Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  The native races south of the Zambesi present a curious problem to the student of primitive societies. All, or nearly all, of kindred race, they are not autochthonous, and the date of their arrival in the country can in most cases be fixed within the last five centuries. Five centuries do not give a long title to a country, as savage titles go, but even this period must be cut down in most cases, since the wars of the great Zulu kings scattered the other races about as from a pepper-box, with the result that few tribes save the Zulus, some of the Cape Colony Kaffirs, the Swazis, and small peoples like the Barolongs, can claim an occupation title of more than a hundred years. This state of affairs, so rare in our dealings with savage peoples, has, politically, both merits and defects. The absence of the autochthonous hold of the soil and of long-settled immovable traditions of tribal life makes the native more malleable under the forces of civilisation. It is easier to break up the tribes and to acclimatise the Kaffir to new localities and new conditions. But this lack of a strong, settled, racial life makes it fatally easy for him to fall a victim to the vices of civilisation, and to come upon our hands as a derelict creature without faith or stamina, having lost his old taboos, and being as yet unable to understand the laws of the white man. This process of disintegration has been going on for a century, and the result is a clearly marked division. We have the tribal natives, who are still more or less strictly under the rule of a chief, and subject to tribal laws sanctioned and enforced by the Governments. The native population of the Transkeian territories in Cape Colony, such as the Pondos, the Amaxosas, and the Tembus; Bechuanaland, with the people of Khama, Bathoen, Sebele, and Linchwe; Basutoland; Zululand; the northern and eastern parts of the Transvaal under such chiefs as Magata, ‘Mpefu, and Siwasa; Swaziland; and the Matabele and Mashona tribes of the vast districts of Northern and Southern Rhodesia are the main instances of this first class. The aim of the different Governments has always been to keep the tribal organisation intact, and, after eliminating certain tribal laws and customs which are inconsistent with the ideas of white men, to give their sanction to the remainder. Basutoland is a Crown colony; the Transkeian territories are a native reserve; Bechuanaland is a native protectorate; in Rhodesia a number of native chiefs control large tracts of land under the Chartered Company’s administration. Elsewhere the tribes live in Government reserves, or in certain cases in locations situated on private land. Between Pretoria and the Limpopo there are dozens of small chieftains and chieftainesses, with tribes varying in numbers from a hundred to several thousands. The second class, the detribalised natives, are to be found scattered over the whole country, notably in the western province of Cape Colony, and in the vicinity of all South African towns. They live as a rule in locations under municipal or Government supervision. In many cases such locations are far larger than those of a small chief; but their distinguishing feature is that they are governed solely by the law of the country or by municipal regulations framed for the purpose, and owe no allegiance to any chief or tribal system.

  It is obvious that for purposes of policy this distinction cannot maintain its importance. The rule of the chief is being rapidly undermined by natural causes, and no taking thought can bolster it up for ever. Education, too, and the closer settlement of the country by white men, are rapidly breaking down tribal customs and beliefs, which, as a rule, have more vitality than the isolated sentiment of allegiance. For us the real distinction is between the natives who can be kept in large reserves or locations, whether tribal or otherwise, and the floating native population, which is every day growing in numbers. Sooner or later we must face the problem of the overcrowding of all reserves, and the consequent efflux of homeless and masterless men. The needs of progress, too, are daily tending to change the tribal native into the isolated native attached to some industry or other. Politically the question is, How far and on what lines the large reserves and locations can be best maintained, and what provision can be made for incorporating the overflow, which exists now and will soon exist in far greater numbers, on sane and rational lines in the body politic?

  Such being the main requirements of the problem, it remains to consider the forms in which they present themselves to the ordinary man. For the working aspect of a question is generally very different from the form it takes in an academic analysis. The translation into the terms of everyday life is conditioned by many accidental causes, so that to one section of the community the labour problem is the sole one, to another the educational, to a third the social. It is important to realise that all are part of one question, and that no single one can be truly solved unless the whole is dealt with. This incompleteness of view, more than any other cause, has complicated the native question, and produced spurious antagonisms, and policies which are apparently rival, but in reality are complementary.

