Our political as well as our racial map of South Africa will now be
complete; for these lines represent the boundaries of the political
states into which South Africa is subdivided. For (and this is a matter
which requires our carefullest consideration) not only is South Africa
peopled everywhere by a mixture of races overlying and underlying each
other in confused layers; but these mixtures of peoples are redivided
into political states whose boundaries, except in the case of a few of
the necessarily ephemeral native states, have no relation to the racial
divisions of the people beneath them, but are purely the result of more
or less political combination and therefore have in them, at core,
nothing of the true nature of national divisions.
This matter lies so deeply at the heart of the South African, and has
so much to do with our complicated problem, that it will be well to
look at it more closely.
A nation, like an individual, is a combination of units; in the nation
the units are persons; in the individual body they are cells. The
single cell, alone and uncombined, is capable only of the simplest
forms of development; the solitary amœboid germ can undergo no high
development, as it floats unconnected in the water or air; it is
only when cells are combined in close and vital union with others,
and there is interaction, that high development is possible. The
highly differentiated complex cells that go to form a human eye or
brain are possible only as parts of a larger interacting organism, a
long-continued and close interaction between millions of cells, and
could come into being in no other way.
Yet more is the analogous fact true with regard to human beings. Alone
and divided from his fellows, the individual man is capable of only
the very lowest form of development. The accounts of persons who have
been lost in infancy and grown up alone, apart from any organization
or interaction with their fellows, shows in the extremest form how
very low is the natural condition of the human amœboid. Speechless,
knowledgeless, its very hands incapable of performing the simplest
operation which the veriest child in the lowest organized society
learns to perform (as we imagine intuitively), such an individuality
impresses on us, in its extremest form, a lesson which all human
history teaches us in other shapes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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