On the other hand, it would be very easy to exaggerate the universality
and intensity of this antipathy. We have known, not isolated instances,
but scores of cases, where both English and Dutch farmers have
entertained the kindliest feelings towards natives generally, and their
own servants in particular. We have known intimately an unlettered
Boer, so innately gifted with the power of ruling wisely that for
fifteen years, during which time he had always from fifteen to thirty
natives on his farm, he had never found it necessary to punish, or even
to threaten, one, and who was so beloved by his servants that, during
a long illness, when he was obliged to leave his farm for months in
the care of his Kaffir servants, he found on his return not one head
of stock missing, and the farm managed as though he had been there
himself. We have known both English and Dutch farmers who have kept
their servants twenty years, cared for them in old age, and aided them
in illness. We have known a Boer woman, herself an invalid, who would
go evening by evening to the hut of her sick servant to comfort and
help her; we have seen a whole Boer family gathered weeping round the
grave of a black Bantu; we have known both English and Dutch farmers
who have treated their native servants with far more consideration and
kindness than the average English landowner shows towards the labourers
on his estates; and, on the other hand, we have known both English and
Dutch farmers with whom no native would willingly remain in service;
who were as cordially hated as they hated; and whose whole relation
with the native was a series of petty oppressions, with occasional acts
of gross injustice or cruelty. But we believe that every one who has
attentively and impartially studied this matter on the spot will allow
that it is a question into which the Dutch or English extraction of the
farmer does not materially enter.
In the notorious Hart case of a few years back when, in the Cape
Colony, an English farmer of that name flogged a Bantu to death in cold
blood, they were English and not Dutch farmers who offered to subscribe
to pay the small fine inflicted on him, and who resented his being
punished at all. The most hopeful sign with regard to this feeling of
"race feud" is that, on the whole, it is a decaying feeling. To find it
in its full intensity among Dutch or English one must always go to the
older men and women of forty, fifty, seventy, or older, who in their
youth went through bitter experiences of conflict with the native, or
remember the experiences of their parents. It is far less intense among
the younger men and women of from twenty-five and under, now growing
up, and in another generation it will probably be all but extinct in
the form of a true race feud.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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