Missionary Travels and Researches in South AfricaLivingstone, David
Religion
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
Livingstone, David
Missions -- South Africa; South Africa -- Description and travel
I can appeal to the Commandant Krieger if the foregoing is not a fair
and impartial statement of the views of himself and his people. I am
sensible of no mental bias toward or against these Boers; and during the
several journeys I made to the poor enslaved tribes, I never avoided
the whites, but tried to cure and did administer remedies to their sick,
without money and without price. It is due to them to state that I was
invariably treated with respect; but it is most unfortunate that
they should have been left by their own Church for so many years to
deteriorate and become as degraded as the blacks, whom the stupid
prejudice against color leads them to detest.
This new species of slavery which they have adopted serves to supply the
lack of field-labor only. The demand for domestic servants must be met
by forays on tribes which have good supplies of cattle. The Portuguese
can quote instances in which blacks become so degraded by the love of
strong drink as actually to sell themselves; but never in any one case,
within the memory of man, has a Bechuana chief sold any of his people,
or a Bechuana man his child. Hence the necessity for a foray to seize
children. And those individual Boers who would not engage in it for the
sake of slaves can seldom resist the two-fold plea of a well-told
story of an intended uprising of the devoted tribe, and the prospect of
handsome pay in the division of the captured cattle besides.
It is difficult for a person in a civilized country to conceive that
any body of men possessing the common attributes of humanity (and these
Boers are by no means destitute of the better feelings of our nature)
should with one accord set out, after loading their own wives and
children with caresses, and proceed to shoot down in cold blood men
and women, of a different color, it is true, but possessed of domestic
feelings and affections equal to their own. I saw and conversed with
children in the houses of Boers who had, by their own and their masters'
account, been captured, and in several instances I traced the parents
of these unfortunates, though the plan approved by the long-headed among
the burghers is to take children so young that they soon forget their
parents and their native language also. It was long before I could give
credit to the tales of bloodshed told by native witnesses, and had I
received no other testimony but theirs I should probably have continued
skeptical to this day as to the truth of the accounts; but when I found
the Boers themselves, some bewailing and denouncing, others glorying in
the bloody scenes in which they had been themselves the actors, I was
compelled to admit the validity of the testimony, and try to account for
the cruel anomaly. They are all traditionally religious, tracing their
descent from some of the best men (Huguenots and Dutch) the world ever
saw. Hence they claim to themselves the title of "Christians", and all
the colored race are "black property" or "creatures". They being the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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