UNlVBRStTY OF j 
 CALIFOr.HlA J 
 
 ANTHROPOLOGY UBKABX 
 
KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
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KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 AND THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 
 STUDY OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 
 
 BY 
 
 DUDLEY KIDD 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 'THE ESSENTIAL KAFIR," "SAVAGE CHILDUOOD," &C. 
 
 LONDON 
 ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 
 
 1908 
 
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PREFACE 
 
 Racial questions, democratic ideals, and the problems of 
 Socialism are in the air. The world is filling up fast, and 
 aggregates, whether of nations, races or classes, are now 
 being sifted drastically by the process of natural selection. 
 Aristocracies, majorities, and minorities, whether of races 
 or classes, seem to have entered on the acute stage of their 
 probation. No matter where we turn, whether to South 
 Africa with its Boer and Native problems, to America with 
 its Negro and Japanese difficulties, to Russia with its 
 nightmare, to India and Egypt with their agitations for 
 self-government, to the Balkans with its tangle, to the 
 Congo with its struggles and tragedies amid primaeval 
 forests, to Australia with its fear of Kanakas and Japanese , 
 to Mohammedans with their aspirations for Pan-Islamism, 
 to Asia in its awakening, or to Europe with its rising tide 
 of Democracy and Socialism, we are face to face with the 
 struggle for existence that is taking place between groups 
 of men that are fighting for very life. In the case of races 
 and classes, just as in the case of individuals, those that 
 are the most efficient in their adaptation to environment, 
 and not those that simply give expression to the loftiest 
 sentiment, will survive and dominate all rivals ; while the 
 weak and inefficient will go to the wall. 
 
 We shall be occupied in these pages with but a single 
 
 \7M?r^ 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 race ; though the future of the Kafii-, and our duty to him, 
 will take us into several fields of thought. The present 
 volume deals with but one aspect of the Native Problem, 
 namely, the conflict of Western conceptions of Individualism 
 with the ingrained Socialism of the Kafir. This aspect of 
 the problem is isolated for several reasons. 
 
 In the first place, no treatment of all the aspects of the 
 Native Problem can hope to be altogether satisfactory 
 unless it takes the form of a symposium in which experts 
 in native thought, economics, politics, education, and 
 missions combine to present the various aspects of this 
 many-sided problem. There seems to be no person who 
 possesses all the qualities necessary for such a work. 
 
 In the second place, so far as I know — and I think I have 
 read every book that has been written on the subject — ^the 
 very existence of the above-mentioned aspect of the problem 
 has not even been recognised by any previous writer. 
 
 In the third place, the conflict of European Individualism 
 with Kafir Socialism constitutes the very heart of the 
 problem. No one has written more wisely about the 
 Native Problem than Mr. Colquhoun ; and yet he not 
 only failed to recognise the existence of this conflict of 
 Socialism and Individualism, but has actually stated that 
 the socialistic ideal is a conception that cannot possibly 
 take hold of the Kafir. I shall quote presently the actual 
 words used by Mr. Colquhoun ; and hope to prove that, 
 so far from being alien to native thought. Socialistic ideals 
 affect almost every conception of the Kafirs, giving colour 
 and form even to their ideas about such widely different 
 things as justice and witchcraft. 
 
 There is a further and final reason for not attempting a 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 complete discussion of the Native Problem. It is a most 
 unsuitable time to make such an attempt, because the 
 present Liberal Government, by reserving the affairs of 
 the Kafirs in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony for 
 its own special care, and by interfering in the native affairs 
 of Natal, is virtually stifling discussion ; for what colonist 
 cares to waste his time in presenting a reasoned statement 
 of his views concerning a thousand details of administration 
 when he has every reason for feeling certain that the Party 
 that meditates interference in the domestic affairs of South 
 Africa will be guided, not by facts and sound sense, but by 
 the uninformed sentiment of " moral experts " ? 
 
 For the above reasons — and assured that Home inter- 
 ference is the transient whim of a political clique rather 
 than the settled will of the people — I have decided to make 
 this volume simply an introduction to, and not a detailed 
 study of, the Native Problem. The native point of view, 
 which I have sought to explain, is of great importance, 
 though it is not the only point of view. Unless we clearly 
 understand native conceptions and ideals, we shall but 
 reckon without our host. 
 
 In South Africa we are all aware that we are building 
 up our commercial, industrial, political and social structure 
 at the foot of a volcano ; but like all Pompeians, we have 
 become so accustomed to the manifold dangers of the situa- 
 tion that we do not worry very much about our Vesuvius. 
 Every now and then we feel some very disquieting and 
 ominous rumblings beneath our feet, and occasionally see 
 a flash of fire and a puff of smoke, and feel a few ashes 
 falling on our heads ; but the anxiety soon wears off ; 
 officials assure us that the natives are quiet again ; and 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 every one goes about his work as though there were no 
 danger brewing. The problem is so many-sided and com- 
 plicated that most of us are content to postpone all serious 
 consideration of the subject. We talk about the natives 
 in vague terms, for most of us know but little about the 
 inscrutable Kafirs. There are comparatively few people 
 who have any first-hand and intimate knowledge of the 
 hraal-life of the natives ; and so most of us are content to 
 accept the many floating, commonplace statements that 
 abound in our towns and villages. Opinion takes the place 
 of knowledge, and we are apt to adopt a sort of nonchalant 
 optimism based on our national reputation of muddling 
 through most of our difficulties. The law-abiding nature 
 of the Kafir tends to confirm us in the delusion that 
 the natives are reconciled to a rule which we know to be 
 just and fair. 
 
 As the result of this attitude towards the subject, the 
 ground is simply littered with half-truths, and with anti- 
 quated though inveterate prejudices. The Kafir that the 
 average white man knows is the semi-civilised barbarian 
 who has suffered from the degenerative influences of civilisa- 
 tion in our centres of industry, on our farms, or in domestic 
 service. The visitor to South Africa picks up some 
 specious and delusive myths about such Kafirs, and if he 
 should write a book, he can scarcely resist the temptation 
 to give the most picturesque of these half-truths a fresh 
 lease of life, a wider currency, and an additional distortion 
 due to his imperfect understanding of a strange and alien 
 race. From the nature of the case, it is impossible even 
 for the globe-trotting Member of Parliament to get to the 
 heart of a racial problem in a visit, the brevity of which 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 makes it impossible for the out-of-the-way Kafir kraals 
 to be visited. Yet the writer feels bound to spatchcock 
 into his book a chapter dealing with the subject. It is 
 no cause for wonder that Home criticism should so often 
 be wide of the mark, and that the most ludicrous suggestions 
 should from time to time appear in the Press, or should be 
 proposed in the House of Commons. 
 
 In addition to these sources of information, we have some 
 valuable Blue Books — studies in the anatomy of the subject 
 — that only few people seem to read until the contents are 
 boiled down into magazine articles. There are also among 
 the annual crop of South African books some volumes in 
 which the writers manage to find space for a short chapter 
 on the Native Problem. Though writers who are experts 
 in economics or sport, or some kindred subject, naturally 
 view the Native Problem through their own special key- 
 hole, the result is interesting and not without value ; for it 
 is of great importance to know the bearing of such a side- 
 issue as the Rand Labour-Supply on the Native Problem, 
 even though the writer may assure us that this side- 
 issue is not only the heart but the whole of the problem. 
 The Kafirs say that no elephant ever felt its own trunk 
 to be a burden, and we may therefore safely take some 
 discount of! the opinion of the man with but one idea. 
 
 But it is not only the mine-owner who is in danger of 
 ignoring the native in his insistence of the importance of 
 some side-issue of the problem : the philanthropist, the 
 person who asks hysterical questions in the House of 
 Commons, and the members of the Aborigines Protection 
 Society are just as much in danger of forgetting the actual 
 Kafir owing to their concentration on their own hobby. 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 It is fatally easy to set up in tlie mind some unreal image 
 of an oppressed and voiceless black man, who is too gentle 
 and peaceable, and witbal too guileless, to provoke hostilities 
 except under the most provoking oppression of some 
 wicked white men. This mental image affords a splendid 
 occasion for giving expression to those most pleasurable 
 and luxurious of all emotions, indignation and pity. A 
 meeting is held, and there is set up an emotional storm in 
 many a tea-cup ; the actual savage is lost sight of, and the 
 " brutality " of the colonist and the humanity of the people 
 at home are apt to become the twin-centres of what the 
 Kafirs call a crab's dance. The question then ceases to 
 be the native, and becomes the white, problem. Under the 
 influence of prejudice or passion, the native, who is the 
 subject of the contention, is lost sight of ; and the real war 
 is waged round such problems as the moral character of 
 the colonist, the nature of the British Constitution, or the 
 abstract idea of Justice, for every one thinks he knows all 
 about these things. The Kafir becomes the ostensible 
 subject of debate in which people exploit their special and 
 peculiar obsessions. The argument becomes practically 
 independent of the actual Kafir of the kraal, and would not 
 be modified much if the aborigines of South Africa were 
 Siamese, Red Indians or even Martians. Every conceiv- 
 able side-interest, prejudice, and false analogy is discussed 
 by these people, whom Carlyle would call Professors of 
 Things in General, and who entirely ignore the real wishes 
 of the Kafir. 
 
 The Native Problem is the 'problem of the native. This is 
 so obvious when once stated that one would be ashamed 
 to say it unless it were so constantly forgotten. Before we 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 can understand the bearings of the Native Problem we 
 must study native customs and thought. We shall never 
 get any nearer a solution of the problem by concentrating 
 our attention on the relative values of Home and Colonial 
 sentiment and ethical sense, or on political panaceas for 
 imaginary and non-existent needs, for it is the Kafir, and 
 not our emotion, that is the determining factor in the 
 problem. 
 
 I have not dealt with the subject of the religious aspect 
 of Missions, though missionaries have done so much to 
 exploit individualism amongst the Kafirs. There is not 
 space available for the treatment of the subject. I fear 
 to say too little or too much, and feel that any inadequate 
 statement would but raise many undesirable misunder- 
 standings. That aspect of the subject must therefore be 
 reserved for a future volume. 
 
 I am not without hope that the picture of the " savage " 
 that I present may do something to undermine the distorted 
 mental image that is ordinarily awakened by that word. 
 Many a race has opprobriously called another race, that 
 it did not understand, barbarian or savage ; even though 
 that despised race was in some directions the more advanced 
 of the two. The Kafir, contrary to ordinary belief, has the 
 most extraordinarily well-developed spirit of altruism and 
 camaraderie, which is very rarely equalled amongst Western 
 nations. Ethnologists are slowly forcing us to admit that 
 the savage is not so savage as has been supposed. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 v,^ I. Primitive Socialism ..,,.. 3 
 
 y^ II. Kafir Conceptions ok Justice .... 63 
 
 III. The Native Franchise . . , . . ^o 
 
 PART II 
 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 yr IV. The Education of the Kafir . . . .141 
 V. Can the Ethiopian change his Skin.^ . . 198 
 
 VI. The First Step towards the Solution of the 
 
 Native Problem 266 
 
PAUT I 
 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
N 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 
 
 In discussions as to whether Socialism would or would not 
 stop progress and remove incentives to the strenuous life, 
 appeal is not uncommonly made to the imagination, and 
 opinion is pitted against opinion. When prophets, armed 
 with private revelations, vie with one another, it is hopeless 
 to judge as to the truth or falseness of the opposed predic- 
 tions by weighing the relative confidence and assurance 
 shown by the contending parties. If we could but leave 
 imagination and prophecy on one side, and examine facts, 
 our position would be much simplified. Ethnology is 
 able, most fortunately, to supply us ^^^th such facts. 
 
 To all civilised people face to face with the problem of 
 Sociahsm, a study of the Clan-System of the Kafirs should 
 be of much interest, for it is an attempt on the part of a 
 primitive people to solve on a lower plane problems we 
 are seeking to solve on a higher. The system has been 
 working for ages, and so the socialistic* experiment has 
 had time to bear its characteristic fruit. 
 
 In examining Kafir Socialism it may be well to keep 
 before us Rousseau's famous definition of the Social Pact : 
 " To find a form of association which may defend and 
 
 * The word socialism is used in these pages to connote an organi- 
 sation of society in which the means of life — whether production, 
 distribution, or protection — are held in eollectiye ownership. 
 
4 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 protect, with the whole force of the community, the person 
 and property of every associate, and by means of which 
 each, coalescing with all, may nevertheless only obey 
 himself, and remain as free as before. . . . Such is the 
 fundamental problem of which the social contract furnishes 
 the solution." * The Kafirs certainly fulfil the conditions 
 of the pact, and the following pages will show how far they 
 have been able to " remain as free as before." 
 
 The Kafirs may not have such a complete and highly 
 developed organisation as the Indian village communities, 
 yet they are, nevertheless, thorough-going collectivists. 
 Their very babes are Socialists. The roots of their social 
 policy are to be found in their Clan-System, which must 
 now be described. 
 
 I, The Clan-System 
 
 According to this system, the native races of South Africa 
 are divided up into a number of tribes, each of which is 
 composed of a number of clans, each of which, again, 
 consists of a group of families. The children are responsible ,. vn^ 
 to the father ; he is responsible to the head-manrwHo, in 
 turn, is responsible to the petty chief; while the petty ^ 
 chiefs are responsible to the Paramount Chief or king. 
 A Paramount Chief, therefore, has to watch the interests 
 of the entire tribe ; the petty chiefs have to watch the 
 interests of the various clans ; the head-men have to watch 
 the interests of their respective groups of families, and 
 the father has to watch the interests of his family, even 
 when the sons are grown up. Group-association and 
 * " Social Contract." English translation by Tozer, p. 109. .-^ 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 5 
 
 responsibility are therefore the essence of the system. 
 There is considerable latitude as to the details of the plan, 
 and as to the extent of powers committed to these various 
 people in different tribes. In one tribe the chief may be 
 more or less assisted by, and responsible to, a number of 
 old councillors ; while in another tribe the chief may be 
 an absolute tyrant. Such a chief can do no wrong. His 
 will is the will of the people, who do not complain about 
 the abuses of his power, because it is the will of the people 
 that the will of the chief should be supreme. It is as 
 though they said to their chief : " We govern ourselves 
 by choosing to do what you tell us." Thus we have the 
 strange phenomenon of self-government taking the form 
 of an Autocracy or Tyranny. In those tribes in which 
 the chief is less autocratic, the people only exert their 
 power very indirectly and occasionally ; and even in 
 such tribes it is not true to say, as it has been stated 
 recently in the Home Press, that the Kafirs are a " pure 
 democracy." 
 
 Even so careful a writer as Mr. Colquhoun has said 
 strangely that Afrikanders " must see for themselves that 
 to introduce Socialism and Democracy to the Kafir is to 
 destroy their strongest hold on him. The conception is 
 not one which can get any real hold of a people just emerging 
 from the tribal state." * In that sentence two different 
 things are confused — Socialism and Democracy. The 
 Kafirs reject the Democracy with all their nature, while 
 they welcome the Socialism with every fibre of their being. 
 They differ from Western Socialists in the fact that they are 
 the firmest believers in both Autocracy (or should we say 
 
 * " The Afrikander Land," p. 118. 
 
6 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 Aristocracy?) and Socialism; and there is no reason why 
 the socialistic state should not " run " itself through its 
 own chosen autocratic chiefs or councillors. 
 
 The various departments of life that have been socialised, 
 or tribalised, by the Kafirs must now be passed under 
 review. It will be seen that so far from the conception 
 of Socialism not being able to get hold of a people emerging 
 from the tribal state, it is the very breath of their life. 
 
 (a) The Individual and all his Rights. — Amongst the 
 Kafirs, the person of the individual belongs in theory to 
 the chief : he is not his own, for he is the chief's man. It 
 is extremely difficult for us, with our advanced conception 
 of the inviolability of the rights of the individual, to 
 appreciate the bearing of this fact. Philanthropists some- 
 times draw the most unwarrantable conclusions from their 
 imperfect understanding of the native's idea : they catch 
 a glimpse of one aspect of this matter, and their sentiment 
 becomes so deeply affected and engaged that they have 
 not patience to study the subject from the Kafir point of 
 view, but at once cry out for the abolition of this intolerable 
 power of the chief. 
 
 The relation of the individual to the chief can be under- 
 stood from the following statement made by a Zulu, who 
 was describing to a white man the custom of the Festival 
 of First Fruits. He said : " The Zulus, if the mealies 
 are ripe, are not permitted by themselves to eat them. 
 The king must always give them permission before they 
 do so. If somebody is eating new mealies, before the king 
 has given his permission, he will be killed entirely. The 
 white men are wondering about it, and say : ' Is a man 
 not allowed to go into his own garden for harvesting food, 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 7 
 
 which he planted himself, and to eat it ? ' But the Zulus 
 are not wondering about that, saying : ' We are all the 
 king's men : our bodies, our power, our food, and all that 
 we have, is the king's property. It is quite right that we 
 do not commence to eat new mealies unless the king has 
 permitted it.' " * 
 
 " Zulus are not wondering about that " : what pregnant 
 words are these ! This custom of the Feast of First Fruits 
 has been designed, probably, partly as a taboo to prevent 
 the squandering of the tribal food-supply, and partly as 
 a means of insuring that the amatongo, or ancestral spirits, 
 shall get their due, and so be kept well disposed towards 
 the tribe. The native also readily understands that his own 
 impulse of greediness must not be allowed to override his 
 social obligations, for the interest of the clan is really his 
 highest interest : apart from the prosperity of the clan, 
 the individual has no security whatever ; consequently the 
 Kafir sees that it would never do for every man to do what 
 is right in his own eyes ; if they did that, the tribe would 
 be at the mercy of surrounding enemies who knew how to 
 curb the anti-social or asocial actions of its members. 
 
 " Zulus are not wondering about that ! " Evidently that 
 
 which puzzles, and sometimes obsesses, the mind of the 
 
 white man, and which seems to him so absurdly unjust, is 
 
 no cause of wonder to the Kafir. To him the matter seems 
 
 essentially just and reasonable. Let the European but 
 
 once accept the data which are impHcitly accepted by the 
 
 Zulus, and the conclusion follows, for the logic is not at 
 
 * South African Folk-Lore Journal. The expression " killed entirely " 
 is used in a somewhat Irish sense, for the disobedient Zulu will probably 
 only suffer considerable gastric disturbance, largely induced by his 
 imaginative fears of breaking a taboo. 
 
8 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 fault. Our own progress should teach us that national 
 advance is due rather to the changing of our data as to 
 " rights " than to an improvement in our logic. 
 i When we come to speak of the sense of justice, this saying 
 of the Zulu will be found of value in showing how a Kafir 
 differs from a European in his conception of justice and of 
 " rights." But in this place it is merely given to show 
 how entirely the rights of the clan supersede those of the 
 individual. So fully does the individual belong to the 
 head of the tribe, that a chief, named Shiluvane, issued 
 the decree : " I do not allow of anybody dying in my 
 country except on account of old age." This command 
 was given with a view to the checking of the use of sorcery 
 and witchcraft to murder people ; for the chief imagined 
 that old age was the natural cause of death, and that none 
 of his warriors could die in the prime of life unless they were 
 bewitched by some private enemy. But the very expres- 
 sion, " I allow no one to die," shows how completely the 
 people were regarded as the property of their chief. The 
 very existence of the tribe depends upon the existence 
 and maintenance of a great number of mature and able- 
 bodied human beings : and in this sense the people them- 
 selves may be regarded as a means of production, for it is 
 they who create and protect the tribe. For this reason, 
 the individuals with all their personal rights must be 
 socialised and brought into subjection to the recognised 
 head of the tribe. 
 
 In theory, the entire property of all the members of the 
 tribe belongs to the chief. When bargaining with the 
 Kafirs for such things as assegais, and even snuff-boxes, 
 the native, when reluctant to sell, has said that he had no 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 9 
 
 right to part with the property of his chief. It is true that 
 this line of argument is advanced more frequently when 
 the article the European wants to buy is a weapon of war 
 than when it is such a thing as a snuff-box, which is practi- 
 cally of no tribal value. But Kafirs have advanced this 
 reason to me even when refusing to sell a wooden spoon. 
 However, the Kafir never pushes a thing to what a European 
 would regard as a logical conclusion. He has a sweet 
 reasonableness ; and when he covets the object offered 
 in barter, he conveniently forgets all about the theoretical 
 rights of his chief, and readily parts even with an assegai. 
 It should be pointed out, in passing, that in every direction 
 we meet with this disinclination to push principles to their 
 logical conclusions, and a failure to recognise this fact not 
 improbably accounts for some of the conflicting theories 
 with regard to the natives and their customs that have been 
 advanced hastily by some observers. 
 
 Since the bodies of all the members of the tribe belong 
 to the chief, any damage done to the person of the individual 
 is regarded as a criminal offence, and restitution has to be 
 made, not to the person injured, but to the chief. Thus if 
 A breaks B's leg, or knocks out his eye, he has to pay 
 damages, not to B, but to the chief. When a white magi- 
 strate reverses this procedure, the natives think he is doing 
 the tribe an injury, for he is putting a premium on anti- 
 social selfishness. The action of the white man is therefore 
 regarded as an immoral one. Thus the tables are turned, 
 and instead of Glaucon's objection, " 'Tis a city of pigs, 
 Socrates," applying to the socialistic state, it would be 
 used by a Kafir as a remark appHcable to our individualistic 
 regime. 
 
10 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 We come now to the question of personal property, and 
 find that, in this matter also, the Kafirs show their excellent 
 moderation. The people regard their cattle as their own 
 property, for the chief has his oxen, and the people have 
 theirs. We may perhaps say that the cattle form the money 
 of the people ; and yet even the cattle are held at the 
 discretion of the chief, who is entirely justified in appropriat- 
 ing them should a man fail in performing his tribal duty. 
 Thus, when a man is convicted of using witchcraft,* and 
 is therefore considered guilty of a grossly anti-social action, 
 he is " eaten up " by the chief, who may either keep the 
 man's cattle for himself or divide them up amongst his 
 councillors. In the eyes of the Kafirs this is not spoliation, 
 for the chief has but taken back what all along was his 
 own. Thus it will be seen that Kafir practice agrees with 
 ancient Roman custom. Maine says : " Peculium — a few 
 head of oxen kept apart — was the name which the Romans 
 gave to the permissive separate property allowed to the son 
 or a slave. No principle was more persistent in Roman law 
 than the subjection of the ^jecwZmwi to the authority of the 
 paterf amilas or the master, should he choose to exercise it. 
 . . . When the house community is in its primitive and 
 natural state there is no feculium : there is none in Monte- 
 negro ; the dominant notion there is that as the community 
 is liable for the delinquences of its members, it is entitled 
 to receive all the produce of their labour." f It will 
 thus be seen that the Kafirs are in very good company 
 on this subject, and that their system is undeserving 
 
 * Not infrequently the accusation of using sorcery is trumped up 
 against any one guilty of anti-social practices, so as to provide an 
 occasion for giving vent to indignation. 
 
 f " Dissertations on Early Law and Custom," pp. 251, 252. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 11 
 
 of tlie plentiful abuse that is showered on it by some 
 philanthropists. 
 
 Dr. SchaflBle, in his " Quintessence of Socialism," explodes 
 a common misunderstanding when he says : " In opposition 
 to all contrary views, which have been very widely spread, 
 it must be emphatically stated that Socialism does not 
 universally exclude either property in general or private 
 property in particular. The principle of collective labour 
 does, indeed, demand plainly, and pretty exclusively, 
 collective capital, but it does not without ceremony deny 
 the admissibility of private property." * The Kafirs, 
 however, only allow people to hold private property and 
 cattle when this does not conflict with the good of the 
 community ; they make short work of the man who grows 
 too rich and who neglects the interest of the clan. Such 
 a man is sure to be accused of amassing wealth by using 
 sorcery, and is consequently " eaten up " by the chief. 
 
 Without going further, it should be evident that the 
 Clan-System is based on obligations to be performed by 
 the individual and not on the man's rights. It is the 
 Kafir's primary obligation to sacrifice, if needs be, every, 
 thing for the good of the clan, and his individual rights are 
 wholly subservient, contingent, and secondary to the 
 performance of his obligations. This sound basis of the 
 social state is undoubtedly one of the main causes of the 
 stability of Kafir society. To do anything that is anti- 
 social is the one heinous offence : nay, it is more, for it is 
 the one hopeless case of " bad form," It is a striking tiling 
 that it should be in primitive peoples and amongst English 
 school-boys, the very classes in which there exists the 
 * Op. cit., English translation, p, 101. 
 
12 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 intensest egoism, that the strongest spirit of communism 
 should be found. School-boys have organised their social 
 forces against their common enemy — their masters : it is 
 therefore the height of treachery, for it is utterly anti- 
 social, for a boy to " sneak," and so put his clan at the 
 mercy of the enemy. Similarly a school-boy who fails to 
 do his duty to his school, soon finds himself deprived of 
 many coveted privileges. The analogy need not be 
 laboured, for we all know how strong is the communistic 
 spirit amongst English school-boys, and how much more 
 " sporting " it is than the unchecked individualism of 
 later life. But, in the case of the Kafirs, it may be well 
 to point out an apparent exception that helps to prove 
 the rule. Every Kafir is supposed to be a sort of policeman, 
 and it is his duty to report to his father, or head-man, or 
 petty chief, any violation of clan-interests that he has 
 observed. He is his brother's keeper in fact and not 
 merely in theory. All this might appear to an English 
 boy as an example of " sneaking." But it is not so ; for 
 a Kafir only gives information against another man when 
 that person has violated clan-interests : he would never 
 think of doing it in the case of private quarrels. 
 
 The tribal solidarity is further strengthened by the 
 regulations concerning marriage. No man is allowed to 
 marry a woman of his own clan, even though she should 
 be but a fifth or sixth cousin ; but he must marry within 
 his tribe.* There are few things that scandalise the Kafir 
 more than to hear a missionary approve of the marriage 
 of cousins. The Kafirs are intensely particular in not allow- 
 ing marriages where any blood-relationship can be traced : 
 
 * A tribe may contain more than a hundred clans. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 13 
 
 they are also, in their natural condition, very averse from 
 marriages betAveen members of different tribes. All this, 
 naturally, consolidates the clan. 
 
 There is a great danger in interfering with racial problems. 
 Largely owing to the natural difficulty that arises from the 
 entire difference in point of view adopted by the Anglo- 
 Saxon and the Kafir, it comes about that our sentiment 
 is offended at the utter ignoring of the " rights " of the 
 individual. We are apt to regard the Kafir as but the 
 chattel of the chief. But this is a great mistake, and easily 
 leads to trouble. Maine has pointed out that : " Wherever 
 servitude is sanctioned by institutions which have been 
 deeply affected by Roman jurisprudence, the servile 
 condition is never intolerably wretched. There is a great 
 deal of evidence that in those American States which have 
 taken the highly Romanised code of Louisiana as the basis 
 of their jurisprudence, the lot and prospects of the negro 
 population were better in many material respects, until 
 the letter of the fundamental law was overlaid by recent 
 statutory enactments passed under the influence of panic, 
 than under institutions founded on the English Common 
 Law, which, as recently interpreted, has no true place for 
 the slave, and can only, therefore, regard him as a chattel." * 
 This is a typical example of the unfortunate effects of Anglo- 
 Saxon action based on a misunderstanding of unfamiliar 
 conceptions. Professor Westermarck points out : " From a 
 moral point of view negro slavery is interesting chiefly be- 
 cause it existed in the midst of a highly developed Christian 
 civilisation, and nevertheless, at least in the British Colonies 
 and the United States, was the most brutal form of slavery 
 * " Ancient Law," p. 170. 
 
14 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 ever known. . . . Through the direct action of Congress 
 it became law that persons known to be free should be 
 sold as slaves in order to cover the costs of imprisonment 
 which they had suffered on account of a false suspicion 
 that they were runaway slaves. This law was repeatedly 
 put into effect. ' How many crowned despots,' says 
 Professor Von Hoist — he might have said, how many 
 autocratic Kafir chiefs — ' can be mentioned in the history 
 of the old world who have done things which compare in 
 accursedness with this law to which the democratic republic 
 gave birth ? '" 
 
 Similarly, any ignorant " democratic " interference on 
 our part with regard to Kafir customs based on the con- 
 ception of the obligations of the people to sacrifice their 
 " rights " for the good of the clan is certain to produce 
 trouble of the most deplorable kind. Later on we shall 
 examine some of the unexpected results arising from this 
 cause. 
 
 (6) Military Forces. — The safety of the tribe — indeed 
 its very existence — depends on the efficient organisation 
 of its military forces. Every individual is therefore 
 compelled to sink his own private wishes and perform his 
 share of military service. Every able-bodied man — 
 that is to say, every man, for amongst the Kafirs in their 
 " raw " state all weaklings are killed off in infancy — is a 
 soldier, and has to go undergo military training. Tshaka, 
 the great Zulu despot, gathered the manhood of his tribe 
 into regiments which lived in military kraals, and which 
 were maintained at public expense. These men were not 
 allowed to marry until the chief gave them permission, for 
 it was essential that their fibre should not be softened 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 15 
 
 unduly by domestic life. The very boys were herded 
 together into military kraals, and had to serve as baggage- 
 carriers for the army. The man who refused to perform 
 his military duties would have been hounded out of his 
 tribe, being regarded as a worthless and anti-social 
 wretch. The Kafirs would stand aghast at the insipid 
 and tepid Socialism of the English Labour Party, for 
 they would regard their anti-military emotionalism as 
 utterly effeminate. 
 
 (c) Hunting.— Co-oi^eTation in hunting has such obvious 
 advantages that it obtains in all primitive societies. The 
 Kafir system of tribal hunting is very interesting. Having 
 elsewhere described at length a tribal hunt,* a brief summary 
 must here suffice. A couple of days in advance of the hunt, 
 the chief sends messengers — usually boys of about sixteen 
 years of age — to tell the people at what hour to arrive at the 
 Great Place, as his kraal is called. These boys are duly ac- 
 credited as messengers, those I have seen being distinguished 
 by two circular patches of red paint at the top of the arm. 
 On the day appointed, the people arrive at the Great Place, 
 clan by clan, and greet the chief, who pretends not to know 
 who the differe it people are until one of the councillors 
 pronounces the ,'sibongo, or surname, of each clan. On 
 hearing the name, the chief pretends to show great delight 
 and praises the men excessively. The tribal diviners, or 
 doctors, then come upon the scene, working magical practices 
 and investigating the omens. When they pronounce that 
 everything is favourable, the whole crowd scatters, and 
 clan by clan the people take their place as they surround 
 a large district that has been pointed out previously to 
 * "The Essential Kafir," p. 316. 
 
16 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 them. The boys act as beaters ; and it is the duty of all 
 the men to drive the game to a common centre where the 
 chief has taken up his position. As the circle gets narrower 
 and narrower, the terrified game grow very wild, and finally 
 turn completely silly, running straight on to the assegais 
 that everywhere surround them. Any one who kills a buck 
 immediately puts it on his shoulder, and, running up to 
 the chief, lays it on the ground at his feet. Possibly half 
 a dozen claimants come up, each maintaining that he has had 
 a hand in the killing of the animal. The chief decides all 
 such claims on the spot, and everybody is satisfied. The 
 man who is judged to have killed the animal carries it 
 away and is allowed to reserve it, not for himself, but for 
 his family or group ; but if the chief should happen to 
 have decided that another man's dog helped to hold 
 the animal while it was being killed, then a leg of the 
 animal — it would sometimes need ten legs to satisfy 
 all the claimants— has to be given to the man as his 
 share of the spoil : but even this man does not regard the 
 leg of the buck as his private property, for he shares it 
 with his group of friends. There are times when the 
 natives hunt privately, but the tribal hunts are the 
 great events, for sometimes enormous quantities of game 
 are then secured. 
 
