Impressions of South Africa Part 16

CHAPTER XXII

MISSIONS

The strength and vitality of a race, and its power of holding its own in the world, depend less on the quickness of its intelligence than on the solidity of its character. Its character depends upon the moral ideas which govern its life, and on the habits in which those ideas take shape; and these, in their turn, depend very largely upon the conceptions which the race has formed of religion, and on the influence that religion has over it. This is especially true of peoples in the earlier stages of civilization. Their social virtues, the beliefs and principles which hold them together and influence their conduct, rest upon and are shaped by their beliefs regarding the invisible world and its forces. Races in which religious ideas are vague and feeble seldom attain to a vigorous national life, because they want one of the most effective bonds of cohesion and some of the strongest motives that rule conduct. It may doubtless be said that the religion of a people is as much an effect as a cause, or, in other words, that the finer or poorer quality of a race is seen in the sort of religion it makes for itself, the higher races producing n.o.bler religious ideas and more impressive mythologies, just as they produce richer and more expressive languages.

Nevertheless, it remains true that a religion, once formed, becomes a potent factor in the future strength and progress of a people. Now the religious ideas of the Bantu races, as of other negroes, have been scanty, poor, and unfruitful. And accordingly, one cannot meditate upon their condition and endeavour to forecast their progress without giving some thought to the influence which better ideas, and especially those embodied in Christianity, may have upon them.

Neither the Kafirs nor the Hottentots have had a religion in our sense of the word. They had no deities, no priesthood, no regular forms of worship. They were, when Europeans discovered them, still in the stage in which most, if not all, primitive races would seem to have once been--that of fearing and seeking to propitiate nature spirits and the ghosts of the dead, a form of superst.i.tion in which there was scarcely a trace of morality. Hence the first task of the missionaries who came among them was to create a religious sense, to give them the conception of an omnipotent spiritual power outside natural objects and above man, and to make them regard this power as the source of moral ideas and the author of moral commands. To do this has been a difficult task.

Besides this constructive work, which was less needed in some other more advanced heathen races, the missionaries had also a destructive work to do. Though the Kafirs had no religion, they had a mult.i.tude of superst.i.tious rites and usages closely intertwined with the whole of their life and with what one may call their political system. These usages were so repugnant to Christian morality, and often to common decency, that it became necessary to attack them and to require the convert to renounce them altogether. Renunciation, however, meant a severance from the life of the tribe, contempt and displeasure from the tribesmen, and possibly the loss of tribal rights. These were evils which it required courage and conviction to face, nor had the missionary any temporal benefits to offer by way of compensation. There was, however, very little direct persecution, because there were no G.o.ds who would be incensed, and the witch-doctors were less formidable opponents than a regular priesthood would have been. The chiefs were often friendly, for they recognized the value of missionary knowledge and counsel. Even the ferocious Mosilikatze showed kindness to Robert Moffat, and Livingstone complained far more of the Boers than he ever did of Kafir enemies. Lo Bengula protected the missionaries: Gungunhana listened, and made his chiefs listen, to their discourses, though his nearest approach to conversion was his expression of detestation for Judas Iscariot. But it rarely befell that a chief himself accepted Christianity, which would have meant, among other things, the departure of all his wives but one, and possibly the loss of his hold upon his tribe. All these things being considered, it need excite no surprise that the Gospel should have made comparatively little progress among the wild or tribal Kafirs.

