Not infrequently his national feeling is intensified by
transplantation. Nowhere on the surface of the globe were toasts to
the health of the Queen and the Royal Family, and to the success of
old England, more heartily drunk than by the British settlers of 1820,
when they ate their first Christmas dinner, beneath the blazing South
African sun, under the kunee trees of Lower Albany. To these men, as
to the English colonists all the world over, the strength and dignity
of their position lay in the fact that they, a minute portion of the
great English nation, had come to this new land to implant themselves,
a branch from the old stock, which should in time take root and grow
to be a giant worthy of its parent tree. They felt themselves the
ambassadors of a great people, the bearers of a flag which waved over
every quarter of the globe; the representatives of a power which they
believed to be the most beneficent and powerful on earth.[14] So these
men named their little villages and their districts after the men
and places of the old country--"East London," "Port Alfred," "King
William's Town," "Queen's Town," "Lower Albany"--and their farms bore
often the names of the homes in England from which they came. Socially,
religiously, and more especially politically, they strove to reproduce,
line by line, as accurately as circumstances would permit, the national
life they had left. "So-and-so things are done at home." That settled,
as it still to-day to a large extent settles, all argument. To-day
the third generation of these men has arrived at adult years; but
consciousness of national identity with the parent people is hardly
dimmed. The young English African who has never been in Europe may
boast that South Africa is the finest country on earth, and swagger
of its skies, and wild, free life or, ridiculously enough, boast of
the civilization which it has attained; he may resent bitterly any
interference with what he considers his material rights on the part of
the "Home Government." But turn to the same man and ask him what his
nationality may be, suggest that he may possibly be of any other race
than his own, and you will not twice repeat your question--
For in spite of all temptation
To belong to another nation,
He remains an Englishman!
[14] Yes, we once all believed that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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