 Wild animals originally formed a large part of the food- 
 supply of the tribe : it was therefore thought that the game 
 belonged to the community, and that no private individual 
 had the right to warn people off any private preserve. 
 Thus the hunting of game was socialised, while there was 
 a certain amount of reasonable liberty granted to the 
 individual to hunt privately. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 17 
 
 (d) Land. — All the land owned by the tribe is vested 
 in the chief, who allows every man to use as much ground 
 as his wives can till. No land can be sold, entailed, or 
 devised, and yet a man knows that his gardens will never 
 be taken from him so long as he cultivates them. All 
 unallotted land that is not required for gardens, together 
 with all wood and water, is regarded as common property 
 for the grazing of cattle or for the needs of all the members of 
 the clan. The nationalisation of land is therefore absolute. 
 
 It is important to note that it was the sense of the 
 solidarity of the clan that led to the tribalisation of the 
 land. It is easy to imagine the institution of a carefully 
 thought-out plan of land-tenure devised so as to prevent 
 scandalous selfishness and neglect of the good of the people, 
 and also so as to produce and fostex a spirit of camaraderie 
 and social union : but this is not what happened amongst 
 the Kafirs ; for in their case the system of land-tenure is 
 the effect and not the cause of their communism. In their 
 case individual self-consciousness is not fully developed, 
 though the clan-consciousness is amazingly strong. The 
 individual amongst the Kafirs to a large extent confuses 
 (we might say fuses) himself with his clan, and therefore 
 has not that strong sense of personal property and " rights " 
 that obtains amongst people who have become acutely 
 conscious of their own individuality. 
 
 Again, this nationalisation of land did not arise out of 
 a sense of territorial sovereignty, for the chiefs were not 
 the chiefs of Zululand, Basutoland, nor of any other 
 " land " ; they were the chiefs of the Zulus, the Basutos, 
 and so forth. " Territorial sovereignty — the view which 
 connects sovereignty with the possession of a limited portion 
 
 B 
 
18 ' KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 of the earth's surface — was distinctly an of£-shoot, though 
 a tardy one, of feudalism. This might have been expected 
 a priori, for it was feudalism which, for the first time, linked 
 personal duties, and by consequence personal rights, to 
 the ownership of land." * 
 
 It would be difficult to devise a more complete socialising 
 of land than that adopted by the Kafirs ; and no wonder 
 the natives are scandalised when they see a missionary 
 putting up a fence around a certain plot of land and declar- 
 ing that it is his private property. " But, eh ! " says the 
 Kafir, " how the white man eats up our land ! " 
 
 (e) Administration of Justice. — In any case of dispute, 
 a man would appeal, naturally, first of all to the head-man 
 of the group : if he were not satisfied with the opinion of 
 the head-man, he would bring the matter before the petty 
 cliief, and only in important cases would he make the final 
 appeal to the Paramount Chief. So thoroughly is justice 
 regarded as a thing within the tribe that a man is only 
 responsible for injuries he does to members of his own 
 tribe. In fact there is no court that is competent to sit 
 on an inter-tribal affair. A man who injures a person 
 belonging to a hostile or rival tribe does a meritorious 
 action in the eyes of his own clan. " International law," 
 says Holland, " can subsist only between States which, 
 on the one hand, sufficiently resemble one another, and are 
 close enough knit together by common interests to be 
 susceptible of the uniform pressure of public opinion, while, 
 on the other hand, they are not so politically combined 
 as to be controlled by the force of a central authority." "j" 
 
 * Maine : " Ancient Law," 10th edit, p. 108. 
 f " Jurisprudence," p. 370. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 19 
 
 There can therefore be no inter-tribal law in the case of 
 the Kafirs. 
 
 Every now and then a chief may send a daughter to 
 another chief with the view of forming an alliance, or of 
 compelHng him to admit his dependence on the sender of 
 the girl. The chief must either accept the girl as wife, 
 and so accept the alliance, or the position of subordina- 
 tion, as the case may be, or he must drive back the girl and 
 prepare for war. This demand for alliance or submission 
 is perhaps the nearest approach the Kafirs can show to 
 international law. 
 
 If a person feared that he was going to be " eaten up " 
 by his chief, he might escape and take refuge with the 
 chief of another tribe—" Live under his shadow," as the 
 Kafijs graphically say. In that case he would have to pay 
 a number of cattle to the new chief as a guarantee for good 
 behaviour. ^Vhen the new chief accepts the cattle he 
 becomes, ifso facto, responsible for the protection of the 
 fugitive, who, having failed in his old tribal obligations 
 of course loses his old tribal privileges. The only peaceable 
 way in which the original chief can get back his escaped 
 subject is by paying a greater number of cattle to the chief 
 with whom the man has taken refuge. Should this prove 
 inefiective, the only other appeal is to war. A recent 
 writer, wishing to make out a case against her own nation, 
 has recently revived an unsavory episode that took place 
 in Natal more than thirty years ago. But her case could 
 not be made out without inventing the existence of a 
 " fundamental " inter-tribal law, forbidding a chief from 
 following a fugitive. It was therefore evolved from the 
 imagination, the writer forgetting that the very existence 
 
20 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 of the Clan-System indicates a social condition anterior to 
 the recognition of " frontiers," or of local contiguity as 
 a political bond. Had she but understood Kafir thought, 
 she would have seen that no Kafir would be scandalised 
 at our action, which was in keeping with native custom. 
 Mr. Brownlee, writing in 1858, says : " About forty years 
 since, it was lawful to put a man to death for the act of 
 adultery ; but Gaika abolished this law and ever since, 
 bloodshed, in a case of this nature, is punished as murder. 
 ... A man is punished for taking the law into his own 
 hands ; and in no case is he justified in doing so, even in 
 a case of retaliation. There is this to be observed, that the 
 above remarks refer to people of one tribe ; but if the case 
 were between people of different tribes, and the injured 
 person obtained no redress, he would retaliate on any one 
 of the other tribe who came within his power, and in this 
 would be supported by his chief until redress was obtained ; 
 but there does not appear to be any law to sanction the 
 custom." * Thus tribal law may restrain a man from 
 injuring a member of his own tribe, but there is no constraint 
 in connection with violence or injury done to a person 
 outside the closed circle of the tribe. It is strange that 
 Brownlee did not see that there could be no " law " in such 
 a case ; for in the first place, a custom needs no law for its 
 support, as in primitive races custom supports the law 
 which it creates ; and in the second place, a law only holds 
 good within the tribe, as there is no vestige of machinery for 
 international or inter-tribal law. In such matters might 
 is the only right. We thus see that the administration of 
 justice is, in the fullest sense of the word, tribalised. 
 * McLean's "Compendium of Kafir Law." 
 
.lIRSITY 
 li PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 21 
 
 (/) Magic. — There are three errors that are so deeply- 
 ingrained in European minds that one almost despairs of 
 eradicating them : they are, first, that magic in the eyes 
 of savages is regarded as a use of supernatural forces ; 
 secondly, that magic is the same thing as witchcraft ; 
 tliirdly, that witch-doctors are sorcerers, witches, or wizards. 
 
 With regard to the fii"st of these errors, it cannot be too 
 clearly stated that the savage regards magic as no more 
 supernatural than such a thing as the rising of the sun, or 
 the growing of the crops, or the falling of a stone to the 
 earth. Magic is no more supernatural than is the electrical 
 dynamo, though it may pass the wit of a plough-boy to 
 conceive how the cunning machine works. The machine 
 may be beyond the comprehension of the lad, who does 
 not, however, imagine that it therefore works by super- 
 natural forces, for he is aware that it was made by men who 
 know more about the laws of this strange universe than he 
 does. In the eyes of the Kafir, the diviner is simply a 
 cunning man who understands, better than ordinary people, 
 the inner working of nature. It follows, as a matter of 
 course, that the diviner can use forces for the service of 
 man in ways that pass the understanding of ordinary folk. 
 
 With regard to the second error, magic is the legitimate 
 social use of these forces of nature, while witchcraft is the 
 private and illicit anti-social use of such forces. The State 
 regulates the use of the secret knowledge of nature's ways, 
 and sees that it is used for the common good of the tribe. 
 The tribal diviner, or magician, therefore, not only con- 
 founds the politics but also frustrates the knavish tricks 
 of the common enemy. He is the bulwark of society. 
 The person who uses witchcraft, however, is supposed to 
 
22 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 have found out some of these secrets of nature wliicli he 
 (or she) uses so as to avenge injuries, or to secure illicit 
 and immoderate gain, purely for personal and anti-social 
 ends. 
 
 With regard to the third error, the sorcerer (the witch or 
 wizard) is the person who either uses these secret forces of 
 nature for his own ends, or who secretly sells his knowledge 
 or puts it at the disposal either of the enemies of the tribe 
 or of people who wish to pay out their own personal grudges 
 regardless of public interests. He is the enemy of the tribe, 
 for he has no regard to its interests. The diviner — the 
 so-called witch-doctor — is the man appointed by the State 
 to use all these tremendous forces of nature for the common 
 good of the tribe. He knows how to ward off evil from 
 the tribe, how to doctor the army, how to form a veritable 
 ring of defence around a kraal or a country into which 
 charmed circle no wizard who is the enemy of the clan> 
 and no disease, can enter. This clever man knows how 
 to make charms to induce the crops to grow ; he knows 
 how to kill the locusts ; and he knows how to prevent the 
 spread of disease, and, in short, to secure the well-being of 
 all the members of the tribe. He is the sworn enemy of 
 the sorcerers ; and it is one of his main functions to detect 
 and " smell out " these anti-social charlatans. All these 
 excellent functions are rarely united in the person of one 
 human being, for there is, as a rule, the duly appointed 
 crops-doctor, the locust-doctor, the witch-detecting doctor, 
 the rain-doctor, the medicinal- or herb-doctor, the war- 
 doctor, the lightning-doctor, and so forth. 
 
 There is a class of magical practices that comes between 
 these two divisions of tribal magic and personal witchcraft. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 23 
 
 The Kafirs are for ever using sucli innocent things as love- 
 charms, which are neither regarded as detrimental to the 
 clan nor as of much use to it. There is thus a sort of neutral 
 zone which is regarded as quite harmless ; native girls or 
 young men will even go to white traders to buy such things 
 as magnets or the prismatic glasses of chandeliers with 
 which to attract and hold the affections of some other 
 person. 
 
 It should now be clear what it is that the Kafir condemns 
 in connection with witchcraft. He does not think it wrong 
 to use the hidden forces of nature, but he thinks it extremely 
 base for a person to use these forces for anti-social purposes. 
 Magic is socialised, and the private individual must recognise 
 this fact. Let us imagine for a moment that some English- 
 man were to discover such a thing as the Heat Ray of Mr. 
 Wells's Martians,* wherewith he could frizzle up whole 
 crowds of men and entire regiments of soldiers. Would 
 not there be a popular outcry that the State, instead of 
 allowing an irresponsible person to make havoc of our 
 population, should interfere and control this force ? In 
 the eyes of the Kafir the witch or wizard has somewhat 
 similar powers at beck and call, and the natives naturally 
 desire such a force to be socialised or controlled by the 
 tribe. 
 
 The Rev. H. A. Junod, in a most interesting and valuable 
 paper on " The Theory of Witchcraft amongst South 
 African Natives," has thrown much light on the subject. 
 Yet towards the end of his paper he says : "It may seem 
 
 * Rsference might also be made to the fears of people half a 
 century ago concerning mesmerism and its possible use for criminal 
 purposes. 
 
24 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 inexplicable that millions of human beings who possess a 
 fair amount of reason and of common sense . . . can enter- 
 tain such absurd, dreadful ideas. But let us remember 
 that three centuries ago European tribunals were con- 
 demning wholesale hundreds of poor people accused of 
 witchcraft. There, however, was a capital difference. The 
 white witches, our ancestors, who were burnt by thousands 
 all over Europe, were supposed to have made a pact with 
 Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness. That sin was considered 
 as essentially diabolical in its origin. The Bantu have no 
 idea of Satan, and that aspect of witchcraft is entirely 
 absent from their mind." 
 
 I do not believe this distinction can bear examination. 
 If anything, the theory and practice were more repre- 
 hensible in the case of the Europeans than in the case of 
 the Kafirs. M. Junod seems to me to fail to see that the 
 indignation shown against witchcraft all the world over 
 is due to a hatred of anti-social tendencies. The essence 
 of our European satanic theory of witchcraft would seem 
 to be quite in keeping with Kafir conceptions. The witch 
 or wizard was supposed to make use of mysterious and 
 uncanny forces. Europeans, no less than Kafirs, had to 
 interpret the thing in terms of their own thought. In 
 Europe the explanation of such a thing was naturally 
 tinged and coloured by the overpowering religious concep- 
 tions of the times. Yet the priests in mediaeval days worked 
 magic in a dozen different ways, and were held in great 
 respect and reverence on that very account. They were 
 able — so the common people thought — to bless the arms 
 of the military forces of the nation ; they were able 
 to effect cures by means of relics ; they forgave sins and 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 25 
 
 granted indulgences ; they controlled miracles ; blessed 
 the crops ; stayed plagues ; and in a dozen different ways 
 performed the most amazing feats that Kafir diviners 
 also are thought to perform. But their actions were all 
 regulated by authority, and were supposed to be used for 
 the good of the State ; but the witches, who used very 
 similar powers, were supposed to work for private, immoral, 
 or anti-social ends, without submitting to the regulations 
 of the authorities. They were therefore regarded as the 
 enemies of mankind ; and, since any stick is good enough 
 to beat a dog with, they were accused of working through 
 evil agencies. Moral indignation takes on a different 
 colour in difEerent races. The satanic theory of witchcraft 
 not only arose as a natural explanation, but was also 
 obviously suited to justify the treatment meted out to 
 these poor wretches. But even in Europe there was a class 
 between these two great types, for there were numbers of 
 Thaumaturgic mystics whose practices were so neutral 
 from a social or moral point of view that it was almost a 
 toss-up whether they came to be regarded as social, neutral 
 or anti-social in their tendency. One of tliese mystics 
 might be made into a saint, another left unnoticed, and a 
 third condemned by the authorities to be burnt to death. 
 
 In the case of the Kafirs, the man who uses the forces 
 of nature in a cunning way to the advantage of the tribe 
 is regarded as a public benefactor, wliile the man who uses 
 precisely similar forces for private and anti-social ends is 
 regarded as an enemy to the tribe, and consequently unfit 
 to live. Between these two there is a class that iLses similar 
 practices for harmless and innocent purposes, and such 
 people are left alone to go their own way unmolested but 
 
26 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 unpraised. We shall never understand Kafir conceptions 
 as to the odiousness and crime of using witchcraft or sorcery, 
 and the beneficence of the users of magic, until we clearly 
 grasp the essential fact that the use of magic, no less 
 than the use of land, has been socialised. Legitimate and 
 public-spirited use of magic makes a man a diviner ; the 
 illegitimate and selfish private use of magic makes a man 
 a sorcerer. 
 
 {g) Religion. — It is but natural that religion in a primi- 
 tive race should crystallise round the axis of the tribe. 
 To change the metaphor, the conception of the tribe is 
 the spine of the whole body of native thought. In the 
 eyes of the Kafir there are few things more important than 
 the maintenance of the religious customs of the tribe. 
 
 There is no need to labour the fact that religion has 
 sometimes been, if not a retrograde force, at least a cause 
 of stagnation at certain epochs in the history of the world. 
 The old enmity between science and religion may be given 
 as an example. Yet ethnology, whatever light it may 
 throw ultimately on the exclusive claims of certain religions, 
 has undoubtedly helped us to appreciate the great benefits 
 the world has received through religion. Even magic, 
 which we had generally regarded as inimical to the good 
 of society, has been shown by Dr. Westermarck (in the 
 second volume of " Sociological Papers ") to have con- 
 tributed in no small way to the amenities of life : by attach- 
 ing great importance to a curse, it has strengthened filial 
 obedience to parents ; it has encouraged charity to the 
 poor ; it has upheld and intensified the claims of hospitality; 
 it has broken down the selfishness of the savage about his 
 food ; it has upheld the right of sanctuary for the oppressed. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 27 
 
 Thus, by appealing to reverence, awe and fear, it has 
 restrained the grossest evils of savage life. And if magic 
 has tended in the direction of civilisation, how much more 
 must religion have done so ? Religion has restrained the 
 turbulent impulses of the savage, and has given him ideals 
 to live for. Mr. Jevons has pointed out, in his " Introduc- 
 tion to the History of Religion," that it is quite possible we 
 owe such things as the culture of wheat and other grains, 
 as well as the domestication of the ox and the sheep, to 
 totemism. His idea seems to be that when men felt a 
 bond of sympathy with such things, they regarded them 
 as totems, and sought to secure the growth of the grain 
 by preserving the seed, and began to protect the sheep and 
 oxen from undue struggle for existence. It is therefore 
 quite possible that the man who rails at religion may owe 
 the very bread he eats to the totemism of his ancestors. 
 Were it not for primitive religion there would probably be no 
 civilisation to-day. The religion of primitive races may 
 not be lofty in a spiritual sense, but it is at least more 
 effective in the direction of restraining the impulses of 
 primitive peoples than is Christianity in curbing the vices 
 of European races. It is hardly too much to say that a 
 savage never knowingly disobeys his reUgious behef or 
 conviction. Within the narrow area of its operations, the 
 religion of a savage is intensely effective, and is something 
 like a law of nature. 
 
 The religion of the Kafirs is a blend of a decadent form 
 of totemism, an elementary type of ancestor worship, and 
 an all-pervading fetishism. No idols of any sort are 
 worshipped ; while the belief in a Supreme Being, to say 
 the least, is vague and uncertain. It is important to 
 
28 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 remember that religion, in the case of a primitive people 
 like the Kafirs, is mainly an affair — and a public affair — 
 of the men, for the women play a very subordinate part 
 in it. 
 
 It is but natural for the people to think that when the 
 chiefs and head-men die they still retain the interests in 
 the tribe or clan that they ever showed during life. They 
 therefore think that the amatongo, or spirits, of such people 
 preside over the destinies of the clan and are in a large 
 measure responsible for its fortunes. It is of the utmost 
 importance that the tribe or clan should maintain an 
 intimate relationship with such ancestral spirits. Religion 
 is therefore socialised. 
 
 The founder of the tribe is the one common ancestor 
 who binds the members of the different clans in religious 
 unity : while the deceased head-men of the different 
 clans cement the family tie and strengthen the bond 
 of consanguinity. Thus ancestral worship is a means 
 of strengthening the tribal and family ties. 
 
 To the European, the Kafirs seem singularly devoid of 
 reverence in their worship of the ancestral spirits, for the 
 meat-feast, which forms one of the chief ceremonies of their 
 worship — " We pray by eating beef," said a Kafir to me 
 once, " just as white men pray by using words " — is not 
 the type of thing that we are accustomed to. Kafir religion, 
 r.ke the religion of the Israelites in early times, does not 
 seem to us to be an inward or subjective religion of the 
 heart, for it is occupied rather with outward action than 
 with inward motive and ideal. There is, however, a good 
 deal more in the religion of the Kafir than meets the eye 
 of the average European observer. A Kafir when on a 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 29 
 
 journey, or when hunting game, or when entering on any 
 important enterprise, prays inwardly to his itongo, or 
 special ancestral spirit, and repeatedly expresses his 
 religious emotions in ejaculatory prayer. Boys pray to 
 the cord used in making bird-traps ; anoint it with medicine 
 and beg it to catch birds nicely ; and having done this, 
 they pray to the amatongo, whom they have heard their 
 fathers address. When a man is offered beer, he will 
 spill a few drops from the full pot on to the earth, saying, 
 " Chiefs " — addressing his ancestral spirits as he offers 
 the libation. He will also, when offered snuff, take a 
 little pinch and drop it on the ground as an offering to 
 the ancestral spirits. When he has received an unexpected 
 boon, he will laugh, and will repeatedly thank his itongo. 
 A dozen similar occasions occur on which a man shows that, 
 though he may not be demonstrative in his emotions, his 
 religion is yet very far from being devoid of heart. The 
 man's religion is, it is true, largely confined to questions 
 of clan-taboo, coupled with the desire to hold communion 
 with his tribal ancestors. In their way, the people are all 
 religious until civilisation undermines their customs, and 
 they are influenced by their religious beliefs more than 
 they are aware, and very much more than most missionaries 
 imagine. Amongst the natives. Church and State are one 
 and indivisible, and everybody is religious in one and the 
 same way — new theologies, nonconformists, and blatant 
 sceptics being unknown. All such things would be regarded 
 as anti-social ; and proselytising Christian Kafirs are 
 regarded as unpatriotic men who are willing to sacrifice 
 the good of their tribe for personal whims and fancies. 
 Kafirs think that missionaries inoculate the people by 
 
30 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 means of medicines and potent charms, turn them silly, 
 and persuade them to be sacrilegious to their tribal 
 ancestors. It is sometimes thought to be a device of 
 the white man to undermine the tribe. It is difficult to 
 see how this can be helped since the Kafirs have socialised 
 their religion. A native who breaks with the rehgion of 
 his clan appears basely to fail in his fundamental duty to 
 his fellows. 
 
 {h) Finally, we must say that all such things as food, 
 beer, private earnings, blacksmithing,* matrimony, &c., 
 are more or less tribalised. When the people are eating 
 food or drinking beer, any member of a clan or tribe who 
 happens to be passing invites himself to the feast ; there 
 is no need for him to wait until he is asked to join the 
 party. But this only holds good for members of the tribe. 
 Scattered about the country at the side of the pathways, 
 there are frequently to be found small heaps of stones called 
 isivivane, about which there has been very much specula- 
 tion, into which we cannot enter in this place. When 
 natives pass one of these heaps, they pick up a stone, or 
 a twig, and throw it onto the isivivane. They do this, 
 amongst other reasons, to ensure the finding of plenty of 
 food along their journey. But it is noticeable that they 
 only throw stones on to such heaps as are in their own 
 territory. If a member of some rival tribe, travelling 
 through the country, were to throw a stone on to the heap, 
 he would almost certainly be noticed by many sharp eyes 
 that are for ever watching ; and at the first kraal he stopped 
 at, he would be told in unmistakable language that there 
 was no food for him in that district. 
 
 * This art is rapidly disappearing under the influence of our trade. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISxM 31 
 
 In ancient days when white men wanted labour, they 
 would sometimes go to a chief, who would order a number 
 of his men to go and work for the white man ; and the chief 
 would take as much of the earnings of these men as he 
 wished, for all that his men earned was so much tribal 
 property, and therefore at the disposal of the chief. 
 
 Coupled with all this, the people have a clear sense of 
 the responsibility of the corporate body for the deeds 
 done by the individuals of the tribe. We shall return to 
 this subject later on. In surrendering their " rights," 
 they may seem to us to pay heavily for this privilege, but 
 in their own eyes they think they drive a very good bargain, 
 as they are thus freed from half the responsibilities and 
 fears of life. 
 
 It will be clear now that the tribe is a liighly socialised 
 community, being what the Greeks would call ttoXi's avrapxrjs, 
 that is to say, a self-sufficed State without any imports. 
 It is complete in itself, and the essence of its government 
 is group-association. The tribe, and in some measure 
 the clan, may be regarded as an organism ; for it is a sort 
 of enlarged individual, and has a solidarity that is almost 
 absolute. It is a closed society into wliich the young men 
 are introduced by a special rite when they come of age ; 
 and when any man in any way fails to perform his obliga- 
 tions, he finds that his privileges vanish. Thus when a 
 man becomes a Christian, he practically cuts himself adrift 
 from his clan, and has to shift for himself as best he may. 
 If he is a good-natured fellow, his lot is not made unpleasant, 
 for the natives value and respect good-nature very highly, 
 f The Clan-System of the Kafirs is of great value because 
 it is the seed-plot in which the altruistic sentiment develops 
 
32 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 It is most striking to notice how there is much less selfish- 
 ness and much more camaraderie amongst the " heathen " 
 Kafirs than amongst the ruck of the " Christian " converts. 
 The Clan-System simply could not exist without a strong 
 sense of the brotherhood of the members of the tribe ; and 
 it might be well for European Socialists to bear this fact 
 in mind. No system of collectivism that is imposed from 
 without upon a selfish, licence-loving people can hope to 
 succeed. To be successful it must be the spontaneous 
 outcome of strong altruistic feeling. Until Europeans can 
 base the structure of their society on a sense of obligations 
 to be performed, rather than on rights to be received, they 
 must remain unfitted for Socialism, and could, at the best, 
 but make the " have nots " change places with the " haves," 
 It is not a little surprising that those who are fighting the 
 Socialists in Europe do not pursue the policy of explaining 
 to the masses that the socialistic state they are asked to 
 help to set up, so far from being a question of extra skittles 
 and beer, will demand the utmost self-sacrifice of fierce 
 individual interests, and mil entail almost undreamt-of 
 obligations and restraints on every man. No doubt all 
 self-respecting and intelligent Socialists * recognise this 
 fact ; but it has not at all penetrated the intelligence of 
 the average working man, who fondly dreams of a sort of 
 bourgeois suburban New Jerusalem, where those who are 
 
 * The popular outcry against Socialists, based on trumped-up accusa- 
 tions of irreligion and immorality, is most deplorable. Though in no 
 sense a Sociahst, I feel bound to protest against the shameful tactics 
 of those who quote sentences from socialistic writers, while concealing 
 the bearing of the context. At the worst, Socialists are visionary and 
 impractical people who think too well of human nature, and who 
 imagine that all men are as altruistic and pubUc-spirited as they are 
 themselves. No great crime this ! 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 33 
 
 at present poor are going to be enriched at the expease 
 of those who are now wealthy. Militant Socialism depends 
 for much of its popularity in the gallery on the ignorant 
 assumption of the man who preaches at the street corner 
 that Socialism will mean all privileges and no obligations. 
 No wonder those who have nothing to lose, and who think 
 they may have much to gain without working for it, are 
 tempted to join the cry ; for in the general scramble that 
 they think will follow a social upheaval, they hope to get 
 something for nothing. Were it made clear to the working 
 man that he will have to ignore most of his individual 
 " rights " that he is now clamouring for, and will have to 
 accept, whole-heartedly, his obligations to society, he would 
 either accept the fact and set to work to discipline his 
 nature, or else he would have nothing more to do with 
 Socialism. And if Socialism should win the day, the 
 tactics suggested above would be found to have been of 
 great value, for the people would thus have developed 
 their altruistic spirit and minimised the evils that are in- 
 separably connected with every human scheme. Whether 
 or_jiQt_JEe— can hope- the_^vfirage_BriioiLJiO- rise to the 
 undoubtedly high level of the despised African savage in 
 this respect is open to doubt. - 
 
 Passing on from the organisation of the clan we must 
 consider the advantages of the Clan-System. 
 
 II. Advantages of the Clan-System 
 
 (1) The system has certainly satisfied the bulk of the 
 people, and that is no small achievement. Amongst the 
 raw Kafirs one practically never finds people who are for 
 
 Q 
 
34 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 ever discontented with, and looking out for causes of 
 complaint against, their rulers. There is no such absurd 
 thing as a Party system, and consequently nobody plays 
 fast and loose with the interests of the tribe. No one ever 
 dreams of asking for the franchise, or for popular control, 
 until white men put the ideas into the heads of the few 
 ill-educated Kafirs, who are naturally hostile to the entire 
 Clan-System and to the chiefs. The system has made the 
 people surprisingly unselfish in the way they sacrifice their 
 own private gain and private ideas for the good of the 
 State. Passive Resisters would be regarded as the most 
 selfish and callous of individualists, and no one dreams of 
 breaking a law so as to attract attention to a grievance. 
 It is only the educated Kafirs who become aggressively 
 selfish, who find their obligations irksome, who press their 
 own ideas, and who foment discontent. If any device 
 that we may have wit enough to introduce will make the 
 bulk of the people even half so contented with the state of 
 affairs, we shall indeed be fortunate. 
 
 (2) The system has led to a general and uniform state 
 of medium prosperity, for on the tribal system of land- 
 tenure poverty is virtually impossible. A system that 
 absolutely prevents the formation of a class of paupers 
 has indeed points in its favour. We cannot hope to intro- 
 duce any plan of individualism which will not inevitably 
 produce a vast amount of poverty, and squalor, and suffering 
 amongst the natives. 
 
 (3) The effect of the system has been that the people 
 rise, if they rise at all, en masse ; therefore the clash of 
 various types, all at different stages of culture, is impossible. 
 There is no w^r between capital and labour, nor yet any 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 35 
 
 class of people that regards another as composed of blood- 
 suckers. This universal social harmony is of no small 
 advantage to the people. 
 
 (4) There has been no trouble whatever as to taxation. 
 Since, until they are brought into contact with civilisation, 
 the people have no money, they can only be taxed in kind : 
 the chief is supported by the fines inflicted for criminal 
 offences ; he can also requisition labour according to his 
 needs ; and he receives large " dowries " from the men 
 who seek to marry his daughters. Thus the people readily 
 and willingly pay their way ; they support their chiefs, 
 and even glory in the self-sacrifice this entails. I have 
 seen the young Swazi warriors, who would scorn the idea 
 of doing anything so feminine as to hoe in the gardens 
 or fetch wood, do both these things for their king. All 
 the young bloods turned out in regiments and showed 
 the highest delight in doing this work, which was changed 
 from a shame into a glory just because the gardens belonged 
 to the king and not to themselves. 
 
 (5) The natives are very frequently satisfied with the 
 decision of the head-man or petty chief ; and if they are 
 dissatisfied with that, they are certain to be content to 
 welcome, and abide by, the decision of their chief, whose 
 judgment is the end of all strife. It is scarcely an exaggera- 
 tion to say that in olden days the man who lost his case 
 was as contented with the chief's verdict as was the man 
 who won it : the chief had spoken, and that was the end 
 of all controversy. It need scarcely be said that our 
 administration of justice can never appear to the Kafir 
 as satisfactory, but must serve as an endless cause of 
 discontent. 
 
36 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 (6) The system produced a most valuable method of 
 inculcating the spirit of unselfishness and camaraderie. 
 It is almost impossible to over-estimate how valuable 
 such a thing is amongst primitive peoples where a fierce 
 egoism walks naked and unashamed. This spirit of good- 
 fellowship is very evident to one when travelling with a 
 large number of native carriers. I have often been struck 
 at the extraordinary kindness these simple children of the 
 veld showed to one another even under the most trying 
 conditions. After a long day's march in the tropics, men 
 who have carried a 60 lb. load on their head for thirty miles 
 will run the last mile or two of the day's tramp, put down 
 their loads at the camping-ground, and race back to carry 
 the load of some native who happened to be tired. Numbers 
 of similar instances of a spirit of unselfishness could be 
 mentioned. 
 
