Transvaal (South Africa) -- Politics and government -- 1880-1910
had almost faded, when the ghastly events, which are too well known to
need referring to, awoke the old ache at the heart a few years ago.
But even they would see quietly no other power standing in the place
of England. “It is a strange thing,” said a well-known Dutch South
African to us twenty-one years ago, “that when I went to Europe to
study I went to Holland, and loved the land and the people, but I
felt a stranger; it was the same in Germany, the same in France. But
when I landed in England I said, ‘I am at home!’” That man was once a
passionate lover of England, but he is now a heart-sore man. There have
been representatives of England in South Africa who have been loved as
dearly by the Dutch as by the English. When a few years ago there was
a talk of Sir George Grey visiting South Africa on his way home from
New Zealand to England, old grey-headed Dutchmen in the Free State
expressed their resolve to take one more long train journey and go down
to Capetown only once more to shake the hand of the old man who more
than forty years before had been Governor of the Cape Colony. So deeply
had a great Englishman, upholding the loftiest traditions of English
justice and humanity, endeared himself to the hearts of South Africans.
“God’s Englishman”--not of the Stock Exchange and the Gatling gun, but
of the great heart.
But great as is the bond between South Africans, whether Dutch or
English, and England, caused by language, sentiments, interest and the
noble record left by those large Englishmen who have labored among us,
the South African pure and simple, whether English or Dutch, cannot
feel to England just as we do. Their material interest may bind them to
England as much as it binds us, but that deep passion for her honor,
the consciousness that she represents a large spiritual factor in our
lives, which, once gone, nothing replaces for us; that her right-doing
is ours, and her wrong-doing is also ours; that in a manner her flag
does not represent anything we have an interest in, or even that we
love, but that in a curious way it is ourselves--this they cannot
know. Therefore, while on our side we are connected with them by our
affection for South Africa and our resolute desire for its good, our
position remains not exactly as theirs. Our standpoint is at once
broader and more impartial in dealing with South African questions, in
that we are bound by two-fold sympathies.
On the other hand of us, who are at once South Africans and Englishmen,
stand in South Africa another body of individuals who are not South
African, in any sense or only partially, but to whom from our peculiar
position we also stand closely bound.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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