The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction

Every race has its Marathon into which the historian does not inquire too closely who has a reverence for holy places and a fear of sacrilege. It may be a battle or a crusade, a creed, or perhaps only a poem, but whatever it is, it is part and parcel of the national life, and it is impossible to reach the naked truth through the rose-coloured mists of pious tradition. A Sempach or a Bannockburn cannot be explained by a bare technical history. The spirit of a nation was in arms, the national spirit was the conqueror, and the combatants appear more than mere flesh and blood, walking “larger than human” on the hills of story. This phenomenon has merits which it is hard to exaggerate. It is the basis for the rhetorical self-confidence which is essential to a strong race. It is a fountain from which generous youth can draw inspiration, an old watchword to call the inert to battle. If the race has a literature, it helps to determine its character; if the race has none, it provides a basis for fireside tales. The feeblest Greek at the court of Artaxerxes must have now and then straightened himself when he remembered Salamis. Without such a retrospect a people will live in a crude present, and, having no buttress from the past, will fare badly from the rough winds of life.

To the Boer the Great Trek is the unrecorded but ever-remembered Odyssey of his people. He has a long memory, perhaps because of his very slowness and meagreness of fancy. His life was so monotonous that the tale of how his fathers first came into the land inspired him by its unlikeness to his own somnolent traditions. Besides, he had a Scriptural parallel. The persecuted children of Israel, in spite of the opposition of Pharaoh, had fled across the desert from Egypt and found a Promised Land. The Boer sense of analogy is extremely vivid and extremely inexact. Here he saw a perfect precedent. A God-fearing people, leaving their homes doubtless at the call of the Most High, had fled into the wilds of Amalek and Edom, conquered and dispossessed the Canaanites, and occupied a land which, if not flowing with milk and honey, was at least well grassed and plentifully watered. How keen the sense of Scriptural example was, and how constantly present to the Boer mind was the thought that he was following in the footsteps of Israel, is shown by one curious story. The voortrekkers, pushing out from Pretoria, struck a stream which flowed due north, the first large north-running water they had met. Moreover, it was liable to droughts and floods recurring at fixed seasons. What could it be but the great river of Egypt? So with immense pious satisfaction they recognised it as the Nile, and the Nyl it remains to this day.

The thought of a national exodus comes easily to the Aryan mind, – an inheritance from primeval Asian wanderings. And in itself it is something peculiarly bold and romantic, requiring a renunciation of old ties and sentiments impossible to an over-domesticated race. It requires courage of a high order and a confident faith in destiny. Perhaps the courage needed in the case of the Great Trek was less than in most similar undertakings, because of the cheering Scriptural precedent and the lack of that imagination which can vividly forecast the future. The past history of the Boer, too, prepared him for desperate enterprises. Made up originally of doubtful adventurers from Holland, hardihood grew up in their blood as they pushed northwards from the seacoast. The people of the littoral might be, as Lady Anne Barnard found them, sluggish and spiritless; but the farmers of Colesberg and Graaff-Reinet were in the nature of things a different breed. The true Dutch blood does not readily produce an adventurer, but it was leavened and sublimated by a French Huguenot strain, scions of good families exiled for the most heroic of causes. The coarse strong Dutch stock swallowed them up; the language disappeared, the Colberts became Grobelaars, the Villons Viljoens, the Pinards Pienaars; but something remained of élan and spiritual exaltation. Harassed from the north by Griqua and Hottentot bandits, and from the east by Kaffir incursions, they became a hardy border race, keeping their own by dint of a strong arm. The quiet of the great sun-washed spaces entered into their souls. They grew taciturn, ungraceful, profoundly attached to certain sombre dogmas, impatient of argument or restraint, bad citizens for any modern State, but not without a gnarled magnificence of their own. They were out of line with the whole world, far nearer in kinship to an Old Testament patriarch than to the townsfolk with whom they shared the country. All angles and corners, they presented an admirable front to savage nature; but they were hard to dovetail into a complex modern society. They would have made good Ironsides, and would have formed a stubborn left wing at Armageddon, but they did ill with franchises and taxes and paternal legislation.

I will take two savage tales from their history to show what manner of men they were in extremity. A certain Frederick Bezuidenhout, a farmer in the Bruintje Hoogte, and by all accounts a dabbler in less reputable trades, was summoned on some charge before the landdrost of the district, and declined to appear. A warrant was issued for his apprehension, and a party of soldiers sent out to enforce it, whereupon Bezuidenhout took refuge in a cave, and was shot dead in its defence. The fiery cross went round among his relatives; overtures, which were refused, were made to the Kaffir chiefs, and Jan Bezuidenhout, the brother of the dead man, swore to fealty a band of as pretty outlaws as ever dwelt on a border. The insurrection failed; thirty-nine of the insurgents were captured, and five were hanged, and Jan Bezuidenhout himself was shot in the Kaffir country by an advance party of the pursuit. Such is the too famous story of Slachter’s Nek. The tale of Conrad de Buys[9 - In Lichtenstein’s ‘Travels in South Africa’ (1803-6) there is an interesting and comparatively favourable account of Buys in his Cape Colony days.] and his doings is wilder but more obscure. A man of great physical strength and the worst character, he was the leader of the sterner desperadoes on the Kaffir border. Through living much in native kraals he had become little better than a savage. He was mixed up in Van Jaarsveld’s insurrection, and by-and-by his private crimes exceeded his political by so much that he was compelled to flee into the northern wilds. This first of the voortrekkers is next heard of on the banks of the Limpopo, living in pure barbarism, with a harem of Kaffir wives and an immense prestige among his neighbours. The emigrant party under Potgieter, on their return from Delagoa Bay, found somewhere in the Lydenburg hills two half-breeds who called this ruffian father and acted as interpreters. Conrad peopled the Transvaal with his children, whom he seems to have ruled in a patriarchal fashion, forming a real Buys clan, who still hang together at Marah, in Zoutpansberg. In the Pietersburg Burgher camp during the war there was a Buys location, who strenuously urged their claim to be considered a white people and burghers of the republic.

Such was one element in the race of border farmers – a substratum of desperate lawlessness. But there were other elements, many of them noble and worthy. Their morals were less bad than peculiar; their lawlessness rather an inability to understand restrictions than an impulse to disorder. They had their own staunch loyalties, their own strict code of honour. They had the self-confidence of a people whose dogmatic foundations are unshaken, and who are in habitual intercourse with an inferior race. In a rude way they were kindly and hospitable. They had a courage so unwavering that it may be called an instinct, and the bodily strength which comes from bare living and constant exertion. “Simple” and “pastoral” used to be words of praise. During the late war they became a sneer; but it is well to recognise that while they may comprise the gravest faults they must denote a few sterling virtues.

