An Evil Legacy
The Cape Colour Question : A Historical Survey. By W. M. MacMillan, Professor of History at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg. (Faber and Gwyer. 218.) PROM whatever point of view it is looked at, this is a very important as well as an intensely provocative and stimulating book. The negrophile will love it ; the Die-hards of repressive Colour policy will gnash their teeth over it ; while the his- torian and the judicious reformer will find in it both warning and instruction. Quite briefly- it is a study of how the Hotten- tots, once a sept universally despised, downtrodden, and held in a state of virtual slavery, won through, first to some sort of industrial independence and later to political equality, till to-day they or their representatives, the somewhat fan- tastically named Eurafricans, can (so Professor MacMillan thinks) rank "as a civilized people."
This victory was won for them by the efforts of the mission- aries who all over the world have always acted as the first line of defence for backward native races, and especially by the unremitting exertions of one missionary, in his day the most hated man in all White South Africa—the Fifeshire weaver, Dr. John Philip. Philip it was who was the first to force the Colour question to the front and Who denied that poorly paid and compulsory farm-service was a sufficient training for a reasonably civilized existence. It is on Dr. Philip's hitherto unpublished papers that this book is largely based, and these papers necessitate, it must be confessed, "a radical revision of the traditional and hitherto accepted interpretation of South African history."
It may be objected that the story of so inconsiderable a folk as the Hottentots is of little significance in any regard. That view, however, is a short-sighted one. The Hottentot question has a direct bearing on modern issues, for it is in very many respects in the closest parallelism with the Bantu problem of to-day. "It was in the effort to dispose of the Hottentots in the Colony that the issues of the modern Colour problem first began to appear, and the difficulties that dis- turbed political harmony in those days remain." It is this evil legacy bequeathed to us by the Dutch East Intik.-- Company
which is to-day poisoning the social and economic condition of South Africa, and, if only as a warning, this book is of very special value. Moreover, it is time that history should be written not alone from the white point of view, and this is doubly necessary in South Africa, where the preponderating majority of the inhabitants are people of colour, and where, in consequence, the interests of black and white are inex- tricably intermingled. That the white is the superior race most people will agree, but this should not mean that the coloured man is to be held for ever in a state of subordinate tutelage. As Mr. MacMillan puts it, "the crux of the matter is to maintain fitting relations between white and coloured people, when and where they inevitably live and work to- gether." If such relations cannot be reached, and as long as the black man is considered only as a producer and not as a consumer, while he is denied a fair opportunity of bringing his labour to the best market, only trouble looms ahead. "This disability of the coloured population remains a bar to the progress of the whole country ; landlessness makes low- grade workers and vagrants ; vagrants are driven into under- paid service ; underpaid servants make for bad and inefficient farming "—(an admirable summary). A serf-economy is a bad economy, and "it is often said—it may begin to be believed—that either the Native must be raised up, or he will drag down White Civilization itself to a lower level." Mr. MacMillan has shown us in his book how in one instance at least this raising-up has been brought to reasonable success.
But though we strongly commend this well-documented study to all interested, there is much in it with which we by no means agree. Feeling his case strongly, Mr. MacMillan urges it as strongly and is often in danger, like Dr. Philip himself, of forgetting that there is another side to the matter, for he seems to make too little of white grievances. Exigencies of space forbid any detailed discussion of many of his views, but we profoundly disagree with his attitude towards the Great Trek, the primary cause of which we believe to have been the indecision of British policy on the Kaffir Frontier. He defends the payment to the slow-thinking Boer countryman of slave compensation-money in London ! His observations on the Black Circuit of 1812 are of the nature of special plead- ing, and he summons the aid of modern scholarship to show that Kaffir stock-thefts were really only natural. Perhaps but the frontiersman, Dutch or English, who woke up in the morning to find his kraals empty would take a different view, and he would very naturally be still more infuriated when he heard later that Dr. Philip had described- the thefts as acts of defensive war. Mr. MacMillan, in speaking of the imagined depredations" of the Bushmen, would do well to refer to Cornwallis Harris's experience of these fierce little stock-stealers. And finally we read that Slagter's Nek "may have left a fatal legacy of bitterness" behind it. There is no " may " in the question. It did and does. The writer of this notice once lived with a Boer, the lintel of whose door was a beam from the gallows at Slagter's Nek. This man, the soul of kindness and hospitality, as are most Boers, would chat volubly and genially on all sorts of subjects, but not, with a Britisher, on Slagter's Nek.
The foregoing, however, are points (sane of them) of minor detail, and do not detract from the particular merits of this book as a very important contribution to South African history, its supreme merit being that it relates the past to the present. Even beyond South Africa, in regions where a dominant white caste is faced with a chronic shortage of native labour, it will convey a useful lesson. M. J. C. M.
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