 (7) The system has served the most invaluable of all 
 functions, namely, that of constraining, controlling, and 
 curbing the appetites and passions of the natives. The 
 system has provided what must be regarded as an immensely 
 strong clan-conscience, and it is this function that, above 
 all others, shows us that the system is no mean mode of 
 civilisation. Clan-custom and clan-taboo perform in 
 primitive peoples what religion does, or tries to do, in 
 more advanced nations. Kafir religion may have ethical 
 force in many directions, yet not infrequently the natives 
 make their religious conceptions the excuse for a gross 
 sensualism of which they feel at times not a little ashamed. 
 When wishing to argue with the white man about the 
 undue gratification of some appetite, a man will say : "If 
 Umhulunhulu (The Great One) gave me this appetite, it is 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 37 
 
 not my affair but his if I indulge it excessively." While 
 the native might argue thus about some semi-bestial 
 private action, he would not, even though he knew he 
 could not possibly be observed, entertain even for a moment 
 the thought of doing some comparatively innocent thing 
 that was condemned by tribal custom as being anti-social, 
 A clan-taboo acts as an immensely strong categorical 
 imperative, except where contact with civilisation has 
 weakened the Clan-System. 
 
 Instead of every man playing for his own hand, the 
 members of the clan have clubbed together to seek the 
 interest and to advance the prosperity of the social group. 
 The most fundamental of all the appetites, and the one 
 most frequently put into operation, is the desire for food. 
 Now we have seen that instead of each man keeping all 
 the food he can for his own consumption, it is one of the 
 first duties in the clan to let all others share in the food that 
 is being eaten. Few things are thought more base than 
 to refuse to share food with others. To eat in secret is a 
 most base and vile action in the eyes of the Kafir. 
 
 Another important department of life the Clan-System 
 took in hand was the regulation of the intercourse of the 
 sexes ; and until Europeans broke up the Clan-System 
 this restraint was wonderfully effective within certain 
 limits. Unblushing abuses we tolerate in Piccadilly or 
 Regent Street could never exist under Kafir rule. All 
 who understand the intensely strong sexual instincts of 
 the raw Kafir— and in this matter the Kafir would make 
 Boccaccio, and possibly Apuleius, blush— will see of what 
 infinite value the Clan-System was in curbing this most 
 violent and turbulent of all Kafir impulses. And amongst 
 
38 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 the worst vices fostered by contact with the white man, 
 the two most pernicious and unlovely are the indulgence 
 in gluttony and greediness in connection with food, and 
 the loss of restraint, and the lack of regulation, of the 
 sexual instincts and impulses. Civilisation pays heavily 
 for the latter, for practically all the outrages on white 
 women are committed by Kafirs who have been for some 
 time in contact with civilisation and out of the reach of 
 clan-control. I have known single white women to live 
 for years all unprotected amongst hordes of raw Kafirs — 
 one American lady lived actually in the kraals — and yet 
 I have never heard of an authentic case of any attempted 
 outrage committed in such cases by the natives. The 
 fear of such lonely white women is that they may suffer 
 at the hands, not of the Kafirs, but of low-typed white men 
 who may be tramping through the country. 
 
 (8) The tribal system has been the one thing that has 
 prevented a universal rising of the natives ; for, coupled 
 with friendship within the tribe, there exists the intensest 
 jealoiisy of one tribe towards another. However much we 
 may condenm this narrow-minded hostility, we must admit 
 that it h£is worked most admirably in our favour. Had the 
 tribes combined in early days, the white man would have had 
 insuperable difiiculty in gaining a foothold in the country ; 
 and it is only in so far as we have undermined the Clan- 
 System that it is possible for natives to combine against us. 
 * * * * * 
 
 When we weigh up these excellent features of the Clan- 
 System, and then think of the way our philanthropists 
 have pressed upon these people the strange and tangled 
 civilisation of the Western world, with all its sordid 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 39 
 
 accompaniments, we can but pause and say to our- 
 selves : 
 
 I often wonder what the Vintners buy 
 One half so precious as the goods they sell. 
 
 Before forming a definite opinion on this point, let us 
 pass on to consider the other side of the story, noting the 
 disadvantages of the Clan-System. 
 
 III. The Defects of the Clan-System 
 
 There are, it would appear, but two serious accusations 
 that can be brought against the Clan-System. The first 
 is that under it the people are too much at the mercy of 
 their chief. To Europeans, who most conveniently ignore 
 the ruthless tyranny of majorities in a democratic country, 
 this possibility of abuse of power seems a very terrible 
 thing. The Zulu chief Tshaka is a notable instance of 
 such a tyrant. Yet it must be clearly understood that the 
 people very rarely complain of the way their chiefs use 
 their power. There are so many subtle ways of bringing 
 a chief to book that as a rule the man is careful not to 
 offend his people. After looking all round the question, 
 I feel fairly certain that this theoretical abuse of power is 
 not so common as is imagined. There is certainly no doubt 
 that the natives would rather be under their chiefs than 
 be ruled by, let us say, the Committee of the Aborigines 
 Protection Society or an English Radical Goverrmient. 
 Yet for all that, in weighing up the advantages and dis- 
 advantages of the Clan-System, we must remember the 
 fact that some chiefs abuse their power. 
 
 The second accusation seems to be a very much more 
 
40 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 serious one. It is often said, with not a little truth, that 
 in a Kafir kraal there is not only no incentive but no room 
 for individual initiative. The consequence of this is that 
 the entire tribe reaches — for it aims at — a low, dull level 
 of mediocrity, in which no one is behind or in front of the 
 mass. The result of this unprogressive state of af!airs is 
 seen in the facts that the Kafirs to-day cling to the customs 
 of their ancestors, build the same type of rude hut, use the 
 same primitive implements and methods of agriculture 
 and warfare, and have borrowed little or nothing from the 
 civilisation of the white man. It is therefore thought that 
 the Clan-System is inherently opposed to the whole spirit 
 of progress, and that the chiefs are, as a rule, the bitterest 
 of all opponents to the missionary and school teacher. 
 The Clan-System seems to enshrine a conservatism that is 
 nearly absolute : all innovations are regarded with sus- 
 picion, simply because they are innovations ; the status 
 of woman will apparently remain low so long as the system 
 continues ; polygamy will vanish slowly, if at all ; the belief 
 in witchcraft will never die out, and many poor wretches 
 will continue to suffer from this cause ; the lobola custom, 
 in virtue of which a man receives a number of cattle when 
 he gives his daughters in marriage, will probably remain the 
 woman's one defence and safeguard — and it is not a noble 
 one, though it is surprisingly effective. 
 
 Such is the second accusation that is brought against the 
 Clan-System. Before we try to weigh up the advantages 
 and disadvantages of the system we must glance at the 
 means by which it has been broken up. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 41 
 
 IV. The Disintegration of the Clan-System 
 
 It is not infrequently stated in the Home Press, and also 
 in books on South Africa, that we are not destroying the 
 Clan-System, but are conserving everything that is good 
 in it. For example, in a recent book on the native problem 
 we find these words at the close of a two-page description 
 of the Clan-System : 
 
 " Such then, briefly, was the tribal system, which has 
 been modified and moulded into the forms thereof in 
 existence at the present time in British South Africa. . . . 
 So we see that all that was excellent in the original forms 
 of native government was to remain, embodied in British 
 rule and necessarily under British protection." It might 
 as well be maintained that after having cut out several 
 square yards from different parts of a balloon we had not 
 destroyed its efficacy. The Clan-System depends for its 
 success upon its completeness, and the removal of essential 
 elements destroys the value of the organisation. We have 
 undermined the Clan-System right and left, and have riddled 
 its defences through and through with the explosive shells 
 of civilisation ; we have removed nearly all the old re- 
 straints which curbed the people, and have disintegrated 
 their religion, and so rendered it, comparatively speaking, 
 useless. It is not to be wondered at that the various tribes 
 are in chaotic and confused condition, ready to listen to 
 any nonsense the Ethiopians choose to put before them. 
 The savage under real self-government is in no sense the 
 same thing as the savage with his customs and government 
 broken up by the presence of white men in the country. 
 
42 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 With the Clan-System have gone, or are going, some of the 
 best traits in Kafir character. 
 
 We have set up an absurd legal fiction in virtue of which 
 some white official is pompously called the Paramount Chief 
 of some native tribe, and we insist that the natives shall 
 salute this person with the forms and ceremonies used 
 to the real Paramount Chief. The natives are so very 
 courteous by nature that they readily show all the signs 
 of outward respect we demand from them, but when our 
 backs are turned they laugh and ask what these inconse- 
 quent white men will want next.* The white man, how- 
 ever, looks at this ridiculous silk tassel that he has fastened 
 on to the ruined balloon, and asks us to believe that the 
 emasculated system of patchwork we have left behind 
 is the Clan-System. 
 
 It may be well to point out how we broke up the Clan- 
 System, looking at this matter of course from a native 
 point of view. We started by undermining the power of 
 the chief, and in striking a blow at him we struck a death- 
 blow at the very heart of the system, for it is in him that 
 all the main girders of the structure are centred. First 
 of all we took away the chief's power of making war against 
 rival clans, and thus dishonoured or insulted him in the 
 eyes of his people. Having done that we set up white 
 magistrates, who took the law out of the chief's hands and 
 refused to allow him to exercise the power of life and death. 
 We then gave him a subsidy, payable only on condition of 
 good behaviour, and thus made it less necessary for the 
 
 * It is interesting to note that this fact has been recorded by Mr. 
 Bryant in his excellent Zulu dictionary, which work is evidently unknown 
 at the Colonial Office, for the new Constitution of the Transvaal keeps 
 up the fiction in all seriousness. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 43 
 
 people to support their chief ; and since people lose interest 
 in what they cease to pay for, the people lost some interest 
 in their chief. Then we deposed one chief and put up 
 another, and departed from native conceptions of hereditary 
 right ; as a consequence it sometimes happened that there 
 were two Popes within the clan, each hurling the Kafir 
 equivalents of Bulls and anathemas at one another. Then 
 we finally pretended that a white man was the Paramount 
 Chief. Thus we discredited the chieftainship. It must be 
 remembered that we are not yet discussing the question 
 as to whether we were wise or not in doing these things, 
 but are merely showing that as a matter of fact we have 
 undermined the system. 
 
 Having effectively broken the power of the chief, we set 
 to work to break up, in many districts, the tribal system 
 of land-tenure. We did this largely in the interest of our- 
 selves and of the few natives who welcomed our civilising 
 influences. Sometimes also we did this with the definite 
 intention of inserting the thin end of the wedge so as to 
 break up the Clan-System. In some districts, as, for 
 example, in Swaziland, large tracts of land were sold by 
 chiefs for a mere nothing as concessions to Europeans ; 
 and it is quite possible that the chiefs did not realise what 
 they were doing until it was too late, for the Kafirs generally 
 say that the chief has no right to alienate land from the 
 tribe. As soon as Europeans began to press in upon lands 
 hitherto held by the natives, every conceivable kind of 
 modification had to be made as to land-tenure. White 
 men needed labour, and so natives came to live on farms, 
 in towns, and on Mission Stations. Native reserves were 
 formed in which land was held by communal tenure. In 
 
44 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 some parts of the country, as in most parts of Bcchuana- 
 land, Zululand and Basutoland, the land was retained 
 ahnost wholly for the natives. 
 
 In other parts, as, for example, in the Transkeian terri- 
 tories, a larger proportion of white men held land, and 
 villages or small towns were laid out in some districts. In 
 Natal much land became vested in the Native Trust ; while 
 in other parts Kafirs owned land individually, having either 
 bought it from white men or (in Cape Colony) having been 
 granted plots in return for services rendered to the State. 
 Natives began to squat on farms, on Mission Stations, or 
 on unoccupied Crown lands, and in certain districts they 
 were allowed to settle on private farms on condition of 
 putting in a certain amount of work in lieu of paying rent. 
 Native syndicates, as in Natal, sprung up, and began to 
 buy up land which had hitherto been the property of the 
 white man. Mr. Rhodes conceived the Glen Grey Act, 
 which is too well known to need description, and which 
 was, confessedly, introduced so as to break down the power 
 of the chief and the corporate spirit of the clan, which 
 were thought to be inimical to progress. 
 
 At our mines we have had to deal with the natives as 
 best we could, with the result that these men, after being 
 under our control, return to the kraals and feel disinclined 
 to submit to the restraints of the clan, which they begin 
 to feel irksome. 
 
 Missionaries, of course, directly aimed their blows at 
 the system ; and every convert, by the very action of 
 professing Christianity, is cut adrift from the clan-life, and 
 yet remains in the country with, at best, divided allegiance 
 to his former chief. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 45 
 
 We next interfered by stopping some of the grosser tribal 
 customs. It was almost necessary for us to do this, but 
 it is to be doubted whether we quite understood the inner 
 meaning and outer effect of some of the customs we put 
 a stop to : the effect of our interference, however, is not 
 subject to doubt. 
 
 Finally, we brought about the dawn of economic in- 
 dividualism. We gave the Kafirs an example — that 
 most potent kind of lesson — of a new kind of liberty, which 
 some of them, naturally, thought excellent. The natives 
 began to be reluctant to part with individual gains. We 
 taught them the value of thrift and of personal property ; 
 we created new wants and urged the natives to labour for 
 us in return for wages — which, of course, was an entirely 
 new thing to them, for in olden days they only worked 
 so as to provide for their actual needs. Traders persuaded 
 the natives to bring them skins, or grain, or wool, or other 
 produce ; and so we introduced a new economic era. 
 Previously there had been but little division of labour, 
 and no production of commodities. The people did not 
 distinguish between use-values and exchange -values, but 
 under our tuition they began to see the value of growing 
 things, not for purposes of consumption, but for utility 
 of exchange. We taught them the use of money. We 
 thus brought in the era of economic individualism, and, since 
 a Kafir loses self-control when plunged into an entirely new 
 environment, we sapped the very foundation of the spirit 
 that had hitherto constituted the motive-power in clan- 
 life. If by these means we have not utterly undermined 
 the entire structure of the Clan-System, it is difficult to 
 see what we have done, 
 
46 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 V. The Results of our Policy 
 
 The advantages and disadvantages of breaking up 
 the Clan-System are so interwoven that it is difficult to 
 differentiate and assess them accurately, and he is a clever 
 accountant who can draw out a balance-sheet. I heard 
 the other day of two clerks who, on the way to town in the 
 train, were discussing the question of Free Trade and 
 Colonial Preference. Said one superficial gentleman : 
 " Oh, it did not take me two minutes to make up my mind : 
 I decided at once for Free Trade." There are hundreds 
 of people in South Africa who decide the great question 
 as to the relative benefits of the Clan-System and the 
 native franchise with a similar amount of thought. 
 
 It is frequently said that we gained considerably by 
 breaking up the Clan-System, for, by undermining the 
 power of the chief just sufficiently to make it difficult for 
 him to fight, and yet not sufficiently to break down tribal 
 jealousies, we avoided a number of little petty wars. It 
 is very doubtful whether our action did not have exactly 
 the opposite effect ; but be that as it may, we quite forgot 
 that our policy, by breaking down tribal jealousies, might 
 possibly lead to an ultimate and united native rising worse 
 than fifty small local wars. It certainly looks as if we had 
 now squandered all our initial advantages, and were 
 beginning to feel the more awkward consequences of our 
 hasty action. The scales seem to be turning against us 
 now, and we are reaping the fruit of our half-considered 
 action. Our past action may be likened to a policy that 
 was adopted in the early days in Australia. It is said that 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 47 
 
 during a bad drought in Queensland the farmers cut down 
 a certain bush which they thought absorbed too much 
 water. When they had destroyed an immense amount of 
 the shrub, they found that it was a preserver of water, and 
 that sheep could live on it in times of drought. In their 
 panic, they had destroyed their best asset. The story 
 may be apocryphal, but it is, none the less, an excellent 
 illustration. The Cape, in granting a native franchise, 
 may have destroyed much of its water-preserving bush ; 
 but we need not, in our desire for symmetry, set to work 
 to cut down by panic legislation all the rest of the bush 
 throughout South Africa. 
 
 But the question before us is not whether ive gained 
 by our action, for there were obviously certain initial 
 advantages in our policy ; what we need to find out 
 is whether or not our action was for the good of the 
 natives. 
 
 The Kafirs certainly reaped some advantages from our 
 action. The main advantage has been that by limiting 
 the power of the chiefs and by stopping inter-tribal wars, 
 we have made life and property more secure, and have 
 abolished, at least theoretically, death by torture in the 
 case of people found guilty of using ^vitchcraft. In talking 
 with old Kafirs, I have invariably found that it is this that 
 has struck them as the one beneficial result of our rule — 
 though they have always been quick to add that they would 
 rather go back to the old regime, with all its disadvantages, 
 than continue as at present. The second advantage is 
 that we have rendered progress possible, while under the 
 Clan-System stagnation was the rule. It must be admitted 
 that there is a great amount of truth in this contention, 
 
48 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 though it is extremely difficult to avoid all the fallacies that 
 lie in wait for us when arguing thus. 
 
 On the other hand, there is but little doubt that progress 
 has been one-sided, superficial, and far too rapid. The 
 civilised Kafirs carry too much sail for their very scanty 
 ballast. We have entirely failed to get the bulk of native 
 opinion on our side, and have made no serious attempt 
 to utilise the immense force of custom. If we had but 
 given them time, the Kafirs would have invented their 
 own restraints suitable to their changed condition. It 
 has been pointed out above that we have broken down the 
 religious and clan -restraints of the people ; it must now 
 be added that we have provided no adequate substitutes. 
 To ask a Kafir to accept the restraint of a precept in the 
 Sermon on the Mount is as unpractical as to ask a Member of 
 Parliament, or the German Emperor, to do the same thing 
 in Party, or International, politics. It may be said that 
 we have sought to restrain the people through their fears. 
 That shows how we fail to understand how little a Kafir 
 fears our punishments compared with the consequences 
 of breaking a clan-taboo. We may flog a Kafir, but such 
 an action demeans the white man who gives it more than 
 it disgraces the Kafir who receives it. I speak of course 
 from the native point of view. The one point on which 
 we can touch them is their cattle, and a substantial fine 
 in that direction has more effect than half a dozen floggings, 
 for the men soon forget their pains, but never cease to 
 regret the loss of their beloved oxen.* 
 
 * For outrages on white women it may be, and I think is, necessary 
 to flog the natives : in such cases it is generally a half-civilised Kafir 
 who is guilty, and he needs sonjewjiat different tres^tujent from that 
 suited to the raw native, 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 49 
 
 No doubt we thought that we should be able to provide 
 restraints as effective as those we removed. We forgot 
 the Kafir proverb which says that the well ahead is not to 
 be depended on. We fully intended to substitute strong 
 restraints ; but having forsaken the well behind us, we 
 found but dry country ahead. A chain is no stronger 
 than its weakest link, and our weakening of certain links 
 of the Clan-System has spoilt the efficacy of the whole 
 chain. The worst elements of our civilisation are being 
 absorbed by the youth of the Kafir tribes. The young 
 men, on returning to their kraals from the goldfields, or 
 Mission Stations, or towns, refuse to submit to the old 
 clan-restraints, and decline to obey the orders of their 
 betters, for they have lost their sense of reverence — a 
 thing almost unheard of in olden times. The young men 
 become lax and lawless, and are a serious peril to all order 
 and decency in the kraal. This spurious liberty and impu- 
 dent swagger are very contagious, and even the children 
 become infected. In olden days, for example, only men 
 of mature age were allowed to drink beer and to smoke 
 Indian hemp. Quite small boys do both these things 
 nowadays, and the old people are powerless to prevent 
 them. Sexual irregularities, which were only allowed 
 between young men and their betrothed lovers in ancient 
 days, are now practised freely even by children. Excesses 
 of this nature were rendered very rare in olden days, 
 because all the girls of the kraal were examined by a court 
 of old women before and after great dances. The girls now 
 refuse to submit to these examinations, and threaten to go 
 and complain to the white magistrate if they are examined 
 against their wish. The old men know quite well that the 
 
 D 
 
50 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 magistrates know but little of native custom, and tliat they 
 will look at this matter with European and hostile eyes ; 
 so they are powerless to compel obedience from the children. 
 It is hopeless— so the Kafir thinks— to obtain anything 
 but opposition from the white magistrate, who is filled full 
 with his ideas of the rights of the individual. Even the 
 missionary cannot provide suitable restraints. Here and 
 there a few Kafirs grasp the essential spirit of Christianity, 
 and in such cases the new restraints are effective. But 
 the average Church member is but little influenced, with 
 regard to his fierce sexual impulses, by Christian ideals. 
 It is no wonder that the old men sigh for the good old days 
 with all their drawbacks. 
 
 As bearing out the above remarks, it may be pointed out 
 that the Rev. F. Roach, giving evidence before the Native 
 Commission upon the native view of British methods of 
 government, said : " The heathen Zulu, I think, compares 
 it unfavourably with his own form of government, before 
 the war. I have had impressions on that point from 
 native head-men themselves, who are heathen, old heathen 
 Izunduna or head-men, and they say : ' No, we prefer 
 the old system.' They say that in these days Indab 
 itengiwe (bribery) is practised ; that evil-doers occasionally 
 get ofi scot-free ; and that children and young fellows get 
 entirely out of hand, because the magistrate's courts 
 uphold them very often in cases of disputes between them- 
 selves and their parents. In these three ways they say 
 the government of the present time is inferior to their old 
 system of government. I do not put that as my own 
 opinion ; that is the expression I have got from the 
 natives." I entirely agree with this evidence, and have 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 51 
 
 heard the same thing from natives in many other 
 districts. 
 
 The Kafirs certainly are an unprogressive race. Of that 
 there is no doubt. They have developed no art, the rude 
 attempts of the children to model in clay not being indulged 
 in, as a rule, after puberty ; they have developed no 
 architecture, for Zimbabye, if indeed it be of Kafir origin, 
 cannot be regarded as anything but primitive ; they have 
 developed no poetry, their attempts in this direction being 
 chiefly limited to absurd and fulsome praise of their chiefs 
 or of themselves ; they have developed no writing — not 
 even knowing the use of pictographs or ideograms * — 
 taking over this art but very slowly from the white man ; 
 they have developed no form of money or of currency ; 
 they have developed no music, not aspiring to anything 
 better than to play the most monotonous jingles on rude 
 instruments ; they have developed no national unity, 
 being split up into rival clans and tribes ; they have 
 developed no lofty religion, being satisfied with a crude 
 and but slightly ethical ancestor worship, combined with 
 a modified form of totemism and a belief in magic and 
 fetishism ; they have developed no philosophy, accepting 
 the crudest hedonism, and giving up the problem of exist- 
 ence as not worth seriously troubling about ; they have 
 developed no lofty ideals of any sort, being frankly content 
 with abundance of cattle, beer, and women. 
 
 With regard to the alleged necessarily unprogressive 
 nature of the Clan-System, I would point out that there 
 
 * It is stated that the Malayan races have developed no less than 
 nine alphabets — a striking contrast to the Kafirs, and one that shows 
 how impossible it is to use the Malay States ae an analogy. 
 
52 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 are probably several factors that have led to the unprogres- 
 sive condition of the Kafirs. We observe some symptom 
 that arises from half a dozen causes, and are so occupied 
 with one cause that we ignore the rest. All Kafirs have 
 brown-black eyes, but he will be mistaken who puts that 
 fact forward as the cause of the stagnation in Kafir society. 
 Building the huts in circles and using wattle and mud as 
 materials are not parts of the Clan-System ; they result 
 from the fact that such materials are ready to hand, and 
 that building in circles leads to simplicity of construction, 
 for angles are difficult things for builders to negotiate. 
 It is extremely difficult to persuade the ordinary Kaffi: to 
 plant and take care of fruit-trees, or to make any agricul- 
 tural improvements. That does not seem to be due to 
 the Clan-System, but to the fact that the people have only 
 to scratch the ground to get all the food they require. The 
 use of the plough is becoming more general, and thousands 
 of raw Kafirs — in spite of the Clan-System — are adopting 
 the implement even when living far away from white men. 
 We might take all the points enumerated above, and could 
 show that it is at least doubtful whether they resulted from 
 the Clan-System, though they were concomitant with it. 
 The way chiefs become envious of men who grow rich, 
 and the devices they adopt to get them " smelt out " and 
 " eaten up," are not essential parts of the Clan-System, 
 for such things occur under individualistic forms of 
 government. Those who propose the entire destruction 
 of the tribal-system make much capital out of the fact that 
 when trouble between whites and blacks comes to a head, 
 the chief is found to be at the head of the movement. Of 
 course he is. We might as well propose to abolish Crown 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 53 
 
 and Parliament because they are found, when European 
 wars break out, to be involved in the declaration of war. 
 It seems to be held by opponents to the Clan-System that 
 the cliiefs are going to remain for ever selfish, oppressive, 
 and opposed to progress. It is forgotten what an immense 
 change has come about in this respect during the last thirty 
 years. Chief after cliief is coming to realise that there are 
 advantages in education ; and the old hostility to progres 
 is beginning to vanish — I think a little too quickly. 
 
 There seem to be several causes, other than the Clan- 
 System, to account for the lack of progress. There is, for 
 example, the intrinsic nature of the race. Even when 
 freed from the Clan-System, the educated natives show 
 almost no initiative ; they start no manufactures, but 
 borrow everything from the white man ; they seem in- 
 capable of steady progress without constant supervision ; 
 the moment this supervision is removed, the men relapse 
 into squalor and indolence. If all this happens when the 
 man is freed from his clan, it is difficult to see how the 
 evil complained of can be due to the clan — unless it is the 
 after-effect of a vicious system. Again, there is the belief 
 in witchcraft, which throws its shadow over the entire 
 life of the people. What is the good of adopting new 
 methods of agriculture, and so growing rich, if it is but 
 to lead to a charge of using sorcery ? The relation of 
 witchcraft to the Clan-System is not by any means simple. 
 It may be the belief in magic, and not the socialistic ideas 
 of the people, that is the trouble in this matter. But, 
 yet again, possibly it is the fact that rich men become 
 anti-social that drives the people to hunt round for some 
 accusation to justify them in curbing such a tendency ; 
 
54 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 thus, it may be, after all, the Socialism of the people, and 
 not their belief in magic, that is really at the bottom of 
 this open sore. The subject can be looked at from two 
 different points of view, and I rather doubt whether any 
 white man can hope fully to understand the matter. 
 
 Again, there is the improvidence of the people which 
 obviously leads to stagnation ; and there is also sheer 
 ignorance as to how to improve land, to say nothing of the 
 natural dislike of innovations of all kinds, a trait that is 
 found everywhere even amongst Englishmen. None of 
 these points that have just been mentioned seem to be 
 organic 'portions of the Clan-System, which, purged of its 
 defects, might yet become progressive. 
 
 One thing seems quite clear, and it is that there is room 
 for great advance under the Clan-System. If we take 
 the Indian village communities, we see how progressive 
 primitive Socialism can be. " The constitution of these 
 communities varies in different parts of India. In those 
 of the simplest form, the land is tilled in common, and the 
 produce divided amongst the members. At the same time, 
 spinning and weaving are carried on in each family as sub- 
 sidiary industries. Side by side with the masses thus 
 occupied with one and the same work, we find the ' chief 
 inhabitant,' who is judge, police, and tax-gatherer in one ; 
 the book-keeper who keeps the accounts of the tillage and 
 registers everything relating thereto ; another official, 
 who prosecutes criminals, protects strangers travelling 
 through, and escorts them to the next village ; the boundary- 
 man, who guards the boundaries against neighbouring 
 communities ; the water overseer, who distributes the 
 water from the common tanks for irrigation ; the Bramin, 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 55 
 
 who conducts the religious services ; the schoolmaster, who 
 on the sand teaches the children reading and writing." * 
 
 It is after examining such a system that Maine has said : 
 " Nobody is at liberty to attack several property, and to 
 say at the same time that he values civilisation." f If 
 he had said " Western," or " Rapid " civilisation, the 
 sentence would hold good. The Kafirs have a very long 
 way to go before they become as civilised as the people 
 living in these Indian village communities ; and as far 
 as one can see, if we had retained the Clan-System in its 
 fulness, we might have led the Kafirs on along the path 
 of civilisation as far as they are ever likely to reach with 
 safety. No civilised Kafirs have advanced to the level of 
 such Indian village communities : in fact they are yet far 
 behind the stage of culture reached in India. 
 
 The question of the relative values of different systems 
 of land-tenure has been left purposely for the close of our 
 chapter on Primitive Socialism ; and to it we must now 
 turn. 
 
 The question of land-tenure, as the recent Native Com- 
 mission states, " dominates and pervades every other 
 question," and is " the bed-rock of the natives' present 
 economic position." It certainly has the most intimate 
 connection with the tribal system. The natives cannot 
 be said to make good use of their land, which, coupled with 
 the genial climate, easily affords the people all they require. 
 It is interesting to note that in the manifesto of the Fabian 
 Society we find it stated that : " The practice of entrusting 
 the land of the nation to private persons in the hope that 
 
 * Karl Marx, " Capital," p. 351. 
 t " Village Communities," p. 230. 
 
56 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 they will make the best of it has been discredited by the 
 consistency with which they have made the worst of it." * 
 Whatever may be the truth or exaggeration of such an 
 accusation with regard to England, the statement could 
 not be made with regard to South Africa with even the 
 vaguest semblance of truthfulness. 
 
 It is very difficult to say for certain whether the agricul- 
 tural progress observable wherever individual tenure holds in 
 South Africa is due to the system of tenure adopted or to 
 some collateral factor. It is quite common for people to 
 point to the Glen Grey experiment as a proof of the value of 
 individual tenure ; yet it is permissible for one who regards 
 the experiment as, on the whole, a great success to point 
 out that there are some peculiar conditions which make it 
 difficult to be sure we are tracing the right cause when we 
 place the success to the credit of individualism. Up to the 
 present it has been possible to select suitable natives for 
 the experiment. Only natives keen to own land and develop 
 it have been selected. When the system becomes universal, 
 this great advantage of selecting suitable Kafirs will vanish. 
 At present no native who believes that crops can only be 
 increased by magical charms applies for land. Thus the 
 commonest cause for indolence is not operative. There is no 
 reason why such a belief should be wedded to any special 
 system of land-tenure. We can no more argue from the 
 success of the Glen Grey Act to the advisability of destroy- 
 ing the system of tribal land-tenure, than we can argue 
 from the success of some land scheme in which selected 
 white men are sent, let us say, to the Orange River Colony, 
 to the wisdom of shipping all our home indolent out-of- 
 
 * Tract No. 2. 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 57 
 
 works wholesale into the Transvaal. Selection is the 
 secret of success in both schemes. The unfit are weeded 
 out before the experiment is begun ; but it is the unfit 
 that will cause trouble when the scheme becomes adopted 
 universally. 
 
 Not a little of the success of the Glen Grey Act has also 
 arisen from the caution, the slowness, the restrictions, 
 and the excellent wisdom with which the scheme has been 
 worked. We could scarcely hope to do so well with a 
 gigantic plan. It is not only the wisdom of a scheme, but 
 it is also the way it is applied and administered, that 
 determines its success or failure amongst the Kafirs. A 
 bad scheme applied with tact will often work amongst 
 primitive people better than a perfect scheme stupidly 
 administered. Our danger is in being premature and in 
 doing excellent things in the wrong way. 
 
 In thinking of the benefits of the Glen Grey Act, we are 
 apt to forget that when individual tenure is the rule rather 
 than the exception, there will be considerable progress in 
 suitable cases and appalling failure in bad cases. Poverty 
 will probably increase yari passu with the increasing 
 adoption of the plan, and there will also be a great increase 
 of selfishness which will undermine one of the best features 
 in the character of the raw Kafir. Aristotle has censured 
 the community of property as tending to repress industry, 
 and as doing away with the spirit of benevolence ; but 
 amongst the Kafirs, whatever may be the result with 
 regard to industry, it is individualism and not collectivism 
 that saps the spirit of benevolence. The raw socialistic 
 Kafir appears to be a philanthropist when compared to 
 the individualistic educated native. 
 
