Native Life in South Africa, by Solomon Plaatje, 1916[Extracts]

General Hertzog's Scheme

It may interest the reader to know that General Hertzog is the father of the
segregation controversy. The writer and other Natives interviewed him before
Christmas, 1912, at the Palace of Justice, Pretoria, when he was still in the
ministry. We had a two hours' discussion, in the course of which the General gave
us a forecast of what he then regarded as possible native areas, and drew rings
on a large wall-map of the Union to indicate their locality. Included in these rings
were several Magistracies, which he said would solve a knotty problem. He told us
that white people objected to black men in Government offices and magistrates in
those areas would have no difficulty in employing them.

General Hertzog was dismissed shortly after, and it has been said that in order to
placate his angry admirers the Ministry passed the Natives' Land Act of which this
Report is the outcome. Judging by the vigour with which the Union administration
has been weeding Natives out of the public service and replacing them with Boers
without waiting for the Commission's Report, it is clear that they did not share
General Hertzog's intention as regards these magistracies. I cannot recall all the
magistracies which General Hertzog mentioned as likely to fall in native areas; but
I distinctly remember that Pietersburg and Thaba Nchu were among them; while
Alice and Pedi (and possibly a neighbouring district) were to be included in a
southern reserve into which the Natives round East London and Grahamstown
would have to move, the land vacated by them to be gradually occupied by the
white settlers now scattered over the would be native block. He went on to
forecast a vast dependency of the Union in which the energies and aspirations of
black professional men would find their outlet with no danger of competition with
Europeans; where a new educational and representative system could be evolved
for Natives to live their own lives, and work out their salvation in a separate
sphere. But the lands Commission's Report places this plausible scheme beyond
the region of possibility, for no native area, recommended by this Commission,
includes any of the magistracies mentioned.

General Hertzog's plan at least offered a fair ground for discussion, but the
Commission's Report is a travesty of his scheme. It intensifies every native
difficulty and goes much further than the wild demands of the "Free" State
extremists. Thus even if it be thrown out, as it deserves to be, future exploiters
will always cite it as an excuse for measures subversive of native well-being. In
fact, that such legislation should be mooted is nothing short of a national
calamity.

How They "Doubled" A Native Area

Near the northern boundaries of Transvaal there lies a stretch of malarial country
in which nothing can live unless born there. Men and beasts from other parts visit
it only in winter and leave it again before the rains begin, when the atmosphere
becomes almost too poisonous to inhale. Even the unfailing tax-gatherers of the
Native Affairs Department go there only in the winter every year and hurry back
again with the moneybags before the malarial period sets in. A Boer general
describes how when harassed by the Imperial forces during the South African
war, he was once compelled to march through it; and how his men and horses --
many of them natives of the Transvaal -- contracted enough malaria during the
march to cause the illness of many and the death of several Burghers and
animals. Of the native inhabitants of this delectable area the Dutch General says:
"Their diminutive, deformed stature was another proof of the miserable climate
obtaining there." (Viljoen, B. My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War, p. 222)

When the Land Commissioners contemplated this "salubrious" region, their hearts
must have melted with generosity, for whereas in our own healthy part of South
Africa they have indicated possible native areas by little dots of microscopically
rings (as in Thaba Nchu for instance), here, in this malarial area, they marked off
a reserve almost as wide as that described by General Hertzog himself at our
Pretoria interview. It is possibly in this way, and in such impossible places, that
the Commission is alleged to have "doubled" the native areas. In the rest of the
country they ask Parliament to confiscate our birthright to the soil of our ancestry
in favour of 600,000 Boers and aliens whose languages can show no synonym for
Home -- the English equivalent of our ikaya and legae!

