South Africa -- Description and travel; South Africa -- History -- 1836-1909; South Africa -- History -- To 1836
The difficulty arises probably from our impatience. Nothing will satisfy
us unless we find a bath in which we may at once wash the blackamoor
white, or a mill and oven in which a Kafir may be ground and baked
instantly into a Christian. That much should be lost,--should “fall off”
as they say,--of the education imparted to them is natural. Among those
of ourselves who have spent, perhaps, nine or ten years of our lives
over Latin and Greek how much is lost! Perhaps I might say how little is
kept! But something remains to us,--and something to them. There is need
of very much patience. Those who expect that a Kafir boy, because he has
been at school, should come forth the same as a white lad, all whose
training since, and from long previous to his birth, has been a European
training, will of course be disappointed. But we may, I think, be sure
that no Kafir pupil can remain for years or even for months among
European lessons and European habits, without carrying away with him to
his own people, when he goes, something of a civilizing influence.
My friend the Wesleyan Minister, who by his eloquence prevailed over me
at Fort Beaufort in spite of my weariness and hunger, took me to
Healdtown, the Institution over which he himself presides. I had already
seen Kafir children and Kafir lads under tuition at Capetown. I had
visited Miss Arthur’s orphanage and school, where I had found a most
interesting and cosmopolitan collection of all races, and had been taken
by the Bishop of Capetown to the Church of England Kafir school at
Zonnebloom, and had there been satisfied of the great capability which
the young Kafir has for learning his lessons. I had been assured that up
to a certain point and a certain age the Kafir quite holds his own with
the European. At Zonnebloom a master carpenter was one of the
instructors of the place, and, as I thought, by no means the least
useful. The Kafir lad may perhaps forget the names of the “five great
English poets with their dates and kings,” by recapitulating which he
has gained a prize at Lovedale,--or may be unable some years after he
has left the school to give an “Outline of Thomson’s Seasons,” but when
he has once learned how to make a table stand square upon four legs he
has gained a power of helping his brother Kafirs which will never
altogether desert him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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