58 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 It is very difficult to say what will happen when all the 
 natives enjoy individual tenure ; some people think that 
 this change will lead to the Kafirs forgetting their other 
 grievances, for they will be so engrossed — so it is argued — 
 with their interests in the land that they will not have time 
 to listen to agitators. And certainly any one who has 
 become intimate with the Kafirs knows that it is as useless 
 to expect to get a Kafir to think about his other duties, 
 when he has to see to his sowing, or ploughing, or reaping, 
 as it is to get a decent day's work out of an Italian youth 
 when he falls in love. The man becomes obsessed with 
 his one interest. But for all, that there would seem to be 
 another possibility, and a rather grave one. It is just as 
 likely that having once tasted the sweets of owning land, 
 the natives will get greedy for more land ; and their land- 
 hunger may make them cast eyes more envious than ever 
 on the districts occupied by white men. 
 
 It is fairly certain that in introducing individual land- 
 tenure we shall make as many difficulties as we shall remove ; 
 for the change will act like the shaking of a dice-box, and 
 there are sure to be unlooked-for results. It is quite 
 possible that we might gain all the advantages derived from 
 the Glen Grey Act by a different system, which would at 
 the same time conserve what is good in native character. 
 I have seen natives living under the Clan-System and 
 communal land-tenure roused to considerable energy by 
 a sensible missionary who introduced to them new kinds 
 of vegetables, and then took the trouble — a thing very 
 few seem to care to do — to see the experiment tided over 
 the initial difficulties. 
 
 Whatever may be done finally, it is to be hoped that 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 59 
 
 arrangements will at least be made so that those natives 
 who prefer to live on land held by communal tenure may 
 be free to do so. Any enactment should be permissive 
 and not obligatory. 
 
 It has been urged that owing to the nature of the land 
 in the native reserves it is not practicable to institute 
 individual holdings. It is possible that some Crown lands 
 may be available ; but there is another possibility which 
 seems to be less reactionary, less risky, and more suited 
 to the people. The land might be broken up so that the 
 natives held it by family or group tenure. If that were done, 
 and if the family owned land in perpetuity, all improve- 
 ments would be kept as family assets. Such a system 
 might appeal to natives who do not wish for individual 
 tenure ; for the plan is in keeping with the genius of the 
 people. The natives in Natal show considerable desire to 
 own land by syndicate — that is, by group-association. 
 
 Difierences as to the value people attach to Socialism 
 may after all resolve themselves in the last analysis into 
 temperamental differences of outlook upon life. Does a 
 man's life consist in the abundance of the things which he 
 possesses, or in his sharing all things with others, and in 
 possessing his soul in contentedness and peace ? Of course 
 in one sense it consists in neither of these alternatives, for 
 " We live by Admiration, Hope and Love." But when 
 we have these, what next ? Shall we find life in the feverish 
 quest of possessions and contrivances, in the enjoyment 
 of luxury and rapid motion, or, on the other hand, shall we 
 find it in the " Simple produce of the common day," and 
 in " Joy in widest commonalty spread " ? The reply to 
 that question will depend upon the temperament of the 
 
60 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 man who answers. In the West, progress, action, luxury — 
 though they can only be reached through strife, competition 
 and a divine discontent — are the ideals most men cherish : 
 in the East, men prefer placid contemplation, quiet enjoy- 
 ment and the simple social life. William Morris may 
 sigh for a paradise in which energy and the quest of beauty 
 are combined with self-sacrifice and a spirit of human 
 fellowship. He would take what appeals to him as highest 
 and best in the West and root the flower in what is highest 
 and best in the East. And well has he called his vision 
 " News from Nowhere," for after all, 
 
 East is East and West is West 
 And never the twain shall meet. 
 
 In England we have long since passed through the 
 socialistic stage, and to go back to it would probably mean 
 regression to semi-barbarism. In spite of the proverbial 
 kindness of the poor to one another, we have too little 
 altruism to ensure the success of collectivism. In our 
 present state of culture we shall get much of the good 
 and none of the evil Socialism would give us, through 
 group-association and a system of co-operative enterprise 
 designed so as to give ample room for individual energy, 
 ambition, and initiative. Amongst the Kafirs the institu- 
 tion of individualism might no doubt lead to certain types 
 of progress ; but the people are in a stage of development 
 in which, I think, they will gain more from a Socialism 
 they are accustomed to than from an individualism suited 
 to a highly developed people. They have so much altruism 
 that it seems almost a crime to break down their own 
 system, and with it to destroy the finest qualities of the 
 savage. Communism has been the breath of their life 
 
PRIMITIVE SOCIALISM 61 
 
 for ages, and they regard the simple life as the best. Shall 
 we, because our nerves are tingling with the desire to hustle 
 everybody on, take these backward people and put them 
 through a process that may possibly lead to some progress, 
 but which must lead also to much sufiering and peril ? 
 If the Kafirs prefer to lie down in the shade, cannot we 
 leave them alone and go our own hot, bustling way ? 
 
 I think that we should do better rather to return to the 
 Clan-System and to Kafir modes of thought than to plunge 
 the native races of South Africa into the vortex of our 
 democratic and industrial life. However, if, as seems 
 probable, we decide to push individualism, we should be 
 more than ever anxious to develop all the various sides 
 of the native's character so that he may be prepared for 
 his new life under the changed conditions. White men, 
 whether engaged in industrial or missionary work, must 
 not merely develop one or two sides of the Kafir's nature, 
 but must draw out aU his capacities so that he may survive 
 the flood we let loose in the land. When missionaries pay 
 less attention to the apex, and more attention to the base, 
 of the native's character, they will find more stability and 
 intelligence in their converts. And the same thing is true 
 of those who are anxious to gather the Kafirs into our 
 industrial system. 
 
 My own view of the matter is that politicians act for Party 
 ends without due forethought, and that there is but little 
 hope that they will mend their ways in this special matter. 
 It looks therefore as if Kafir SociaHsm were, unfortunately, 
 doomed : but I feel it to be of the very utmost importance 
 that we should retard rather than hasten the process. It 
 is late, but not too late, to conserve many of the finest 
 
62 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 traits in Kafir character : therefore we should not break 
 up the Clan-System in any district more than we are 
 absolutely bound to do, but should conserve it wherever 
 we can. When the people have outgrown the system, 
 it will drop off of itself. We pass on to trace the effect 
 of socialistic ideals on the Conception of Justice. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 KAFIK CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 
 
 There is an unmapped region that is bounded in one 
 direction by legal duty, in a second by moral obligation, 
 in a third by social usage, and in a fourth by instinct 
 or habit. It is a sort of no-man's-land, for it is beyond 
 the frontier lines of jurisprudence, sociology, ethics and 
 biology. Since racial custom is so intimately interwoven 
 with conceptions of what is right and fitting, ethnologists 
 have recently annexed this hinterland of the four sciences 
 enumerated ; and it is already evident that a study of 
 this region will prove of great interest and importance to 
 all who would rule or civilise the backward races of mankind. 
 If we would help such people to rise out of their backward 
 condition, we must cease to take it for granted that a 
 course of action that is approved of by our highly specialised 
 sense of justice must necessarily appear obviously right 
 and fitting to primitive races. 
 
 The most superficial observer is forced to notice certain 
 individual physical differences as well as certain broad 
 resemblances in the different races of mankind : but it often 
 escapes his observation that there are also mental and moral 
 differences that in 'some directions outweigh the resem- 
 blances. This failure to recognise deep-seated differences 
 is largely due to our insularity of nature, which is apt to shut 
 us off from intimate association with the races we govern. 
 
64 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 It is strangely difficult to explain convincingly to people 
 who have never come into close contact with backward or 
 primitive races, how widely Europeans and Kafirs differ 
 in their conceptions of justice. It not only calls for much 
 sympathy, but it also takes time for the mind to accustom 
 itself to the atmosphere of primitive thought. It is 
 extremely difficult for a white man to " think black." 
 The man in the street little realises how slowly his own 
 ideas on morals and legal rights have become crystallised 
 into their existing shapes and forms, and how profoundly 
 his conceptions of justice have been affected by custom 
 and social usages. It is not every one who has the oppor- 
 tunity to study the misty region — that " vanishing-point 
 of jurisprudence " — where, as Holland says, " law and 
 morality are not conceived as distinct." 
 
 The average Briton is apt to grow impatient at the mere 
 mention of the fact that human beings differ in their con- 
 ceptions as to what is just and unjust. " Don't tell me," 
 he is apt to say impatiently, " that there is a single sane 
 human being who does not in his heart of hearts know what 
 is just or unjust : we want none of your theoretical subtle- 
 ties : just give the Kafir straightforward British justice 
 and see if he will not recognise it at first sight." " The 
 Hebrew prophet," writes Jowett, " believed that faith in 
 God was enough to enable him to govern the world ; the 
 Greek philosopher imagined that contemplation of the 
 good would make a legislator. There is as much to be filled 
 up in the one case as in the other." The Briton imagines 
 that the administration of his own ideas of justice will 
 usher in the millennium. It seems to be the peculiar right 
 of an Englishman to constitute his own conception of fair 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 65 
 
 play as a sort of Platonic archetype of Eternal Justice. 
 He seems to be constitutionally incapable of believing that 
 his conception of justice is not necessarily universal. He 
 regards his sense of justice as a sort of noumenon^ orthing- 
 in-itself, that is independent of time and space : he thinks 
 he comes to his conclusions as to what is just or unjust by 
 means of fixed and infallible " intuitions " that must be 
 shared by all other rational beings. He solves the native 
 problem at a stroke, so he thinks, when he urges us to 
 give the Kafirs simple justice and have done with it. The 
 British are proud of many things : they are proud of their 
 Empire, of their Navy, of their commercial activities, of 
 their free institutions ; but there is nothing they are so 
 proud of as their impartial administration of justice to all 
 the races they govern. There may be individual Britons 
 who rail at the Empire, who would reduce the Navy, who 
 condemn our industrial and commercial life, who find 
 fault with our Party system ; but there is scarcely a 
 Briton who does not profoundly beheve that it is pretty 
 well the whole duty of man to administer British justice 
 to all the subjects of the King. The love of justice 
 is the god of our idolatry ; and it is the one thing in 
 which we take refuge when we feel ourselves libelled by 
 some other envious nation as to our territory-grabbing 
 propensities. 
 
 Our imagination is so dull that we feel something of a 
 shock when so sane and level-headed a man as Jowett says 
 (in his " Plato's Republic ") : " There may come a time 
 when the saying, 'Have I not a right to do what I will 
 with my own ? ' may appear to be a barbarous {sic) relic of 
 individuahsm. Such reflections appear wild and visionary 
 
 E 
 
66 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 to the eye of the practical statesman, but they are fairly 
 within the range of possibility to the philosopher." 
 
 Our historic memory is so short-lived that we forget that 
 the " infallible intuitions " of our great grandfathers are poles 
 asunder from our own intuitions on such a subject as the 
 justice of burning human beings for using witchcraft ; yet 
 it was, comparatively speaking, but yesterday that many 
 European nations considered the justice of that action as 
 beyond question, and appealed triumphantly, as the Kafirs 
 do to-day, to their " intuitions " as being decisive. Nay, 
 we need not go so far back : many things that seemed to us 
 essentially just when we were children appear to us in a 
 very different light forty years later, and we pause and 
 pick our steps carefully where once we would have stepped 
 out boldly. The pain with which we part from the old 
 judgments of childhood might give us pause, if not sym- 
 pathy, with a backward race that often stands aghast at 
 our twentieth-century conceptions of what is just. 
 
 " The business of the jurist," says Holland, " is, in the 
 first place, to accept as an undoubted fact the existence of 
 moral principles in the world, differing in many particulars 
 in different nations and in different epochs : and, in the 
 second place, to observe the sort of sanction by which these 
 principles are made effective." There are, of course, 
 certain broad resemblances, especially in abstract questions, 
 between Kafir and European ideas of what is just, and 
 no one wishes to deny the fact. The Kafir, for example, 
 will admit that it is unjust to punish a man who is ad- 
 mittedly guiltless. But once we leave abstract questions 
 and come to practical details, we are faced with endless 
 difficulties in the most unexpected quarters. For example. 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 67 
 
 Is it just to punish a man for theft ? Is it just to punish a 
 man for breaking a contract ? Is a child responsible for 
 the debt of his deceased father ? Just as an Irishman 
 and an Englishman may differ as to the justice of cattle- 
 driving, just as a Conservative and a Socialist may differ 
 as to the justice of punishing a starving man for stealing 
 bread, so may Kafir and European differ on the questions 
 just asked. The Kafir sees nothing wrong in stealing from 
 a rival tribe, or in leaving, without giving any notice, his 
 European employer who has entered into a contract with 
 him. In some of the above cases, therefore, the European 
 has the loftier ethical conception, but in others, as, for 
 example, the duty of a son to pay his deceased father's 
 debts, the Kafir surpasses him. The soft and welcome 
 excuses that the European might honestly advance with 
 regard to such obligations would be indignantly scouted 
 by the savage. We may imagine, then, how surprised 
 the Kafirs are to find us looking to them for gratitude when, 
 in a bungling fashion, we feel it our duty to correct what 
 we imagine to be their wrong-headed conceptions. It is 
 pathetic to see how chagrined a European magistrate 
 sometimes is when he has gone out of his way to give the 
 Kafir what he considers the inestimable boon of substan- 
 tial British justice, only to see the Kafir leaving the court 
 in a grumbling and discontented spirit. 
 
 The mistake of the Briton consists in his imagining that 
 human nature is all of a piece, and that even as in all races 
 men are agreed as to the intellectual judgment that twice 
 two make four, so they must be agreed as to moral and 
 emotional judgments. 
 
 If justice be defined in Justinian's words as the " constant 
 
G8 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 and perpetual will to render to each one his right," then 
 differences in thought as to a man's " right," will lead to 
 concrete differences in human judgments as to what is 
 just. Professor Westermarck, in his " Origin and Develop- 
 ment of the Moral Ideas," * has pointed out that the 
 emotional constitution (perhaps he should have said 
 emotional judgment) of man does not present the same 
 uniformity as does the human intellect. It would be 
 interesting to pause at this point and to see whether this 
 dissimilarity in emotional judgment be due to constitu- 
 tional differences, or merely to variations in the data on 
 which the emotional nature works. Leaving on one side 
 this somewhat academic problem, let us pass under review 
 a few of the more important points in which Kafirs differ 
 from Europeans as to conceptions of justice, and as to 
 emotional judgments. 
 
 (1) It is custom and precedent, rather than considera- 
 tions of abstract fairness, that are considered by the Kafirs 
 in their system of jurisprudence. This arises partly out 
 of their veneration for old men and worship of Ancestral 
 Spirits ; partly from a tendency in human nature in virtue 
 of which that which is forbidden by authority comes, in 
 process of time, to be felt intrinsically wrong ; and partly 
 because " in the vague and floating order of primitive 
 societies the mere definition of a right immensely increases 
 its strength." | 
 
 Professor Drummond's description of the way in which 
 the natives in Central Africa form a pathway across country 
 is an excellent illustration of the way in which laws are 
 
 * Vol. i. p. 11. 
 
 f Maine, " Village Communities," p. 150. 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 69 
 
 formed in primitive societies.* He tells us how the natives, 
 clad in a little palm oil and a few mosquitoes, avoid stones, 
 ant-heaps, or small bushes, and thereby form their tortnous 
 pathway. One man goes a little bit out of the way because 
 of some obstacle, and the dozen men following him walk -^ 
 in his erratic footsteps, so that the path maintains in the 
 main the desired direction while incessantly wriggling 
 to left and to right. Even so in the case of savages, the 
 people are conscious of a vague direction in which it is 
 best to go. Some individual meets with a difficulty, and 
 the chief is called in to solve the doubt. The path gets 
 twisted a little to one side. This detour becomes estab- 
 lished when, lo, another obstacle is met. Resort is again had 
 to the chief, with the result that the path is again deflected. 
 Little by little customs and precedents get established. 
 In opposition to this idea it is sometimes said by theorists 
 that the idea of a custom must precede that of a judicial 
 sentence : but it seems certain that in primitive races 
 it is the judgment of the chief that generally inaugurates 
 a new custom. Maine has expressed this by saying that 
 " the only authoritative statement of right and wrong, in 
 the infancy of mankind, is a judicial sentence after the 
 facts, not one presupposing a law that has been violated, "f 
 The Kafir chief who gives a verdict, within certain limits, 
 makes an action right or wrong in the eyes of the natives ; 
 and, consequently, precedents are all-important in their 
 system of law. To controvert, or even to doubt, the 
 justice of the decisions of a dead chief is tantamount to 
 contemptuous behaviour towards the itongo or spirit of that 
 
 * See also Holland, " Jurisprudence," p. 54. 
 f Maine, " Ancient Law," pp. 4, 5, 7. 
 
70 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 ancestor : it is the last thing that the Kafir would dream 
 of doing ; and should he reverse the chief's decision by 
 inadvertence, and subsequently discover the fact, he would 
 be prepared to expect untold calamity to the tribe as a 
 most natural consequence of angering the Ancestral Spirits. 
 In many instances the Kafirs are honestly confused as 
 to the rightness or wrongness of certain actions : they go 
 to their chief with their ideas nebulous, or at least held in 
 solution. As the case proceeds their difficulties get cleared 
 up and their judgments crystallise out into a definite shape, 
 so that new habits of thought are formed. Each party is 
 glad to get his ideas clarified, and though we could not 
 exactly say with Maine that the " person aggrieved com- 
 plains, not of an individual wrong, but of the disturbance 
 of the order of the entire little society," * yet this socialistic 
 aspect of the case is certainly present in the sub-conscious 
 mind of the Kafir. The important point is that the chief 
 has spoken and resolved the doubt. Every one now thinks 
 he knows what is right. With each act of obedience the 
 new course of conduct becomes easier and confirmed. 
 Just as a bodily habit, by the mere repetition of certain 
 nerve impulses, forms a pathway in the cells of the brain, 
 thus making the action easier and more natural, so does a 
 custom, which is but a public habit, make a pathway in the 
 brain of the body politic. Men tacitly assume that what 
 they have always done is the thing they ought to do. The 
 custom has no sooner become a habit than it comes to be 
 regarded as an obvious rule of conduct : " Custom," as 
 Bacon has said, " is the principal magistrate of man's 
 life." 
 
 * Maine, " Village Communities," p. 68. 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 71 
 
 We are apt to take it for granted that all other nations 
 must desire the progress we are bent upon ourselves. 
 " In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult 
 for a citizen of Western Europe to bring thoroughly home 
 to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds 
 him is a rare exception in the history of the world. The 
 tone of thought common among us, all our hopes, fears 
 and speculations, would be materially affected if we had 
 vividly before us the relation of the progressive races to 
 the totality of human life. It is indisputable that much the 
 greatest part of mankind has never shown a particle of 
 desire that its civil institutions should be improved since 
 the moment when external completeness was first given to 
 them by their embodiment in some permanent record. . . . 
 Instead of civilisation expanding the law, the law has 
 limited the civilisation. . . . The stationary condition of 
 the human race is the rule, the progressive the exception." * 
 Though the Kafir has no permanent record, yet his memory 
 is a very good substitute. I have seen a Kafir chief dis- 
 cussing with a number of aged councillors a precedent 
 made eighty years previously by one of his ancestors. 
 After two or three minutes' discussion the whole case was 
 revived to the satisfaction of all the councillors — so excel- 
 lent is the memory of the Kafir, and so reliable is tradition 
 in such cases. 
 
 When these facts are borne in mind it causes us no 
 
 surprise to find that the Kafir is a confirmed Conservative : 
 
 . the fact that his grandfathers did a certain thing, or held a 
 
 certain opinion, is sufficient to recommend it to him and to 
 
 caase him to reject new ideas. He neither wants to have 
 
 * Maine, " Ancient Law," pp. 27, 28. 
 
72 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 the equal and placid flow of his life interrupted by the 
 intrusion of new conceptions, nor does he wish to have his 
 system of law improved, for it quite satisfies him. When 
 some European magistrate rules according to Western 
 ideas, giving the people British justice, and consequently 
 upsetting all Kafir precedents, there must of necessity be a 
 feeling of discontent in the hearts of the natives. They are 
 bewildered at the pace we insist on, and leave the white 
 magistrate's court with glum faces, for they are incapable 
 of seeing rhyme or reason in the white man's view of the 
 case. It frequently happens that the more the white 
 magistrate thinks that he is just, and the more (where a 
 native and a white man are opposed) he strains the law in 
 favour of the Kafir, the more unjust does the Kafir think 
 him. European reformers and philanthropists may talk 
 to the raw Kafir till doomsday, but they will not change his 
 opinion on this point : the native will either be silent and 
 refuse to waste his breath, or else he will say : " We are 
 going along different roads ; your path goes in that direc- 
 tion and mine in this. Let us each go our own way." 
 
 Speaking of Kafir jurisprudence, Mr. Dugmore, who had 
 excellent opportunities of studying the subject before the 
 Kafirs had been much brought into contact with white 
 men, wrote : "It would be scarcely correct to speak of a 
 system of Kafir law. The laws of the Kafir tribes are but a 
 collection of 'precedents, consisting of the decisions of the 
 chiefs and councillors of bygone days, and embodied in 
 the recollections, personal or traditional, of the people of 
 the existing generation. That these decisions, in the first 
 instance, were founded upon some general notion of right 
 is not unlikely. It is not, however, to the abstract merits 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 73 
 
 of a case that the appeal is now ordinarily made, in legal 
 discussions, but to what has been customary in past times. 
 The decisions of deceased chiefs of note are the guide for 
 the living in similar circumstances. The justice of those 
 decisions is usually assumed as a matter of course, no one 
 presuming to suppose that an Amaxosa chief, any more 
 than an English khig, can do ' wrong.' " * 
 
 (2) We are prepared now to see that the Kafir does not 
 regard justice as an abstract thing in the way we do in 
 Europe : to him it is essentially a personal thing, and he 
 cannot abide our Western idea of cold, impersonal, and 
 abstract justice. He likes it to be hot, personal, and con- 
 crete. It is the chief alone who can give it to him, for 
 justice is a thing that scarcely exists apart from the 
 chief who creates it. As English children beheve — or used 
 to beheve, in the good old days — in the necessary justness 
 of all that their fathers do, and consider such decisions to be 
 necessarily final, even so the Kafir, before he is educated, 
 has a passionate faith in the essential Tightness of the deci- 
 sion of his chief. It never occurs to him to question the 
 word of his chief, for the verdict instantly inhibits all other 
 action of his judgment. The man does not want abstract 
 justice, but the personal opinion of his chief : and the last 
 thing a Kafir would like to do would be to call in a white 
 man to examine, and possibly to reverse, the decision of 
 his chief, even when such decision had been given against 
 him. The Kafir distrusts our entire machinery of ad- 
 ministering justice, and he cannot for the life of him 
 conceive that the white man is in any way justified in 
 
 * " A Compendium of Kafir Laws and Customs," MacLean,' pp. 
 33,34. 
 
74 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 forcing natives to bring their cases to white magistrates. 
 He cannot admit that it is just that a white man should 
 come in uninvited and set up his new-fangled authority. 
 He admits that the white man is the very person to decide 
 what constitutes justice for the European, but will never 
 admit that he is capable of deciding what is right for black 
 men. The home sentimentalist is ever saying : "All will 
 come well if you will but give the Kafir what you know 
 to be just." The Kafir says, however, that this is the one 
 thing in the world he does not want, and will not have if 
 he can help it. Can the decision of a usurper make things 
 right or wrong ? Is not the very action of the white man 
 in presuming to administer justice an act of injustice ? 
 And how can any decision of such an unjust tribunal be 
 anything but discredited in advance ? That is the Kafir's 
 natural thought when first the white man sets up his court. 
 Under the influence of time and education, the natives are 
 here and there becoming somewhat reconciled to our rule ; 
 but there is still an immense amount of underlying discontent 
 with our administration of justice, which, I hasten to add, is 
 clean and irreproachable from the European standpoint. 
 
 The thought of the Kafir should be familiar to us, for 
 are we not accustomed to the argument of the extreme 
 Socialist who defends the starving man when he steals 
 bread, and condemns the judge who punishes the theft ? 
 To the rabid Socialist, our entire economic system is a cruel 
 tyranny and a gigantic injustice ; and the law is nothing 
 but a device of the men who steal the labour of the poor 
 to render secure their unlawfully gotten gains. These men, 
 so the argument runs, rob the poor of their means of getting 
 bread ; and the starving man — or it may be the poacher — 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 75 
 
 simply takes back what really is his own, but which has been 
 previously stolen from him by the rich. The landlord is 
 supposed to have wrested the land from the poor in a most 
 iniquitous and unrighteous fashion : he then makes and 
 administers the law of the land, which is all in his own 
 interests. Therefore the decision of a magistrate, who is 
 ex hi/pothesi the official of this iniquitous conspiracy, is dis- 
 credited in advance,whenever a question relating to property 
 comes before him. If we accept this point of view and these 
 data, we cannot for a moment be surprised at the judgment 
 of the Socialist. The starving man has but appealed from 
 legalised tyranny to essential justice, and has but taken that 
 to which he has a perfect right. We may deplore this way 
 of looking at the matter, and may be certain that it is 
 wrong, but that need not prevent us from understanding 
 the position taken up by such an extreme Socialist. In 
 a somewhat similar way the Kafir looks upon the white 
 magistrate as the administrator of a wholly indefensible 
 system. In the eyes of the Kafir the selection of the 
 man who is to administer justice is all-important. 
 
 (3) Perhaps the very central conception of Kafir law 
 — a conception in intimate correlation with the whole idea 
 at the base of the Clan-System — is that of collective, or 
 corporate, responsibility. It is a conception most admir- 
 ably suited to a race that is in a backward condition, for 
 it is a great deterrent from crime in all immature societies. 
 It is also a conception that could be used by us to reduce our 
 difficulties to a minimum. 
 
 A striking example of a successful use of the imagination 
 in making laws for subject races is seen in what is known 
 as the Spoor Law. It is true that it was not an original 
 
76 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 Kafir conception, but it is in keeping with Kafir ideas. 
 The law came into force early in the nineteenth century, 
 when the natives in the eastern territories were incessantly 
 stealing the cattle of the white settlers. It was found to be 
 useless to try to convict the thieves, or to regain the cattle, 
 for no native would ever tell against another native in such 
 a case. In 1817 Lord Charles Somerset suggested to Gaika 
 that when the spoor of stolen cattle could be traced to 
 within a few hundred yards of a kraal, the white men 
 should give over the pursuit, and should tell the people of 
 that kraal to pay up the stolen cattle or else point out the 
 spoor leading away to another kraal.* Any kraal that 
 obliterated the spoor so as to hide the thief became, ipso 
 facto, responsible for the theft. The natives raised no 
 objection to the plan, for it was a brilliant piece of imagina- 
 tive legislation, as it appealed to the conception of collec- 
 tive responsibility. Never, until quite recently, have the 
 Kafirs accused us of injustice in insisting on this rule. 
 It is significant to notice who it is that raises the objection. 
 It is the educated Kafij, who has renounced his connection 
 with his clan, who has lost, through our teaching, his sense 
 of solidarity with his fellows, who shirks his obligations, 
 who demands his rights, and who has become an intensely 
 self-centred individualist. From time to time senti- 
 mentalists in England have described this law as tyrannical 
 and unjust, for it does not look like British justice. But 
 it has worked with extraordinary smoothness and success ; 
 it has found a congenial soil in Kafir thought and senti- 
 
 * IVIr. Theal says : " This is the ordinary Kafir law, which makes a 
 community responsible for the acts of the individuals composing it." 
 — " History of South Africa," vol. 1795-1834, p. 200. 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 77 
 
 ment ; and is now often regarded by the Kafirs as one of 
 their own laws. 
 
 When we reflect that, in our own evolution of legal 
 institutions, we have slowly and with great difficulty 
 passed, during the last thousand years, from semi-primitive 
 conceptions of law through such systems as Legal Fictions, 
 and Equity, to Legislation, we see that we might well 
 be patient with the people that we found but yesterday 
 in a more primitive state than we ourselves were in a 
 thousand years ago. But no ; we would fain force the 
 natives into our highly developed Conception of Contract, 
 and in the course of a single generation or two would rush 
 them through all the stages of a legal development that has 
 taken us more than a thousand years to accomplish. We 
 press on them the Canons of Conduct that suit some 
 advanced European State in the midst of complicated 
 world-politics ; and when a luckless Kafir of the veld, 
 who does not clearly understand his share in some trans- 
 action he has entered into, fails to fulfil his part, we call 
 him bad names ; and should the native happen to be a 
 Mission boy we cry out in horror at his hypocrisy. We take 
 a man out of his condition of Status and plunge him head- 
 long into the most advanced conditions of Contract, and 
 then abuse him if, through defective imaginative apprehen- 
 sion, he fails to take the same view as we do of the obliga- 
 tions he has undertaken in ignorance of the full meaning of 
 his action. As Maine would say, the Kafirs " do not possess 
 the faculty of forming a judgment on their own interests : 
 in other words, they are wanting in the first essential of an 
 engagement by Contract."* Is it a cause for wonder that 
 * " Ancient Law," p. 173. 
 
78 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 a miner or a storekeeper in the Colonies, ignorant of the 
 slow development of law, should feel that he has all the 
 right on his side when he condemns a native for breach of 
 engagement ? 
 
 " Ancient law knows next to nothing of individuals, it 
 is concerned not with individuals but with families, not 
 with single human beings but with groups. Even when 
 the law of the State has succeeded in penetrating the small 
 circles of kindred into which it had originally no means of 
 penetrating, the view it takes of individuals is curiously 
 different from that taken by jurisprudence in its maturest 
 stage. The life of each citizen is not regarded as limited 
 by birth and death ; it is but a continuation of the existence 
 of its forefathers, and it will be prolonged in the existence 
 of his descendants." * Our profound belief in the individual 
 and the Kafirs' equally profound belief in the community 
 tinge all our several thoughts, both in the administration 
 of justice and in. political life. The Kafirs carry their 
 idea of group-association to such an extent that they 
 regard a debt as a family concern. A man's debts succeed 
 to his nearest relations. We take the Kafir out of this 
 group-system to which he is accustomed, and then wonder 
 that the man does not consider it dishonest to run into 
 debt and die without paying it. We cannot have it both 
 ways : if we elect to insist on importing our own changes 
 into Kafir society, we must be prepared to be more intelli- 
 gent than to blame the native who but dimly grasps the 
 significance of the enormous change we make in his condi- 
 tion. A curious result of our haste is seen in the case of the 
 native convert. A Christian Kafir is, as we have seen, cut 
 of? from his clan by the very fact of his change of religion : 
 
 * Maine, " Ancient Law," p. 270. 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 79 
 
 he retains, however, his natural habit of incurring debt, while 
 his children, who have been brought up outside the clan, do 
 not see the fun of paying the debts he leaves at death, for 
 their sense of corporate union with others has been destroyed 
 by the missionary's teaching of individual responsibihty. 
 
