Transvaal (South Africa) -- History -- War of 1880-1881
corresponding contempt for all the rest of mankind. Laws and taxes are
things distasteful to him, and he looks upon it as an impertinence that
any court should venture to call him to account for his doings. He is
rich and prosperous, and the cares of poverty, and all the other
troubles that fall to the lot of civilised men, do not affect him. He
has no romance in him, nor any of the higher feelings and aspirations
that are found in almost every other race; in short, unlike the Zulu he
despises, there is little of the gentleman in his composition, though
he is at times capable of acts of kindness and even generosity. His
happiness is to live alone in the great wilderness, with his children,
his men-servants, and his maid-servants, his flocks and his herds, the
monarch of all he surveys. If civilisation presses him too closely, his
remedy is a simple one. He sells his farm, packs up his goods and cash
in his waggon, and starts for regions more congenially wild. Such are
some of the leading characteristics of that remarkable product of South
Africa, the Transvaal Boer, who resembles no other white man in the
world.
Perhaps, however, the most striking of all his oddities is his
abhorrence of all government, more especially if that government be
carried out according to English principles. The Boers have always been
more or less in rebellion; they rebelled against the rule of the
Company when the Cape belonged to Holland, they rebelled against the
English Government in the Cape, they were always in a state of
semi-rebellion against their own Government in the Transvaal, and now
they have for the second time, with the most complete success, rebelled
against the English Government. The fact of the matter is that the bulk
of their number hate all Governments, because Governments enforce law
and order, and they hate the English Government worst of all because it
enforces law and order most of all. It is not liberty they long for,
but license. The "sturdy independence" of the Boer resolves itself into
a determination not to have his affairs interfered with by any superior
power whatsoever, and not to pay taxes if he can possibly avoid it. But
he has also a specific cause of complaint against the English
Government, which would alone cause him to do his utmost to get rid of
it, and that is its mode of dealing with natives, which is radically
opposite to his own. This is the secret of Boer patriotism. To
understand it, it must be remembered that the Englishman and the Boer
look at natives from a very different point of view. The Englishman,
though he may not be very fond of him, at any rate regards the Kafir as
a fellow human being with feelings like his own. The average Boer does
not. He looks upon the "black creature" as having been delivered into
his hand by the "Lord" for his own purposes, that is, to shoot and
enslave. He must not be blamed too harshly for this, for, besides being
naturally of a somewhat hard disposition, hatred of the native is
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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