  The first is the grave difficulty which must always attend the existence of a subject race. Slavery is the extreme form of the situation, and in it we see the evils and dangers on a colossal scale. A subject population, to whom legal rights are denied, tends in the long-run to degrade the value of human life, and to depreciate the moral currency, — a result so deadly for true progress that the consensus of civilised races has utterly condemned it. The denial of social and political rights is almost equally dangerous, since, apart from the risks of perpetual tutelage in a progressive community, there follows necessarily a depreciation of those political truths upon which all free societies are based. Many honest men have clearly perceived this; but after the fashion of headstrong honesty, they have confused the issues by an inaccurate use of words. Legal rights must be granted, and since the law is the child of the fundamental principles of human justice, legal equality should follow. Social and political rights also must be given; but why social and political equality? The most embittered employer of native labour does not deny that the black man should share certain social privileges, and be made to feel his place in the political organism, but he rightly denies that rights mean equality of rights; while his doctrinaire opponent, arguing from exactly the same premises, claims a foolish equality on a misunderstanding of words. The essence of social and political equality must be a standard of education and moral and intellectual equipment, which can be roughly attributed to all members of the community concerned. But in this case there can be no such common standard. Between the most ignorant white man and the black man there is fixed for the present an impassable gulf, not of colour but of mind. The native is often quick of understanding, industrious, curiously logical, but he lives and moves in a mental world incredibly distant from ours. The medium of his thought, so to speak, is so unique that the results are out of all relation to ourselves. Mentally he is as crude and naïve as a child, with a child’s curiosity and ingenuity, and a child’s practical inconsequence. Morally he has none of the traditions of self-discipline and order, which are implicit, though often in a degraded form, in white people. In a word, he cannot be depended upon as an individual save under fairly vigilant restraint; and in the mass he forms an unknown quantity, compared with which a Paris mob is a Quaker meeting. With all his merits, this instability of character and intellectual childishness make him politically far more impossible than even the lowest class of Europeans. High property or educational qualifications for the franchise, or any other of the expedients of Europe, are logically out of place, though they were raised to the possession of a fortune and a university degree; for the mind is still there, unaltered, though it may be superficially ornamented. Give the native the full franchise, argues one class of observer, and he will in time show himself worthy of it, for in itself it is an education. On a strictly logical view it would be as reasonable to put a child on a steam-engine as driver, trusting that the responsibility of his position would be in itself an education and would teach him the necessary art.

  Social and political equality will seem to most men familiar with the subject a chimera, but social and political rights the native must have, and in most cases has already obtained. But u
nless such rights are carefully adjusted the absolute cleavage remains. We have two races, physically different, socially incapable of amalgamation: if we make the gulf final, there is no possibility of a united state; if we bridge it carelessly, the possibility is still more distant. We may scruple to grant rights, such as the political franchise, which are based in the last resort on a common moral and intellectual standard; but we can grant rights which are substantive and educative and capable of judicious extension. The Glen Grey Act, as we shall see, made a valuable experiment in securing to the native the social status which attends individual tenure of land. Some form of representation might be devised, by which a chief might have a voice on a district council, or a representative elected by an industrial location assist in local government. Such measures, joined with a rational system of education, will leave the door open for the extension of rights till such time as the native has finally shown whether he is worthy of equality or condemned by nature to rank for ever as a subject race. There are men, able men with the courage of their opinions, who see no hope in the matter, and who would segregate the natives in a separate territory under British protection. The chief objection to this policy is that it is impossible. The native is in our midst, and we must face the facts. We have a chance to solve a burning question which no other nation has had, since, as in the United States, the matter has either been complicated by initial slavery, or, as also in the States, a thoughtless plunge has been made into European doctrines of liberty, equality, and fraternity. If we patiently and skilfully bring to bear upon the black man the solvent and formative influences of civilisation, one of two things must happen. Either the native will prove himself worthy of an equal share in the body politic; or, the experiment having been honestly tried, he will sink back to his old place and gradually go the way of the Red Indian and the Hottentot. For it is inevitable that civilisation, if wisely applied, must either raise him or choke him, — raise him to the rank of equal citizenship, or, by its hostility to his ineradicable qualities, prove a burden too heavy to support.

  The second is the ever-recurring problem of labour. In an earlier chapter the economic aspect of the question has been discussed; for the present we have to face that aspect which is connected with a native policy. The Kaffir is fundamentally an agriculturist, and when his lands are well situated he reaps enough for his simple existence with a minimum of labour. If he is rich enough to have several wives, they do the necessary picking and hoeing, and their lord and master sits in the shade of his hut and eats the bread of idleness. This was well enough in the old hunting and fighting days, when the male folk lived a strenuous life in the pursuit of game and the slaughter of their neighbours. But with civilisation close to their gates, the old system means a degraded somnolent life for the man, and the continuance of a real, though not necessarily unpleasant, form of slavery for the woman. And this in a country which is crying aloud for labour and development! To be sure, the foregoing is not a complete picture of all Kaffir life, but it is true of the larger reserves and the wealthier kraals. To most men it is an offence that the native, who is saved by British power from insecurity of life and limb, should be allowed to remain, by the happy accident of nature, an idler dependent only on the kindness of mother earth, multiplying his kind at an alarming rate, and untouched by the industrial struggle where his sinews are so sorely needed. The Kaffir owes his existence to the white man; in return he should be compelled to labour for hire and take his proper place in a world which has no room for his vegetating habits. He holds his land by our favour, he is protected from extinction by our arms, he enjoys the benefits of our laws; and he must pay for it all, not only in taxes but by a particular tax, a certain quantity of labour. This mode of argument sounds so serenely reasonable that one is apt to miss the very dangerous political doctrine which underlies it. Stated shortly, it runs thus. Compulsory labour without payment is to be reprobated like all forms of corvée, but if we pay what we regard as a fair price and make the compulsion indirect, then we get rid of such an objection. This doctrine involves two principles which seem to me to be subversive of all social order, and in particular of that civilisation which they profess to support. The Kaffir would be placed outside the play of economic forces. His wages would be arbitrarily established on an artificial basis, unalterable save at the will of his white masters. In the second place, compulsion by high taxation is not indirect compulsion, but one of the most direct forms of coercion known to history. To constrain a man indirectly is to use unseen forces and half-understood conditions which, being unrealised, do not impair his consciousness of liberty; but this is not the method which is proposed. A white man, it is argued, suffers want if he does not work. Well and good, — so does the Kaffir; but the work which he does, unless he is rich enough to have it vicariously performed, is different in kind from the work which others want him to do, and hence the trouble arises. To force a man, black or white, to enter on labour for which he is disinclined, is to rank him with beasts of burden, and prevent him, as an industrial creature, from ever attaining the conscious freedom which labour bestows. The old truth, so often misapplied, that a man who does not work shall not eat, is a statement of economic conditions to which those who quote it in this connection would seek to do violence.