When Pieter Retief left Graaff-Reinet in 1837, he issued an ingenious proclamation which contains his justification of the Great Trek. He complains of the unnecessary hardships attending the emancipation of the slaves, the insecurity of life and property caused by the absence of proper vagrancy laws, and the disaster certain to attend Lord Glenelg’s reversal of British policy on the Kaffir border. Retief was a man of high and conscientious character, and his profession of faith is valuable as showing the view of current politics held by the better class of the voortrekkers. They did not defend slavery – Retief expressly repudiates it; but they objected to the method of its abolition, and the lack of precautions for future public safety which the event demanded. Lord Glenelg’s withdrawal from the eastern border to the boundary of the Keiskama and Tyumie rivers, as fixed by Lord Charles Somerset in 1819, appeared to them a flagrant piece of weakness which sooner or later must make life on that border impossible. They saw no hope of redress from the imperial Government, which seemed to be dominated by philanthropic hysteria. It is a grave indictment, and worth examination. The slavery question stands in the foreground. The ocean slave-trade was suppressed in 1807, and the English abolitionists had leisure to turn their minds to South Africa. The first progressive enactment came in 1816, when the registration of slaves and slave-births was made compulsory in every district. In 1823 a series of laws were passed restricting slave labour on the Sabbath, giving slaves the right of owning property, and limiting the punishments to which they were liable. In 1826 officials were appointed in country districts to watch over slave interests, and see that the protective enactments were carried out. The famous Fiftieth Ordinance of 1828 gave the Hottentots the same legal rights as the white colonists. Meanwhile for years a great missionary agitation for total abolition had been going on, which was powerfully supported by the Whig party in England. The Dutch saw clearly the trend of events, and, in what is known as the “Graaff-Reinet proposals,” attempted to procure gradually the emancipation which they realised was bound to come. They proposed, unanimously, that after a date to be fixed by Government all female children should be free at birth, and, by a majority, that all male children born after the same date should also be free. I cannot find in these proposals the insidious attempt to defeat the movement which some writers have discerned: they seem to me to be as fair and reasonable an offer as we could expect a slave-holding class to make. But the British attitude is also perfectly clear. Slave-holding had been condemned as a crime by the national conscience, and there could be no temporising with the evil thing. Here, again, a certain kind of education was necessary to appreciate the point of view. The farmers of Graaff-Reinet had not listened to the harangues of Wilberforce and Fowell Buxton; Zion Chapel and its all-pervading atmosphere of mild brotherly love were not within the compass of their experience. England was right, as she generally is in policies which are inspired by a profound popular conviction; but she could hardly expect men of a very different training to fall in readily with her views. In any case the working out of the policy was attended by many blunders. The Emancipation Act took effect in Cape Colony from the 1st of December 1834. £1,200,000 seems a rather inadequate compensation for 35,000 slaves, and as each claim had to be presented before commissioners in London, the farmer had perforce to employ an agent, who bought up his claims at a discount of anything from 18 to 30 per cent.

The losses from emancipation were chiefly felt in the rich agricultural districts of the colony, such as Stellenbosch, Ceres, and Worcester; the border farmers were not a large slave-owning class, and the lack of cheap labour did not trouble them. But emancipation meant a general dislocation of credit all over the country. A man who in 1833 was counted a rich man was comparatively poor in 1835, and this peripeteia had a bad effect on the whole farming class. It was rather the spirit of the Act which the Boers of Graaff-Reinet complained of, – the theory, to them ridiculous, that the black man could have legal rights comparable with the white, and the sense of insecurity which dwellers under such a régime must feel. The average Boer was an arbitrary but not an unkind slave-master; he regarded his slaves as part of his familia, an enclosure to which the common law should not penetrate. To be limited by statute in the use of what he considered his chattels, to find hundreds of officious gentlemen ready to take the part of the chattels on any occasion against him, were pills too bitter to swallow. Emancipation produced vagrants, and he asked for a stringent vagrancy law which his landrosts could administer. England, refusing naturally to take away with one hand what she had given with the other, declined to expose the emancipated slave to the arbitrariness of local tribunals. Well, argued the farmers, our slaves, being free, have become rogues and vagabonds; they may plunder us at their pleasure and England will take their part: it is time for us to seek easier latitudes.

But the chief factor in Dutch dissatisfaction was undoubtedly Lord Glenelg’s limitation of the eastern border line. There is something to be said for the view of that discredited, and, to tell the truth, not very wise statesman. The Boer was a bad neighbour for a Kaffir people. He was always encroaching, spurred on by that nomadic something in his blood – a true Campbell of Breadalbane, who built his house on the limits of his estate that he might “brise yont.” A buffer state was apt to become very soon a Boer territory. Better to try and establish a strong Kaffir people, who might attain to some semblance of national life, and under the maternal eye of Britain become useful and progressive citizens. So reasoned Lord Glenelg and his advisers, missionary and official. Unfortunately facts were against him, the chimera of a Kaffir nation was soon dispelled, and ten years later Sir Harry Smith, a governor who did not suffer from illusions, made the eastern province a Kaffir reserve under a British commissioner. The frontier Boer, however, was not in a position to share any sentiment about a Kaffir nation. He saw his cattle looted, his family compelled to leave their newly acquired farm, and a long prospect of Kaffir raids where the presumption of guilt would always be held to lie against his own worthy self. Above all things he saw a barred door. No more “brising yont” for him on the eastern border. Expansion, space, were as the breath of his nostrils, and if he could not have them in the old colony he would seek them in the untravelled northern wilds.

There were thus certain well-defined reasons for the Great Trek in contemporary politics which, combined with distorted memories like Slachter’s Nek, made up in Boer eyes a very complete indictment against Pharaoh and his counsellors. But the real reason lay in his blood. Had the British Government been all that he could desire, he would still have gone. He was a wanderer from his birth, and trekking, even for great distances, was an incident of his common life. A pastoral people have few vested interests in land. There are no ancient homesteads to leave, or carefully-tended gardens or rich corn-lands. Their wealth is in their herds, which can be driven at will to other pastures. The Boer rarely built much of a farm, and he never fenced. A cottage, a small vegetable-yard, and a stable made up the homestead on even large farms on the border. There was nothing to leave when he had gathered his horned cattle into a mob, yoked his best team to his waggon, and stowed his rude furniture inside. With his rifle slung on his shoulder, he was as free to take the road as any gipsy. He was leaving the country of the alien, where mad fancies held sway and unjust laws and taxes oppressed him. He was bound for the far lands of travellers’ tales, the country of rich grass and endless game, where he could live as he pleased and preserve the fashions of his fathers unchanged. He would meet with fierce tribes, but his elephant-gun, as he knew from experience, was a match for many assegais. There was much heroism in the Great Trek, but there was also for the young and hale an exhilarating element of sport. To them it was a new, strange, and audacious adventure. No predikant accompanied the emigrants. The Kirk did not see the Scriptural parallel, and to a man preferred the treasure in Egypt to the doubtful fortunes of Israel.

The first party consisted of about thirty waggons, under the leadership of Louis Trichard and Jan van Rensburg. They travelled slowly, the men hunting along the route, and outspanned for days, and even weeks, at pleasant watering-places. The main object of those pioneers was to ascertain the road to Delagoa Bay; so they did not seek land for settlement, but pushed on till they came to Piet Potgieter’s Rust, a hundred miles or so north of Pretoria, which they thought to be about the proper latitude. Here the party divided. Van Rensburg and his men went due east into the wild Lydenburg country on their way to the coast, and were never heard of again. Trichard waited a little, and then slowly groped his way through the Drakensberg to Portuguese territory. The band suffered terribly from fever; their herds were annihilated by the tsetse fly, of which they now heard for the first time; but in the end about twenty-six survivors struggled down to the bay and took ship for Natal. So ended the adventure of the path-finders. The next expedition was led by the famous Andries Potgieter, and came from the Tarka and Colesberg districts. The little Paulus Kruger, a boy of ten, travelled with the waggons to the country which he was to rule for long. Potgieter settled first in the neighbourhood of Thaba ’Nchu on the Basuto border, and bought a large tract of land from a Bataung chief. Farms were marked out, and a few emigrants remained, but the majority pushed on to the north and east. Some crossed the Vaal, and finding a full clear stream coming down from the north, christened it the Mooi or Fair River; and here in after-days, faithful to their first impression, they planted the old capital of the Transvaal. Potgieter with a small band set off on the search for Delagoa Bay, but he seems to have lost himself in the mountains between Lydenburg and Zoutpansberg. On his return he found that Mosilikatse’s warriors had at last given notice of their presence, and had massacred a number of small outlying settlements. So began one of the sternest struggles in South African history.

