Generally speaking (and allowing for the many exceptions which will
always occur where men are spoken of in large masses), there is,
in this class of the population, a strong tendency, not so much
towards scorn and indifference towards the native, as of keen, bitter
resentment, which can sometimes not be described otherwise than as
hatred: a feeling which is not generally found in any other large class
of the community. Nor is this in any way to be wondered at, when we
recall the century-long bitterness between folk so closely allied as
are Highland Scots and Lowland English, and the deathless feuds of the
border, and, above all, when we recall the fact that in modern times
a whole civilized nation has howled frantically for the blood of a
brother nation, to avenge defeat sustained by superior numbers of its
own men, fighting against inferior numbers, inferiorly placed, of the
fellow nation.
With the wild-beast cry of "Avenge Amajuba" still ringing in our ears,
it appears rather wonderful than otherwise that so much of pacific
human feeling should prevail between frontier farmer and fore-trekker
and the aboriginal races as still does exist.
There are few old frontier families in Dutch or English in the Cape
Colony, Transvaal, Free State, or Natal, who, if their past family
history were written, would not have to record hair-breadth escapes of
women and children who have fled for miles at night to avoid sudden
attacks, of farm-houses destroyed, of men coming home to find the women
and children killed and mutilated; this in addition to the record of
countless open battles in which their ancestors or they themselves took
part. And, on the native side, are even bitterer memories, and the
consciousness, in many cases, that the land on which the white man now
lives, and where he dominates, was once his father's. Alike among Dutch
and English, these memories have left their bitter mark. We have never
heard the natives so bitterly and fiercely denounced as by descendants
of English settlers whose ancestors had suffered racially from them.
"I almost hate you," has cried a friend belonging to one of the most
cultured and intelligent of our English Cape families, "when you talk
of raising and educating the natives. Hewers of wood and drawers of
water they shall be to us to the end, in spite of you." "I feel a
shudder of hatred go up my spine when I look at a Kaffir," said another
refined and, in many respects, noble frontier English woman to us once;
"I feel as if I could just put out my foot and crush them."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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