  But such truisms do not exhaust the question. It is not the Kaffir who chiefly matters, for in his present stage of development he might be as well off one way as another; it is the white man’s interests which must decide. If the whole of Kaffirdom were sunk in a state of feminine slavery and male indolence, violence might be done to political axioms with some show of reason; but the Kaffir is emerging from his savagery and has shown in more ways than one a capacity for industrial development. But, taking the Kaffir on the lowest plane, what is to be the effect on the white population of South Africa if forced labour is to stereotype for ever a lower race, to which the free selection of labour, the first requisite of progress, is denied? “The safety of the commonwealth,” wrote John Mackenzie, “absolutely demands that no hatches be battened down over the heads of any part of the community.” At the back of all the many excellent cases which have been made out for compulsory labour by high taxation, there lie the immediate needs of the great gold industry — needs which it is now clear can never be met in South Africa alone by any native legislation. An instant industrial demand is apt to blind many good men for the moment to those wider truths, which on other occasions they are ready enough to assent to. The case has been further prejudiced for most people by the bad arguments used on the native side, and the intolerable cant with which obvious truths have been sicklied over. We need not concern ourselves with the so-called degradation of Kaffir manhood implied in compulsory labour, for such self-conscious manhood does not exist; but we are very deeply concerned with the degradation of white manhood, which will inevitably follow any of the facile solutions which are cried in the market-place. If by violent methods economic laws are checked in their play, a subject race in a low state of civilisation is checked on the only side on which development can be reasonably looked for. The harder and lower forms of toil will fall into Kaffir hands for good; the white population will become an aristocracy based on a kind of slave labour; and with the abolition of an honest hierarchy of work, degeneration will set in with terrible swiftness. It is a pleasing dream this, of a community of cultivated white men above the needs of squalid or menial toil, but on such a dream no free nation was ever built. The old tribal system is crumbling, and in a hundred years or less we shall see the Kaffirs abroad in the land, closely knit to all industries and touching social and political life at countless points. If they are a portion, however small, of the civic organism, there is hope for the future; but if they are a thing apart, denied the commonest of all rights, and remaining in their present crude and stagnant condition, they will be a menace, political and moral, which no one can contemplate with equanimity. There are, indeed, only two entirely logical policies towards the native. Either remove him, bag an
d baggage, to some Central African reserve and leave him to fight his wars and live as he lived before the days of Tchaka, or bring him into close and organic relation with those forces of a high civilisation which must inevitably mend or end him.

  There is a third chief aspect in which the native problem presents itself to the ordinary man. The Kaffir, south of the Zambesi, already outnumbers the white man by fully five to one, and he increases with at least twice the rapidity. Most native reserves and locations are overcrowded, the Kaffir is being driven on to private land as an unauthorised squatter, and the floating population in and around the towns is daily increasing. What is to be the end of this fecundity? Living on little, subject apparently to none of the natural or prudential checks on over-population, there seems a real danger of black ultimately swamping white by mere gross quantity. In any case there will soon be a grave economic crisis, for, unless prompt measures are adopted, a large loose vagabondage will grow up all over the land. It is to be noted that this danger is the converse of the two problems we have already discussed. They referred to the stereotyping of the Kaffir races as a settled agricultural people out of line with industrial progress; this concerns the inevitable break-up of the old agricultural condition by mere excess of population and the difficulty of dealing with the overflow. This complementary character which the problems assume is one of the most hopeful features of the case. Natural forces are bringing the Kaffir to our hands. The débâcle of his old life is turning him upon the world to be formed and constrained at our pleasure. The field is clear for experiment, and it behoves us to make up our minds clearly on the forms which the experiment must take.