 I can imagine some objector still persisting in saying 
 that all this is mere theory, and entirely remote from daily 
 practice. I will therefore point out a case in which our 
 conflicting views of justice led directly to a serious war 
 which the Kafirs still regard as the most unjust one the white 
 man has ever waged against the black — though the British 
 were entirely justified from their point of view. I refer 
 to what is known as the War of the Axe. In 1846 a Kafir 
 named Kleintje was caught steahng an axe, and was sent 
 to be tried by a magistrate at Grahamstown. He was 
 handcuffed to a Hottentot offender, and was accompanied 
 by four armed Hottentots who were sent with them as a 
 guard. On the road the guard was surprised by members 
 of Kleintje's clan, who seized two of the guns. One of the 
 Hottentot guards, seeing a companion beneath a Kafir, 
 fired at the native and killed him on the spot. The man 
 who was slain happened to be Kleintje's brother. The 
 guards escaped in safety, while the Kafirs murdered the 
 Hottentot to whom KUeintje was manacled. Now Kleintje*s 
 crime had been committed on colonial ground, and the 
 murdered Hottentot was a British subject ; the matter 
 therefore could not be overlooked. The British demanded 
 the surrender of the rescued prisoner as well as the murderer 
 of the Hottentot. The head-man dechned to give him up, 
 though he sent back the guns. The chief of the clan was 
 then appealed to, but he refused to deliver them up, explain- 
 ing that in his view of the case the death of the Hottentot 
 
80 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 was compensated by the death of Kleintje's brother ; 
 he added that if the governor was grieving for the Hottentot 
 he himself was grieving for his own man. Sandile, with 
 whose people the criminals were known to be, was then 
 called on to surrender the two men, but acted in the same 
 manner as the others.* 
 
 I think that in this case the natives were not bluffing ; 
 they were truthfully stating the case as it appeared to them. 
 They believe in the justice of retaUation against people 
 outside their clan, and think that in a case like this blood 
 washes out blood. Justice, they think, is corporate rather 
 than individualistic. A member of the clan was killed, 
 and the matter could never be levelled up till a member 
 belonging to the other party was killed. As a result of this 
 clashing of conceptions of justice, a long and tedious war 
 ensued. So far, then, from these considerations as to 
 differences in the conception of justice being academic, 
 they are intensely practical, and a failure to understand 
 them has led, and I fear will lead again, to widespread 
 bloodshed in South Africa. 
 
 (4) With regard to the subject of individual liberty, 
 the Kafirs, on account of their socialistic tendencies, differ 
 widely from us, and, " barbarians " though they be, do 
 not think " a man may do what he likes with his own." 
 They are not obsessed with the European idea of 
 personal liberty, but believe strongly that individuals 
 belong to the chief, and that they are his property. They 
 find their self-realisation in their constituted head, for the 
 tribe comes to self-consciousness in the person of the chief. 
 
 * The above account is condensed from Theal's " History of South 
 Africa," vol. 1834-1854, pp. 258-260. 
 
""=— ""^ KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 81 
 
 Offences are divided into two classes, criminal and civil : 
 an offence against the person is a " case of blood," and is 
 criminal, because an injury to a person is an injury done 
 to the chief's property, and is a loss not so much to the 
 person hurt as to the chief, to whom the fine is paid. The 
 tribe cannot afford to have its fighting power weakened, 
 and therefore any damage done to an able-bodied person 
 is a damage done to the fighting power of the tribe, and 
 therefore to the chief, who is regarded by the people as 
 the embodiment of the tribe. All offences committed 
 against private property are civil cases, and are regarded 
 as of a less serious nature than those committed against 
 the chief's property. 
 
 We may feel that a man who has had his leg broken by 
 another should have the right to claim personal damages ; 
 but the Kafir thinks that it is the chief who suffers loss ; 
 for the injured man is the chief's property. That a fine, 
 paid by a native, should go, not to his chief or clan, but to 
 an alien Government, is well-nigh inconceivable injustice 
 in the eyes of a Kafir. 
 
 There was quoted in the previous chapter the statement 
 of a Zulu with regard to the chief's right to forbid people 
 to eat the produce of their own gardens until the Feast of 
 First Fruits. The passage was quoted to illustrate the 
 native's conception of the relation of the individual to the 
 chief. It also throws much light on the Kafir's conception 
 of justice, and gives proof, if that were needed, how useless 
 it is to think that British justice with regard to the rights 
 of the individual can appeal to the Kafirs. 
 
 (5) According to Kafir law a man is guilty until he proves 
 he is innocent ; the plaintiff therefore feels aggrieved when 
 
82 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 he comes into our courts and finds the onus of proof shifted 
 on to his own shoulders. " This is a strange thing ! " 
 thinks the injured Kafir in school-boy fashion. " That 
 rascal of the dirty Jama clan has not only taken three of 
 my oxen which he has got all snug in his own cattle-kraal, 
 but here I come to the white man of the law for redress, 
 and he actually takes the side of that scoundrel of a fellow, 
 and tells me — me ! the man who is grieving for his s olen 
 cattle ! — that it is I, forsooth, who must prove this fellow 
 guilty ; though there are the cattle actually in the cattle- 
 kraal of that thief, and anybody with eyes in his head 
 can see the fact for himself ! " 
 
 It need not surprise us that the Kafirs take this point 
 of view, for it is a principle well known in Europe. But 
 there are special reasons why this custom should be found 
 amongst the Kafirs. It is very difficult to procure evidence 
 to incriminate a man ; the people are too clannish to give 
 evidence voluntarily against one another, unless it be for 
 the common good of the tribe. There is no judicial oath 
 required of witnesses, who may, however, volunteer an 
 oath if they wish ; in such cases the evidence gains in value ; 
 but no one can be subpoenaed to give evidence : there is 
 thus no offence of perjury, and no compulsion to appear as 
 a witness. Under such conditions it is but natural that a 
 man should be considered guilty until he proves his inno- 
 cence, for it is extremely difficult for the prosecution to 
 make out a case. 
 
 (6) Kafir conceptions about responsibility often seem 
 very humorous to Europeans. A Kafir lends a knife or a 
 hoe to a friend who injures himself while using the imple- 
 ment ; the injured man will argue that if his friend had 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 83 
 
 never lent him the article in question there could have 
 been no injury done : the responsibility for the damage is 
 therefore said to rest with the man who lent the instrument.* 
 In such matters the Kafirs are very like European children. 
 They sometimes make the most unexpected demands of 
 this nature, and the decisions of the magistrate may seem 
 obviously right to us and yet obviously wrong to the Kafirs. 
 Mr. Carl Jeppe, in his book on the Transvaal, has given 
 an example of this sort of difl&culty which he met with in 
 his ofl&cial life ; he does not seem to appreciate the point of 
 view of the Kafir, but seems to regard such a demand as 
 something utterly inconsequent and absurd. It is evidently 
 very difficult for a European to divest himself, even for a 
 moment, of his European cast of thought. 
 
 Here is another Kafir conception that is somewhat 
 akin to the previous one. When a Kafir is on a journey 
 and receives hospitality for the night at some hut he is 
 passing, he leaves his possessions on the floor of the hut 
 and troubles no more about them until he is leaving. He 
 holds the host responsible for taking care of such property 
 while h^ is under his roof; and a Kafir court of law in 
 olden days would certainly have maintained the man's 
 case. 
 
 (7) With regard to the question of theft, it may be pointed 
 out that it is not an offence to steal from people of a hostile 
 or rival tribe. All tribes are, in primitive races, at least 
 potential, if not actual, enemies of one another. Europeans 
 still rob from their enemies during war, and justify the 
 
 * Such a case is not very far removed from some unexpected side- 
 results of recent legislation in England with regard to the liability of 
 employers of labour. 
 
84 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 action. The Kafirs rob from their rivals in times of 
 peace, and advance similar arguments. In olden days, 
 to punish a Zulu for robbing or injuring a Pondo or a 
 Basuto would have appeared absurd to all parties. Is it 
 thus that a man's meritorious action, in advancing the 
 interests of his own clan by spoiling the Egyptians, is 
 rewarded ? A man who is injured by a person of another 
 tribe is, in the eyes of the Kafirs, entirely right in taking 
 his revenge on any member of that rival tribe. If a Zulu 
 had an ox stolen by a Tonga, he would feel it essentially 
 just — so strong is the sense of corporate responsibility — 
 that he should recoup himself by taking an ox from any 
 Tonga that came in his way. 
 
 There is no one who has any judicial power to interfere 
 in such inter-tribal affairs. There is no such thing as inter- 
 national or inter-tribal law among the Kafirs, and so force 
 is the prime and final arbiter in all such quarrels. The 
 individual who has suffered loss at the hands of a member 
 of a rival tribe must either overlook the insult and loss 
 or resort to retaliation. The Kafirs believe more than we 
 do in the intrinsic justice of retaliation. In this they are 
 like the English school-boy, but they show a sweet reason- 
 ableness, as has already been pointed out. It is only in 
 certain offences that they may take the law into their 
 own hands. Theoretically a man has no right to judge his 
 own case and to take redress, but in certain cases custom 
 allows him to do so. The question as to retaliation is left in 
 some directions undefined, and it has worked well to trust 
 the uncommon good sense of the people in this matter. 
 
 (8) With regard to the question of punishment, the Kafirs 
 display a very characteristic mildness in ordinary cases, 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 85 
 
 and a corresponding severity in other cases. If a man 
 should have his cattle stolen, there is no idea in his head of 
 punishing the thief ; all he wants is to get his cattle back, 
 and to be allowed to be left unmolested. Should the cattle 
 be returned without any trouble, then recourse is not had 
 to the chief. All that the aggrieved man seeks, and all 
 that Kafir law gives him, is redress when the cattle cannot 
 be discovered. The theft is not punished. 
 
 The natives do not as a rule recognise any one's right 
 to administer corporal punishment, for such a procedure 
 would appear to them indecorous and undignified. There 
 are, however, the inevitable exceptions. When boys are 
 being initiated into manhood, they are subjected to an 
 extremely severe course of thrashing ; and in olden days 
 it was not uncommon for boys to die under such treat- 
 ment. A father, also, sometimes administers corporal 
 punishment to his son ; he very rarely nags at his boy, 
 but leaves him alone to his own good sense : but should 
 the boy do anything worthy of thrashing, the father 
 administers it with a vigour and fury that are simply 
 astonishing. 
 
 There are certain occasions in which a Kafir will beat a 
 man. In this he is like an English school-boy smarting 
 under the injury done to him by another boy. The imme- 
 diate personal chastisement of the offending boy is the only 
 form of redress that will satisfy this temporary little Shy- 
 lock. The Kafir may sometimes find his heart seething 
 with fury, and may deal with his opponent in this school- 
 boy fashion so as to get rid of the perilous stuff from off 
 his chest : in five minutes' time he will be as calm as the 
 placidest cow. 
 
86 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 Professor Westermarck has said that punishment in all 
 its forms is essentially an expression of indignation in the 
 society which inflicts it.* If that is so, the Kafirs must be a 
 people signally deficient in moral feeling. If we contrast 
 with their procedure the severity of punishment which 
 obtained in England during the early part of the nineteenth 
 century, we shall be forced to admit that we are a very 
 indignant people. " When, in 1837, the punishment of 
 death was removed from about 200 crimes, it was still 
 left applicable to exactly the same offences as were capital 
 at the end of the thirteenth century. Pocket-picking was 
 punishable with death until the year 1808 ; horse-stealing, 
 cattle -stealing, sheep-stealing, stealing from a dwelling- 
 house and forgery, until 1832 ; letter-stealing and sacrilege, 
 until 1835 ; rape, until 1841 ; robbery with violence, 
 arson of dwelling-houses and sodomy, until 1861." f Such 
 a list would simply shock the mind of a Kafir, who would 
 regard us as monsters of cruelty for such needless severity. 
 There is only one type of offence for which a Kafir 
 inflicts a very heavy punishment : any kind of action that 
 he regards as anti-social, he punishes in the extremest 
 fashion. There is, of course, a reason for this, for such an 
 action weakens the tribe and must be prevented in self- 
 defence. It shocks the European to find that the one 
 ofience which is punished by a death of torture is such a 
 seemingly harmless thing as the use of witchcraft. Mis- 
 sionaries are apt to describe some punishment for such an 
 offence, and then to add, " The dark places of the earth are 
 full of the habitations of cruelty," altogether forgetting the 
 
 * " Origin of the Moral Ideas," vol. i. p. 169. 
 t Ibid. p. 188. 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 87 
 
 severity of punishment meted out in Europe. It is too 
 little understood by people who condemn the Kafirs for 
 such severity that the crime of witchcraft is thought to sap 
 the very foundation of social life. The Kafir therefore 
 shows his utter indignation at such base proceedings by 
 inflicting the severest penalty he can devise. It is only 
 fair to own that the cruelty in such cases which so shocks 
 our sentiment is the expression of their hatred of the 
 criminal selfishness they are punishing, and is therefore 
 due to injured moral feeling. Distorted thought, it may 
 show, but not callous cruelty. 
 
 (9) When the methods employed to ascertain the truth 
 and to test accusations are concerned, the matter becomes 
 more complicated. To the Kafir, trial by ordeal, whether 
 by poison or any other similar method, seems absolutely 
 just and infallible — much more so than a trial by a white 
 magistrate could ever be. When the Kafirs come into our 
 courts, they find themselves lost in what is to them a maze 
 of forms and ceremonies, which they do not understand, 
 and which are ahen to their whole type of thought. They 
 find their own ideals and customs overridden rough-shod. 
 Furthermore, the white man is so easily duped by sly 
 Kafirs that it is very difficult for him to sift false evidence 
 from true. A native chief, just because he is a Kafir, can 
 see through the imposture in a moment. The result of 
 all this is that the Kafirs go back to their kraals and say 
 that " The white man does not go by the truth," and that 
 " Lies go down better and pay better than truth." The next 
 time they have to give evidence, the temptation to tell 
 deliberate untruths is very great. But an ordeal instituted 
 by the native diviner is infallible in all cases. " There is no 
 
88 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 shuffling, there the action lies in his true nature." It is 
 astonishing to the European who sees through the tricks of 
 some of these diviners to note how even the man accused of 
 witchcraft comes finally to admit the entire justice of his 
 own punishment. For example, here is a sick person who 
 is supposed to be the subject of secret bewitchment by some 
 enemy. A doctor declares the illness is caused by a lizard 
 which some witch or wizard has placed in the patient's 
 stomach. The diviner hides a lizard about his person, 
 and then, after impressing the audience as to the charms 
 he is working, by mere sleight of hand produces the lizard 
 out of the patient's mouth. Every one is so impressed by 
 the production of the lizard that there is not a grain of 
 doubt left in any mind. Then follows the smelling out — 
 generally performed by another type of doctor — of the witch 
 or wizard. The man finally settled on as the culprit is 
 amazed at the accusation, but cannot gainsay the evidence. 
 He is told that he committed his crime in the following way. 
 In his body there lives a kind of " beast," * very largely 
 independent of his personality and will. When the culprit 
 was sleeping, this beast left the body of the man lying 
 on the mat in the hut, and went and placed the lizard in 
 the stomach of the person who is ill. Having done this, 
 the beast hastened back to the hut, and re-entered the 
 sleeping body. When the man awoke in the morning, he 
 was entirely ignorant of what he (or his " beast ") had done 
 during the night. But when the diviner actually pro- 
 duces the lizard, the man is dumbfounded and exclaims : 
 
 * I describe the affair as natives have described it to me. The account 
 given above is not nearly so full as that given in the admirable paper by 
 M. Junod referred to in the previous chapter. 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 89 
 
 " Eh ! sirs, but I admit I must have done this thing ; I 
 remember nothing about it, but indeed I ovm that I deserve 
 to be punished for doing this evil thing." And what is 
 more, the man's best friends will leave him in horror, and 
 will say in the name of justice that such a wretch should not 
 be allowed to Hve, for he has been secretly working evil 
 against the clan. 
 
 The Kafirs also differ from us fundamentally as to what 
 constitutes sufficient evidence to condemn a person ; and 
 this difference sometimes works to our serious disadvantage. 
 A native chief ^vill not hesitate for a moment to condemn 
 a man of whose guilt he has no doubt, even though nothing 
 in the shape of what we regard as formal proof of the 
 man's guilt has been adduced. Our magistrates may be 
 assured of a man's guilt, but unless the evidence is tech- 
 nically complete, the man is given the benefit of the doubt. 
 For example, a chief is accused of fomenting rebellion : 
 we may be morally certain that he is guilty, but unless we 
 can bring formal proof that will be accepted in our own 
 courts of law, the man will be discharged with his character 
 cleared, and with added power to do mischief. And more 
 than that : the Kafirs who look on laugh at our weakness 
 and divine in a moment that they have the whip-hand of us. 
 It is not so they would treat us if we fell into their hands : 
 they would give us summary Kafir justice. 
 
 The natives know how to take advantage of the curious 
 ideas of the white men better than the white men know 
 how to take advantage of the ideas of the Kafirs. It would 
 be difficult to beat the " appKed ethnological knowledge" 
 which led a whole army of Kafirs, when caught in a bad 
 strategic position in one of our old Border Wars, to sit 
 
90 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 down unarmed in front of our soldiers. They knew we 
 would not shoot down unresisting people, and took ad- 
 vantage of their knowledge. It is hard to decide whether 
 this incident showed more shrewdness or a greater sense 
 of humour. 
 
 (10) Then come the law's delays. The Kafirs like to 
 have justice meted out to them while the blood is hot : 
 half the zest of the " justice " evaporates if the delay be 
 prolonged. If it be said that we are confusing two things, 
 namely, the nature of justice and the method of its admin- 
 istration, the reply must be that this is precisely what the 
 Kafir, in keeping with every English school-boy, does. 
 To tell the school-boy that, if he will but wait, he may get 
 abstract justice from some " just beast " of a headmaster, 
 is to talk nonsense to him. He would rather not have that 
 sort of justice ; for to have to wait while the headmaster 
 pries into things would be very awkward and very unsatis- 
 factory. By the time the master had examined the case, 
 the whole desire for redress would have vanished. In 
 addition to this, every Kafir winces at the thought of en- 
 countering the schoolmaster of a magistrate, just as every 
 school-boy winces at the idea of encountering the magistrate 
 of a schoolmaster. Both Kafir and school-boy expect that 
 all sorts of awkward questions will be asked ; and the very 
 witnesses fear that the magistrate or schoolmaster may bring 
 up some past actions of the witnesses themselves, even 
 though such things have no connection with the matter in 
 hand. There is probably neither a native nor a school-boy 
 who is not conscious that he has done things that his judges 
 would condemn, if only they knew about them : and the 
 longer the delay in settling the question, the longer is the 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 91 
 
 victim kept on tenter-hooks. So while the Kafir is kept 
 waiting for the judgment of the white magistrate, he is all 
 the time kept in an uncomfortable condition of anxiety 
 as to which of his misdeeds the magistrate will refer ; for 
 if every man got his desert few of us would escape whipping. 
 
 The Kafirs think that judgment should be carried out 
 immediately after the verdict has been given. They really 
 cannot take the white man seriously when, with much 
 pomp and seriousness, he inflicts the death penalty and 
 then grants a reprieve. In the eyes of the Kafir that is not 
 justice ; it is mere folly. We may think it important to 
 delay an execution lest there might possibly have been 
 some miscarriage of justice. But that is not what the 
 Kafir is thinking about. If, while our blood was hot, 
 we were even to shoot down the man suspected of rebellion, 
 the Kafir would quite understand our action even though 
 he pretended he did not : it is just what the Kafir himself 
 would do if he were in our place. 
 
 Our final insult consists in the employment of Kafir 
 policemen, who are, as a rule, men of mean extraction. 
 These " dogs of the Government," as they are called by the 
 Kafirs, are universally hated ; they are nearly always 
 tyrannical, and not infrequently grossly immoral, abusing 
 the moral support they get from the white man to ride a 
 high horse when they enter a native kraal. When a Kafir 
 is given unlimited power to lord it over men who would 
 look down upon him in the ordinary tribal life, he becomes 
 ten times more cruel and callous than the very worst white 
 man. The supervision of these native policemen by white 
 men is necessarily inadequate. It is less so in the towns, 
 no doubt ; though the place where the white supervision 
 
92 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 is most wanted is the districts far away from civilisation. 
 But that is just where the native policeman, on account of 
 the expense, cannot be adequately supervised. Moreover, 
 it would be useless and superfluous to have native police 
 at all if they were invariably accompanied by white men. 
 We are periodically informed on official authority that the 
 native police do not abuse their power. It rarely occurs 
 to us to note that the white Government official who makes 
 such a statement naturally never sees the evil complained 
 of, and is the worst possible judge of the subject, for the 
 native policeman is on his good behaviour when the white 
 official is at hand. I have frequently seen these native 
 policemen entering kraals far away from civilisation ; 
 I say nothing about the way the women fly in terror to 
 the bush ; but the overbearing manner put on by these 
 men when swaggering about a kraal is peculiarly galling 
 to a self-respecting Kafir. It is bad enough to be roughly 
 handled by men of an alien race, but to be so treated by 
 inferior members of their own race is regarded by the 
 Kafirs as atrocious. 
 
 When this subject of the differences in the sense of justice 
 is considered in all its bearings, we cease to wonder that 
 the Kafir dislikes our impartial British justice. It is the 
 irony of fate that the very love of justice — that quality 
 on which every Briton prides himself, and which is the 
 one thing he thinks is alone necessary for the successful 
 management of backward races — should be the very 
 thing of all others to aggravate and comphcate the native 
 problem. 
 
 " The philosophic administrator of a native district," 
 says Mr. Scully, a Cape magistrate well known for his 
 
KAFIR CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE 93 
 
 patient study of Kafir thought, " may draw comfort from 
 the reflection that in the more difficult future other hands 
 than his will hold the plough. Problems ahead make one 
 almost afraid to think. When one considers the tremen- 
 dous increase of population, and remembers there is no 
 room for expansion in any direction, the prospect looks 
 dark indeed. What will become of these inarticulate 
 myriads whose standards of righteousness we are so rapidly 
 destroying, and to whom our standard of righteousness is 
 so unintelligible ? " 
 
 Unable ourselves to recognise any good in customs and 
 modes of thought which were not familiar to us, we expected 
 the Kafirs instantly to divine the value and beauty of our 
 customs and modes of thought with which they were not 
 familiar. We expected the savage to be broader-minded than 
 ourselves. The old standards of righteousness familiar, 
 and in many directions extremely effective, in Kafir society 
 scandalised our moral sense — partly on account of our 
 taking but little pains to understand the Kafir point of 
 view, and partly because we are so slow to see anything 
 good in customs that are unfamiliar to us. These standards 
 of righteousness, such as they were, were rooted in the 
 Clan-System. With the best intentions we set to work to 
 destroy this system, and we have as yet supplied no ade- 
 quate substitutes that a primitive people can understand. 
 Our moral sense or our soft sentiment, it matters not which, 
 made it impossible for us to place severe and effective 
 restraints in the place of those we removed : as a con- 
 sequence we have bred lawlessness and crime, and have 
 undermined the morality of the people. It is time we 
 brought to bear on this difficult problem less sentiment 
 
94 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 and more intelligence, lest our moral impulses bring disaster 
 on South Africa. 
 
 It should be plain, at this stage of our study, that the 
 mode of organisation of society produces far-reaching 
 effects in the fundamental conceptions of people and races. 
 Laws and privileges that are excellently well adapted to a 
 nation of individualists are inadequate or pernicious in a 
 socialistic community. A race must grow its own laws, 
 just as an animal must grow its skeleton, so as to meet its 
 own special requirements. All organisms are such delicate 
 things that if we upset the balance in one direction we 
 produce many unlooked-for consequences in other direc- 
 tions. With this idea in our minds, let us proceed to 
 examine the question as to whether political ideals that 
 are suited to individualistic Europe are helpful or baneful 
 to the socialistic Kafirs. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 
 
 There are but two possible types of theory with regard 
 to the political status of the Kafir, though each of these is 
 divided into endless sub-groups. On the one hand, it is pro- 
 posed that we should fuse the Kafirs into our democratic, 
 individualistic, political life, giving them a voice in South 
 African affairs ; on the other hand, it is suggested that 
 we should keep the Europeans and Kafirs politically 
 separate, ruling the natives in a parental fashion and 
 leaving them more or less to cherish socialistic ideals. At 
 present we are trying to combine both methods — with 
 unfortunate results. Politicians find the problem a most 
 difficult one to argue upon, largely owing to their very slight 
 acquaintance with the Kafir of the kraal, who, in spite of 
 Native Commissions, remains much of an unknown quantity : 
 it is not surprising, therefore, to find political publicists 
 taking refuge in the vaguest of terms. But surely we must 
 be getting a little tired of being told that our methods must 
 be founded on " justice and humanity," as Sir R. Solomon 
 sagely tells us, or that " the natives must not be kept in a 
 state of virtual slavery," as Dr. Jameson, catching the 
 popular cry of the hour and wishing to make party capital 
 at the expense of Natal and the Transvaal, adroitly says ;, 
 or that we should adopt " a humane and just native policy, 
 removed alike from the impracticabilities of uninformed 
 
96 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 sentiment and from the spirit of uneducative repression," 
 as we were grandiloquently told in the colonial address 
 presented to Lord Milner ; or, again, that it is to be hoped 
 that the new Transvaal Government will show a proper 
 recognition of the principle, " equal rights for all civilised 
 men," as the Under-Secretary of the Colonies, quoting 
 Cecil Rhodes, said in answer to a very awkward question 
 asked in the House of Commons. We are all of us agreed 
 as to the excellence of all these platitudes, for who imagines 
 the policy he favours to be unjust, deficient in humanity, 
 tainted with slavery, impracticable, uninformed, senti- 
 mental, uneducative, repressive or neglectful of every 
 human " right " ? We differ as to the blessedness of such 
 abstract and vague catchwords no more than we do as to 
 the truths of the multiplication table ; but we need some 
 one to explain clearly to us precisely what, in the case of the 
 Kafirs, is just, unrepressive, practicable, humane, educative 
 and civilised ; for it is on these points that we all differ. 
 Take, for example, the expression, " equal rights for all 
 civilised men " : the phrase seems irreproachable, and yet 
 no less than five out of the six words, when used in connec- 
 tion with the Native Problem, are vague and inexact in 
 their connotation, as the following brief examination will 
 show.* 
 
 Equal. — Apart from the fact that no system of franchise 
 has yet been devised that, even in theory, gives one vote 
 
 * This vagueness of expression is accountable for more trouble than 
 is generally imagined. Leaving South Africa, let us take an example 
 from India, where racial problems are perhaps more intricate than they 
 are in South Africa. Holland, in his " Jurisprudence," says : " The 
 commissioners for preparing a body of substantive law for India recom- 
 mended that the judges should decide such cases ' in the manner they 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 97 
 
 one value, black and white will never agree in such a simple 
 thing as taxation. But equality in taxation is one of the 
 most essential aspects of equality in political rights. The 
 white men say that indirect taxation is not " equal " 
 because black men do not thus pay a fair proportion of 
 the national expenses : the natives say that all systems of 
 hut tax are unequal because white men do not pay their 
 share ; when the Kafir has to pay ten hut taxes, simply 
 because he has ten wives, he complains of the inequality, 
 and feels that he should be rewarded and not penalised for 
 doing his duty and strengthening the State — or should at 
 least be given ten votes : when a poll-tax is applied without 
 respect to colour, the educated natives are up in arms at 
 once, and say the tax is unequal because white men earn 
 five times the wages that Kafirs receive. Whatever aspect 
 of political life we touch, similar invincible differences of 
 opinion as to equality of rights are found. 
 
 Rights. — But what are to be regarded as " rights " ? 
 The white man maintains that he has a right to the land 
 he buys and improves, but the Kafir regards such ownership 
 as usurpation, for he thinks the land belongs to the natives 
 on account of priority of possession. The white man re- 
 torts that on that theory the Kafirs should be dispossessed 
 and the land given to the Bushmen, for they were in the 
 country before them. The white man also says that the 
 Kafirs have no right to carry arms or to buy liquor, but the 
 
 deem most convenient with the principles of justice, equity, and good 
 conscience.' " These words are considerably more definite than the 
 words " Equal rights for all civilised men," and yet, in a foot-note, 
 Holland says: "Sir Fitzjames Stephen seems to have maintained that 
 such attractive phrases mean 'little more than an imperfect under- 
 standing of imperfect collections of not very recent editions of English 
 text-books ' " (p. 37). 
 
 G 
 
98 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 educated natives agitate for both these " rights." Again, 
 Europeans and Kafirs differ radically as to the relative 
 rights of the individual and of the corporate community 
 or clan. It is quite impossible to define " rights " in a 
 way that will please all parties concerned. 
 
 All. — And how shall we determine the meaning of this 
 simple word ? Shall it include Randlords who spend three 
 months, six months, a year, three years, out of the country ? 
 Shall it include Kafirs who do the same ? Shall it cover 
 natives who migrate from the kraal to the Rand, or from 
 one colony to another? Shall it include British soldiers 
 and Government servants (who form a very large class in 
 South Africa) ? After giving expression to the ambiguity 
 I am discussing, the Under-Secretary for the Colonies 
 wrote to Mr. R. Bell, M.P. {see the Times, January 18, 
 1907), justifying a circular " to restrain the servants of the 
 Central South African Railways from taking an active part 
 in political agitation arising out of the approaching elec- 
 tions." He remarked : " Wherever State servants take an 
 active part in the warfare of political parties there is always 
 the danger that triumphant political parties " — was he 
 here thinking of the agitation to increase the number of 
 Liberal Justices of the Peace in England ? — " will try to 
 job their own supporters into positions of profit and trust 
 and to exclude their opponents. Such a system has been 
 found everywhere to be fatal to good Government, and we 
 should certainly not be justified in doing anything to intro- 
 duce it into those new colonies for whose fair start we are 
 responsible." So it was decided that these men should be 
 allowed to join any political association, and even to sign 
 requisitions to candidates : but " prominent political 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 99 
 
 activities " were denied them. It is difficult to decide 
 whether this arrangement throws light on the meaning of 
 the word " equal," or " rights," or " all," or " civilised," 
 or " men." The chief fact of importance seems to be that 
 Mr. Winston, wishing to favour the Dutch at the expense of 
 the British, would adopt one definition of — shall we sa • ? — 
 the word " all," and later on Mr. Churchill would use the 
 word in a different sense when the exigencies of Party 
 required a catchword in the House of Commons. The word 
 is thus seen to be a most inexact and accommodating one ; 
 an election might be won on the adroit usage of the word. 
 
 Civilised. — But who would venture to define the word, 
 seeing we have to deal with a very slow progression that 
 vignettes off from absolute savagery on the one hand up to, 
 let us say, Government Ministers on the other? Who 
 could possibly draw a line to please all parties ? The word 
 is too inexact and artificial to be of any service when used 
 in the above connection. 
 
 Men. — Finally, what constitutes a man ? Shall we say 
 a male human being above the age of twenty-one ? There 
 are well-known racial differences as to the age at which 
 people reach manhood, and the Malays, Indians, Chinese 
 and Kafirs would all have to be consulted in this matter. 
 The Kafirs always contend that a male reaches manhood 
 at the circumcision rite, or at the initiation into the clan, 
 which usually takes place between the ages of sixteen and 
 eighteen. It would be a great insult to refuse to such a 
 lad the name of " man," for he is very proud, not only of 
 the adult clan-privileges he receives at such a time, but 
 also of the much-coveted name of man, which he may 
 then use for the first time ; and, indeed, in many ways a 
 
100 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 Kafir lad of eighteen is as mucli grown up as a white man 
 of twenty-one. 
 
 I have but pointed out a few of the most obvious and 
 superficial differences of meaning in the above five words ; 
 the moment the politician got to constructive work, he 
 would find many other differences awaiting solution. None 
 of the terms used can for one moment be regarded as the 
 exclusive property of any person or party, though many 
 politicians seem anxious to annex them for their own 
 exclusive use. 
 
