Native Life in South Africa | Page 8

Magistrates and the Chief Native Commissioner. Every

time they are told to find themselves other places, or remain where they
are under labour conditions. At Peters and Colworth, seventy-nine and
a hundred families respectively are being ejected by the Government
itself without providing land for them."
Some readers may perhaps think that I have taken the Colonial
Parliament rather severely to task. But to any reader who holds with
Bacon, that "the pencil hath laboured more in describing the afflictions
of Job than the felicities of Solomon," I would say: "Do, if we dare
make the request, and place yourself in our shoes." If, after a proper
declaration of war, you found your kinsmen driven from pillar to post
in the manner that the South African Natives have been harried and
scurried by Act No. 27 of 1913, you would, though aware that it is part
of the fortunes of war, find it difficult to suppress your hatred of the
enemy. Similarly, if you see your countrymen and countrywomen
driven from home, their homes broken up, with no hopes of redress, on
the mandate of a Government to which they had loyally paid taxation
without representation -- driven from their homes, because they do not
want to become servants; and when you know that half of these
homeless ones have perforce submitted to the conditions and accepted
service on terms that are unprofitable to themselves; if you remember
that more would have submitted but for the fact that no master has any
use for a servant with forty head of cattle, or a hundred or more sheep;
and if you further bear in mind that many landowners are anxious to
live at peace with, and to keep your people as tenants, but that they are
debarred from doing so by your Government which threatens them with
a fine of 100 Pounds or six months' imprisonment, you would, I think,
likewise find it very difficult to maintain a level head or wield a
temperate pen.
For instance, let us say, the London County Council decrees that no
man shall rent a room, or hire a house, in the City of London unless he
be a servant in the employ of the landlord, adding that there shall be a
fine of one hundred pounds on any one who attempts to sell a house to
a non-householder; imagine such a thing and its effects, then you have
some approach to an accurate picture of the operation of the South
African Natives' Land Act of 1913. In conclusion, let me ask the
reader's support in our campaign for the repeal of such a law, and in
making this request I pray that none of my readers may live to find

themselves in a position so intolerable.
When the narrative of this book up to
Chapter XVIII
was completed, it was felt that an account of life in South Africa,
without a reference to the war or the rebellion would be but a story half
told, and so Chapters XIX-XXV were added. It will be observed that
Chapters XX-XXIV, unlike the rest of the book, are not the result of the
writer's own observations. The writer is indebted for much of the
information in these five chapters to the Native Press and some Dutch
newspapers which his devoted wife posted to him with every mail.
These papers have been a source of useful information. Of the Dutch
newspapers special thanks are due to `Het Westen' of Potchefstroom,
which has since March 1915 changed its name to `Het Volksblad'. Most
of the Dutch journals, especially in the northern Provinces, take up the
views of English-speaking Dutch townsmen (solicitors and Bank
clerks), and publish them as the opinion of the South African Dutch.
`Het Westen' (now `Het Volksblad'), on the other hand, interprets the
Dutch view, sound, bad or indifferent, exactly as we ourselves have
heard it expressed by Dutchmen at their own farms.
Translations of the Tipperary Chorus into some of the languages which
are spoken by the white and black inhabitants of South Africa have
been used here and there as mottoes; and as this book is a plea in the
main for help against the "South African war of extermination", it is
hoped that admirers of Tommy Atkins will sympathize with the
coloured sufferers, who also sing Tommy Atkins' war songs.
This appeal is not on behalf of the naked hordes of cannibals who are
represented in fantastic pictures displayed in the shop-windows in
Europe, most of them imaginary; but it is on behalf of five million loyal
British subjects who shoulder "the black man's burden" every day,
doing so without looking forward to any decoration or thanks. "The
black man's burden" includes the faithful performance of all the
unskilled and least paying labour in South