Sidelights
To all who have read and loved Jock of the Bushveld, this volume will come as a shock. In that charming and elusive book South Africa was still virginal : game still ranged the open spaces ; the Rand had not broken out into a devastating rash of mines ; the drill did not mock the silences ; the clash of colour was yet to come. That old elusive atmosphere made the greatest of dog books also the most enduring. Here we meet a rather blatant and corybantic imperialism. Wars, raids, plots and intrigues form the background of a depueelated Africa and the foreground is littered with the debris of industrial revolution : in the middle distance the native problem looms insistent.
The part that Sir Percy played in South African develop- ment is well known : as an ardent Jameson Raider he was in the thick of politicial intrigue and knew intimately the leaders, both British and Dutch, who have made South Africa what she is to-day.
What from his very intimacy he loses in perspective— for on many issues important omissions distort the true picture—he gains by the freshness and sincerity of personal experience. His sidelights illuminate events, even if the apocalypse is partial ; they help us to understand movements by revealing the actors ; they disentangle the knotted skein of politics and chicanery. We may not all agree with the cause which Sir Percy championed, but we cannot doubt his sincerity. His outlook may have been too much of the type which enabled him to write that Dingaan's day was " marked by the heroic sacrifices of the old Pioneers as the triumph of civilization over barbarism " : but, at any rate, this triumph threw up some very remarkable characters, and it is with these that Sir Percy is primarily concerned.
The dramatic moment at Versailles when, in the presence of Lord Milner, Botha recalled the Boer War and the peace of Vereeniging is happily recorded, and Sir Percy tells us how his association with these two men, friendly before that war, gradually became more intimate as he was joined with them in the trusteeship of a post-war fund to help the Boer people. But, indubitably, the finest portrait is that of De la Rey, for whom Sir Percy had an unbounded admiration and whose trag!c death finds here a fitting epitaph. " Swift, penetrating, impersonal ! " he writes. " So calm, so clear and so decisive ! Master of his job and at home." Or, again, " it was De la Rey alone who seemed to be single-minded, undisturbed, uncon- scious and uncaring for what anyone might have thought." True, it was a different De la Rey who at the end found himself distracted by a conflict of emotions, and failed in decision at the time of the last rebellion, and it was his own daughter who took the General to task : " It's all a wicked shame," she cried. " It's treachery, dishonour, disgrace. You must go at once to General Botha ; he is our leader. You must tell him all." She refused to leave her father alone ; she slept in his room that fateful night after the conspirators had called at De la Rey's farm, and at dawn she took him to Pretoria.
More careful editing of these memoirs would have made a better book. There is too much duplication and the episodes are apt to be incoherent. But it is a revealing book and portraits such as that of De la Rey will live for the future historian of South Africa.
J. H. DBIBERG.
Previous page