 Thus it comes about that we are asked to choose between 
 two diametrically opposed policies, each of which is ex- 
 pressed in irreproachable Pecksniffian language, and each 
 of which threatens us ^vith the most dire alternatives. 
 When asked to state which we like the better, we can 
 only reply with the children that we like both best. Our 
 politicians play with fictions, and because their painted 
 ship is making rapid progress on their painted ocean, they 
 imagine that South African problems are being solved. 
 If it is sound rather than sense, appearance rather than 
 reahty, that we want, then we should be charmed with the 
 terminological ambiguities offered to us. 
 
 Our national progress has been so intimately connected 
 with our political development that we are apt to assume, 
 not only that the former was the result of the latter, but 
 also that no other race can hope to advance unless it follows 
 in the same path. We feel in a dim way that political 
 methods, which more or less satisfy our sense of expediency, 
 must of necessity satisfy a similar feeling in all other races. 
 We forget how slow has been our own political develop- 
 ment, and we ignore the fact that there are not wanting 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 101 
 
 symptoms to indicate that our own custom needs a change. 
 Even our democratic newspapers to-day are discussing 
 the causes of the smallness of the number of men who 
 exercise their right of voting ; and in the most democratic 
 of our colonies, so difficult is it to get people to take an in- 
 terest in politics that it is even proposed— not in the comic 
 papers, as one might have expected— to penalise people 
 who do not use their vote by refusing them the suffrage. 
 
 Every nation that is substantially contented with its 
 form of government virtually enjoys self-government : 
 and conversely, a race that has an alien form of government 
 forced on it, even though that form of government be 
 accompanied with universal suffrage, is not free. It has 
 been well said that " every nation is free whose institutions 
 are adequate to its needs." A people that is content to 
 sit down quietly under a form of government which we 
 regard as a tyranny has clearly not yet arrived at that 
 stage of development at which it can make good use of 
 democratic rule. 
 
 We know that there is " Nationality in Drinks " : for 
 there is Claret, there is Tokay, and there is British Beer : 
 we scarcely need a Browning Society to explain to us the 
 meaning of the particular poem to which I refer. But 
 apparently we do need an Ethnological Society to prove 
 to us that if there be nationality in drinks much more must 
 there be nationality in methods of government. Ethnology 
 is bound ultimately to destroy our insular idea that there 
 is in the supernal heights of the British heavens a platonic 
 pattern of perfect government suited to all races of mankind. 
 
 There would seem to be two axioms with regard to the 
 political development of the Kafii'S. The fii-st is that. 
 
102 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 while we should give them every privilege they can use 
 wisely for their own good and for the good of the country, 
 we should force on them no privilege that will lead to more 
 harm than good ; the second is that the people should not 
 be given what Mr. Bryce calls the " doubtful boon " of 
 the franchise before they feel the need of it. In deciding 
 a question of this nature the argument from analogy is 
 apt to lead us astray, and to confuse the issues. It does 
 not follow because some backward race, whose condition 
 and environment in no sense resemble those of the South 
 African natives, has made good use of the franchise, 
 that the system would suit the Kafirs. Nothing there- 
 fore is proved in favour of granting the franchise when 
 it is argued that the system has worked well amongst 
 negroes of a different type in a different land. Analogy, 
 however, may prove helpful in a negative way, for if 
 it can be shown that the granting of the franchise has 
 proved a failure amongst negroes more advanced than 
 the Kafirs, then at least we have cause for walking warily. 
 The case of the Kafirs can be argued on its own merits, 
 and I now proceed to give some reasons why I think the 
 franchise should not be granted to the natives. 
 
 (1) The Kafirs will never fuse with us politically, and 
 any attempt to bring them into our pohtical system will 
 lead to far more loss than gain both to them and to us. I 
 have pointed out above how loose is the language employed 
 when politicians discuss the Native Problem. Now looseness 
 of expression is not only frequently the result, it is also 
 the cause, of looseness of thought. So long ago as 1842, 
 we find Lord Stanley instructing Sir George Napier, when 
 bargaining with the emigrant Boers of Natal, to insist on 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 103 
 
 a clause to the effect that " there should not be, in the eye 
 of the law, any distinction or any disqualification whatever 
 founded on mere difference of colour, origin, language, or 
 creed ; but that the protection of the law, in letter and in 
 substance, should be extended impartially to all alike." * 
 Quite recently an educated native in Natal, the Rev. J. L. 
 Dube, has taken up liis parable, and in an inflammatory 
 letter has asked : " Why should the colour of a man make 
 a difference as to his obtaining his rights f any more than 
 the colour of his hair or his eyes ? " What are we to say 
 to this question that is often echoed in England ? There 
 are, amongst others, two main answers ; and the first is 
 that we do not propose to withhold the franchise from any 
 one because of his " mere colour," but because, when a 
 Kafir is brought into contact with white men on equal 
 terms, any form of competition leads to the hopeless defeat 
 of the black man, who invariably loses more than he gains 
 by his " privilege " ; and the second reason is that we 
 wish to give the educated Kafir (who is the only person 
 who wants the franchise) something that is very much 
 better for his race than the thing he clamours for. 
 
 With regard to Dube's question, the colour of the eyes 
 and of the hair is accompanied with but a very trifling 
 
 * Theal's " History of South Africa," vol. 1834-1854, p. 353. 
 
 "i" It is just this question of " rights " that has to be settled. It is a 
 cavalier procedure for one of the disputants to assume the necessary 
 truth of his view of the problem under discussion. The inquiry is, 
 WTiat are the " rights " of Kafirs in contact with a civilised race that is 
 immeasurably superior in knowledge ? That question cannot be solved 
 by insisting on the assumptions of one of the disputants. Let us suppose 
 but for a moment that the existence of these " rights " depends on the 
 performance of certain duties that all civiUsed nations recognise — and 
 where do Kafir " rights " come in then ? 
 
104 KAFIR SOCIALISM • 
 
 difference in the underlying nature : * but the difference 
 in the colour of the skin is correlated with far vaster 
 temperamental difEerences. That Dube does not see 
 through his verbal fallacy is proved by his further state- 
 ment : " Let us compare our status with other subjects 
 of the EngHsh. How is it in New Zealand ? In that 
 land there are of the aborigines about 50,000 people called 
 Maoris. They are as black as we are. White men only 
 came there about twenty years before they came to us ; 
 but for more than twenty years those people have had 
 representatives in the government — four of their own men 
 chosen by themselves to stand for them in Parliament." 
 Because Maoris are black {sic), therefore they are on all 
 fours with Kafirs ! But what about the relative mental 
 capacity and temperamental differences ? " Colour " is 
 not even skin-deep, as any one who examines a micro- 
 scopical section of a Kafir's skin will see ; the coloration 
 is confined to the single layer of the superficial cells of the 
 thick skin. It is not the colour of the skin that makes the 
 Kafir ; and the difficulty does not lie in the superficial, 
 but in the deep-seated differences, physiological, psychical 
 and temperamental, that for some reason or other are in- 
 tegrally correlated with the colour of the skin. The ques- 
 tion as to why we should make " colour " the occasion of 
 discrimination seems to be so simple and answer-compel- 
 ling that people get flurried and forget that the question 
 derives what little plausibility it possesses from looseness 
 of expression and from the superficiality of popular thought 
 
 ' * I speak comparatively. It seems to have been proved that the 
 blonde type of European with blue eyes is considerably less fertile in 
 town life than the dark type with brown eyes. 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 105 
 
 on racial problems. It is forgotten that the real question 
 is concerned with almost everything but colour ; con- 
 sequently few people seem to detect the fallacy that lurks 
 in the misuse of a word that has two connotations, one 
 direct and the other metaphorical ; for the word " colour " 
 may refer either to the tint of the skin or else to constitu- 
 tional differences of character, outlook on life, and racial 
 characteristics. Just as the expressions Eastern and 
 Western, when applied to an individual, refer, not to his 
 actual place of abode at the moment, but to his heredity 
 and temperament, so the word " colour " may refer to a 
 man's nature rather than to the colour ot his skin. Cole- 
 ridge has said : " I for one do not call the sod under my 
 feet my country ; but language, religion, laws, government, 
 blood ; identity in these makes men of one country." He 
 might also have said that identity in these things makes 
 men of one " colour." 
 
 It is a " mere " accident that the sense of sight rather 
 than that of, let us say, smell, should be the first to acquaint 
 us with the profound hidden differences I have spoken of ; 
 otherwise we should be speaking popularly of questions of 
 odour rather than of colour. A sailor at a fashionable 
 sea-side resort recently complained of the inadequacy of 
 an excellent photograph of the local harbour, and justified 
 his criticism by the remark that the photograph entirely 
 failed to convey any impression of the characteristic and 
 evil smell. People in England, who get most of their 
 knowledge of the Kafir from picture-books or the illustrated 
 papers, are apt to think unduly of the Kafirs in terms of 
 colour, and wonder why there should be such a social and 
 political cleavage on account of it. Were the photographs 
 
106 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 but duly scented, they would learn a very valuable lesson. 
 Not only do the white men object to the smell of the 
 natives ; the Kafirs also complain of the sickly and un- 
 pleasant odour of the white man. Sir Ian Hamilton has 
 told us that the Japanese say the very same thing about 
 an Englishman fresh from his morning tub. Now a man 
 might live very comfortably with a woman whose skin was 
 any colour of the rainbow, so long as she was a companion- 
 able sort of person ; but he would find it difficult to live 
 happily in the constant society of a person whose odour 
 was offensive. Speaking for myself, I think the colour of 
 a Kafir's skin, especially when he has well greased himself, 
 is extremely fine : in almost every way it is superior to 
 the sickly colour of the average European. One has only 
 to see a white man bathing alongside of Kafirs to be 
 convinced that he is but a bleached specimen of humanity. 
 Mr. Bryce has said : " Nothing really arrests intermarriage 
 except physical repulsion, and physical repulsion exists 
 only where there is a marked difference in physical aspect, 
 and especially in colour." If the word colour be expanded 
 so as to cover odour, the statement may be accepted. One 
 cannot argue with a dislike that is so profound and instinc- 
 tive. " It needs something more than the virtue of a 
 philosopher — it needs the tenderness of the saint — to 
 preserve the same courtesy toward the members of a 
 backward race as is naturally extended to equals." * The 
 social fusion of the races of South Africa is impossible. 
 Where the difficulty of social intercourse is felt on 
 one side only, there may be some chance of an ultimate 
 blending of the races, but when the barrier is acutely felt 
 * Bryce, " Romanes Lecture," p. 40. 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 107 
 
 by both parties, as it is in South Africa, a rapprochement 
 is impossible. 
 
 Religion also seems powerless to uproot these deep-seated 
 prejudices. The Dutch, who are by far the most religious 
 people in South Africa, will not allow coloured persons into 
 their churches. The English churches are not so exclusive 
 in this respect, — anyhow in theory ; yet they cannot be said 
 to have begun to break down the barrier. If religion is 
 powerless to unite two peoples, it is not likely that politics 
 will prove effective. When one race says to another : " I will 
 buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, 
 and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with 
 you, nor play with you," there is no chance of their fusing 
 in political life. The races will remain distinct, and will 
 cherish antagonistic ideals. It is therefore better for the 
 Kafirs that they should be brought into contact with white 
 men as little as possible, and vice versa ; for the entire 
 separation of the races, with mutual contentment, is better 
 than intermingling with constant exhibition of ill-will. 
 Tolerance is easier to cultivate when occasions for the 
 clashings of interests are reduced to a minimum. 
 
 The question we are discussing is far more important 
 than many people imagine. The idea that discrimina- 
 tion in legislation is inherently unjust has ever appealed 
 to theorists, who object to it, not because it does not tend 
 to the greatest happiness of the people ruled, but because 
 it offends their sentiment with regard to ihe abstract 
 equality of all human beings. They will continue to ask, 
 no matter how much the fallacy is exposed, why a mere 
 difference of colour should make it necessary to treat people 
 differently. Their argument seems to be that because all 
 
108 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 human beings are men, therefore all human beings are 
 equal and should be treated as equals. Without going 
 into the logic of such an argument, it is not difficult to see 
 that the facts on which it is based are at fault. The truth 
 is — and all the facts at the base of the doctrine of evolution 
 can be called in as witness — that all men are not equal. 
 It is a suggestive fact that the ignorant Boer farmers of 
 Natal were able to see through the fallacy that deceived 
 Lord Stanley and Sir George Napier. They pointed out, in 
 reply to the British demands which have been referred to 
 above, that even if nature had not made a great consti- 
 tutional difference between white men and black, the 
 training of the two races during countless generations 
 had been so unlike that it was impossible they should 
 live harmoniously together under exactly the same laws. 
 They remarked that one might as well try to put a horse 
 and an ox in the same yoke. They looked beneath the 
 skin and thus saw that what actually was in question was, 
 not the colour of the skin, but the entire difference of 
 conception as to what the two races considered just and 
 desirable. To be fair to one was to be unfair to the other 
 and vice versa. Taught by the hard logic of facts, we have 
 had to abandon our doctrinaire attitude, and have had to 
 govern the natives under a discriminating native code. This 
 necessity should have been obvious to the most sujoerficial 
 observer. Take, for example, such a subject as polygamy: 
 if we have one law for black and white, then we must either 
 commit folly in sanctioning polygamy among white men, 
 or else we must most unjustly drive all the native races 
 of South Africa into violent opposition. There are 
 many similar points that might be pointed out, but it is 
 striking that such an obvious thing as this did not occur 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 100 
 
 to our statesmen in England. Now the moment we allow 
 any discrimination whatever, no matter on what subject, 
 we give away the entire case for " no discrimination " ; 
 for the whole theory of the policy is based on the supposed 
 equality of all men. As the Kafirs say, it is the chip that 
 killed the elephant. Admit that the races differ as to 
 equality in but one direction, and the whole theory goes 
 by the board. If the theory is to be accepted, then we 
 can allow no discriminating privileges with regard to, let 
 us say, land ; no discrimination as to civic obligations ; 
 no discrimination as to taxation ; and no discrimination 
 as to liquor laws, and so forth. But under such conditions 
 it would obviously be impossible to rule a backward race 
 that is in contact with a forward one. So long as nature 
 makes profound discrimination in the character of races 
 so long must the statesman do the same in politics. 
 
 We had better frankly admit that when two races differ 
 so much that they require discriminating legislation (and 
 moreover cannot fuse either in social or religious life), it 
 is better to keep them politically distinct. The love of 
 maintaining an abstract unity on paper must not be allowed 
 to hide from us the immense temperamental differences — 
 differences, amongst other things, as to individualism and 
 collectivism — that lie behind colour. What we need to 
 do is to consider the government of the whites on its own 
 merits, and that of the Kafirs also on its own merits : if 
 we separate entirely these two functions, we give each race 
 a chance to work out its own ideal, and we reduce to a 
 minimum the conflict a ising from different racial aspira- 
 tions. Where these functions are separated, as, for example, 
 in the Crown Colony of Basutoland, we find that a modus 
 Vivendi has become established, and we note that the 
 
110 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 system works well, though of course there is room for 
 improvement even in that district. 
 
 (2) The franchise is not in keeping with the genius of 
 the people, and would not be a form of true self-govern- 
 ment. The Kafirs have given expression of their own 
 ideas on self-government in the formation of the Clan- 
 System, which has given the people great satisfaction. The 
 people have been amazingly patient and content under 
 the rule of their chiefs, even when these men abused their 
 power : how much more content would they be under 
 the rule of their chiefs if we simply guaranteed that such 
 abuses should never again occur ? To say the least, it 
 is doubtful whether the natives will ever be as happy under 
 the franchise as they have been under their chiefs. And 
 the vast bulk of the people would rather bear the ills they 
 have than fly to others that they know not of. 
 
 There are no doubt many things about which the Kafirs 
 are uneasy. They are conscious of the workings of race- 
 hatred ; they dislike our system of taxation ; they dread 
 our administration of justice ; they are extremely suspicious 
 of our Missions and of our schools ; they dislike being 
 hustled on along the path of civilisation ; they abhor change 
 of all sorts : it is not any one of these things, however, 
 that is really at the bottom of their unrest, though once 
 their minds are disturbed from a state of stable equilibrium 
 they gather these, and a dozen similar suspicions, in their 
 progress towards revolt. The thing that is the fons et 
 origo mali is the constant dread that we are going to " eat " 
 up their land. If a Kafir could give expression to his 
 fears he would say, the land's the thing ; that is the touch- 
 stone that shows the real attitude of the white man towards 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 111 
 
 the black. If all the States of South Africa could but 
 put the native mind at rest on this point, the trouble 
 that is fermenting everywhere would soon disappear : 
 but somehow or other our assurances do not assure the 
 Kafirs. 
 
 (3) The natives as a whole have not asked for the 
 franchise. To tinker at the constitution is about the last 
 thing a Kafir would think of doing. The native imagines 
 that whatever is, is right : this is his basal thought in 
 politics. With regard to the franchise, we may use the 
 words of the native already quoted : " The black man is not 
 wondering about that." The average Kafir, if left to him- 
 self, would as soon think of asking for a vote for his cows 
 ai for himself. It is only a very small section of educated 
 natives that makes such a noise and pother about the 
 subject ; while most of these agitators have been artificially 
 inoculated from America. The great majority of the 
 natives have never so much as heard that there is such a 
 thing as the franchise, nor would they be able readily to 
 understand what it is even if it were explained to them. 
 
 There are not many things about the Kafir on which all 
 white men who have had much dealings with them are 
 agreed : but there is one thing, and it is that it is never 
 wise to give a native a thing he has not asked for, because 
 such an action immediately leads to a demand for some- 
 thing else. Newcomers, who scorn to learn from the 
 experience of every white man who made the mistake 
 before them, are always falling into this trap. It is com- 
 monly said in South Africa that the Kafir has no sense 
 of gratitude, but is a confirmed and hopeless beggar ; 
 whereas the very demand for something more is the exhibi- 
 
112 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 tion of the man's gratitude. The Kafir mode of giving 
 thanks consists in saying: "Don't be tired of giving to- 
 morrow." This remark is meant to imply that the recipient 
 beheves the donor is so very liberal that he can never be 
 tired of giving. That is not a British way of returning 
 thanks, and so the average colonist is unable to believe 
 that the Kafir is thankful when he uses such language. 
 In keepinT; with this idea of thanking a man by begging 
 and by showing belief in his liberality, a native always 
 holds out two hands to receive the smallest gift. The 
 Briton has such a love of independence that he cannot 
 understand any one acting in this way. But the Kafir is 
 a beggar partly because he is grateful. So it happens that 
 when a man gives a raw Kafir a sixpence, the fellow holds 
 out both his hands with which to take it, and promptly 
 asks for a shilling, though he has not the least desire to 
 have the money. He would entirely understand the 
 Arab Sheik who gave money to a necessitous friend with 
 the words, " Ennoble me by accepting these two piastres." 
 As a result of this racial mode of giving thanks, it comes 
 about that no sooner does the most ephemeral whim cross the 
 mind of a native than he asks for the boon. A native once 
 noticed something desirable about my boots and gaiters, and 
 unblushingly asked me to take them off and give them to 
 him. He saw nothing strange in the request. The English- 
 man feels it a sort of degradation to act thus : to beg he 
 is ashamed. In the case of the Kafir such an emotion 
 simply does not exist : to beg well is one of the graces of 
 life, and who is ashamed of his graces ? If the Kafir feels 
 the least desire for the franchise he will ask promptly for 
 two franchises so as to ensure getting one. To press political 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 113 
 
 boons on the natives as though they were shamefacedly 
 disinclined to demean themselves by begging for a gift, 
 is the sheerest folly and shows a radical misunder- 
 standing of native character. The Kafir never suffers 
 in silence for the loss of a thing he passionately desires : 
 his conscious wants are never inarticulate. However, 
 sentimental friends of the Kafirs are never tired of 
 harrowing our feelings with regard to the sufferings of 
 the natives. I quote a typical passage from a recent 
 book written to accuse the Europeans in South Africa 
 of tyrannising over the natives. The indictment runs 
 as follows : 
 
 " You have seen a little child who has cried for some- 
 thing till in sheer weariness and despair he has cried 
 himself to sleep. By-and-by the mother will come and 
 take the child into her arms, and kiss his tear-stained 
 cheek, and when he awakes his tears will change to 
 smiles ; for to the mother-heart the silence that has 
 sobbed out its grief is a more pitiful appeal than any 
 sound — and the silent cry of Africa will be heard at 
 last." 
 
 Where amongst the actual Kafirs do we find tear- 
 stained cheeks ? Where the silence that has sobbed 
 out its grief ? Where the silent crying in sheer weari- 
 ness and despair ? Where the Kafir who cries himself 
 to sleep ? Nay, rather, where do we find the Kafir who 
 does not without the slightest embarrassment ask for all, 
 and far more than all, he wants ? The fact that the 
 natives do not ask for the franchise may be regarded 
 therefore as the surest of all proofs that they do not 
 
 really want it. 
 
 H 
 
114 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 When it is said that the Kafirs have not asked for the 
 franchise, reference is only made to the raw natives. In 
 recent years the civilised Kafirs, who have broken entirely 
 with all clan-relationships, and who have now become a 
 small and exclusive party of their own, have been agitating 
 on the subject of the franchise. If we may judge by the 
 violence and intemperance of their language, this handful 
 of educated Kafirs wants the franchise very badly. It 
 would, however, be folly to listen to the clamour of these 
 men who make extravagant demands, for they do not quite 
 know what they want, and would soon be more discontented 
 than ever if they got what they demanded. Our difficulties 
 would be enormously increased if we were to exploit the 
 interests of a clique to the detriment of the whole com- 
 munity. A nation must rise as a whole, and those who 
 form the vanguard must not lose touch with the main body. 
 That cannot be a racial demand which is unknown even 
 in name to the majority of the people. The question can 
 be reduced to its true proportions by asking whether in 
 England we shovdd alter our entire constitution because 
 half a member kept creating a continual disturbance in the 
 House of Commons. 
 
 (4) The Kafirs are not fitted to profit by the franchise 
 even if it were granted to them, for democracy is a concep- 
 tion alien to their past thought. The natives have a 
 sententious proverb, which says that height is not reached 
 in a hurry. This is their own shrewd remark that is 
 addressed to all young men who are in great haste. I 
 have more hope than many have with regard to the future 
 of the Kafir, and for that reason I feel anxious that the 
 natives should not be led into a cul-de-sac. If they are 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 115 
 
 left to follow their own natural political development, the 
 result arrived at will be more stable and will have a more 
 permanent value than the outcome of any impatient patch- 
 work of our own. It is of the utmost importance that the 
 Kafirs should not get their attention artificially turned to 
 futile topics. There are far more important things than 
 the franchise for the educated natives to think about. 
 At present it is largely the bizarre and the fantastic that 
 appeal to them, and every crack-brained idea that is 
 mooted is apt to occupy their thoughts unduly. They are 
 not yet capable of taking long views on the problems that 
 arise from the contact of the races, and, like children, 
 would gaily sacrifice the future for the present. The 
 natives are quite capable, so long as they are not in contact 
 with Europeans, of managing their own affairs : but they 
 cannot steer their course aright when they are brought 
 into contact or competition with white races. It is agreed 
 on all sides, on the side of the Kafir no less than on that 
 of the European, that a social fusion of the races is im- 
 possible : why then should we seek to bring the Kafirs 
 into the stress and turmoil of our political life ? It is 
 difficult to conceive a more risky thing for the future of 
 South Africa than to throw two races, which are entirely 
 distinct socially, into violent conflict on political matters. 
 Even the educated natives are better ofi attending to the 
 things that concern their own progress than they would 
 be in meddhng with matters that do not concern them 
 by carrying on a race- warfare at the Polls. They have 
 more than sufficient work before them in attending to 
 education, industry, and the evolution of their race. The 
 granting of the fra-'chise would not only distract the 
 
116 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 attention of the natives from urgent to trivial matters, 
 but it would certainly lead to accentuated race-animosity: 
 it would throw the respective interests of the races into 
 conflict, and it would make racial problems perennial. If 
 only this question could be settled once and for all, then 
 the various parties would recognise the fact that it was 
 useless to pit race against race ; they would then bury 
 the subject of their differences and turn their attention 
 to the next thing. If we insist on keeping alive racial 
 conflict by endless conflict at the hustings, we must be 
 prepared for the inevitable consequence ; racial problems 
 will then remain an open sore, for as long as a man looks 
 at a grievance it worries and chafes him. The very machi- 
 nery of political life would stir up race-hatred owing to a 
 great increase of racial contact ; and it would do this at a 
 time when both the parties had their passions inflamed 
 by frothy eloquence. At present the white men are, on 
 the whole, well disposed towards the natives ; but any 
 granting of the franchise would be certain to stir up 
 slumbering fires. There are plenty of white men keen 
 on the welfare of the Kafirs, and who will see that no 
 injustice is done to them. And as for the natives, they 
 are happier, more contented, and generally better off 
 under parental government than they would be when 
 frittering away their time in fighting the white man 
 on the political platform. 
 
 Mr. Bryce has summed up admirably the relative advan- 
 tages and disadvantages of such a situation, thus : 
 
 " If one race enjoys privileges denied to the other, it is 
 likely to abuse its power to the prejudice of the backward 
 people, placing them, it may be, under civil as well as 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 117 
 
 political disabilities, or imposing heavier taxes upon them, 
 or refusing them their fair share of benefits from the public 
 revenue. If, on the other hand, both races are treated 
 alike, granted the same suffrage, made eligible for the 
 same offices, each will be disposed to organise itself separately 
 for political purposes, so that a permanent separation of 
 parties will be created, which, because irrespective of the 
 issues that naturally arise from time to time, may prevent 
 those issues from being dealt with on their merits, and may 
 check the natural ebbs and flows of political life. The 
 nation will, in fact, be rather two nations than one, may 
 waste its force on internal dissensions, may lose its unity of 
 action at moments of public danger. Evils of this sort tend 
 to become more acute the more democratic a government 
 becomes." * 
 
 The Kafirs have been accustomed from time immemorial 
 to fixed and stable rule, and changes of Party would certainly 
 worry them. The one thing necessary for the Kafirs, if 
 they are to rise out of barbarism, is that their minds should 
 be left at peace for many a long year to come. Continuity 
 in government is therefore essential. In this connection 
 reference must be made to the evidence of Dr. Addison given 
 before the Native Commission. He stated most clearly 
 that the natives are mystified by our frequent changes of 
 Ministry, and by our lack of a fixed policy : the result is 
 that the natives say we are always " prodding " them. If 
 it is unfortunate for us to bring the Kafirs partly under our 
 party system, it surely will not mend matters to bring them 
 wholly under it, for then the last vestige of fixed policy will 
 vanish, and the " prodding " would be incessant. The 
 * " Romane3 Lecture," pp. 30, 31, 
 
118 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 raw natives would be bewildered for many a long day to 
 come, for they would be mere pawns in the party game : 
 the educated natives would, for their own purposes, at first 
 exploit the raw Kafir, who is quite as good a fellow, if not 
 better, than his educated brothers ; for these half-educated 
 natives think only of their own personal interests, and 
 would without a pang of regret let the devil take the 
 unlucky black man who was hindmost. But even the 
 educated natives would soon find out that as they had 
 treated the raw Kafir so would the white men treat them ; 
 for anything, apparently, is fair in British political warfare. 
 It is strange that the educated natives are unable to see 
 that they cannot have it both ways. They want all the 
 advantages of political " rights " that are given only to 
 mature adults, and yet, as all who follow the speeches of 
 the educated Kafirs know, they want also to have at the 
 same time all the discriminating privileges that are given 
 only to children or minors. But the moment they get their 
 political " rights " they will lose their children's privileges. 
 Because they are backward and immature, they ask us to 
 protect them from competition with keen and smart white 
 men, and piteously appeal for discriminating legislation 
 on such a subject as the high rates of usury demanded by 
 shady European money-lenders ; they expect us to secure 
 to them enormous tracts of land — and they insist on having 
 the most fertile land — though thousands of white men are 
 anxious that this land should be thrown into the market. 
 At present we decline to listen to the white people, even 
 though we know they would exploit the land to better 
 purpose than the Kafirs do ; and we base our refusal to 
 listen to the white men simply on the fact that we adopt 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 119 
 
 a parental relation to the native, and therefore protect 
 him from the fierce competition of civilisation. The moment 
 we really grant an honest franchise, the Kafirs will find the 
 white man " eating up " the land. In a dozen different ways 
 we protect and shield the natives because of their political 
 immaturity. The educated Kafirs may now clamour for the 
 rights of fully civilised men, but they would be the very 
 first people to cry out when they found that the privileges, 
 granted merely because of their immaturity, were vanishing 
 one by one. The educated natives therefore could not be 
 more short-sighted than to seek to be placed on an absolute 
 equality with white men. They may not now fully realise 
 their immeasurable inferiority to the Europeans ; let them 
 but receive a real franchise and they would find it out with 
 a vengeance. 
 
 They are insistent on the curtailment of the powers of 
 the chiefs, who do not take them at their own valuation. 
 They may chafe at that now, but they would chafe still 
 more if they were brought into inexorable competition 
 with white men, who would value them even less than do 
 their chiefs. 
 
 There may be no objection in the abstract to allowing 
 natives who are really sufficiently educated and civilised 
 to appreciate the bearing of South African politics to 
 exercise a vote ; but when we ask how many natives show 
 even an intellectual appreciation of such problems, we 
 must admit that there are very few who are qualified in 
 this respect, though there are pro^:ably fifty thousand 
 natives who fancy themselves quite competent to exercise 
 the vote wisely. A character-test would be essential, 
 and I, for one, am not surprised that, though Natal 
 
120 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 theoretically grants the franchise to Kafirs of a certain 
 state of civilisation, yet she has added the proviso that 
 the consent of the Governor must be obtained in each 
 individual case before the privilege is granted. 
 
 (5) The native franchise would almost certainly prove 
 either a sham or a calamity to South Africa. To offer the 
 native even the instalment of a limited franchise would 
 make it inevitable that he would ultimately demand the 
 full gift of manhood suffrage ; it is indeed possible that 
 we should receive ever-increasing demands for fuller and 
 yet fuller representations until in every kraal of the country 
 there was raised the cry, Votes for Women ! It is difficult 
 to see how — unless they threw their hearts into the scales — 
 the recent Native Commissioners failed to perceive that 
 the very cautious scheme they proposed could but end 
 in a demand for manhood suffrage, for the small dole of 
 representation that they propose would but serve as hors- 
 d'ceuvres to the appetite. 
 
 It is almost certain that if a real franchise were given to 
 the Kafirs, the white men would find means, as in America, 
 of rendering the gift illusive. Mr. Bryce admits that in 
 America it was impossible to give the negroes effective 
 protection in the exercise of the suffrage. The same is un- 
 doubtedly true of South Africa. There is one thing the 
 white men in South Africa are determined on, and that is 
 that the whites and not the blacks must be what the Kafirs 
 call the " Bull in the Kraal." Even Mr. Bryce, who seems 
 to be in favour of a limited native franchise, says : " It is 
 easy for people in Europe, who have had no experience of 
 the presence among them of a semi-civilised race, destitute 
 of the ideas anl habits which lie at the basis of a free 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 121 
 
 government, to condemn the action of these colonies, 
 in seeking to preserve a decisive electoral majority for 
 the whites. But any one who has studied the question 
 on the spot, especially any one who has seen the evils 
 which in America have followed the granting of the 
 suffrage to persons unfit for it, will form a more charitable 
 judgment." * 
 
 It is not necessary to enter into a lengthy description of 
 the various schemes of native representation that have 
 been suggested. These range from the formation of a 
 Council or Debating Society of Hereditary Chiefs — with 
 no executive power — with which the white Government 
 might consult, up to a representation of black men by their 
 full numerical proportion of Kafirs who should actually sit 
 in Parliament. Every conceivable compromise between 
 these extremes has been suggested, though no one seems 
 to have sought to show that the movement could be stayed 
 anywhere short of the logical conclusion in which there 
 would be at least five black men to every white man in 
 Parliament. Neither representation of black men by 
 white men, nor representation by two or three black 
 men, nor representation by men chosen by the Governor 
 to watch native interests, would have the remotest 
 chance of satisfying any sense of need such schemes 
 might awaken. We do not usually give children just 
 a little taste of a thing we know they will eat to excess. 
 And the worst of experimenting in a subject of this 
 sort is that, should the scheme prove impracticable, 
 the recall of such a privilege would stir up every evil 
 passion. 
 