It has been preached to them for nearly a century, by German (chiefly, I think, Moravian) and French, as well as by English, Scottish, and American missionaries. At present there are not a few British societies and denominations in the field. The French Protestants have done some excellent work, especially in Basutoland, and have also stations near the east coast and on the Upper Zambesi. There are also French Roman Catholic missions, mostly in the hands of Jesuit fathers, many of whom are men of learning and ability. Between the Roman Catholics, the Protestant Episcopalians (Church of England), and the missionaries of the English Nonconformists and Scottish or French Presbyterians there is little intercourse and no co-operation. Here, as in other mission fields, this absence of intercourse and sympathy puzzles the native. I was told of an English (Protestant Episcopal) clergyman who made it one of his prime objects to warn the Kafirs against attending the services of the French Protestant missionaries, whom he apparently regarded as outside the pale of the true Church. In the Boer Republics there are fewer missions in proportion to the number of natives than in British territories; but no district, except the deserts of the west, seems to be wholly unprovided for, and in some cases stations have been pushed far beyond the limits of European administration, as, for instance, among the Barotse, who dwell north of the Upper Zambesi. The native congregations are usually small, and the careers of the converts not always satisfactory. This is so natural that it is odd to find Europeans, and most conspicuously those whose own life is not a model of Christian morality, continually growling and sneering at the missionaries because their converts do not all turn out saints. The savage is unstable in character, and baptism does not necessarily extinguish either his old habits or the hold which native superst.i.tions have upon him. It is in this instability of his will, and his p.r.o.neness to yield to drink or some other temptation, rather than in his intellect, that the weakness of the savage lies. And a man with hundreds of generations of savagery behind him is still, and must be, in many respects a savage, even though he reads and writes, and wears European clothes, and possibly even a white necktie. The Kafirs are not such bad Christians as the Frankish warriors were for two or three generations after the conversion of Clovis. We must wait for several generations before we can judge fairly of the influence of his new religion upon the mind of a Kafir whose ancestors had no religion at all, and were ruled by the lowest forms of superst.i.tion.

These facts are better recognized by the missionaries to-day than they were sixty years ago, and they have in consequence made some changes in their methods. They are no longer so anxious to baptize, or so apt to reckon success by the number of their converts. They are more cautious in ordaining native pastors. The aid of such pastors is indispensable, but the importance of the example which the native preacher or teacher sets makes it necessary to be careful in selection. The dogma of the equality of the black man and the white, which was warmly insisted on in the old days, and often roused the wrath of the Boers, has now been silently dropped. It was a dogma wholesome to inculcate so far as equality of protection was concerned, but its wider application led the early philanthropists of South Africa, as it led their excellent contemporaries, the Abolitionists of America, to some strange conclusions. Perceiving that other influences ought to go hand in hand with religion in helping the natives forward, the missionaries now devote themselves more than formerly to secular instruction, and endeavour to train the people to habits of industry. The work of education is indeed entirely in their hands. Special mention is due to one admirable inst.i.tution, that which was founded by the Free Church of Scotland at Lovedale, in the Eastern Province, not far from King William's Town, nearly fifty years ago. Conducted on wholly non-sectarian lines, it receives coloured people, together with some whites, not only from the Colony, but from all parts of Africa--there are even Galla boys from the borders of Abyssinia in it--and gives an excellent education, fitting young men and women not only for the native ministry, but for the professions: and it is admitted even by those who are least friendly to missionary work to have rendered immense services to the natives. I visited it, and was greatly struck by the tone and spirit which seemed to pervade it, a spirit whose results are seen in the character and careers of many among its graduates. A race in the present condition of the Kafirs needs nothing more than the creation of a body of intelligent and educated persons of its own blood, who are able to enter into the difficulties of their humbler kinsfolk and guide them wisely. Dr. Stewart, who has directed the inst.i.tution for many years, possesses that best kind of missionary temperament, in which a hopeful spirit and an inexhaustible sympathy are balanced by Scottish shrewdness and a cool judgment.

One of the greatest among the difficulties which confront the missionaries is to know how to deal with polygamy, a practice deeply rooted in Kafir life. A visitor from Europe is at first surprised to find how seriously they regard it, and asks whether the example of the worthies of the Old Testament does not make it hard for them to refuse baptism to the native who seeks it, though he has more than one wife.