Potgieter gathered all the survivors into a great laager at a place called Vechtkop, between the Rhenoster and Wilge rivers. The precaution was taken none too soon, for one morning a few days later a huge native army appeared, led by the chief induna of Mosilikatse. The odds, so far as can be gathered, were about a hundred to one, but the little band was undaunted, and Sarel Celliers, a true Cromwellian devotee of the Bible and the sword, called his men to prayer. Then forty farmers rode out from the laager, galloped within range, spread out and fired a volley, riding back swiftly to reload. They did good execution, but forty men, however bold, cannot disperse 5000, and in a little the Matabele were round the laager, and the siege began. The defence was so vigorous that after heavy losses the enemy withdrew, driving with them the little stock which formed the sole wealth of the emigrants.

The glove had been thrown down and there could be no retreat. Midian must be destroyed root and branch before Israel could possess the land. After a short rest Potgieter and Gerrit Maritz began the war of reprisals. With a commando of over 100 men and a few Griqua followers, they forded the Vaal, crossed the Magaliesberg, and arrived at Mosilikatse’s chief kraal at Mosega. The farmers’ victory was complete. Over 400 of the Matabele were slain, several thousand head of cattle secured, and the kraal given to the flames. Potgieter returned to found the little town of Winburg in memory of his victory, and, with the assistance of Pieter Retief, to frame a constitution for the nascent state. But Mosilikatse still remained. He had not been present at the debâcle of Mosega, and while he remained on the frontier there was no security for life and property. New recruits had come up from the south, including the redoubtable family of Uys, the horses were in good condition, all had had a breathing-space; so a new and more formidable expedition started in search of the enemy. They found him on the Marico, and for nine days fought with him on the old plan of a charge, a volley, and a retreat. Then one morning there was no enemy to fight; a cloud of dust to the north showed the line of his flight; Mosilikatse had retired across the Limpopo. Whereupon the emigrants proclaimed the whole of the late Matabele territory – the Transvaal, the Orange River Colony, and a portion of Bechuanaland – as theirs by the right of conquest.

So runs the tale of the Great Trek, – rather an Iliad than an Odyssey, perhaps, and a very bloodthirsty Iliad, too. To most men it must seem a noble and spirited story. Whatever the justice of the emigrants’ grievances, they conducted themselves well in their self-imposed exile. Potgieter and his men were indeed rather exceptional specimens of their race, and they were strung to the highest pitch by Christian faith and the unchristian passion of revenge. They relapsed, when all was over, to a somewhat ordinary type of farmer, which seems to bear out the general conception of the Boer character – that, while it is capable of high deeds, it is powerful by sudden effort rather than by sustained and strenuous toil. The experiment which began so well should have ended in something better than two bourgeois republics. There are some who see in the tale nothing more than an unwarranted invasion of native territory, and a cruel massacre of a brave race. No view could be more unjust. The Matabele had not a scrap of title to the country, and had not dwelt in it more than a few years. The real owners, if you can talk of ownership at all, were the unfortunate Bataungs and Barolongs, whom the emigrants befriended. The Matabele were indeed as murderous a race of savages as ever lived, and their defeat was a moral as well as a political necessity. It is well to protect the aborigine, but when he is armed with a dozen assegais and earnestly desires your blood, it is safer to shoot him or drive him farther afield. That the Boers were guilty of atrocities in those fierce wars is undoubted, and, if some tales be true, unpardonable. But there are excuses to be made. When a man has seen his child writhing on a spear and his wife mutilated; when he reflects that he stands alone against impossible odds, and has a keen sense, too, of Scriptural parallels, – he may be forgiven if he slays and spares not, and even gives way to curious cruelties. Revenge and despair may play odd pranks with the best men: tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.

What, then, is the proper view to take of this footnote to the world’s history, this Marathon of an unimaginative race? It is possible to see in it only an attempt of a half-savage people to find elbow-room for their misdeeds. The voortrekkers, it has been said, fled the approach of a mild and enlightened modern policy, invaded a land which was not theirs, slaughtered a people who had every right to resist them, and created for themselves space to practise their tyranny over the native, and perpetuate their exploded religious and political creed in a retrograde society. It is easy to say this, as it is easy to explain the doings of the Pilgrim Fathers as a flight from a too liberal and tolerant land to wilds where intolerance could rule unchecked. With the best will in the world to scrutinise Dutch legends, the Great Trek seems to me just that legend which can well support any scrutiny. For it was first and foremost a conflict between civilisations. There were strong and worthy men among the voortrekkers, as there were estimable people among their opponents. The modern political creed, based on English constitutionalism, stray doctrines of the French Revolution, and certain economic maxims from Bentham and Adam Smith, is, in spite of minor differences, common to the civilised world. This was the creed which was forced upon the Border Dutch, and, having received no education in the axioms on which it was based, they unhesitatingly rejected it, and clung to their old Scriptural feudalism. When two creeds come into conflict, the older and weaker usually goes under. But in this case the men on the losing side were of a peculiar temper and dwelt in a peculiar country. They took the bold path of carrying themselves and their creed to a new land, and so extended its lease of life for the better part of a century. Let us take the parallel of the American Civil War. The North fought for the cause of the larger civic organism and certain social reforms which were accidentally linked to it. The South stood for the principle of nationality, and for certain traditions of their own particular nationality. Roughly speaking, it was the same conflict; but the Southern creed perished because there was no practicable hinterland to which it could be transplanted. Had there been, I do not think its most stubborn opponents would have denied admiration to so bold an endeavour to preserve a national faith.

The Great Trek set its seal upon the new countries. The Orange River Colony and the Transvaal are still in the rural places an emigrant’s land. The farmhouse is the unit; the country dorps are merely jumbles of little shanties to supply the farmers’ wants. The place-names, with the endless recurrence of simple descriptive epithets like Sterkstroom or Klipfontein, or expressions of feeling like Nooitgedacht or Welgevonden, still tell the tale of the first discoverers. There is no obscurity in the nomenclature, such as is found in an old land where history has had time to be forgotten. Any farm-boy will tell you how this river came to be named the Ox-Yoke or that hill the Place of Weeping. It has made the people a solemn, ungenial folk, calculating and thrifty in their ways, and given to living in hovels which suggest that here they have no continuing city. Perhaps, as has been said, no performance, however stupendous, is worth loss of geniality; and the finer graces of life have never had a chance on the veld. There is gipsy blood in their veins, undying vagabondage behind all their sleepy contentment. The quiet of the old waggon journeys, when men counted the days on a notched stick that they might not miss the still deeper quiet of the Sabbaths, has gone into the soul of a race which still above all things desires space and leisure. It is this gipsy endowment which made them born warriors after a fashion; it is this which gives them that apathy in the face of war losses which discomfits their sentimental partisans. Britain in her day has won many strange peoples to her Empire; but none, I think, more curious or more hopeful than the stubborn children of Uys and Potgieter.

CHAPTER IV.

THE BOER IN SPORT

It is a fair working rule of life that the behaviour of a man in his sports is a good index to his character in graver matters. With certain reservations the same holds true of a people. For on the lowest interpretation of the word “sport,” the high qualities of courage, honour, and self-control are part of the essential equipment, and the mode in which such qualities appear is a reflex of the idiosyncrasies of national character. But this is true mainly of the old settled peoples, whose sports have long lost the grim reality in which they started. To a race which wages daily war with savage nature the refinements of conduct are unintelligible; sport becomes business; and unless there is a hereditary tradition in the matter the fine manners of the true hunter’s craft are notable by their absence.