The Britishers' vocabulary includes that sacred word: and that, perhaps, is the
reason why their colonizing schemes have always allowed some tracts of country
for native family life, with reasonable opportunities for their future existence and
progress, in the vast South African expanses, which God in His providence had
created for His Children of the Sun. The Englishman, moreover, found us speaking
the word Legae, and taught us how to write it. In 1910, much against our will, the
British Government surrendered its immediate sovereignty over our land to
Colonials and cosmopolitan aliens who know little about a Home, because their
dictionaries contain no such loving term; and the recommendations of this
Commission would seem to express their limited conception of the word and its
beautiful significance.

Natives Have No Information About the Coming Servitude

All too little (if anything at all) is known of the services rendered to the common
weal by the native leaders in South Africa. In every crisis of the past four years,
and the one-sided policy of the Union, has produced many of these -- the native
leaders have taken upon themselves the thankless and expensive task of
restraining the Natives from resorting to violence. The seeming lack of
appreciation with which the Government has met their success in that direction
has been the cause of some comment among Natives. On more than one occasion
they have asked whether the authorities were disappointed because, by their
successful avoidance of bloodshed, the native leaders had forestalled the machine
guns. But, is the reason what it may, this apparent ingratitude has not cooled
their ardour in the cause of peace.

Today the Native Affairs Department has handed over £7,000 from native taxes to
defray the cost of the Land Commission, consisting of five white Commissioners,
their white clerks and secretaries -- the printing alone swallowed up nearly
£1,000 with further payments to white translators for a Dutch edition of the
Report. But not a penny could be spared for the enlightenment of the Natives at
whose expense the inquiry has been carried through. They have been officially
told and had every reason to believe that the Commission was going about to
mark out reservations for them to occupy and live emancipated from the
prejudicial conditions that would spring from contiguity with the white race. For
any information as to the real character of the contents of the Dutch and English
Report of this Commission, they would have to depend on what they could gather
from the unsalaried efforts of the native leaders, who, owing to the vastness of
the sub-continent, the lack of travelling facilities and their own limited resources,
can only reach a few localities and groups.

It may be said with some reason that English leaders of thought in South Africa
have had a task of like difficulty: that they worked just as hard to get the English
colonists to co-operate loyally with a vanquished foe in whose hands the Union
constitution has placed the destiny of South Africa. It could also be said with
equal justice that the Boer leaders' task has been not less difficult, that it required
their greatest tact to get the Boer majority -- now in power -- to deal justly with
the English who had been responsible for the elimination of the two Boer flags
from among the emblems of the family of nations. But the difficulties of their task
are not comparable to that of the native leaders. English and Dutch Colonial
leaders are members of Parliament, each in receipt of £400 a year, with a free
first class ticket over all systems of the South African Railways. They enjoy,
besides, the co-operation of an army of well-paid white civil servants, without
whom they could scarcely have managed their own people. The native leader, on
the other hand, in addition to other impediments, has to contend with the
difficulty of financing his own tours in a country whose settled policy is to see that
Natives do not make any money. His position in his own country approximates to
that of an Englishman, grappling single-handed with complicated problems, on
foreign soil, without the aid of a British consul.

Bullyragging The Natives

For upwards of three years the Government of the Union of South Africa has
harassed and maltreated the rural native taxpayers as no heathen monarch, since
the time of the Zulu King Shaka, ever ill-used a tributary people. For the greater
part of our period of suffering the Empire was engaged in a titanic struggle,
which, for ghastliness is without precedent. I can think of no people in the Eastern
Hemisphere who are absolutely unaffected by it; but the members of the Empire
can find consolation in the fact that almost all creation is in sympathy with them.
Constant disturbance has brought a realization to the entire universe that nature,
like the times, is out of joint. The birds of the air and the fishes, like other
denizens of the deep, are frequently drawn into the whirlpool of misery; and a
mutual suffering has identified them as it were with some of the vicissitudes of an
Empire at war. And they too have in their peculiar way felt impelled to offer their
condolence to the dependants of those who have fallen in the combat on land, in
the air, on sea, and under the sea. And while all creation stands aghast beside the
gaping graves, by rivers of blood, mourning with us the loss of some of the
greatest Englishmen that ever lived, South Africa, having constituted herself the
only vandal State, possesses sufficient in compassion to celebrate the protection
conferred on her by the British Fleet and devote her God-given security to an orgy
of tyranny over those hapless coloureds subjects of the King, whom the Union
constitution has placed in the hollow of her hands.

