South Africa and the Boer-British War, Volume I: Comprising a History of South Africa and its people, including the war of 1899 and 1900Halstead, Murat
History
South Africa and the Boer-British War, Volume I: Comprising a History of South Africa and its people, including the war of 1899 and 1900
Halstead, Murat
South African War, 1899-1902
at a later date to live, with their families, upon fixed Government
allowances. They received occasional accessions up to 1781, when
the last batch came out. As a result of these successive racial
importations Cape Colony came in time to include a most singular
and varied half-breed population in which Dutch and Hottentots and
Malay and Negro were all intermixed.
[Sidenote: European Population in 1759]
In 1759, a century and a half after the Colony was established,
its population contained 9,782 Europeans, of whom
1,486 were women and 8,104 slaves. How many
natives there were it is difficult to estimate, as they
were always a very movable quantity. Up to the end of the
century this population lived and slowly increased under conditions
which absolutely precluded real progress and evolved the character
of singular stagnation which met the English conquerors in 1795.
In 1779 the Dutch settlers pleaded in vain with the Directors of the
East India Company for a limited privilege of making purchases
directly in Holland instead of through the Company's stores at Cape
Town. In vain the so-called burghers also asked for the most
elementary political rights--though even then entirely unwilling to
concede any rights to the surrounding natives. In vain they petitioned
for printed copies of the laws and regulations of the Government
and for a printing press.
They were regarded at this time by the Batavian Government
much as the Transvaal authorities regarded the Uitlanders of
another century. The Law Officer of the Cape Government, to
whom the petitions were referred in 1779 by the Home authorities,
declared that: "It would be a mere waste of words to dwell on the
remarkable distinction to be drawn between burghers whose
ancestors nobly fought for and conquered their freedom and such as are
named burghers here, who have been permitted as matter of grace
to have a residence in a land of which possession has been taken by
the Sovereign Power, there to gain a livelihood as tillers of the
earth, tailors and shoemakers."[1] At the end of the nineteenth
century the Uitlanders believed themselves to have been taxed and
treated in the Transvaal with very much similar motives and entirely
from the point of view of Dutch revenues and the strengthening of
Dutch supremacy. The Boers had been well taught this peculiar lesson
in government, and nowhere better than in another part of this same
document: "Now it is clear, and requires no lengthy argument, that
for the purpose of enabling a subordinate Colony to flourish as a
Colony it is not always expedient to apply those means which,
considered in the abstract, might be conducive to its prosperity. The
object of paramount importance in legislating for Colonies should
be the welfare of the parent state, of which such Colony is but a
subordinate part and to which it owes its existence."
[1] _Three Lectures on the Cafe of Good Hope_,
Judge Watermeyer. Cape Town, 1857.
[Sidenote: The Afrikander Dialect]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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