It is worth while considering the Boer in sport, for it is there he is seen at his worst. Without tradition of fair play, soured and harassed by want and disaster, his sport became a matter of commerce, and he held no device unworthy in the game. He hunted for the pot, and the pot cast its shadow over all his doings. His arms were rarely in the old days weapons of precision, and we can scarcely expect much etiquette in the pursuit of elephant or lion in a bush country with a smooth-bore gun which had a quaint trajectory and a propensity to burst. The barbarous ways which he learned in those wild games he naturally carried into easier sports. Let us admit, too, that the Boer race has produced a few daring and indefatigable hunters, who, though rarely of the class of a Selous or a Hartley, were yet in every way worthy of the name of sportsmen. I have talked with old Boers from the hunting-veld, and in their tales of their lost youth there was a fervour which the commercial results of their expeditions did not explain. But the fact remains that to an Englishman the Boers, with a few exceptions, are not a sporting race – they are not even a race of very skilful hunters. They came to the land when game was abundant and they thinned it out; but the manner of this thinning was as prosaic as the routine of their daily lives.

One advantage the Boer possessed in common with all dwellers in new lands – he was familiar from childhood with gun and saddle, and had to face the world on his own legs from his early boyhood. In this way he acquired what one might call the psychological equipment of the hunter. Any one who has hunted in wild countries will remember the first sense of strangeness, the feeling that civilisation had got too far away for comfort, which is far more eerie than common nervousness. To this feeling the Boer was an utter stranger. It was as natural for him to set a trap for a lion before returning at nightfall, or to go off to the hunting-veld for four winter months, as it was to sow in spring and reap in autumn. And because it was an incident of his common life he imported into it a ridiculous degree of domesticity. On his farm he shot for the pot; on his winter treks with stock to the bush-veld and the wilder hunting expeditions for skins and horns he carried his wife and family in his buck-waggon, built himself a hut in the wilds, and reproduced exactly the life of the farm. It was easy to reproduce anywhere, for it was simplicity itself. Mealie-meal, coffee, and some coarse tobacco were his supplies, and fresh meat when game fell to his gun. So it is not to be wondered at if hunting became to him something wholly destitute of romance and adventure, an affair like kirk and market, where business was the beginning and the end.

But besides the Boer who farmed first and hunted afterwards, there was the Boer who hunted by profession. The class is almost extinct, but in outlying farms one may still meet the old hunter and listen to his incredible tales. Some were men of the first calibre, the pioneers of a dozen districts, men of profound gravity and placid temper, who rarely told the tale of their deeds. But the common hunter is above all things a talker. Like the Kaffir, he brags incessantly, and a little flattery will lead him into wild depths. He lies to the stranger, because he cannot be contradicted; he lies to his friends, because they are connoisseurs in the art and can appreciate the work of a master. Boer hunting tales, therefore, should be received with extreme caution. They would often puzzle an expert lawyer, for they are full of minute and fallacious particulars, skilfully put together, and forming as a rule a narrative of single-hearted heroism. I have listened to a Boer version of a lion-hunt, and I have heard the facts from other members of the same party; and the contrast was a lesson in the finer arts of embroidery. But this society had its compensations. Those men live on the outer fringe of Boerdom; they have no part in politics and few ties to the civilised society of Pretoria; and the result is that race hatred and memory of old strifes have always had a smaller place in their hearts. Without the virtues of their countryman, they are often free from his more unsocial failings.

It is as a big-game hunter that he has acquired his reputation, and by big game he meant the lion and the elephant, animals which he had to go farther afield and run greater risks to secure. The old race of elephant-hunters were a strong breed, men in whom courage from long experience had become a habit; and certainly they had need of it with their long-stocked cumbrous flint-locks, which might put out a man’s shoulder in the recoil. They knew their business and took no needless risks, for elephant-hunting is a thing which can be learned. Save in thick bush, there is little real danger; and if the hunter awaits a charging elephant, a point-blank shot at a few yards will generally make the animal swerve. Mr Selous, whose authority is beyond question, has drawn these men as they appeared to him in Mashonaland – skilful shikarris, but jealous, uncompanionable, often treacherous as we count honour in sport; and Oswell’s story is the same. The lion, which, in spite of tales to the contrary, remains one of the two most dangerous quarries in the world, was a different affair to them. There was little commercial profit from shooting him, and they had no other motive to face danger. Nor can we blame them, for a charging lion to a man with an uncertain gun means almost as sure destruction as a shipwreck in mid-ocean. The Boer hunter shot him for protection, rarely for sport. Very few of the lions killed on the high veld fell to rifles; a trap-gun set near a drinking-place was the ordinary way of dealing with them. Mr Ericsen, the most famous of Kalahari pioneers, who brought many herds of Ovampa and Damara cattle across the desert, used to tell this story of Boer prowess in lion-hunting. He was travelling with a party of Boer hunters, and one night a lion killed one of the oxen. The men were in a fury, and urged Mr Ericsen to follow, bragging that each of them was prepared to tackle the beast single-handed. Mr Ericsen said that he was no hunter, but promised to let them have his dogs and natives to follow up the spoor in the morning. But when the morning came the party had silently dispersed, mortally afraid lest they should be expected to fulfil their promises. In the long list of South African big-game hunters the names are mostly English, – Gordon-Cumming, Byles, Hartley, Oswell, Sharpe, Selous, Francis, John Macdonald, – and the reason does not wholly lie in the inability and disinclination of the Boer to bring his deeds from the rhetoric of talk to the calmer record of print.

At other four-footed game, from the buffalo to the duiker, the Boer was generally a fair shot, in some cases a good shot, but very rarely a great shot. Reputation in marksmanship was very much a matter of accident. A happy fluke with them, as with natives, might make a reputation for life, though the man in question shot badly ever afterwards. The number of Boer marksmen of the first rank could be counted on the ten fingers. On the other hand, the nature of their life produced a very high average. The Boer boy shot from the day he could hold a rifle, and there were few utter failures among them. To be sure, it was not pretty shooting. His first business was to get the game, and if he could do it by sitting on a tree near the stream and killing at twenty yards, he did it gladly. When he went hunting he reflected that his cartridges cost him 3d. apiece, and were all that stood between him and starvation; so very naturally he became as poky a shot as the English gamekeeper who is sent out to kill for the table. If a hunter took out 500 cartridges and brought back 120 head of game, he was reckoned a good man at his work. To this, of course, there were exceptions, such as old Jan Ludig, who once in Waterberg shot five gnu (who travel in Indian file) within seven miles. The name of Mr Van Rooyen, too, familiar to all Matabele hunters, shows what the Dutch race can produce in the way of marksmanship and veld-craft. In one branch of the chase they were consummate masters. The Boer method of stalking is an art by itself, for it is really a kind of driving, by showing oneself at strategic points till the game is forced into suitable ground. In open country they also followed with great success the method of riding down. Mounted on a good shooting pony, the hunter galloped alongside a herd till he was within reasonable distance; then in a trice he was on the ground, had selected his animal, and fired – all within a few seconds. This was a risky game for a large party, owing to the very rude etiquette which prevailed on the subject of shooting in your neighbour’s direction; and I have heard of many seriously wounded and even killed by their companions’ shots. Still another way was to ride alongside an animal and shoot him from the saddle at a few paces’ distance. This was called “brandt” or “burning,” and required a firm seat and a very steady eye.