Is there nobody left on earth that is just enough to call on South Africa to put an
end to this cowardly abuse of power?

We appeal to the Colonists of Natal, who have declared themselves against the
persecution of their Natives; and would draw their attention to the fact that in
spite of their disapproval, expressed to the Lands Commission, the Union
Government, at the behest of a prisoner, is still tyrannizing over the Zulus.

We appeal to the Churches. We would remind them that in the past the Christian
voice has been our only shield against legislative excesses of the kind now in full
swings in the Union. But in the new ascendancy of self and pelf over justice and
tolerance, that voice will be altogether ignored, unless strongly reinforced by the
Christian world at large. We appeal for deliverance from the operation of a
cunningly conceived and a most draconian law whose administration has been
marked by the closing down of native Churches and Chapels in rural South Africa.

We appeal to the Jews, God's chosen people, who know what suffering means. We
would remind them that if after 1913 there was no repetition of a Russian pogrom
it was largely because the native leaders (including the author) have spared
neither pains nor pence in visiting the scattered tribes and exhorting them to obey
all the demands of the South African Government under the Grobler law pending
a peaceful intercession from the outside world. But for this self-imposed duty on
the part of the native leaders, I am satisfied that numbers of the native peasantry
would have been mown down early in 1914, and humanity would have been told
that they were justly punished for disobedience to constituted authority.

We appeal to the leaders of the Empire -- that Empire for which my own relatives
have sacrificed life and property in order to aid its extension along the Cape to
Cairo route, entirely out of love for her late Majesty Queen Victoria and with no
expectation of material reward. We ask these leaders to honour the plighted word
of their noble predecessors who collectively and severally assured us a future of
peace and happiness as our membership privilege in the Empire for which we
bled. They were among the noblest Englishmen that ever left their native shores
to create a prestige for their nation abroad. They included heroes and empire-builders too many to mention, who all told us that they spoke in the name of
Queen Victoria and on behalf of her heirs and successors. What has suddenly
become of the Briton's word -- his bond -- that solemn obligations of such
Imperialists should cease to count? And if it is decided that the Victorian
Englishman and the Twentieth Century Englishman are creatures of different clay
(and that with the latter honour is binding only when both parties to the
undertaking are white), surely this could hardly be the moment to inaugurate a
change the reaction of which cannot fail to desecrate the memories of your just
and upright forebears.

We would draw the attention of the British people to the fact that the most painful
part of the present ordeal to the loyal black millions, who are now doing all they
can, or are allowed to do, to help the Empire to win the war, is that they suffer
this consummate oppression at the bidding of a gentleman now serving his term
for participating in a rebellion during this war. We feel that it must be a source of
intense satisfaction to Mr. Piet Grobler in his cell, that the most loyal section of
the King's South African subjects are suffering persecution under his law -- a fact
which, looked at from whatever standpoint, is equal to an official justification of
the ideals for which he rose in rebellion. And if there is to be a return to the
contented South Africa of other days, both the Natives's Land Act his law -- and
the Report of the Lands Commission -- its climax -- should be torn up.