The clergy of the Church of England, however, and those of the French Protestant Church--and I think other missionaries also--are unanimous in holding that, although they may properly admit a polygamist as a catechumen, they should not baptize such a one; and they say that the native pastors hold this view even more strongly than they do themselves. Polygamy is so bound up with heathen customs, and exerts, in their view, so entirely baneful an influence upon native society, that it must be at all hazards resisted and condemned.[70] One is reminded of the Neoplatonic philosophers, the last professors of the Platonic academy at Athens, who in the sixth century of our era sought an asylum from Christian persecution at the court of Chosroes Anurshirwan, in Persia. They forced themselves to tolerate the other usages of the people among whom they came, but polygamy was too much for them, and rather than dwell among those who practised it, they returned to the unfriendly soil of the Roman Empire.

The missionaries, and especially those of the London Missionary Society, played at one time a much more prominent part in politics than they now sustain. Within and on the borders of Cape Colony they were, for the first sixty years of the present century, the leading champions of the natives, and as they enjoyed the support of an active body of opinion in England and Scotland, they had much influence in Parliament and with the Colonial Office. Outside the Colony they were often the princ.i.p.al advisers of the native chiefs (as their brethren were at the same time in the islands of the Pacific), and held a place not unlike that of the bishops in Gaul in the fifth century of our era. Since, in advocating the cause of the natives, they had often to complain of the behaviour of the whites, and since, whenever a chief came into collision with the emigrant Boers or with colonial frontiersmen, they became the channel by which the chief stated his case to the British Government, they incurred the bitter hostility of the emigrant Boers and some dislike even in the Colony. To this old cause much of the unpopularity that still attaches to them seems due. Unpopular they certainly are. They are reproached with the paucity of their converts, and that by white men whose own treatment of the Kafirs might well make the white man's religion odious to a native. They are also accused of abusing their position to enrich themselves by trade with the Kafirs. This abuse has sometimes occurred, and clearly ought to be checked by the home societies. But probably it does not disgust the wandering white trader any more than the fact that the missionary often warns the native against the exorbitant prices which the trader demands for his goods. They are blamed for making the converted Kafir uppish, and telling him that he is as good as a white man, an offence which has no doubt been often committed. A graver allegation, to which Mr. Theal has given some countenance in his historical writings, is that they used to bring groundless or exaggerated charges against the Boer farmers, and always sided with the natives, whatever the merits of the case. I do not venture to p.r.o.nounce on the truth of this allegation, which it would take much time and labour to sift. As there have been some few missionaries whose demeanour was not creditable to their profession, so there have doubtless been instances in which partisan ardour betrayed them into exaggerations. But whosoever remembers that but for the missionaries the natives would have lacked all local protection, and that it was only through the missionaries that news of injustice or cruelty practised on a native could reach the ears of the British Government, will look leniently on the errors of honest zeal, and will rejoice that ministers of religion were found to champion the cause of the weaker race and keep the home Government alive to a sense of one of its first duties.

Notwithstanding the slowness of the progress. .h.i.therto made, the extinction of heathenism in South Africa may be deemed certain, and certain at no distant date. There is here no ancient and highly organized system of beliefs and doctrines, such as Hinduism and Islam are in India, to resist the solvent power which European civilisation exerts. In forty years there will probably be no more pagan rites practised in Cape Colony. In eighty years there will be none in Matabililand, or perhaps even sooner, if the gold-reefs turn out well; for though a mining-camp is not a school of Christianity, it is a destroyer of paganism. Already I found, in traversing Mashonaland, that the poor ghosts were ceasing to receive their wonted offerings of native beer.

What will happen when heathenism and the tribal system have vanished away? Such morality, such principles of manly conduct as the natives now have, are bound up with their ghost-worship and still more with their tribal system, which prescribes loyalty to the chief, courage in war, devotion to the interests of the tribe or clan. When these principles have disappeared along with the tribal organization, some other principles, some other standard of duty and precepts of conduct, ought to be at hand to replace them. Where are such precepts to be found, and whence are the motives and emotions to be drawn which will give the new precepts a power to command the will? Although the Kafirs have shown rather less apt.i.tude for a.s.similating Christian teaching than some other savage races have done, there is nothing in the experience of the missions to discourage the hope that such teaching may come to prevail among them, and that through it each generation may show a slight moral advance upon that which has gone before. As the profession of Christianity will create a certain link between the Kafirs and their rulers which may soften the asperity which the relations of the two races now wear, so its doctrines will in time give them a standard of conduct similar to that accepted among the whites, and an ideal which will influence the superior minds among them. So much may certainly be said: that the Gospel and the mission schools are at present the most truly civilizing influences which work upon the natives, and that upon these influences, more than on any other agency, does the progress of the coloured race depend.