Birds were thought little of, except by some of the more advanced farmers and by sportsmen from the towns. The country is full of many excellent sporting birds: guineafowl, quail, francolin, duck, geese, and several kinds of partridge and bustard; but though a few farmers shot wildfowl on their dams, the average Boer was a poor shot with a gun, and when he did use one he liked to take his birds sitting. A hunter might kill a bird neatly with a rifle, which he would miss at shorter range with a shot-gun. This fashion is quickly passing. Many farmers possess excellent guns of the latest pattern; and I have known Boers who could hold their own with credit in Norfolk or Perthshire. As shooting is becoming more of a sport and less of a business, etiquette is growing up; and the Boer is learning to spare does and ewes and take pleasure in hard shots, where his father would have slaughtered casually and walked long and far to spare his cartridges. The new order is bringing better manners, but nothing can restore the noble herds of game which fell unlamented and unnoted under the old régime.

Other sports were scarcely considered. He rarely fished, leaving the catching of yellow-fish, tiger-fish, and barbel to the Kaffirs; and when he did, his rod and tackle were neolithic in their simplicity. I have never seen a Boer rod which had any of the proper attributes of a rod, and he used to profess scorn for a man with a greenheart or a split-cane as for one who would stipulate for an elegant spade before digging potatoes. Sometimes in a village or among neighbouring farmers flat-races would be got up; but the Boer pony was bred more for endurance than for speed, and a small selling-plate meeting was about the limit of his horse-racing. I have never seen or heard of a Boer steeplechase. On the other hand, he had a wonderful skill, as our army discovered, in riding at full speed over a breakneck country, – a skill due, perhaps, more to veld-craft than to horsemanship. Hunting big game on horseback taught him, as part of the business, to leave much to his horse; and his horse rarely played him false. Whether he was clattering down a stony hillside, or dodging through thick scrub, or racing over veld honeycombed with ant-bear holes, he rode with a loose rein and full confidence in his animal. It is difficult to frame an opinion on his horsemanship. His long stirrups, the easy “tripple” of his horse, and his loose seat make him a type of horseman very different to our cavalryman or Leicestershire master of hounds. But, loose as he sits, he can stick on over most kinds of country, and he is a natural horsemaster of the first order. A Boer knows by instinct how to manage his horse: he never frets him; he rarely ill-treats him; and he can judge to a mile the limits of his endurance.

As a sportsman, then, the Boer is scarcely at his best. He has shown himself dull, sluggish, unimaginative, capable of both skill and endurance, but a niggard in the exercise of either, unless compelled by hunger or hope of gain. Unlike most races, it is in his sports that he shows his most unlovely traits, and that flat incomprehensible side of his character which has puzzled an ornamental world. The truth is that he is, speaking broadly, without imagination and that dash of adventure which belongs to all imaginative men. The noble spurs of the Drakensberg rose within sight of his home; but he would as soon have thought of climbing a peak for the sport or the scenery as of dabbling in water-colours. A dawn was to him only the beginning of the day, a mellow veld sunset merely a sign to outspan; and I should be afraid to guess his thoughts on a primrose by the river’s brim, or whatever is the South African equivalent. His religion made him credulous, but his temperament transformed the most stupendous of the world’s histories into a kind of Farmer’s Almanac, and Eastern poetry became for him a literal record of fact. A friend of mine, travelling with a Boer hunter in the far north, called his attention to the beauty of the starry night, and, thinking to interest his companion, told him a few simple astronomical truths. The Boer angrily asked him why he lied so foolishly. “Do not I read in the Book,” he said, “that the world stands on four pillars?” And when my friend inquired about the foundation of the pillars, the Boer sulked for two days. But there is one trait which he shared with all true sportsmen, a love of wild animals. To be sure, the finest reserves of buck were made by new-comers, such as Mr van der Byl’s park at Irene and Mr Forbes’s at Athole, in Ermelo, both unhappily ruined by the war. But many veld farmers had their small reserves of springbok or blesbok, and permitted no hunting within them. Some did it as a speculation, being always ready to lease a day’s shooting to a gun from Johannesburg, and many for the reason that they sought big farms and complete solitude – to pander to a sense of possession. But in all, perhaps, there was a strain of honest pleasure in wild life, a desire to encircle their homes with the surroundings of their early hunting days. In which case, it is another of the anomalies which warn us off hasty generalisations.

CHAPTER V.

THE BOER IN ALL SERIOUSNESS.[10 - The word “Boer” is used in this chapter to denote the average country farmer in the new colonies, and not the educated Dutch of the towns.]

The Boer character has suffered by its simplicity. It has, as a rule, been crudely summed up in half a dozen denunciatory sentences, or, in the case of more curious students, it has been analysed and defined with a subtlety for which there is no warrant. A hasty condemnation is not the method for a product so full of difficulty and interest, and a chain of laborious paradoxes scarcely enables us to comprehend a thing which is pre-eminently broad and simple. The Boer has rarely been understood by people who give their impressions to the world, but he has been very completely understood by plain men who have dwelt beside him and experienced his ways in the many relations of life. It is easy to dismiss him with a hostile epigram; easy, too, to build up an edifice of neat contradictions, after the fashion of what Senancour has called “le vulgaire des sages,” and label it the Boer character. The first way commends itself to party feeling; the second appeals to a nation which has confessedly never understood its opponents, and is ready now to admit its ignorance and excuse itself by the amazing complexity of the subject. Sympathy, which is the only path to true understanding, was made difficult by the mists of war, and, when all was over, by the exceeding dreariness of the conquered people. There was little romance in the slouching bearded men with flat faces and lustreless eyes who handed in their rifles and came under our flag; National Scouts, haggling over money terms, and the begging tour of the generals, seemed to have reduced honour to a matter of shillings and pence, and dispelled the glamour of many hard-fought battlefields. There is a perennial charm about an ancien régime; but this poor ancien régime had no purple and fine gold for the sentimental – only a hodden-grey burgess society, an unlovely Kirk, and a prosaic constitution.

And yet the proper understanding of this character is of the first political importance, and a task well worth undertaking for its own sake. Those men are for ever our neighbours and fellow-citizens, and it is the part of wisdom to understand the present that it may prepare against the future. To the amateur of racial character there is the chance of reading in the largest letters the lesson of historical development, for we know their antecedents, we can see clearly the simple events of their recent history, and we have before us a product, as it were, isolated and focussed for observation. Nor can sympathy be wanting in a fair observer, – sympathy for courage, tenacity of purpose, a simple fidelity to racial ideals. No man who has lived much with the people can regard them without a little aversion, a strong liking, and a large and generous respect.

In any racial inquiry there are certain determinant factors which form the axioms of the problem. In the case of a long-settled people these are so intricate and numerous that it is impossible to disentangle more than a few of the more obvious, and we explain development, naturally and logically, rather by the conscious principles which the race assimilated than by the objective forces which acted upon it from the outer world. But in the case of a savage or a backward nation, the history is simple, the ingredients in racial character few and intelligible. The wars of the spirit and the growth of philosophies are potent influences, but their history is speculative and recondite. But the struggle for bare life falls always in simple forms, and physical forces leave their mark rudely upon the object they work on. In this case we have a national life less than a century long, a mode of society all but uniform, a creed short and unsophisticated, an intelligible descent, and a country which stamps itself readily upon its people. Origin, history, natural environment, accidental modes of civilisation, these are the main factors in that composite thing we call character. We can read them in the individual: we can read them writ large in a race which is little more than the individual writ large. In complex societies the composition is a chemical process, the result is a new product, not to be linked with any ingredient; the soul and mind of the populace is something different in kind from the average soul and mind of its units. But in this collection of hardy individualists there was no novel result, and the type is repeated with such scanty variations that we may borrow the attributes of the individual for our definition of the race.