Courting Retribution

For three years and more the South African Government have persecuted my
kinsmen and kinswomen for no other crime than that they have meekly paid their
taxes. I had come to the conclusion, after meeting Colonials from all quarters of
the globe and weighing the information obtained from them, that in no Colony are
the native inhabitants treated with greater injustice than in South Africa.
(footnote: Some white South Africans in recent years have migrated to the
Katanga region in the Belgian Congo. I have read in the South African daily
papers, correspondence from some of them complaining of their inability to make
money. They attributed this difficulty to the fact that the Belgian officials will not
permit them to exploit the labour of the Congolese, as freely as white men are
accustomed to make use of the Natives in British South Africa.) Yet in spite of all I
had seen and heard, I must say that, until this Report reached me, I never would
have believed my white fellow-countrymen capable of conceiving the all but
diabolical schemes propounded between the covers of Volume I of the Report of
the South African Lands Commission, 1916, and clothing them in such plausible
form as to mislead even sincere and well-informed friends of the Natives. There
are pages upon pages of columns of figures running into four, five or six noughts.
They will dazzle the eye until the reader imagines himself witnessing the
redistribution of the whole sub-continent and its transfer to the native tribes. But
two things he will never find in that mass of figures; these are (a) the grand total
of the land so "awarded" to Natives; and (b) how much is left for other people. To
arrive at these he has to do his own additions and subtractions, and call in the aid
of statistics such as the Census figures, the annual blue books, etc., before the
truth begins to dawn on him. They talk of having "doubled" the native areas. They
found us in occupation of 143,000,000 morgen and propose to squeeze us into 18
million. If this means doubling it, then our teachers must have taught us the
wrong arithmetic. Is it any wonder that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us
to continue to love and respect the great white race, as we truly loved it at the
beginning of this century?

We would submit a few problems in this Report for the British People and their
Parliamentary Representatives to solve: --

First: Who are to become the occupants of the lands from which the Commission
recommends the removal of the native proletariat?

Secondly: In view of certain upheavals which we have seen not very long ago,
and others which might take place in the future, it is pertinent to ask, concerning
the "very small minority of the inhabitants" -- the Whites - alluded to by Mr.
Schreiner at the head of this chapter, (a) what proportion is in full sympathy with
the ideals of the British Empire; (b) what proportion remains indifferent; and (c) what proportion may be termed hostile?

Thirdly: Does the autonomy granted to this "small minority" amount to complete
independence, or does it not?

Fourthly: Would it not be advisable also to inquire: Of "the vast majority of the
inhabitants" the King's Black subjects, doomed by this Report to forfeit their
homes and all they value in their own country, (a) how many of these are loyal,
and (b) how many are not?

Finally and solemnly we would put it to all concerned for the honour and
perpetuity of British dominion in South Africa, can the Empire afford to tamper
with and alienate their affections?

As stated already, the "very small minority" has strafed this "very vast majority of
the inhabitants" of South Africa for over three years. And when the burden loaded
on our bent backs becomes absolutely unbearable we are at times inclined to
blame ourselves; for, when some of us fought hard and often against British
diplomacy to extend the sphere of British influence, it never occurred to us that
the spread of British dominion in South Africa would culminate in consigning us to
our present intolerable position, namely, a helot age under a Boer oligarchy. But
when an official Commission asks Parliament to herd us into concentration camps,
with the additional recommendation that besides breeding slaves for our masters,
we should be made to pay for the upkeep of the camps: in other words, that we
should turn the Colonials into slave raiders and slave-drivers (but save them the
expense of buying the slaves), the only thing that stands between us and despair
is the thought that Heaven has never yet failed us. We remember how African
women have at times shed tears under similar injustices; and how when they
have been made to leave their fields with their hoes on their shoulders, their tears
on evaporation have drawn fire and brimstone from the skies. But such blind
retribution has a way of punishing the innocent alike with the guilty, and it is in
the interests of both that we plead for some outside intervention to assist South
Africa in recovering her lost senses.

The ready sympathy expressed by those British people among whom I have lived
and laboured during the past two years inspires the confidence that a consensus
of British opinion will, in the Union's interest, stay the hand of the South African
Government, veto this iniquity and avert the Nemesis that would surely follow its
perpetration.

Source:

Karis, T & Carter G. M. (1972). From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882-1964, Volume 1: Protest and Hope, 1882-1934. Stanford University: Hanover Press.

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