[Footnote 70: After listening to their arguments, I did not venture to doubt that they were right.]

CHAPTER XXIII

SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TWO BRITISH COLONIES

The two South African Colonies have not yet had time to develop new and distinctive types of life and character. Though Cape Colony is nearly as old as Ma.s.sachusetts or Virginia, it has been less than a century under British rule, and the two diverse elements in its population have not yet become blent into any one type that can be said to belong to the people as a whole. One must therefore describe these elements separately. The Dutch are almost all country folk, and the country folk are (in Cape Colony) mostly Dutch. Some, especially near Cape Town, are agriculturists, but many more are ranchmen or sheep-masters. They are a slow, quiet, well-meaning hospitable people, extremely conservative in their opinions as well as their habits, very sparing, because they have little ready money, very suspicious, because afraid of being out-witted by the English traders, and many of them so old-fashioned in their theory of the universe as to object to legislation against sheep scab, because they regard it as a visitation of Providence, to be combated only by repentance and not by ordinary human means. The women are usually ill-educated and often unattractive; but they have strong characters. Nothing was more remarkable in the wars of the emigrant Boers against the Kafirs than the courage and devotion which the women displayed. That love of cleanliness for which their kinsfolk in Holland are famous has vanished under the conditions of a settler's life and the practice of using negro servants, and they are now apt to be slatternly.

These country folk live in a simple, old-fashioned way, loving solitude and isolation, yet very hospitable, and enjoying the rare occasions on which they meet for festivities at one another's farmhouses. Such meetings are almost their only recreations, for hunting is less attainable now that the larger game has disappeared, and they care nothing for the intellectual pleasures of reading or art or music.

Education is beginning to spread among them, but it has not yet done much to quicken their minds or give them new interests. The population is so extremely thin, the towns so few and so small, that it is not surprising that a people who came out from the least educated strata of society in Holland should, under the difficult conditions of a settler's life, have remained at a low level of mental culture. They would probably have been still more backward, and have produced fewer men of ability, but for the infusion of French Huguenot blood, which still proclaims itself in the names of some of the leading families.

Compared to the Dutch, the English are recent immigrants. They have all arrived within the present century, and few of them can point to grandfathers born in South Africa. Partly for this reason, partly from their desire to be unlike the Dutch, they have remained markedly English, both in their speech, in their ideas, and, so far as the differences of climate permit, in their way of life. Nevertheless, they have been affected by the Dutch. They have taken from the latter the aversion to field labour, the contempt for the blacks, the tendency to prefer large pastoral farms to agriculture, and, in some districts, a rather sleepy and easy-going temperament. Even in Mashonaland I was told that the English ranchmen were apt to fall into the habits of their Boer neighbours. They form the large majority of the town population, for not only the seaports, but also such inland places as Graham's Town, King William's Town, and Kimberley are quite English, and nearly all the commerce and finance of the country are in their hands. They have more enterprise than the Dutch, and are much less antiquated in their ideas, so it is to them that the profits of the new mining ventures have chiefly fallen, so far as these have not been appropriated by keener and more ingenious adventurers from Europe, mostly of Semitic stock.

There has been hardly any Irish immigration; and though one meets many Scotchmen among the bankers and merchants, the Scottish element seems smaller than in Ontario or most of the Australasian Colonies. Many settlers have come from Germany, but these have now become blended with the English. There are no better colonists than the Germans; and indeed the Europeans whom the last ninety years have brought have been mostly of excellent stocks, superior to the mid-European races that have lately inundated the United States.

