly since the threat of a color bar has become a reality. British treatment, however harsh it has been at times, has always returned, soon or late, to the traditional principles of British justice and fair play. The Dutch tradition, since the Hottentots were first enslaved, has stood for treatment of a very different sort. Similarly the Indians uniformly support the British point of view. The status of the Asiatic, though bad enough as it is, would be worse if the Union were without the restraints of Imperial obligations. It is the custom, in fact, for Indians, failing to make progress in Africa with their cause, to appeal directly to India, where, through the mediation of Downing Street, the Empire influence is brought to bear in the Union. I have seen no more outspoken opposition to the Nationalist régime than that contained in the Indian paper published in Natal by the son of Mahatma Gandhi.
But natives and Indians have practically no political standing in South Africa, and since the present is a political struggle it will be determined finally by the European population. The size of the Dutch and English communities of the Union is about the same, with the Dutch in a slight advantage. For that reason, if the Nationalists could align the entire Dutch population with themselves, the issue might soon be settled. South Africa could break from the Empire, and after British opposition had wrought what havoc it could an Independent Republic might eventually be built out of the fragments of the Union.
But the Nationalist Party, as I have pointed out, is a back-veldt party, prospering chiefly upon the ignorance and suspicion of the bush farmer who lives where schools are few and contacts limited. Its strategy, up to now, has been to pit country against town — the nonprogressive independence of the vortrekker against the modern drive of the city dweller who has invaded the vortrekker’s realm. How successful this strategy has been I have also indicated.
But by this very programme the Nationalist has alienated, as definitely as he alienated the British, those Boers who have learned, in spirit at any rate, to travel with the cities. Botha and Smuts were not alone when they stepped from the slow-moving line of their ancestors — a line which they had fought to defend — and went forward at a more rapid pace with the British. The men who went with them, a goodly number, reverenced the traditions of the Boers. But, union once accomplished, they turned their backs upon the prejudices which the back-veldt nurtured, learned the practice of coöperation, and merged their earlier fealty in loyalty to the South African Nation — which was a greater thing. There were few small men in that group.
And though they by no means constitute a majority of their race in the Union, these Anglo-Dutchmen are a real, perhaps a vital factor in the present situation. This is due to the fact that in this class are to be found a great many of the cultural leaders of the Dutch population. Even the Dutch Reformed Church, which is trembling on the verge of a Modernist Movement, has been obliged, increasingly, to recruit its academic leadership from those who stand, in sympathy at any rate, with the more progressive interests of the Anglo-Dutchmen. Into the ranks of this group a great many of the younger, college-trained Boers are being constantly drawn, until it seems likely that it is the Anglo-Dutchman who may finally be called upon to resolve the issue which has arisen in the political life of South Africa.
The British position, so far as the present situation is concerned, is relatively fixed. Even now the Labor Party, which is predominantly British, is wavering in its support of the Pact Government — wavering because of the Republican programme which the Nationalists preach. If the fundamental question of South Africa’s position in the Empire were raised for immediate decision there is little doubt that Labor would stand in a vast majority for the maintenance of the British connection.
The position of the rank and file of the Nationalist Party is likewise certain. The back-veldt Boer is a DieHard. His politics are of the pre-BoerWar period, to which have been added the bitterness of the war itself and the developments that followed it. Only irrigation schemes and capital and the capture of his schools and pulpits by progressive teachers and preachers will alter his environment or change his political outlook. The political awakening of the back-veldt Boers, which found its first significant expression two years ago, has been urged steadily forward by strenuous Nationalist campaigning. It is altogether likely, in fact, that another general election — if it comes in the near future — will strengthen the position of the Boer Party, whereupon the question of a South African Republic, independent of the British Empire, is almost certain to be raised at once. And a final settlement of that problem, since the Dutch and English populations are so nearly equal, will doubtless be found to rest with the Anglo-Dutch voters who would constitute a balance of power.
In such a situation the position of the Anglo-Dutchman would be relatively certain. His environment is that of progressive South Africa. His faith is in the commercial and cultural development of a Union that is genuinely one. He repudiated ‘South Africa, First and Alone,’ when he signed the Act of Union, and his sons sealed that repudiation with the Colonials in Delville Wood. He is, in fact, one of the South Africans of to-morrow, the citizen alike of an independent nation and of an Empire; moving abreast of the modern world, yet with the spirit alive in him of those other South Africans who widened the boundaries of the land and traveled, through the red fog, never faster than two miles an hour.