 * " Impressions of South Africa," p. 452. 
 
122 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 There are those who reply to my line of argument by 
 pointing to the Cape franchise ; they will say that as a 
 matter of fact the evil consequences I have prophesied 
 have not been found to arise. The reply to such a rejoinder 
 is very simple. The rake's progress is notoriously easy 
 and pleasant in its first stages. In Cape Colony only eight 
 thousand natives out of a quarter of a million adult male 
 Kafirs have a vote : and this pitiful handful of men is broken 
 up into a number of ineffective groups owing to our electoral 
 system. The " blanket " vote is just big enough to cause 
 at times serious complication in questions that have nothing 
 whatever to do with the natives, but it is not large enough 
 to gain for the natives a single thing they want. Regarded 
 as a means of making the will of the people effective, it is 
 a delusion ; for if a franchise be a democratic instrument 
 designed for the practical obtaining of what men want, 
 namely, a voice in the management of their own affairs, 
 then the Cape native franchise is mere tinsel and pinchbeck. 
 Indeed, it is something worse than this, for while it is no 
 good to the Kafirs, it keeps up the illusion that the natives 
 are in some sense " represented " and given self-govern- 
 ment. Those who know anything of party devices in 
 politics will readily see that the Cape franchise is of but 
 little good to the Kafirs. If white men are determined 
 that black men shall not capture the political machine, 
 and with it the country, had they better not say so frankly 
 once and for all ? And can any one believe that we mean 
 to let the quintuple majority of the Kafirs ever become 
 politically effective ? 
 
 Let us suppose for a moment that an honest franchise is 
 granted to the natives, and that, in the favourite catch- 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 123 
 
 word of the hoiir, Colour is not made any test of political 
 rights : what would be the result ? The Kafirs would at 
 once set to work in real earnest to wrest the country from 
 the white man. It is often said that the natives would never 
 unite ; but it is one thing to unite on the field of battle, 
 where fierce and clashing clan-instincts would be sure to 
 arise, but it is quite another — and easier thing — to combine 
 at the polls. Furtherm.ore, it must be remembered that 
 the very granting of such a franchise would not only force 
 on the Kafirs the fact of their immense numerical supe- 
 riority over us, but would also teach them the value of 
 combination. Indeed it would do more ; such an action 
 would be the one thing to break down the very last 
 remains of the Clan-System, which alone keeps Kafirs from 
 combining. 
 
 But long before things came to such a pass as this, 
 the country would be wrecked by misrule. " Equality of 
 rights," says Mr. Bryce, speaking of the abstract problem, 
 " might seem to be here (in the sphere of poHtics) also that 
 which is fairest and most likely to make for unity and peace. 
 But the backward race may be really unfit to exercise 
 political power, whether from ignorance, or from an in- 
 difference that would dispose it to sell its votes, or from 
 a propensity to sudden and unreasonable impulses. The 
 famihar illustration of a boy put to drive a locomotive 
 engine might in some communities be no extreme way 
 of describing the risks a democracy runs when a suffrage 
 is granted to a large mass of half-civilised men." * 
 
 (6) The granting of the franchise would immensely 
 complicate colonial politics. Apart from the fact that the 
 
 * " Romanes Lecture," p. 38. 
 
124 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 natives might quite conceivably legislate by sheer force 
 of numbers with regard to polygamy and other moral prob- 
 lems in a way that would stagger the world, they would 
 certainly ask for two things that can never be granted them. 
 I refer to Drink and Arms. In saying this one is in no 
 sense drawing on the imagination ; for the educated natives 
 have already in speech and in print demanded the right to 
 carry guns, and have insisted on the removal of the ex- 
 isting liquor restrictions.* I do not think it is necessary 
 to waste time in arguing that the liquor restrictions cannot 
 be removed on any pretext whatever : if they were with- 
 drawn, the country would be turned into a pandemonium 
 in six months. It may be well, in passing, to point out 
 the bearing of this fact : if a people is fit to receive the 
 franchise it is, ex hypothesi, fit to legislate for itself on a 
 topic like this ; and conversely, if it is fit to legislate for 
 itself then it is impossible for us permanently to maintain 
 a restriction on drink against the wish of such enlightened 
 and responsible people. 
 
 With regard to the demand for the right to carry guns, 
 we must ask for what conceivable object, other than a 
 native rising, could such a request be made ? The educated 
 Kafirs say guns are required for protection and hunting ; 
 but for protection from what ? And for hunting what 
 kind of animal ? Most of the native territories are well- 
 nigh denuded of game and wild animals ; and Natal, from 
 whence the proposal emanates, may be said to be practically 
 free from such things. The only places where guns could 
 be required for shooting game are a few isolated fever 
 
 * I refer to Cube's letter referred to above, in which both these 
 demands were made. 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 125 
 
 districts, where, however, the natives are not asking for this 
 privilege. "With regard to protection, the natives cannot 
 require guns for this purpose, for we do not allow inter- 
 tribal wars, and so there is no one — shall we say, except 
 the white man ? — from whom the natives need to be 
 protected. The barefacedness of the demand at a time 
 when the native franchise is in dispute shows us what we 
 may expect when the Kafir suffrage will be in full swing. 
 If they do these things in a green tree, what will they do 
 in a dry ? 
 
 The native franchise would also have bearings upon 
 Imperial problems. In the Colonial Parliaments, Imperial 
 problems are for ever cropping up. If the natives enjoyed 
 the franchise, they would make their vnW felt in such 
 matters ; and how can people who have lived all their 
 Uves in a tea-cup understand problems of finance, commerce, 
 and world-politics that have their roots across an ocean ? 
 At present the average Kafir thinks that the white man 
 gets his goods ready-made out of the sea ; yet when granted 
 the suffrage he will give his vote, forsooth, on questions 
 that affect the commerce and politics of nations and conti- 
 nents. If England were embroiled in war, it would be a 
 pretty pass it the action of a native editor of a certain 
 Kafir paper during the Boer War were to be repeated : 
 and repeated it most assuredly would be. That would 
 be bad enough, but it would be as nothing to the asking 
 of awkward questions, and still more awkward voting, 
 by native representatives in the Colonial Parhament. We 
 have sufficient burden of Empire already without going 
 out of our way to add to it. The natives would at one 
 moment vote with sententious wisdom, and would the next, 
 
126 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 owing to their natural instability of nature and limited 
 knowledge, vote with the most egregious folly : nor could 
 we hope to educate the Kafir to take a place in our political 
 life without passing him through a preliminary stage which 
 would be accompanied with the gravest risk. At the 
 present moment, the few Cape Kafirs who have a vote are 
 on their good behaviour, and have as yet not come to full 
 self -consciousness. Consequently they do not quite know 
 what they want. They are few in number, and are but 
 at the top of the hill ; let them gain impetus through 
 an extension of the franchise, and there is no telling 
 what they may do when obsessed by some silly whim. 
 They are such an uncertain quantity that it would be 
 indeed risky to give them a voice in Imperial or Colonial 
 matters. 
 
 (7) The experiment of granting the franchise to a back- 
 ward race, that is in close contact with a fonvard one, has 
 been tried on a large scale in America, and it has proved 
 a colossal failure. As has been pointed out above, this 
 analogy might not have much weight unless there were a 
 number of other reasons pointing in the same direction. 
 An argument drawn from the West Indies or from Jamaica, 
 where the interests concerned are not so great or so clashing, 
 and where the conditions of environment are totally dis- 
 ^milar, has really no force. But the analogy of America, 
 where the negroes are far more civilised and more intellectu- 
 ally developed than the Kafirs, is at least suggestive. The 
 humanitarian sentiment of the North imposed its infalli- 
 bility on the practical instincts of the South, and the 
 infallibility of sentiment has gone the way of all its kind. 
 The " intuition " which the North felt sure would lead 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 127 
 
 to race-friendship has led to the race-hatred it sought to 
 avoid. It were better never to grant a franchise than, 
 having granted it, to be forced to prevent the recipients 
 avaiUng themselves of the " doubtful boon." If the 
 comparatively advanced American negroes could not be 
 trusted to use the gift, how much less can we expect the 
 backward Kafirs to use it wisely ? In America the relative 
 proportion of blacks to whites is roughly one to ten : in 
 South Africa it is as ten to one.* To prevent the danger 
 of overcolouring the matter, I quote from Mr. Bryce, who, 
 owing to his knowledge of American politics and to his 
 sympathy to backward races, is above suspicion of taking 
 a gloomy view of the matter. 
 
 Speaking of the granting of the franchise to the American 
 negroes, Mr. Bryce says : " The moral to be drawn from 
 the case of the Southern States seems to be that you must 
 not, however excellent your intentions, and however 
 admirable your sentiments, legislate in the teeth of facts. 
 The great bulk of the negroes were not fit for the suffrage ; 
 nor under the American Federal system was it possible 
 (without incurring other grave evils) to give them effective 
 protection in the exercise of the suffrage. It would, there- 
 fore, have been better to postpone the bestowal of this 
 dangerous boon. True it is that rocks and shoals were 
 set thick round every course ; true that it is easier to 
 perceive the evils of a course actually taken than to realise 
 other evils that might have followed some other course. 
 Nevertheless, the general opinion of dispassionate men 
 
 * In this latter figure the natives in German and Portuguese territory 
 south of the Zambesi are included. The general granting of a native 
 franchise in British territory would have far-reaching consequences 
 in German and Portuguese territory. 
 
128 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 has come to deem the action taken in 1879 a.d. a 
 mistake."* 
 
 In the face of the admissions made by Mr. Bryce the 
 philosopher, when speaking on abstract racial problems, 
 it is somewhat surprising to read the conclusions of Mr. 
 Bryce the politician, with regard to the problem of the 
 native franchise in South Africa. " The tremendous 
 problems," says Mr. Bryce, " presented by the Southern 
 States of America, and the likelihood that similar problems 
 will have to be solved elsewhere, as for instance, in South 
 Africa and the Philippine Isles, bid us ask. What should 
 be the duty and the poHcy of a dominant race where it 
 cannot fuse with a backward race ? Duty and policy are 
 one, for it is equally to the interest of both races that their 
 relations should be friendly. 
 
 " The answer seems to be that, as regards political rights, 
 race and blood should not be made the ground of discrimina- 
 tion. Where the bulk of the coloured race are obviously 
 unfit for political power, a qualification based on property 
 and education might be established which should permit 
 the upper section of that race to enjoy the suffrage. Such 
 a qualification would, doubtless, exclude some of the poorest 
 and most ignorant whites, and might on that ground be 
 resisted. But it is better to face this difficulty than to 
 wound and alienate the whole of the coloured race by 
 placing them without the pale of civic functions and 
 duties." t 
 
 Mr. Bryce evidently sees grave difficulties in connection 
 with his own conclusion, which does not seem to rise 
 
 * " Romanes Let^ture," pp. 39, 40. 
 t Ibid. pp. 42, 43. 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 129 
 
 logically out of the facts and metaphors that form his data. 
 In the first place there is no question about " wounding 
 and alienating the whole of the coloured race " in South 
 Africa, because the majority of those people have not the 
 least glimmering idea about our " civic functions and 
 duties." It would therefore be gratuitous folly, for the 
 sake of mere theory, to exclude a large mass of " the poorest 
 and most ignorant whites " from political activity, and so 
 to ensure a certain difficulty, for, at best, a doubtful gain. 
 Such a test as Mr. Bryce proposes, if made at all stringent 
 and effective, would exclude about half the Boer population, 
 a state of affairs that Mr. Bryce's party would never listen 
 to. The plan would lead to endless heart-burnings amongst 
 the white men who were denied a privilege granted to some 
 of the natives. Such men would never consent to remain 
 voiceless and voteless when some Kafirs, centuries behind 
 them in imaginative grasp of world-problems, were allowed 
 to propose, or vote on, a policy that might be destructive 
 of civilisation. But apart from such considerations, even 
 those who think Mr. Bryce wise in placing school-boys — for 
 that is what educated Kafirs are at the best — on the engine 
 of South African progress, must admit that the policy is 
 what medical men call an heroic remedy. Moreover, such 
 a proposal cannot be regarded for one moment, even in 
 theory, as a final solution of the problem; for by intro- 
 ducing arbitrary tests and standards it is lacking in all 
 the essential elements of permanence, and is, at the best, 
 heroic though it be, a mere palliative designed to give 
 relief to one symptom of the trouble. It must fail to 
 solve the problem, if for no other reason, because the 
 politically excited Kafirs would not rest content with 
 
 I 
 
130 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 the sweet reasonableness expected by the philosophical 
 Englishman. We should remember the Kafir proverb — 
 it is easier to turn back the enemy from the hill than 
 to drive him out of the village. 
 
 What then is the conclusion of the matter, and what 
 should we do ? In the first place, we should, I think, as 
 far as possible leave things exactly as they are, altering 
 as little as possible, for amongst primitive races all violent 
 changes are bad. We must accept whole-heartedly the 
 burden of maintaining parental rule, and must own that the 
 Kafirs are not a democratic people. We might inquire into 
 and remove all real grievances, explaining to the natives 
 how unreal are some of the trumped-up ones. This would 
 not be difficult, for the Kafirs are above all things a shrewd 
 people. We should retain every relic we can of the Clan 
 System, even giving back to the chiefs little by little somt 
 of their lost power. This should be done with a clear 
 proviso that any breach of trust on the part of the chiefs, 
 who would, of course, be under white supervision, would 
 be followed by a withdrawal of privilege. Even though 
 this policy might put back the clock in some districts, it 
 would do but little harm, for the hands of the clock have 
 been jerked forward artificially by civilisation and by the 
 Ethiopians. In this way we should give to the Kafirs a 
 larger amount of honest and straightforward self-govern- 
 ment, and since the position of all missionaries and traders 
 would naturally be respected, the seeds of progress would 
 still be present. We might extend the experiment tried 
 by the Cape Colony, and develop the idea that led 
 to the formation of the Transkeian District Council. We 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 131 
 
 should interfere as little as possible with the " domestic " 
 affairs of the natives, simply restraining such abuses 
 as the condemning of people on charges of witchcraft, 
 glaring miscarriage of justice, persecution of Christian 
 natives, &c. 
 
 We should seek to persuade the educated Kafir to 
 stop fostering an artificial demand for the franchise, 
 and should get him to imitate 5<tooker Washington, and 
 to turn his thought to the moral, intellectual and social 
 improvement of his fellows and of himself. 
 
 Finally, we should be very chary of seeking to draw up 
 any uniform paper-policy, to be applied with undiscriminat- 
 ing energy to all the different tribes of the various colonies. 
 I think it so important that we should refuse to be hustled 
 into an artificial and rigid uniformity in this matter, that 
 I must explain my reasons. There is a general movement 
 in South Africa to hasten on federation by devising a 
 solution of the Native Problem to be accepted by all the 
 various colonies. The idea is most tempting, but I fear 
 it is Utopian and will lead to great disappointment ; the 
 most we can do is to have a common goal toward which to 
 aim : it is too late in the day — or too early — for uniformity 
 in methods. 
 
 It is sometimes thought that the proposal is a new one, 
 due to the recent Native Commissioners ; but the idea 
 is very old. The Earl of Carnarvon, writing to Sir H. 
 Barkley on May 4, 1875, said officially : " While I believe 
 the policy of each Government (in South Africa) to 
 present features which may be studied with advantage, 
 there is a real and serious inconvenience containing the 
 germs of great danger, in the continued maintenance, 
 
132 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 in close proximity, of widely differing systems of native 
 treatment. 
 
 " As long as tlie natives, who are shrewd observers in 
 such matters, perceive that the comparatively small popula- 
 tion of South Africa is divided under a number of Govern- 
 ments, which not only are not in close and cordial relations 
 with each other in regard either to native questions or to 
 any other matters, but are in some cases estranged by 
 controversies which are sometimes sustained with only 
 too much warmth, they must continue restless and un- 
 settled ; they are at the mercy of factious intrigues, and 
 are ready to listen to suggestions as to their power of 
 combining successfully against the disunited European 
 Governments." * 
 
 The opinion advanced by the Earl is endorsed by some 
 of the men who are engaged in the administration of native 
 affairs. The Civil Commissioner of Zululand has stated 
 that since the natives travel from one State to another so 
 very much, they are getting bewildered with the differences 
 of our various systems of native law. But the things that 
 puzzle the natives are mainly such things as differences 
 as to the amount of taxation. We can easily perceive that 
 a Kafir must be puzzled why a native should be charged 
 £2 hut tax in one district and only Hs. in another. The 
 natives say : " We are all under the British Government " ; 
 they wonder, in consequence, why the amount of taxation 
 should vary. 
 
 The real difficulty does not consist in differences of 
 native taxation but in differences of economic condition 
 
 * South African Blue Book. Proposal for a Conference of Delegates 
 from the Colonies and States of South Africa, May 1875. 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 133 
 
 in various parts of South Africa ; and until that (which 
 is the cause) can be remedied, it is difficult to see how the 
 other matters (the symptoms) arising out of such economic 
 disturbances can be remedied. It will not do to rest 
 satisfied with treating symptoms : we shall not get much 
 help from such a line of treatment. And until the causes 
 of the trouble can be dealt with radically, we shall gain but 
 little from tinkering at the symptoms. A hasty institution 
 of uniformity might possibly introduce far greater difficulties 
 than it would remove. So long as a native on the Zambesi 
 gets a wage of but three shillings a month, while a native 
 in domestic service at the Rand gets three shillings a day, 
 it is idle to set up an artificial and uniform standard of 
 taxation. The natives, of course, cannot see this, and that 
 is where so many of our difficulties come in. We insist on 
 civihsing the natives, and on urging them to enter into 
 economic relationships with us, and then complain because 
 the consequences are awkward. 
 
 To legislate in favour of the natives who travel, we must 
 legislate to the disadvantage of those who do not. Under 
 these conditions it is safer not to press for uniformity ; 
 for though the matter may be awkward, it is in no sense 
 serious. We should lose more than we should gain if we 
 were to sacrifice vital needs for our love of symmetry and 
 order. Our policy should be elastic if it is to meet the 
 real, rather than the paper, requirements of the case. Just 
 when we think we have all the wheels of the mechanism 
 adjusted, one wheel will insist on jumping out of its 
 bearings, and so spoils the working of the machine. The 
 natives in one district should not be put under a 
 certain law because it suited the Kafirs in another district. 
 
13i KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 It is not a cast-iron plan we need, but a master-con- 
 ception that might be developed differently in every 
 district. If our policy is to succeed in a rough-and-ready 
 workaday world, then it should have many seemingly 
 illogical turns and twists — and great capacity for adaptation 
 —about it. We shall never solve a Kafir problem by 
 geometry. 
 
 There is a rage nowadays for monism. The politician 
 with his dream of the Federation of the World is moved by 
 the same impulse as is the philosophical or scientific monist. 
 We seem forced, by some hidden spring of compulsion 
 deep in our nature, to reduce all things to unity, if not to 
 uniformity. If we cannot explain matter in terms of spirit, 
 let us try to explain spirit in terms of matter : if we cannot 
 succeed in that, then let us try to explain both matter and 
 spirit in terms of some common tertium quid, of which both 
 matter and spirit are but manifestations or " aspects." 
 But of all forms of monism the political is the most apt to 
 lead us to an impasse. To this desire of reducing all things 
 to one principle is probably due the effort to reduce the 
 Native Problem to some one single question, such as the 
 labour-supply, or land-tenure, or the franchise, or the ad- 
 ministration of British justice, or education, or missionary 
 work. We must attend to a number of things if we would 
 solve the Native Problem, for it has as many roots as a 
 man has fingers. 
 
 One reason why we are asked to adopt a uniform native 
 policy would seem to be based in the idea that since all 
 Kafirs are black men therefore all Kafirs need a similar 
 mode of treatment. But the various Kafir tribes, in 
 common with European nations, differ amongst themselves. 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 135 
 
 and are found to be at very different stages of development 
 and culture. Our civilising process has been carried on 
 vigorously in one district for a century, while in others, 
 especially in fever districts, very little or nothing has been 
 done. 
 
 If any one will start from, let us say. King Williamstown, 
 and will travel up the country to the Zambesi, spending 
 several months in each tribe, he will see how impossible 
 it is to suit all the various tribes with a hard-and-fast policy 
 on any subject whatever. Let us confine ourselves to a 
 single question — say, land-tenure, and see how the matter 
 would work out. Starting at King Williamstown we find 
 the natives quite ready for the Glen Grey Act. On 
 crossing the Kei we find the natives much less ready for 
 it, though the Fingos are an intelligent and industrious 
 people. Crossing the Bashee, we find the Tembus and 
 Bomvanas still less ready for the Act. If we pay a hurried 
 visit to Basutoland before crossing the Umtata River, we 
 find the Basutos advanced in quite a different manner ; 
 the Act would not suit them : they want something quite 
 different. Coming down towards the coast, we cross the 
 Umtata River and find the Pondos so backward that the 
 Act would be neither welcome nor useful. Crossing into 
 Natal, we find the conditions of native life amongst white 
 men so different that something quite unlike a Glen Grey 
 Act is required to meet the needs of the case. Crossing the 
 Tugela, we find the Zulus wedded to tribal land-tenure and 
 not at all ready for the Glen Grey Act. Swaziland, Gaza- 
 land, Matabeleland, Mashonaland and the Gorongoza 
 country are all in different stages of development. Uni- 
 formity of legislation is impossible. Thus the Act would 
 
136 KAFIR SOCIALISM 
 
 be a progressive measure in Bomvanaland, but a retrogres- 
 sive one in the centre of Natal, Not only is uniformity 
 inadvisable, it is impossible. 
 
 A similar result would be arrived at if we took up any 
 otber important detail of our policy ; and when we came 
 to examine the opinion of the Europeans in these different 
 districts, we should find that the Cape Colony and Natal, 
 for example, would never consent to a uniform policy on 
 such a subject as the franchise. Political monism may be 
 attractive, but it is impracticable, because the various 
 Kafir tribes are not political counters each of a conveniently 
 equivalent value. 
 
 The reason why certain officials press uniformity of 
 detail upon us is doubtless due to the fact that their vision 
 is keenly and laudably focussed on the natives in the 
 district in which they work. They thus become somewhat 
 provincial in their view of a very broad problem. As I 
 have travelled for years in various districts and amongst 
 many tribes, I have been astonished to find how very little 
 the ofl&cials in one district knew about the natives of the 
 adjoining tribes : yet they seem to think that their very 
 local experience of one set of natives entitled them to argue 
 from the particular to the universal. 
 
 There are, of course, many directions in which we might 
 simplify our Native Administration. We might do much 
 to centralise our organisation, and not a few anomalies 
 in our procedure might be altered. In several departments 
 we might bring about a much greater uniformity. But 
 for all that, each tribe should be treated on its own merits, 
 and we should do well to refuse to sacrifice the actual needs 
 of any group of natives to our love of uniformity. . . . 
 
THE NATIVE FRANCHISE 137 
 
 It has been said that the justification of democracy 
 consists in the fact that it clears the way for superiority. 
 The justification of SociaUsm, at least in primitive peoples, 
 consists in the fact that it clears the way for inferiority, 
 and so gives the laggards in the race a chance. Democ- i 
 racy is fiercely individualistic when it first arises, and, 
 if introduced, will surely break up Kafir SociaKsm and 
 altruism. The fundamental conceptions of a race should 
 be altered slowly ; and I do not think that South Africa 
 is in a sufficiently stable state of equilibrium to justify 
 us in making an experiment that must of necessity let 
 loose vast forces of discontent. 
 
 It should be clear by now that a political individualism, 
 suited to Europe, cannot be regarded as a wise policy 
 for a socialistic race. If the essential spirit and genius 
 of the Kafirs consist in the negation of individuaUsm, 
 and if it is se?/-government that the Kafirs need, then 
 to give them the franchise is but to offer stones to 
 hungry men. 
 
PART II 
 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 
 
 Theke have been three forces at work, all tending to 
 awaken the sense of individuality in the Kafir. In the 
 first place, commercial activity has led to the opening of 
 markets for our goods, while the need of cheap labour has 
 attracted the Kafir to our industrial centres. The creation 
 of wants and the demand for labour have united in arousing 
 the natives from their placid life, and in inoculating them 
 with the ferment of economic individualism. In the second 
 place, education has been the means of quickening the 
 intelligence and of directing the mind of the people to their 
 individual, rather than to their corporate, improvement. 
 In the third place, missionaries, by arousing the religious 
 sense of personal responsibility and by holding over the 
 heads of the people the fear of future punishment, have 
 developed the sense of individuality to a considerable degree 
 of intensity in some cases. 
 
 It must be admitted that, on the whole, commerce has 
 done, and is doing, its work thoroughly. Philanthropists 
 are never tired of telling us that the evil deeds of the trader 
 are the real cause of the native's suspicion and dislike of 
 white men. Arguing from their own personal point of 
 view, they contend that the Kafirs ought to be tremendously 
 shocked when they find themselves deceived by a trader, 
 and that, from the nature of the case, they must nurse a 
 
142 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 sense of iU-will in consequence. No doubt savages ought 
 to do this : but equally there is no doubt that they do 
 nothing of the kind. Any one who has seen a Kafir, after 
 he has been egregiously cheated, will not readily forget the 
 way the man shows a mixture of amusement at his own 
 stupidity and admiration at the cleverness of the cunning 
 white man. The native is too much of a sportsman to 
 harbour ill-will, for he feels that the white man has but 
 beaten him at his own game of bluff. So far from having 
 his moral sense injured, he is apt to think the better of the 
 white man for his cleverness. A 'priori reasoning is little 
 use in ethnology. 
 
 No doubt individual traders have fleeced the natives ; 
 such a thing is inevitable since human nature is what it is. 
 No doubt from time to time there have been certain abuses 
 at our mining-centres and on our farms : but commercial 
 white men have avoided, in the main, the gross vices that 
 have marred their contact with primitive peoples in other 
 countries. It is true that in a past generation the Europeans 
 held slaves, but modern industrial South Africa has been free 
 from the vice of using slave labour, of underpaying natives 
 (indeed, we are notorious for the way in which we have 
 overpaid them), or of " sweating." There are spots in every 
 sun ; but there have been few backward races in the history 
 of the world that have had so much consideration shown 
 to them, or that have been exploited with so little admixture 
 of abuses. This is all the more creditable to South Africa, 
 on account of the fact that our main industry has been 
 gold-mining, which is notorious for its awakening of fierce 
 passions in the white man. Yet in spite of this, our contact 
 with the native races of South Africa has been comparatively 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 143 
 
 free from the blots — for example, the lynching of negroes — 
 that disgrace the exploitation of primitive races in other 
 parts of the world. It is but the irony of fate that South 
 Africa should be picked out for unmeasured abuse by 
 people who, either owing to their ignorance or their over- 
 powering compassion, are deficient in a sense of proportion. 
 The white man who engages in commerce does not go to 
 South Africa " for his health " — as the Americans say : 
 he frankly admits that he goes there to make money : he 
 does not profess to be impelled by altruistic motives : he 
 does not give it out that he is an apostle of self-denial. 
 His function in the body politic is the creation and exploita- 
 tion of wants ; and though perhaps one cannot agree with 
 Huxley in thinking that the trader does more than the 
 missionary to elevate savages, one cannot deny that if 
 an awakening of the sense of individuality in a backward 
 race be a boon, then the natives have little cause for 
 complaint against trade and commerce. The one great 
 benefit that comes from awakening a race through 
 commerce and industrialism, rather than by politics 
 or missionary work, is that the people awaken slowly, 
 and have time to adjust themselves to their changed 
 condition. We may think the Kafirs would have been 
 better off if they had never come in contact with white 
 men, but that need not cause us to vilify our kith 
 and kin. 
 
 When we turn to education and religion, we can be in 
 no doubt as to the altruism of the missionaries. From 
 one point of view they are men " of whom the world is not 
 worthy " ; yet for all that we may be strongly tempted 
 to call in question the wisdom of the methods they use. 
 
144 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 It is difficult also to maintain that the missionaries have 
 intelligently and wisely anticipated the needs that were 
 bound to arise owing to certain evil consequences of the 
 contact of the natives with white men, or that they have 
 provided a guiding light wholly suited to the changed 
 circumstances. 
 
 The Kafirs are the victims, not only of our commercialism, 
 but also of our benevolence and moral impulses. We are 
 bent on educating the Kafirs, and it is too late in the day 
 for the man in the veld to cry out to us to stay our hand. 
 The Kafirs themselves are beginning to demand education ; 
 and the missionary naturally asks why he alone should 
 refrain from doing what he considers his part in the civilis- 
 ing process. The trader and the mine-owner are both 
 educating the Kafir in their own way, and why should 
 they expect to be allowed a monopoly of the " educa- 
 tion " of the Kafirs ? Since the white man has not the 
 slightest intention of ceasing to exploit the native 
 — and such exploitation is a potent form of educa- 
 tion — why should the missionary fold his hands and 
 abandon his pet hobby ? The spirit of South Africa is 
 fair play all round, and the missionary intends to take 
 advantage of this fact. 
 
 The ideal thing would be for the Kafirs to develop a 
 civilisation of their own. Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, 
 Roman, Indian, Chinese and Japanese ideals of civilisation 
 all differ, though each was suited to the national genius 
 of the people. Why, it may be asked, should not the 
 Kafirs throw up a civilisation of their own, suited to their 
 own nature and environment ? There are two answers 
 to this question. The first is, they have done so; and the 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 145 
 
 second is, that their Clan-System was unable to stand the 
 disintegrating contact of white civilisation. If we would 
 but leave them alone, they could easily set up a civi- 
 lisation that would give them unbounded satisfaction. 
 But our industrial requirements, no less than our moral 
 impulses, make that solution of the difficulty impossible. 
 The natives must be helped in the present conditions of 
 affairs because their life is now so interwoven with an alien 
 civilisation that they are bewildered. They have not 
 sufficient originality, spontaneity, intelligence, or ballast 
 to steer their course in the troubled waters in which they 
 find themselves. We have ourselves broken up their own 
 type of civilisation as it expressed itself in the Clan-System. 
 We did this partly because we could not understand it ; 
 partly because we did not try to understand it ; partly 
 because we were assured that we knew what was good for 
 the Kafirs better than they did themselves ; partly because 
 we thought it was to our advantage to break up the system ; 
 partly because we did not think about it at all. No doubt 
 we saw some obvious defects in their system, such as their 
 constant tribal wars, their belief in witchcraft, the occasional 
 tyranny of their chiefs, and the " immorality " of some of 
 their customs. These things were so revolting in our eyes 
 that we did not take the trouble to find out whether these 
 abuses were so evil as they were said to be, or whether they 
 were essential elements in the very structure of the Clan- 
 System, or whether they were merely accidental elements 
 which had no organic connection with the system. We 
 thought the Clan-System was a menace to white supremacy, 
 and our moral impulses combined with this behef to urge 
 us to get rid of these evils. In uprooting the Clan-System 
 
 E 
 
146 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 we made a mistake that has given us the pernicious develop- 
 ments of Ethiopianism (which would never have arisen 
 had we not checked the power of the chiefs) ; that has 
 introduced questions as to native franchise ; that has 
 intensified the evils that arise from intimate race-contact ; 
 and that may possibly end in a final undoing of all our 
 work of civilisation in South Africa. The problem before 
 us now is how to awaken the sense of individualism, and 
 how to educate the people, so as to destroy as little as 
 possible of the finer traits in Kafir character that have 
 survived our somewhat unfortunate efEorts to upUft the 
 natives. 
 