Though the English and the Dutch form distinct social elements which are not yet fused, and though these elements are now politically opposed, there is no social antagonism between the races. The Englishman will deride the slowness of the Dutchman, the Dutchman may distrust the adroitness or fear the activity of the Englishman, but neither dislikes nor avoids the other. Neither enjoys, or even pretends to, any social superiority, and hence neither objects to marry his son or his daughter to a member of the other race. Both are, as a rule, in fairly easy circ.u.mstances; that is to say, nearly everybody has enough, and till lately hardly anybody had more than enough. Within the last few years, however, two changes have come. The diamond mines and the gold-mines have given vast riches to a small number of persons, some half-dozen or less of whom continue to live in the Colony, while the others have returned to Europe. These great fortunes are a disturbing element, giving an undue influence to their possessors, and exciting the envy or emulation of the mult.i.tude. The other change is the growth of a cla.s.s of people resembling the "mean whites" of the Southern States of America, loafers and other lazy or shiftless fellows who hang about and will not take to any regular work. I heard them described and deplored as a new phenomenon, but gather that they are not yet numerous. Their appearance, it is to be feared, is the natural result of that contempt for hard unskilled labour which the existence of slavery inspired in the whites; and they may hereafter const.i.tute, as they now do in the Southern States of America, the section of the population specially hostile to the negro, and therefore dangerous to the whole community.

To an Englishman or American who knows how rapidly his language has become the language of commerce over the world; how it has almost extinguished the ancient Celtic tongues in Scotland and Ireland; how quickly in the United States it has driven Spanish out of the South West, and has come to be spoken by the German, Scandinavian, and Slavonic immigrants whom that country receives, it is surprising to find that Dutch holds its ground stubbornly in South Africa. It is still the ordinary language of probably one-half of the people of Cape Colony (although most of these can speak some English) and of three-fourths of those in the Orange Free State, though of a minority in Natal.

Englishmen settling in the interior usually learn it for the sake of talking to their Dutch neighbours, who are slow to learn English; and English children learn it from the coloured people, for the coloured people talk it far more generally than they do English; in fact, when a native (except in one of the coast towns) speaks a European tongue, that tongue is sure to be Dutch. Good observers told me that although an increasing number of the Africanders (_i.e._, colonists born in Africa) of Dutch origin now understand English, the hold of Dutch is so strong that it will probably continue to be spoken in the Colony for two generations at least. Though one must call it Dutch, it differs widely from the cultivated Dutch of Holland, having not only preserved some features of that language as spoken two centuries ago, but having adopted many Kafir or Hottentot words, and having become vulgarized into a dialect called the Taal, which is almost incapable of expressing abstract thought or being a vehicle for any ideas beyond those of daily life. In fact, many of the Boers, especially in the Transvaal, cannot understand a modern Dutch book, hardly even an Amsterdam newspaper. This defect might give English a great advantage if the Boers wished to express abstract ideas. But they have not this wish, for they have no abstract ideas to express. They are a people who live in the concrete.

The rise of great fortunes, which I have noted, has been too recent and too exceptional a phenomenon to have affected the generally tranquil and even tenor of South African social life. Among both Dutch and English months and years flow smoothly on. Few new immigrants enter the rural districts or the smaller towns; few new enterprises are started; few ambitions or excitements stir the minds of the people. The Wit.w.a.tersrand gold-field is, of course, a startling exception, but it is an exception which tends to perpetuate the rule, for, by drawing off the more eager and restless spirits, it has left the older parts of both the Colonies more placid than ever. The general equality of conditions has produced a freedom from a.s.sumption on the one hand, and from servility on the other, and, indeed, a general absence of sn.o.bbishness, which is quite refreshing to the European visitor. Manners are simple, and being simple, they are good. If there is less polish than in some countries, there is an unaffected heartiness and kindliness. The Dutch have a sense of personal dignity which respects the dignity of their fellows, and which expresses itself in direct and natural forms of address. An experienced observer dilated to me on the high level of decorum maintained in the Cape Parliament, where scenes of disorder are, I believe, unknown, and violent language is rare. One expects to find in all Colonies a sense of equality and an element of _sans gene_ in social intercourse. But one usually finds also more roughness and more of an off-hand, impatient way of treating strangers than is visible in South Africa. This may be partly due to the fact that people are not in such a hurry as they are in most new countries. They have plenty of time for everything. The climate disinclines them to active exertion. There is little immigration. Trade, except in the four seaports,[71] is not brisk, and even there it is not brisk in the American sense of the word.

