clothes are very well; but do you know that in forty years time your
portly figure in its black skirt and white kappie, if painted as they
are to-day, would seem to the men of that time more things of beauty
than the misproportioned productions of the fashions of the day. Hold
but fast, Tant' Annie! Under that capacious waist of yours lie sleeping
the ancestors of heroes of a larger, freer mould than would ever have
sprung from you if the iron band of fashion had compressed you to a
point. Hou maar vas! We have need of your simplicity to save us from
the disease of our artificiality, we have need of your faith in the
value of things that cannot be bought and sold, to save us from the
terrible scepticism that is creeping over us, that perhaps there is
nothing worth living for but success, and that success means wealth.
Hou maar vas, Tant' Annie! Hou maar vas, Oom Piet! And if we will
faithfully teach you our lesson and you will teach us yours, the day
will come when we will build up between us a people of whom the world
will not be ashamed. We will try to heal you of the disease that exists
in your condition; we look to you to save us from the disease that
battens on ours."
The question of the relation of Englishman and Boer differs from the
question of the relation between Caucasian and African races in this,
that, while our problem of relation to the Boer tends to simplify and
finally to dissolve itself as the mere result of the course of time,
the question of the relation of African and European races does not so
tend to dissolve and solve itself.
When any two peoples inhabiting one country are so physically related
that they have a powerful sexual attraction for each other, and that
individuals brought face to face are unconscious of racial difference,
the problem of union can be one of great moment, but cannot be one of
permanent difficulty. Wait, do nothing, and in time, literally and
not figuratively, love finds out the way, smoothes away difficulties,
and makes of the two races one. Where races are so far removed that
they are more or less sexually repellant to one another, that not
difference of speech and training divide them, but marked differences
of physical and mental conformation, of colour and build, then,
if these two races are obliged to inhabit the same territory, the
difficulty of arranging for their happy and useful interaction becomes
steadily greater as time passes, _and does not tend to solve itself_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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