Descent, history, natural environment have laid the foundation of the Boer character. The old sluggish Batavian stock (not of the best quality, for the first settlers were as a rule of the poorest and least reputable class) was leavened with a finer French strain, and tinctured with a little native blood. Living a clannish life in solitude, the people intermarried closely, and suffered the fate of inbreeders in a loss of facial variety and a gradual coarsening of feature. Their history was a record of fierce warfare with savage nature, and the evolution of a peculiar set of traditions which soon came into opposition with imported European ideas. They evolved, partly from the needs of their society and partly from distorted echoes of revolutionary dogma, an embryo political creed, and in religion they established a variant of sixteenth-century Protestantism. Their life, and the vast spaces of earth and sky amid which they lived, strengthened the patriarchal individualism in their blood. The whole process of development, so remote from the common racial experience, produced in the Boer character a tissue of contradictions which resist all attempts at an easy summary. He was profoundly religious, with the language of piety always on his lips, and yet deeply sunk in matter. Without imagination, he had the habits of a recluse and in a coarse way the instincts of the poet. He was extremely narrow in a bargain, and extremely hospitable. With a keen sense of justice, he connived at corruption and applauded oppression. A severe moral critic, he was often lax, and sometimes unnatural, in his sexual relations. He was brave in sport and battle, but his heroics had always a mercantile basis, and he would as soon die for an ideal, as it is commonly understood, as sell his farm for a sixpence. There were few virtues or vices which one could deny him utterly or with which one could credit him honestly. In short, the typical Boer to the typical observer became a sort of mixture of satyr, Puritan, and successful merchant, rather interesting, rather distasteful, and wholly incomprehensible.

And yet the phenomenon is perfectly normal. The Boer is a representative on a grand scale of a type which no nation is without. He is the ordinary backward countryman, more backward and more of a countryman than is usual in our modern world. At one time this was the current view – a “race of farmers,” a “pastoral folk”; but the early months of the war brought about a reversal of judgment, and he was credited with the most intricate urban vices. Such a false opinion was the result of a too conventional view of the rural character. There is nothing Arcadian about the Boer, as there is certainly nothing Arcadian about the average peasant. A Corot background, a pastoral pipe, and a flavour of honeysuckle, must be expelled from the picture. To analyse what is grandiloquently called the “folk-heart,” is to see in its rude virtues and vices an exact replica of the life of the veld. “Simple” and “pastoral,” on a proper understanding of the terms, are the last words in definition.

Let us take an average household. Jan Celliers (pronounced Seljee) lives on his farm of 3000 morgen with his second wife and a family of twelve. His father was a voortrekker, and the great Sarel was a far-out cousin. Two cousins of his mother and their families squat as bywoners on his land, and an orphan daughter of his sister lives in his household. The farmhouse is built of sun-dried bricks, whitewashed in front, and consists of a small kitchen, a large room which is parlour and dining-room in one, and three small chambers where the family sleep. Twelve families of natives live in a little kraal, cultivate their own mealie-patches, and supply the labour of the farm, while two half-caste Cape boys, Andries and Abraham, who attend to the horses, have a rude shanty behind the stable. Jan has a dam from which he irrigates ten acres of mealies, pumpkins, and potatoes. For the rest he has 500 Afrikander oxen, which make him a man of substance among his neighbours, including two spans of matched beasts, fawn and black, for which he has refused an offer of £30 apiece. He is not an active farmer, for he does not need to bestir himself. His land yields him with little labour enough to live on, and a biscuit-tin full of money, buried in the orchard below the fifth apricot-tree from the house, secures his mind against an evil day. But he likes to ride round his herds in the early morning, and to smoke his pipe in his mealie-patch of a late afternoon. He is not fond of neighbours, but it is pleasant to him once in a while to go to Pretoria and buy a cartload of fancy groceries and the very latest plough in the store. As a boy Jan was a great hunter, and has been with his father to the Limpopo and the Rooi Rand; but of late game has grown scarce, and Jan is not the fellow to stir himself to find it. Now and then he shoots a springbok, and brags wonderfully about his shots, quite regardless of the presence of his sons who accompany him. These sons are heavy loutish boys, finer shots by far than Jan, for they have that infallible eyesight of the Boer youth. They, too, are idle, and are much abused by their mother, when she is wide awake enough to look after them. The daughters are plump and shapeless, with pallid complexions inside their sun-bonnets, and a hoydenish shyness towards neighbours. Not that they see many neighbours, though rumour has it that young Coos Pretorius, son of the rich Pretorius, comes now and then to “opsitten” with the eldest girl. Jan believes in an Old Testament God, whom he hears of at nachtmaals, for the kirk is too far off for the ordinary Sabbath-day’s journey; but he believes much more in a spook which lives in the old rhinoceros-hole in the spruit, and in his own amazing merits. He is sleepily good-natured towards the world, save to a Jew storekeeper in the town who calls himself on the sign above his door the “Old Boer’s Friend,” and on one occasion cheated him out of £5. But Jan has also had his triumphs, notably when he induced a coal prospector to prospect in an impossible place and leave him, free of cost, an excellent well. When war broke out Jan and three of his sons, sorely against their will, went out on commando. Two of the boys went to Ceylon, one fell at Spionkop, and Jan himself remained in the field till the end, and came back as proud as a peacock to repatriation rations. His womenfolk were in the Middelburg Burgher camp, where they acquired a taste for society which almost conquered their love for the farm. At any rate, it was with bitter complaints that they sat again under a makeshift roof, with no neighbours except the korhaan and a span of thin repatriation oxen. Jan did not enjoy war. At first he was desperately afraid, and only the strangeness of the country and the presence of others kept him from trekking for home. By-and-by he found amusement in the sport of the thing, and realised that with caution he might keep pretty well out of the way of harm. But in the guerilla warfare of the last year there was no sport, only stark unrelieved misery. Sometimes he thought of slipping over to the enemy and surrendering; often he wished he had been captured and sent to Ceylon with his boys; but something which he did not understand and had never suspected before began to rise in his soul, a wild obstinacy and a resolve to stand out to the last. Once in a night attack he was chased by two mounted infantrymen, and turned to bay in a narrow place, shooting one man and wounding the other badly. He did his best for the sufferer before making off to the rendezvous, an incident which has appeared in the picture papers (Jan is depicted about eight feet high, with a face like Moses, whereas he really is a broken-nosed little man), and which shows that he had both courage and kindness somewhere in his slow soul. But he gladly welcomed peace; he had never cared greatly for politics, and had an ancestral grudge against the Kruger family; and when he had assured himself that, instead of losing all, he would get most of his property back, and perhaps a little for interest, he became quite loyal, and figured prominently on the local repatriation board. He takes the resident magistrate out shooting, and has just sold to the Government a fraction of his farm at an enormous profit.

Such is an ordinary type of our new citizens. If we look at him the typical countryman stands out clear from the mists of tortuous psychology. It is an error, doubtless, to assume that the primitive nature is always simple; it is often bewilderingly complex. An elaborate civilisation may produce a type which can be analysed under a dozen categories; while the savage or the backwoodsman may show a network of curiously interlaced motives. But the man is familiar. We know others of the family; we have met him in the common relations of life; he stands before us as a concrete human being.