The slackness of the black population, which has to be employed for the harder kinds of work, reacts upon the white employer. I have visited no new English-speaking country where one so little felt the strain and stress of modern life. This feature of South African society, though it implies a slow material development, is very agreeable to the visitor, and I doubt if it be really an injury to the ultimate progress of the country. In most parts of North America, possibly in Australia also, industrial development has been too rapid, and has induced a nervous excitability and eager restlessness of temper from which South Africa is free. Of course, in saying this, I except always the mining districts, and especially the Wit.w.a.tersrand, which is to the full as restless and as active as San Francisco or Melbourne.

The comparative ease of life disposes the English part of the population to athletic sports, which are pursued with almost as much avidity as in Australia. Even one who thinks that in England the pa.s.sion for them has gone beyond all reasonable limits, and has become a serious injury to education and to the taste for intellectual pleasures, may find in the character of the climate a justification for the devotion to cricket, in particular, which strikes him in South Africa. Now that the wild animals have become scarce, hunting cannot be pursued as it once was, and young people would have little incitement to physical exertion in the open air did not the English love of cricket flourish in the schools and colleges. Long may it flourish!

The social conditions I have been describing are evidently unfavourable to the development of literature or science or art. Art has scarcely begun to exist. Science is represented only by a few naturalists in Government employment, and by some intelligent amateur observers.

Researches in electricity or chemistry or biology require nowadays a somewhat elaborate apparatus, with which few private persons could provide themselves, and which are here possessed only by one or two public inst.i.tutions. English and American writers have hitherto supplied the intellectual needs of the people, and the established reputation of writers in those countries makes compet.i.tion difficult to a new colonial author. The towns are too small, and their inhabitants too much occupied in commerce to create groups of highly educated people, capable of polishing, whetting, and stimulating one another's intellects. There are few large libraries, and no fully equipped university to train young men in history or philosophy or economics or theology. Accordingly, few books are composed or published, and, so far as I know, only three South African writers have caught the ear of the European public. One of these was Robert Pringle, a Scotchman, whose poems, written sixty or seventy years ago, possess considerable merit, and one of which, beginning with the line,

Afar in the desert I love to ride,

remains the most striking picture of South African nature in those early days when the wilderness was still filled with wild creatures. Another, Miss Olive Schreiner (now Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner), has attained deserved fame. A third, Mr. Scully, is less known in England, but his little volume of _Kafir Tales_ is marked by much graphic power and shows insight into native character.

These three writers, and indeed all the writers of merit, belong to the English or Anglified section of the population. The Dutch section is practically disqualified by its language (which, be it remembered, is not the language of Holland, but a debased dialect) from literary composition, even were it otherwise disposed to authorship. Literature will always, I think, remain English in character, bearing few or no traces of the Dutch element in the people. But otherwise things are likely to change in a few years. The conditions which have been described as unfavourable to intellectual production are not necessarily permanent, and the time will probably come when the Europeans of South Africa will emulate their kinsfolk at home or in North America in literary and artistic fertility. The materials for imaginative work, whether in poetry or in prose, lie ready to their hand. The scenery deserves some great native landscape-painter, and such a genius will, no doubt, one day arise.

Journalism has now everywhere become, in point of quant.i.ty, the most important part of literature. The South African newspapers impress a visitor favourably. Several of them are written with great ability, and they were in 1895 comparatively free from that violence of invective, that tawdriness of rhetoric, and that p.r.o.neness to fill their columns with criminal intelligence which are apt to be charged against the press in some other new countries. No journal seems to exert so great a political power as is wielded by several of the Australian dailies. As might be expected, the Press is chiefly English, that language having sixty-one papers, against seventeen printed in Dutch and twenty-three in both languages.

Although the dispersion of the small European population over an exceedingly wide area makes it difficult to provide elementary schools everywhere,[72] education is, among the whites, well cared for, and in some regions, such as the Orange Free State, the Boer element is just as eager for it as is the English. Neither are efficient secondary schools wanting. That which is wanting, that which is urgently needed to crown the educational edifice, is a properly equipped teaching university.

There are several colleges which provide lectures,[73] and the Cape University holds examinations and confers degrees; but to erect over these colleges a true university with an adequate teaching staff seems to be as difficult an enterprise at the Cape as it has proved to be in London, where thirteen years had to be spent in efforts, not successful till 1898, to establish a teaching university. It is strange to find that in a new country, where the different religious bodies live on good terms with one another, one of the chief obstacles in the way is the reluctance of two of the existing colleges, which have a denominational character, to have an inst.i.tution superior to them set up by the State.

The other obstacles are the rivalry of the eastern province with the western, in which, at Cape Town, the natural seat of a university would be found, and the apathy or aversion of the Dutch section of the people.

Some of them do not care to spend public money for a purpose whose value they cannot be made to understand. Others, knowing that a university would necessarily be mainly in English hands and give instruction of an English type, fear to establish what would become another Anglifying influence. Thus several small colleges go on, each with inadequate resources, and the Cape youth who desires to obtain a first-rate education is obliged to go to Europe for it. He cannot even get a full course of legal instruction, for there is no complete law school. It is no doubt well that a certain number of young men should go to Europe and there acquire a first-hand knowledge of the ideas and habits of the Old World; but many who cannot afford the luxury of a European journey and residence remain without the kind of instruction to which their natural gifts ent.i.tle them, and the intellectual progress of the country suffers. Were Cape Colony somewhere in the United States, a millionaire would forthwith step in, build a new university, and endow it with a few millions of dollars. But South Africa is only just beginning to produce great fortunes; so the best hope is that some enlightened and tactful statesman may, by disarming the suspicions and allaying the jealousies I have described, succeed in uniting the existing colleges, and add to their scanty revenues an adequate Government grant. This may possibly be effected. But the jealousies and ambitions which those who control an inst.i.tution feel for it are often quite as tenacious as is the selfishness of men where their own pockets are concerned; and since these jealousies disguise themselves under a cloak of disinterestedness, it is all the more hard to overcome them by the pressure of public opinion.

One other intellectual force remains to be mentioned--that of the churches. In the two British Colonies no religious body receives special State recognition or any grants from the State.[74] All are on an equal footing, just as in Australia and in North America. In the two Boer Republics the Dutch Reformed Church is in a certain sense the State church. In the Transvaal it is recognized as such by the Grondwet ("Fundamental Law"), and receives a Government subvention. In that Republic members of other churches were at one time excluded from the suffrage and from all public offices, and even now Roman Catholics are under some disability. In the Orange Free State the Dutch Reformed Church receives public aid, but I think this is given, to a smaller extent, to some other denominations also, and no legal inequalities based on religion exist. In these two Republics nearly the whole of the Boer population, and in the Free State a part even of the English population, belong to the Dutch Reformed communion, which is Presbyterian in government and Calvinistic in theology. In the British Colonies the Protestant Episcopal Church (Church of England) comes next after the Dutch Reformed, which is much the strongest denomination; but the Wesleyans are also an important body; and there are, of course, also Congregational and Baptist churches. The Presbyterians seem to be less numerous (in proportion to the population) than in Canada or Australia, not merely because the Scottish element is less numerous, but also because many of the Scottish settlers joined the Dutch Reformed Church as being akin to their own in polity and doctrine. The comparative paucity of Roman Catholics is due to the paucity of Irish immigrants.[75] These bodies live in perfect harmony and good feeling one with another, all frankly accepting the principle of equality, none claiming any social pre-eminence, and none, so far as I could learn, attempting to interfere in politics. Both the bishops and the clergy of the Church of England (among whom there are many gifted men) are, with few exceptions, of marked High-church proclivities, which, however, do not appear to prevail equally among the laity. The Dutch Reformed Church has been troubled by doubts as to the orthodoxy of many of its younger pastors who have been educated at Leyden or Utrecht, and for a time it preferred to send candidates for the ministry to be trained at Edinburgh, whose theological schools inspired less distrust. It is itself in its turn distrusted, apparently without reason, by the still more rigid Calvinists of the Transvaal.