His most obvious characteristic is his mental sluggishness. Dialectic rarely penetrates the chain-armour of his prejudices. He has nothing of the keen receptive mind which, like a sensitive plant, is open to all the influences of life. His views are the outcome of a long and sluggish growth, and cling like mandrakes to the roots of his being. He makes no deductions from ordinary events, and he never follows a thing to its logical conclusion. His blind faith requires a cataclysm to shake it, and to revise a belief is impossible for him save under the stress of pain. Death and burning towns may reveal to him a principle, but unless it is written large in letters of blood and fire it escapes his stagnant intelligence. Change is painful to all human creatures, but such coercion of change is doubly painful, since he has no scheme of thought into which it can fit, and it means, therefore, the upturning of the foundations of his world. But the countryman, while he holds tenaciously his innermost beliefs, has a vast capacity for doing lip-service to principles which he does not understand. He sees that certain shibboleths command respect and bring material gain, so he glibly adopts them without allowing them for a moment to encroach upon the cherished arcana of his faith. Hence comes the apparent inconsistency of many simple folk. The Boer had a dozen principles which he would gladly sell to the highest bidder; but he had some hundreds of prejudices which he held dearer (almost) than life. His principles were European importations, democratic political dogmas, which he used to excellent purpose without caring or understanding, moral maxims which bore no relation to his own ragged and twisted ethics. The mild international morality which his leaders were wont to use as a reproach to Britain seems comically out of place when we reflect upon the high-handed international code, born of filibustering and Kaffir wars, which he found in the Scriptures and had long ago adopted for his own. His political confession of faith, which the framers of his constitution had borrowed from Europe and America, with its talk of representation and equal rights and delegated powers, contrasted oddly with the fierce individualism which was his innermost conviction, and the cabals and “spoils to the victor” policy which made up his daily practice. His religion had a like character. In its essentials it was the same which a generation or two ago held sway over Galloway peasants and Hebridean fishermen; but the results were very different. The stern hard-bitten souls who saw the devil in most of the works of God, and lived ever under a great Taskmaster’s eye, had no kinship with the easy-going sleek-lipped Boer piety. The Boer religion in practice was a judicious excerpt from the easier forms of Christianity, while its theory was used to buttress his self-sufficiency and mastery over weaker neighbours. His political creed may be stated shortly as a belief in his right to all new territories in which he set foot, his indefeasible right to control the native tribes in the way he thought best, a denial of all right of the State to interfere with him, but an assertion of the duty of the State to enrich him. To these cardinal articles liberty, equality, and fraternity were added as an elegant appendage before publication. So, too, in his religion: God made man of two colours, white and black, the former to rule the latter till the end of time; God led Israel out of Egypt and gave to them new lands for their inalienable heritage; any Egyptian who followed was the apportioned prey of the chosen people, and it was a duty to spoil him; this beneficent God must therefore be publicly recognised and frequently referred to in the speech of daily life, but in the case of the Elect considerable latitude may be allowed in the practice of the commandments, – such may fairly be taken as the ordinary unformulated Boer creed. But, as the statement was too short and bare, all the finer virtues had to be attached in public profession.

A countryman lives in a narrow world which he knows intimately, but beyond is an unexplored region which he knows of by hearsay and fears. He is not naturally suspicious. Among his fellows he is often confiding to a fault, and a little acquaintance with a dreaded object will often result in a revulsion to contempt. The Boer has in a peculiar degree this characteristic of rural peoples. He has an immense awe of an alien Power while he does not know it, but once let it commit itself to some weakness, and the absence of all mental perspective changes the exaggerated awe into an equally exaggerated condescension. This truth is written clear over the whole history of England in Africa. A lost battle, a political withdrawal, a wavering statesman, have had moral effects of incalculable significance. The burgher who opposed us with terror and despair became at the first gleam of success a screeching cock-of-the-walk, and this attitude, jealously fostered, obscured the world to him for the rest of his days. In our threats he saw bluster, in our kindness he read weakness, in our diplomacy folly; and he went out at last with the fullest confidence, which three years of misery have scarcely uprooted. This is one side of the parochial mind; the other is the suspicion which became his attitude to everything beyond his beacons. It is not the proverbial “slimness”; that graceful quality is merely the rustic cunning which he thought the foundation of business, a quality as common on Australian stock-runs and Scottish sheep-farms. His suspicion was his own peculiar possession, born of his history and his race, and, above all, of his intercourse with native tribes. He did not give his confidence readily, as who would if he believed that the world was in league against him? New ideas, new faces, new inventions were all put on his black list. Like Mr By-ends, he found his principles easy and profitable, and was resolved to stick to them. Two forces, however, tended to undermine his distrust. One was his intense practicality. If his principles ceased to be profitable, he was prepared, against the grain, to consider emendations. The second was his crude pleasure in novelties, the curious delight of a child in a mechanical toy. A musical box, a portrait of Mr Kruger which, when wound up, emitted the Volkslied, or the latest variety of mealie-crusher, were attractions which he had no power to resist.

At the root of all his traits lies a meagre imagination. In religion he turns the stupendous tales of Scripture into a parish chronicle, with God as a benevolent burgomaster and Moses and the prophets as glorified landrosts. In politics no Boer since President Burgers saw things with a large vision, and his rhetorical dreams were folly to his countrymen. The idea of a great Afrikander state, very vigorously held elsewhere in South Africa, had small hold on the ordinary population of the Republics, save upon sons of English fathers or mothers, half-educated journalists, and European officials. In the wars which he waged he saw little of the murky splendour which covers the horrors of death. The pageantry of the veld was nothing to him, and in the amenities of life he scarcely advanced beyond bare physical comfort. He had neither art nor literature. If we except Mr Reitz’s delightful verses, which at their happiest are translations of Burns and Scott, he had not even the songs which are commonly found among rural peoples. His nursery tales and his few superstitions were borrowed from the Kaffir. On one side only do we discern any trace of imaginative power. Somehow at the back of his soul was the love of the wilds and the open road – a call which, after years of settled life, had still power to stir the blood of the old hunter. He was not good at pictorial forecasts, but he had one retrospect stamped on his brain, and this hunger for old days was a spark of fire which kept warm a corner of his being.

The typical countryman he remains, typical in his limitations and the vices which followed them. The chief was his incurable mendacity. Truth-speaking is always a relative virtue, being to some men an easy habit, and to others of a livelier fancy a constant and strenuous effort. The Boer is not brutal, he is eminently law-abiding and sober, and kindly in most of the relations of life. He has the rustic looseness in sexual morals, and in the remoter farmhouses this looseness often took the form of much hideous and unnatural vice. But the cardinal fault, obvious to the most casual observer, is a contempt for truth in every guise. Masterful liars, who have held their own in most parts of the world, are vanquished by the systematic perjury of the veld. The habit is, no doubt, partly learned from the Kaffir, a fine natural professor of the art; but to its practice the Boer brought a stolid patience, an impassive countenance, and a limited imagination which kept him consistent. He bragged greatly, since to a solitary man with a high self-esteem this is the natural mode of emphasising his personality on the rare occasions when he mixes with his fellows. He lied in business for sound practical reasons. He lied at home by the tacit consent of his household. The truest way to outwit him, as many found, was to tell him the naked truth, since his suspicion saw in every man his own duplicity. But because he is a true countryman, when once he has proved a man literally truthful he will trust him with a pathetic simplicity. There were Englishmen in the land before the war, as there are Englishmen to-day, whose word to the Boer mind was an inviolable oath.

So far I have described the average Boer failings with all the unsympathetic plainness which a hostile observer could desire. But there is a very different side to which it is pleasant to turn. If he has the countryman’s faults strongly developed, he has also in a high degree the country virtues. Simplicity is not an unmixed blessing; but it is the mother of certain fine qualities, which are apt to be lost sight of by a sophisticated world. He could live bare and sleep hard when the need arose; and if he was sluggish in his daily life it was the indolence of the sleepy natural world and not the enervation of decadence. Because his needs were few he was supremely adaptable: a born pioneer, with his household gods in a waggon and his heart turning naturally to the wilds. The grandeur of nature was lost on him; but there is a certain charm in the way in which he brought all things inside the pale of his domesticity. His homely images have their own picturesqueness, as when he called the morning star, which summoned him to inspan, the voorlooper, or “little boy who leads out the oxen.” It is the converse of sublimity, and itself not unsublime. His rude dialect, almost as fine as lowland Scots for telling country stories, is full of metaphors, so to speak, in solution, often coarse, but always the fruit of direct and vigorous observation. In short, he had a personality which stands out simply in all his doings, making him a living clear-cut figure among the amorphous shades of the indoor life.

Wild tales and judicious management from Pretoria succeeded in combining him temporarily into a semblance of a state and a very formidable reality of an army; but at bottom he is the most dogmatic individualist in the world. His allegiance was never to a chief or a state, but to his family. The family was generously interpreted, so that distant relations came within its fold. This clannishness has not been sufficiently recognised; but it is a real social force, and of great importance to a survey of Boer society. In the country farms, with their system of bywoners, a whole cycle of relations lived, all depending upon the head of the household for their subsistence. When sons or daughters married they lived on in the homestead, and as their children grew up and married in turn they squatted on a corner of the farm. The system led to abuses, notably in the ridiculous subdivision of land and the endless servitudes and burdens imposed on real estate; but it relieved the community of any need for orphanages and workhouses. The Boer’s treatment of orphans does him much credit. However poor, a family would make room for orphaned children, and there was no distinction in their usage. It is a primitive virtue, a heritage from the days when white folk were few in numbers: a little family in the heart of savagery, bound together by a common origin and a common fear.

But his chief virtue was his old-fashioned hospitality. A stranger rarely knocked at his gates in vain. You arrived at a farmhouse and asked leave to outspan by the spruit. Permission was freely granted, and in a little girls came out with coffee for the travellers. An invitation to supper usually followed, and there is no better fare in the world than a chicken roasted by a Boer housewife and her home-made sausages. Then followed slow talk over deep-bowled pipes, and then good-night, with much handshaking and good wishes. And so all over the veld. The family might be wretchedly poor, but they dutifully and cheerfully gave what they had. In the early months of peace it was a common thing to come on a Boer family living in a hut of biscuit tins or a torn tent, with scanty rations and miserably ragged clothes. But those people, in most cases, set the little they had gladly before the stranger. The Boer, who will perjure himself deeply to save a shilling, will part with a pound’s worth of entertainment without a thought.

And, as a host, he has a natural dignity beyond praise. A placid life, backed by an overwhelming sense of worth, is a fine basis for good manners. Boastfulness and prejudice may come later, but the first impression is of an antique kindliness and ease. The veld has no nerves, no uneasy consciousness of inferiority, least of all the cringing friendliness of the low European. The farmer, believing in nothing beyond his ken, makes the stranger welcome as a harmless courier from a trivial world. No contrast can be more vivid than between the nervous, bustling cosmopolitans who throng the Rand and the silent veld-dwellers. The Boer type of countenance is not often handsome; frequently it is flat and expressionless, lustreless grey eyes with small pupils, and hair growing back from chin and lip. But it is almost always the embodiment of repose, and in the finer stock it sometimes reaches an archaic and patriarchal dignity. The same praise cannot be given to the jeunesse dorée of the Afrikander world, who acquired the smattering of an education and migrated to the towns. Ignorant, swaggering, mentally and bodily underbred, they form a distressing class of people who have somehow missed civilisation and hit upon the vulgarity of its decline. They claim glibly and falsely the virtues which their fathers possessed without advertisement. Much of the bad blood and spurious nationalism in the country comes from this crew, who, in partnership with the worst type of European adventurer, have done their best to discredit their nation. The true country Boer regards them much as the silent elder Mirabeau and Zachary Macaulay must have regarded their voluble sons – with considerable distrust, a little disfavour, and not a little secret admiration for a trick which has no place in his world.

Understanding is the only basis of a policy towards this remarkable section of our fellow-citizens – understanding, and a decent abstinence from subtleties. We used to flatter our souls that we created our Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness, and in all our troubles convinced ourselves that we were destined to “muddle through.” But there are limits to this policy of serene trust in Providence, and it is rather our duty to thank God we have taken so few falls, and brace our minds to forethought and prudence. The Boer is the easiest creature in the world to govern. He is naturally law-abiding, and he has an enormous respect for the accomplished fact. True union may take long, but the nominal amalgamation which is necessary for smooth government already exists. We must understand how slow he is to learn, how deep his pride is, how lively his suspicions. Spiritually he will be a slow pupil, but with proper care politically he may be a ready learner. He has a curiously acute sense of justice, which makes him grumble at compulsion, but obey, and end by applauding. He is also quick to realise what is competent and successful in administration. He will give everything a fair trial, waiting, watching, and forming his slow mind; and if a thing is a practical fiasco, he will laugh at it in the end. The practical is the last touchstone for him. He is not easily made drunk with the ideals of ordinary democracy; an efficient government, however naked of adornments, will always command his respect, and the fool, though buttressed with every sublime aspiration, will find him adamant. To a government which can estimate the situation soberly and face it manfully he is a simple problem. But he will be a hard critic of weakness, and when once his laggard opinions are formed it will be a giant’s task to shake them. The war has broken his old arrogance, and he now waits to make up his mind on the new régime. We shall get justice from him from the start – laborious justice and nothing more. If we fail, all the honesty of purpose on earth will not save us; for to the Boer good intentions may preserve a man’s soul in another world, but they cannot excuse him in this one. There is much practical truth in Bunyan’s parable when he makes Old Honest come “from the town of Stupidity,” which town “lieth four degrees beyond the City of Destruction.”

If the Boer is once won to our side we shall have secured one of the greatest colonising forces in the world. We can ask for no better dwellers upon a frontier. If the plateaux of our Central and East African possessions are to be permanently held by the white man, I believe it will be by this people who have never turned their back upon a country which seemed to promise good pasture-land. Other races send forth casual pioneers, who return and report and then go elsewhere; but the Boer takes his wife and family and all his belongings, and in a decade is part of the soil. In the midst of any savagery he will plant his rude domesticity, and the land is won. With all her colonising activity, Britain can ill afford to lose from her flag a force so masterful, persistent, and sure.

PART II.

NOTES OF TRAVEL

CHAPTER VI.

EVENING ON THE HIGH VELD

We leave the broken highway, channelled by rains and rutted by ox-waggons, and plunge into the leafy coolness of a great wood. Great in circumference only, for the blue gums and pines and mimosa-bushes are scarcely six years old, though the feathery leafage and the frequency of planting make a thicket of the young trees. The rides are broad and grassy as an English holt, dipping into hollows, climbing steep ridges, and showing at intervals little side-alleys, ending in green hills, with the accompaniment everywhere of the spicy smell of gums and the deep rooty fragrance of pines. Sometimes all alien woodland ceases, and we ride through aisles of fine trees, which have nothing save height to distinguish them from Rannoch or Rothiemurchus. A deer looks shyly out, which might be a roebuck; the cooing of doves, the tap of a woodpecker, even the hawk above in the blue heavens, have nothing strange. Only an occasional widow-bird with its ridiculous flight, an ant-heap to stumble over, and a clump of scarlet veld-flowers are there to mark the distinction. Here we have the sign visible of man’s conquest over the soil, and of the real adaptability of the land. With care and money great tracts of the high-veld might change their character. An English country-house, with deer-park and coverts and fish-ponds, could be created here and in many kindred places, where the owner might forget his continent. And in time this will happen. As the rich man pushes farther out from the city for his home, he will remake the most complaisant of countries to suit his taste, and, save for climate and a certain ineradicable flora and fauna, patches of Surrey and Perthshire will appear on this kindly soil.