One curious feature of South African society remains to be mentioned, which impressed me the more the longer I remained in the country. The upper stratum of that society, consisting of the well-to-do and best educated people, is naturally small, because the whole white population of the towns is small, there being only four towns that have more than ten thousand white residents. But this little society is virtually one society, though dispersed in spots hundreds of miles from one another.

Natal stands rather apart, and has very little to do either socially or in the way of business with Cape Colony, and not a great deal even with the Transvaal. So too the four or five towns of the eastern province of Cape Colony form a group somewhat detached, and though the "best people"

in each of them know all about the "best people" in Cape Town, they are not in close touch with the latter. But Cape Town, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, the five most important places (excluding the Natal towns), are for social purposes almost one city, though it is six hundred and fifty miles from Cape Town to Kimberley, and one thousand miles from Cape Town to Johannesburg. All the persons of consequence in these places know one another and follow one another's doings. All mix frequently, because the Cape Town people are apt to be called by business to the inland cities, and the residents of the inland cities come to Cape Town for sea air in the summer, or to embark thence for Europe. Where distances are great, men think little of long journeys, and the fact that Cape Town is practically the one port of entrance and departure for the interior, so far as pa.s.sengers are concerned, keeps it in constant relations with the leading men of the interior, and gives a sort of unity to the upper society of the whole country, which finds few parallels in any other part of the world.

Johannesburg and Cape Town in particular are, for social purposes, in closer touch with each other than Liverpool is with Manchester or New York with Philadelphia. When one turns to the map it looks a long way from the Cape to the Wit.w.a.tersrand; but between these places most of the country is a desert, and there is only one spot, Bloemfontein, that deserves to be called a town. So I will once more beg the reader to remember that though South Africa is more than half as large as Europe, it is, measured by population, a very small country.

[Footnote 71: Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London and Durban.]

[Footnote 72: In Cape Colony 28.82 of the male and 28.02 of the female population could not (census of 1891) read or write.]

[Footnote 73: Five colleges receive Government grants.]

[Footnote 74: The small grant for religious purposes made in Cape Colony was in 1895 being reduced, and was to expire shortly.]

[Footnote 75: The census of 1891 gives the numbers as follows: Dutch Reformed Church, 306,000; Church of England, 139,000; Wesleyans, 106,000; Congregationalists, 69,000; Presbyterians, 37,000; Roman Catholics, 17,000; Mohammedans, 15,000.]

CHAPTER XXIV

POLITICS IN THE TWO BRITISH COLONIES

The circ.u.mstances of the two South African Colonies are so dissimilar from those of the British Colonies in North America and in Australasia as to have impressed upon their politics a very different character. I do not propose to describe the present political situation, for it may change at any moment. It is only of the permanent causes which give their colour to the questions and the movements of the country that I shall speak, and that concisely.

The frame of government is, in Cape Colony as well as in Natal, essentially the same as in the other self-governing British Colonies.

There is a Governor, appointed by the home Government, and responsible to it only, who plays the part which belongs to the Crown in Great Britain. He is the nominal head of the executive, summoning and proroguing the Legislature, appointing and dismissing ministers, and exercising, upon the advice of his ministers, the prerogative of pardon.