 We may all of us at times feel the Scholar-gipsy mood 
 in which we condemn all Western civilisation with its 
 " sick hurry," its " sick fatigue," its " heads o'ertaxed " : 
 and we may listen from time to time to some man as he 
 
 takes dejectedly 
 His seat upon the intellectual throne 
 And all his store of sad experience he 
 Lays bare of wretched days. 
 
 But the mood passes ; and again " each half lives a 
 hundred different lives " and succumbs to " this strange 
 disease of modern life." Who is there that does not, with 
 Rousseau and the Scholar-gipsy, at times suffer from a 
 nostalgia in which he longs to return to nature, and to 
 wait for the spark to fall from heaven ? But the infec- 
 tion of civilisation soon overtakes us, and the dream 
 that held us in its meshes fades into the light of common 
 day. And since we chose the complex and intellectual life 
 for ourselves, we feel bound to give it to those savages 
 who are unlucky enough to fall defenceless into our hands. 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 147 
 
 " The masters of education," says Leibnitz, " hold in 
 their hands the future of the world." A perilous trust it 
 is. Nothing so complicates the position of a forward race 
 as its attempt to be benevolent to a backward one. It is 
 comparatively easy to recover from the effect of some 
 political mistake, but it is almost hopeless to seek to undo 
 the evils caused by mistaken benevolence. It is our moral 
 impulses that land us in our greatest and most tragic 
 difficulties. 
 
 The person who goes through life resolutely abstaining 
 from the attempt to put the world right is saved a thousand 
 heart-aches, for if he behaves but moderately well, he will 
 make no enemies and but few grave mistakes. The moment 
 he sets to work in earnest, and engages in any form of 
 philanthropic or political endeavour, he will make enemies 
 where he expected to make friends ; he will do harm 
 where he honestly intended to do good ; he will see how 
 seemingly hopeless it is to help people onward ; and he 
 will probably discover that his very sentiment and zeal 
 are his most inveterate and subtle enemies. Taking 
 opinion for his guide, he will again and again knock 
 his head against some hard fact, till in moments of 
 despondency he will wonder whether he might not have 
 been better employed at other things. It is so easy to 
 do good, but so difficult not to do harm at the same 
 time. 
 
 The philanthropist is apt to think that devotion and 
 good intention will atone for mere technical deficiencies. 
 It is a radical mistake in presuppositions, and it is casting 
 its baneful spell over much of our modern political life. 
 Goethe has made us familiar with the merciful comedy at 
 
148 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 the heart of things when he made Mephistopheles confess 
 that he was 
 
 Part of that Power, not understood. 
 
 Which always wills the bad, and always works the good. 
 
 It was a lesson needed by people who were about to have 
 their moral sense shocked by the theory of natural selection, 
 and it is still needed by sentimentalists who are always 
 shouting about the wicked white man in South Africa. 
 To a certain degree, we have grown accustomed to the ever- 
 pressing struggle for existence in Nature, and yet we are 
 now in the midst of an emotional reaction in which we need 
 to remember Goethe's further words : 
 
 While man's desires and aspirations stir, 
 He cannot choose but err. 
 
 A nemesis seems to follow hard on the heels of those who, 
 whether in Parliament or out, are for ever calling attention 
 to their benevolent motives. When confronted with some 
 unexpected result caused by their unbalanced sentiment, 
 they are apt to cry out in an aggrieved tone, " But look 
 at our excellent intentions ! " They might as well say, 
 with the Mad Hatter, " It was the best butter." Good 
 motives cannot make up for lack of knowledge and sound 
 sense. 
 
 The education of a savage is a peculiarly difficult task ; 
 and it is pathetic to think how we send out missionaries with 
 the kindest of hearts without giving them any training 
 suited to their requirements. The education of a backward 
 race is as delicate a work as the training of defective or 
 feeble-minded children at home : we educate them by 
 means of highly trained teachers,_but we let loose upon 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 149 
 
 the Kafirs teachers whose sole qualification for the work 
 is their goodness. The ordinary missionary may be an 
 expert in religion, but he rarely even tries to make himself 
 an expert in education. I have seen men and women 
 fresh out from England simply turned loose on the Kafirs. 
 These excellent people knew that there was a thing called 
 education which was thought to elevate people ; and 
 without more ado they set to work to experiment on the 
 natives. Again, I have seen native teachers set to work 
 to teach children as though the scholars were automata. 
 The brain of the child seemed to be regarded as a sort of 
 enormously capacious phonographic cylinder, and regula- 
 tion lessons were hammered in so as to make dents or 
 grooves in the brain, in order that, under suitable conditions, 
 the parrot-lessons might be repeated. The Kafir teacher 
 has too often been utterly ruined by having been put 
 through the process himself ; he therefore reproduces 
 and accentuates every vice that has been ground into his 
 composition by a faulty education. The man's develop- 
 ment has been stunted, and it seems as if he set to work 
 dehberately to stifle all intelligent progress in his pupils. 
 The fellow could not have done worse if he had tried — 
 though his intentions were faultless. I know nothing so 
 dull as to be taken round some small up-country school 
 and to see the native teacher conducting his lessons. It 
 has often been a puzzle to me what conceivable good could 
 come of the process ; the harm was sufficiently obvious. 
 It was weary work to watch the cliildren submitting to 
 their slow torture under the oppression of what Browning 
 would have called " the pig- of -lead pressure of the teach- 
 ing-man's immense stupidity." No wonder the product 
 
150 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 of such methods brings discredit on education. The result 
 turned out at Lovedale or Amanzimtoti by trained teachers 
 is of a wholly different order, because the system employed 
 is more rational. 
 
 It may seem very ungracious to examine in a cold, dry 
 light the result of years of the self-denying labour of 
 people actuated by the noblest motives. To do so seems 
 as bad as " to peep and botanise upon a mother's grave." 
 Too much honour cannot be given to those who do the 
 thankless work of educating the native ; but no criticism 
 need be feared that is intended simply to minimise the 
 monotonous drudgery and to improve the quality of this 
 work. In education everything turns on quality. 
 
 I. The Case against our Present Methods of 
 
 EDUCATING THE KaFIRS 
 
 It is a matter of common knowledge that the average 
 colonist thinks education spoils the native. Let us see 
 what is to be said for this judgment. In actual experience 
 there exists no hard and fast line between the general 
 civilising effect of contact with white men and the effect 
 of formal education ; the one vignettes off into the other. 
 In dealing with the drawbacks of our entire civilising 
 process, we will therefore start with the unfortunate con- 
 sequences of mere civilisation, and will then pass on to 
 a consideration of some of the evil effects of a misguided 
 and formal education, drawing no hard and fast line between 
 these two things. 
 
 The first and most obvious result of contact with civilisa- 
 tion is a change in the outward appearance of the Kafir 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 151 
 
 for the worse. The raw native is a fine, big, burly, dignified, 
 merry, courteous, picturesque specimen of humanity. He 
 is one of nature's gentlemen ; he gives himself no airs ; he 
 is frank and natural in his behaviour ; he is unafiected, 
 and yet holds himself in a manner that shows he has 
 plenty of self-respect. He is every inch a man, even if 
 he be somewhat of a savage. There is something about 
 him so free and unconstrained — so perfectly natural and 
 human — that he puts the white man, who sees him in his 
 kraal, in a good humour. He seems conscious neither of 
 superiority nor inferiority (as a matter of fact, however, 
 he thinks himself superior to the white man in all things 
 but knowledge and cunning), but speaks to a white man 
 as if all men were equals. But he does this with such a 
 natural and unaffected grace that no one resents it, for 
 who but a Portuguese * wants the Kafir to debase his 
 manhood by cringing ? 
 
 But the moment the Kafir embraces civilisation he 
 gathers a smattering of " knowledge " ; he dons dirty, 
 frousy, patched, second-hand clothing ; he looks slovenly 
 and untidy ; he presents either a ridiculous or a sordid 
 appearance ; he looks mean and shabby in the extreme. 
 As he ascends the educational ladder, all the man's natural 
 self-respect vanishes, and in its place there is found an 
 aggressive, unnatural, and unpleasant self-assertion and 
 effrontery. Coupled with this, the fellow wears, for the 
 first time in his life, a hang-dog expression as if he felt the 
 need of apologising for his existence. Instead of feeling 
 
 * Englishmen who travel extensively in Portuguese possessions are 
 all disgusted with the way Portuguese officials make the natives literally 
 grovel in the dust at their feet. 
 
152 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 that nature had made them gentlemen, one can only 
 imagine, with Hamlet, that some of nature's journeymen 
 had made them and not made them well, they imitate 
 humanity so abominably. 
 
 The civilised Kafir is taken at his face value, and this by 
 his own request. South Africa is a country where appear- 
 ance and pretence count for very little, for men are usually 
 taken for what they are rather than for what they seem ; 
 and yet even in South Africa the civilised Kafir cannot 
 escape from the tyranny of his appearance. He thinks 
 he looks excessively grand in his borrowed plumes, and 
 asks to be considered to be all that he looks. The white 
 man does this, and promptly regards the man as a shoddy 
 specimen of mankind, saying : " There can be no kernel 
 in this light nut : the soul of the man is in his clothes." 
 The Kafir has sought to gain a cheap reputation, and is 
 injured to find that the white man accordingly holds him 
 very cheaply. The man is his own enemy, and yet cannot 
 be made to see it. Thus it comes about that the colonist 
 says that civilisation spoils the Kafir. It certainly spoils 
 his appearance. 
 
 The next thing that every one notices is that the Kafir 
 is apt to absorb the vices rather than the virtues of the 
 white man. Even in his religion, he borrows the superficial 
 and unlovely elements of modern Christianity more often 
 than its inner and essential spirit. To hear a native 
 evangelist preach on the terrors of hell is enough to make 
 one's hair stand on end. There can be no doubt, I think, 
 that the Colonist has some grounds for maintaining that 
 education at the average Mission school further undermines 
 some of the most valuable elements in the character of 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 153 
 
 a savage, which can resist mere civilisation but not formal 
 education ; robs him of some of his original virtues, which 
 are greater than the missionary is usually willing to admit ; 
 and gives him instead some very superficial and shoddy 
 accomplishments. A one-sided education at first puffs 
 up the Kafir ; it makes him restless and top-heavy ; it 
 disturbs his balance and makes him difficult to manage ; 
 it perverts his perspective and his sense of proportion ; 
 it makes him disinclined for manual labour ; it renders 
 him selfish and unduly egoistic ; it undermines the safe- 
 guards of the old clan-restraints ; it leads him to think 
 that he is on an equality with white men in general know- 
 ledge and culture ; it makes him aggressive in his self- 
 assertion ; it prompts him to listen to political agitators ; 
 it vastly increases his power to do evil, and generally under- 
 mines his character. It is a significant fact that the raw 
 natives are inclined to agree with the colonists in this 
 verdict, for they say that educated Kafirs are feckless and 
 unfortunate people : in their own graphic phrase, they say 
 that these educated natives are unpleasant men to live 
 with, for they always have cockroaches in their ears. (That 
 is to say, they are always grumbling and in trouble.) They 
 add that these men are unfortunate in appearance, and 
 cause endless trouble to their chiefs. 
 
 The above list of accusations fairly well exhausts the 
 general colonial condemnation of the education of natives. 
 Where opinion is so united and so intense, there must be 
 some element of truth in the contention ; and the colonists, 
 who do not gratuitously go out of their way to condemn 
 things, must see something in the educated Kafir that is 
 both very unpleasant and very unsatisfactory. It should 
 
154 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 pay the missionary to seek to discover the cause of this 
 opinion, for it will not do to put it down entirely to irreligion 
 or to any other single motive. 
 
 When it is said that the foregoing represents the typical 
 colonial attitude with regard to the education of the 
 natives, reference is made neither to the Press nor to the 
 Governments in South Africa. The Press is, on the whole, 
 desirous that the natives should have an industrial educa- 
 tion, and the various Governments in South Africa are not 
 slow to make grants for educational purposes. It must 
 be understood therefore that I have been speaking of the 
 opinion of the man in the veld : and surely it should not 
 cause us any surprise to find the work of education thus 
 criticised in that quarter. The first effect of education in 
 Europe is notoriously unfortunate ; it is difficult to see 
 why we should expect it to be anything else in South 
 Africa. Impatience, all the world over, would often away 
 with all nascent and amorphous kinds of goodness, instead 
 of seeking to cherish the most imperfect and embryonic 
 of beginnings. 
 
 From the moment when a native puts on his first shirt 
 right up to the day when he passes his last examination, 
 the whole civilising process forces the attention of the man 
 to himself. He is not slow in finding out that the white 
 man stands up for his own personal " rights " ; nor does 
 it take him long to discover that the European is absorbed 
 in the pursuit of his own personal interest, even competing 
 keenly with his fellows for his bread and butter. Hitherto 
 the Kafir had sunk his personality and his individual rights 
 for the good of his clan : to set himself in opposition to, or 
 competition with, his fellows was in his eyes a great offence. 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 155 
 
 From the white man he learns the new idea — new at 
 least in its intensity — that the individual has inalienable 
 " rights " : he consequently determines to have them with 
 a vengeance, and to pay out the clan that has so long 
 trampled on his private interests. The first effect of this 
 change is to make the man intensely self-conscious and 
 selfish, so that he obtrudes his wretched individuality at 
 every angle, and thus appears aggressively conceited. If 
 there were some increase of capacity as a set-off for this 
 self-assertion, the case might be different ; but civilisation 
 does not, at least at first, lead to the marked quickening 
 of any capacity, to the substitution of any new restraints, 
 or to the discovery of any new germ of promise. The change 
 is one of external accretion, and not one of absorption and 
 inward growth, for the savage only borrows his new accom- 
 plishments. So obvious is this to all but the civilised Kafir, 
 that even the raw natives see through the sham. A young 
 civilised Ethiopian informs an old heathen chief in a superior 
 and pitying tone that the Ethiopians are the coming men ; 
 they are going to make a church to embrace and cover all 
 the Kafirs ; and are not going to submit any longer to 
 European initiative and control, for they are able, now 
 they are educated, to stand on their own legs. The old 
 chief lets the man have his say and spin ample rope. He 
 then begins to catch the fellow in his own words. He 
 ignores the lofty idea of a universal church, and asks 
 him in an off-hand manner whether the actual building 
 in which the Ethiopians worship was built by civilised 
 natives. The answer is in the negative. Then the chief 
 courteously suggests that possibly civilised Kafirs made 
 the corrugated iron, or cut the timber for the building. 
 
156 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 It transpires that they did neither of these things. The 
 chief expresses his astonishment, and chuckles from time 
 to time as, pushing his inquiries, he finds that the civilised 
 Kafirs did not even make the glass of the windows, the 
 nails, the screws, the doors, the paint, the furniture, the 
 books. The Ethiopian has to admit that the civilised 
 Kafirs who worship in the church did not even make their 
 own clothes. The old chief then tells the upstart that he 
 is " big in the mouth," and advises him and his friends 
 first of all to learn how to make some of these things before 
 they boast of getting on without the white man's help. 
 
 This hopeless lack of a sense of proportion is not to be 
 wondered at, though it is to be deplored. The individual 
 is top-heavy and unbalanced, and cannot see things in 
 their general relations, v, 
 
 A somewhat unsuspected effect of civilisation is the 
 awakening of the dormant self-consciousness of the race. 
 When white men first appeared in South Africa, the natives 
 seem to have had no consciousness that they formed a 
 class opposed to the white men. One tribe regarded the next 
 tribe as its eternal enemy. The natives were intensely 
 conscious of the tribal bonds, but it never occurred to them 
 that they had a bond of " colour." The efEect of civilisa- 
 tion and education has been to draw their attention to this 
 racial conflict ; and the way many unwise philanthropists 
 have talked to the natives about the antithesis of black and 
 white has had a most potent effect in awakening a sense of 
 racial, as opposed to a tribal, solidarity. 
 
 In olden days, before the advent of civilisation, the 
 various tribes were kept apart by distance and by wars ; 
 but civilisation has abolished both these barriers. With 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 157 
 
 the impossibility of exercising the fighting habit, the 
 natives have grown less hostile to each other. The sheer, 
 wanton hatred of tribe for tribe grew by the wars it fed 
 on. Distance no longer keeps the natives apart, for we 
 have covered South Africa with a network of railways 
 and have supplied focus-points where tribe meets tribe. 
 The effect of this has been to break down some of the tribal 
 hostility, for the white man makes natives of different 
 tribes live amicably side by side : thus at Johannesburg 
 a Zulu comes to find that a Pondo is not such a " baboon " 
 as he thought ; a Swazie discovers that a Basuto can be 
 quite a decent fellow ; a Shangaan is surprised to note that 
 a Bechuana is quite a gentleman. In addition to this, 
 semi-civilised Kafirs of all tribes meet in Mission schools 
 and Mission churches with a new and common bond, and 
 set to work to hatch a common grievance. Since nothing 
 draws people together like a common grievance, large 
 centres, such as Johannesburg and Durban, become hot- 
 beds of Ethiopian discontent, and the pernicious seed of 
 race-hatred, like thistle-down in a wind, is carried away 
 to the remotest kraal in the country. The very massing 
 of tens of thousands of natives in one district teaches the 
 Kafirs their power. Civilisation also gives the natives a 
 Press of their own, which not only spreads discontent but 
 also hastens on the dawn of national self -consciousness. It 
 may be argued that all this is for the ultimate good of 
 the country. Possibly it is ; possibly it is not. But what- 
 ever may be the ultimate result, the immediate one is 
 fraught with danger ; for civilisation supplies the machinery 
 for wrecking itself, and colonists do well to be anxious. 
 This dawn of racial self-consciousness leads naturally 
 
158 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 to a desire for new kinds of self-government, for the Kafirs 
 are told by injudicious white men that they are being 
 ill-treated. When the half-educated Kafir is told that the 
 white man is keeping some of his " rights " from him, 
 he is apt, not unnaturally, to grow suspicious ; and the 
 spirit of discontent that is thus awakened is not wholly 
 a divine thing. Hitherto the Zulu, let us say, has never 
 heard of the franchise, and does not even know what it is. 
 Either at Johannesburg, or through some political agitator, 
 he hears that certain natives in the Cape Colony have 
 votes while he has none. He naturally feels that he has 
 a grievance, and readily lends himself as a tool to any 
 nimble-witted Ethiopian who has an axe to grind. 
 
 On the top of all this there arises a desire for something 
 more than self-government. I refer to the wish that is not 
 unmanifested in the nursery or dame-school for a person 
 not only to manage his own affairs but also to control 
 those of others. There is not much use in hiding the fact 
 that the chief reason why the civilised natives want the 
 franchise is that they know that they could then not so 
 much manage their own afiairs as dominate, or get- rid 
 of, the hated white man. It is idle to suppose that any- 
 thing short of this will ever permanently satisfy the natives 
 who have broken loose from their Clan-System. Every 
 boon the white man gives such people is accepted and 
 promptly used to undermine the position of the giver. 
 
 The effect of civilisation is thus seen to be unfortunate. 
 Individualism at first spoils the native ; breaks up the 
 clan ; sets the black man against the white ; binds certain 
 black men together in new ways ; leads to discontent and 
 crude self-assertion ; introduces poverty where it was 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 159 
 
 unknown before ; sets one class of Kafir against another 
 class ; and, finally, is used against those who introduce 
 it. The problem becomes acute just in proportion to the 
 number of whites living in close proximity to the natives. 
 It is therefore most acute in Natal, where Englishmen, 
 Kafirs and Indians are huddled up together in almost 
 inconceivable confusion ; and it is comparatively slight 
 in many other districts, such as Cape Colony, where the 
 whites press upon the natives, but to a very slight extent. 
 It is not pleasant to think what the result will be when 
 the country is filled with educated Kafirs— educated on 
 the system now in vogue. What will happen when there 
 are hundreds of thousands of perfectly useless, poverty- 
 stricken, ill-educated Kafirs, who will be fit for nothing, 
 but who will wander round the country seeking employ- 
 ment, unwilling or unfit to engage in manual work ? 
 Puffed up with a vain idea that they can find a living by 
 their comparatively feeble brain-work, they will find all 
 posts available for them occupied by Europeans or by better 
 educated Kafirs. At present South Africa may be able to 
 absorb, either for purposes of education or trade, all the 
 natives Mission schools turn out ; but there is certain to be 
 a slump one of these days, and the economic consequences 
 of such a state of affairs will be a menace to the country. 
 Does it not call for almost superhuman wisdom in steering 
 the bark of civilisation in South Africa between Scylla and 
 Charybdis ? And do we not well to halt at times so that 
 we may examine the situation and take stock of our 
 methods, lest by chance we be steering towards sunken 
 reefs ? It is time the missionary stopped chafing under 
 the criticism of the colonists and set to work seriously to 
 
160 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 find out and alter the defects in an educational system tliat 
 has grown up in a haphazard fashion. 
 
 II. The Case for Education 
 
 If we ask the missionary what he has to say to these 
 charges, he will reply that there is much exaggeration in 
 the indictment. He will possibly say that the colonist 
 judges a Kafir's value by the readiness with which he will 
 serve the ends of the white men. No one cares to have 
 his servants too well educated or too enlightened. Some 
 missionary will accept the challenge, and will go round cer- 
 tain towns and ask the various employers of labour whether 
 they are satisfied with certain boys who attended a certain 
 school. The results of one such inquiry are before me in 
 a pamphlet published by Mr. Le Roy of the American Zulu 
 Mission. This missionary has been connected for years 
 with the Amanzimtoti educational institution. The 
 Americans are nothing if not practical and resourceful ; 
 they ought to be able to show good results — and they can. 
 He says that " sixty of our graduates are now engaged 
 as teachers in the schools of South Africa. One of these, 
 Rev. John Dube, by his own enterprise has organised, 
 and is carrying on successfully, a Christian Industrial 
 School, and is also the editor and publisher of a leading 
 native paper." It was unfortunate for the argument that 
 this man was picked out by name, for he has subsequently 
 written the most virulent long letter in his own paper, 
 stirring up race hatred. The colonist will with justice, 
 as I think, take hold of this point. But let us imagine 
 that Dube is an unfortunate exception. Mr. Le Roy 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 161 
 
 arranged to get the employers' opinion of all^the boys who 
 had been at his educational establishment and who were 
 working in Durban. The employers of forty-seven were 
 interviewed, and they were asked whether the boys were 
 good workers, whether they were truthful, respectful and 
 trustworthy, and whether they compared favourably with 
 raw Kafirs. In the case of forty-four out of the forty-seven, 
 the verdict given by the employers was one of unqualified 
 approval. There were forty-four boys who had been in the 
 Institute who were found to be working at Johannesburg. 
 Their employers were consulted in a similar way. And 
 thirty-eight out of the forty-four boys were reported as being 
 quite satisfactory. The verdicts (on both sides) are ex- 
 pressed in vigorous and colloquial language, and I quote a 
 few samples : " All rattling good boys ; never any trouble ; 
 hard workers " ; " The best boy I have " ; " Good boys, 
 but exceptions. Mission natives worthless " ; "A fine 
 fellow. No complaint " ; " Was here a year but knew 
 too much " ; "No fault to find whatever ; but does not 
 learning English usually spoil the native ? " ; " Good boy. 
 Wouldn't have raw Kafirs " ; " No good. All Kafirs no 
 good, no exceptions. This one a bad egg, always a bad egg. 
 We had him a long time " ; "A credit to missionaries. 
 Wish there were more like him " ; " Good boy ; very 
 respectful " ; " Good fellow ; civil, always ready for work. 
 No fault to find " ; " Absolutely the best boy I've had " ; 
 " Very good boy, well educated, no complaint " ; " Two 
 boys, both good, the best we have. Most trouble with 
 boys comes through the way they are treated " ; " First- 
 rate boy " ; &c. &c. 
 
 The men who give the bovs such characters — and the 
 
 L 
 
162 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 bulk of the criticisms are just like these, which I have 
 picked out indiscriminately — are all business men in 
 Durban or Johannesburg, the heads of large commercial 
 houses or mine officials. It is impossible to form any 
 quantitive conclusions on but the hundred cases available, 
 even though these boys represented the entire number of 
 old students that could be traced at these two centres. 
 But these verdicts are sufficient to show that the missionary 
 can, under some conditions, show unexpectedly good 
 results. Quite a number of the employers emphasise the 
 fact that the boys in question were " exceptional " boys, 
 and that all other educated boys are worthless. But it 
 looks a little strange that when common talk is tested by 
 actual facts there should be found to be so many excep- 
 tions. Clearly no great conclusion can be drawn from these 
 figures, for many facts are not taken into consideration. 
 We naturally ask what can be said about the rest of the 
 natives educated at the Institute. Those fittest for work 
 would survive in employment in commercial houses ; and 
 so no idea can be drawn from these figures as to the total 
 result of education. It is a fair question to ask whether 
 all educational institutions could show a similar record. 
 And moreover it would be possible to urge the fact that 
 the bulk of natives are not being educated in institutions 
 where several hours a day are devoted to manual work, 
 as is the case at Amanzimtoti. And yet again it is strange 
 that the missionary did not seek to dissociate religion from 
 education in his analysis. It is very difficult, no doubt, to 
 define a Christian : yet a missionary can feel the difference 
 between a Christian and an educated " heathen " more 
 easily than he can formulate it. When these facts 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 163 
 
 are borne in mind it becomes evident that it is very 
 difficult to say how far the results were due to education, 
 and how far to religious principle. But even when that 
 is pointed out, the evidence in favour of combined religious 
 and educational instruction appears very strong, and shows 
 that the missionary can make out a very good case for Mission 
 schools precisely in the direction where his cause is thought 
 to he unsatisfactory and iveaJc. If all these Kafirs were 
 Christian boys, they show that a Christian native can 
 carry a good deal of educational sail without becoming 
 top-heavy. 
 
 The missionary will next point to the Report of the 
 Native Commissioners, who adopt an optimistic tone when 
 speaking of education. Their report shows that there is 
 a considerable section of people who think that education 
 is highly beneficial to the native. This argument looks 
 very strong indeed, for here are sensible, level-headed men, 
 who have had every opportunity of hearing both sides of 
 the case, and they pronounce strongly in favour of educating 
 the native. The Colonist, however, might well maintain 
 that this evidence is not final. 
 
 There are advancing waves even on an ebbing tide, and 
 there are retreating waves on a flowing one. To discount 
 all the accidental elements, and to gauge the actual advance, 
 is by no means an easy task. In South Africa there is a 
 general feehng that the Commissioners said the best that 
 could possibly be urged on behalf of education. They did 
 not err on the side of being pessimistic : perhaps they were, 
 if anything, a Httle too sanguine. It must also be remem- 
 bered that the Commissioners were not trained ethnologists 
 who examined everything for themselves, and who discarded 
 
164 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 all " evidence " tliat had no scientific value ^ Much of 
 their evidence was drawn from mere hearsay and from 
 interested parties who were deeply committed to the 
 existing regime. And it does not appear that the Com- 
 mission sought to dissociate the effects of education from 
 the effects of religion. This I am seeking to do, and I 
 would speak much more hopefully of the Christian than 
 of the merely educated native. Not a few of those who 
 gave " evidence " were exposed to the danger of putting 
 down to the account of education what should have been 
 put down to the account of religion : yet that did not pre- 
 vent them from entering the same sums later on under 
 the columns of the rehgious account as well. By this 
 spurious " double entry " they have probably somewhat 
 swelled the total account. The giver of evidence is also, 
 when asked to give an account of his assets, perilously 
 in danger of thinking more of his successes than of his 
 failures. 
 
 Again, students at such schools as Lovedale or Aman- 
 zimtoti are apt to be taken as typical of the class produced 
 by education, for a Commission can visit such large institu- 
 tions and pays especial attention to the opinion of the 
 managers of such schools, but cannot visit the small schools 
 far away from civilisation. Yet it is in such schools that the 
 great bulk of the scholars is to be found. I have on two occa- 
 sions spent a week at Lovedale, and so I hope I am not for- 
 getting it and a few other excellent institutions when I fix my 
 attention mainly on the small Mission schools never visited 
 by Commissions. In those schools the education is carried 
 on for the most part by native teachers, who teach the 
 children their alphabet and to recite unintelhgible words 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 1G5 
 
 parrot-fashion. The vast bulk of educated natives never 
 rises beyond that condition, though a few Kafirs become 
 highly educated. Those who are satisfied with the present 
 educational regime are, of course, satisfied with turning out 
 native teachers suited to carry on such a type of educa- 
 tion, and naturally approve of the result. I admit that 
 every now and then a fine specimen of Kafir is produced, 
 but I think this is perhaps more in spite of, than because 
 of, the methods in vogue. Indeed it is very often the 
 case that religion rather than education is accountable 
 for these remarkable cases. It is possible to point to such 
 men as Tiyo Soga, and to say he is a proof of what is being 
 done with Kafirs. I quite agree with Mr. Theal when he 
 describes Soga as " An earnest, enlightened, zealous, self- 
 denying Christian missionary, such a man as any nation 
 in the world might be proud of " ; and yet we must re- 
 member that this man, on the breaking out of the War 
 of the Axe, was sent to Scotland for his education ; that 
 he married a Scotch wife ; and that he was placed in an 
 environment — rehgious and social — that was exceptional. 
 He may be an earnest of what the educated Kafir may 
 ultimately become, but he cannot be adduced as a proof 
 of the value of existing educational methods in South Africa, 
 or as an example of the general fwduct of our Mission 
 schools. 
 
 But the missionary has many other arguments to bring 
 forward. He might say that people have expected far 
 too much from educated Kafirs, and that they are quite 
 unreasonable in the way they condemn a native for not 
 being the equal of the white man. The Enghshman is 
 known all the world over for his intolerance of all that is 
 
166 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 unfamiliar. The missionary might point out that it is the 
 nature of human knowledge to lead to experiment in things 
 that are evil as well as in things that are good. In the 
 language of religious allegory, he might say that eating of 
 the Tree of Life ever leads to the knowledge of both good 
 and evil. He might quote Rousseau's remark that modesty 
 is born only with the knowledge of evil : and what is true 
 of modesty is also true of some of the finest qualities in 
 human nature. It is too late in the day to put down all the 
 evil to the credit of some defect in the educating process, 
 for much of it is due to contact with Western individualism, 
 to the nature of things, and to the natural and inherent 
 imperfection of the material on which the missionary 
 has to work. The symptom complained of may be admitted, 
 but the suggested cause may be denied. The missionary 
 might go on to point out that much of the evil complained of 
 is not due to formal education, but to intercourse of the Kafir 
 with the civiHsed white man himself. 
 
 Again, what do the critics expect ? Do they seriously 
 imagine that they will ever find perfection amongst the 
 Kafirs ? That would be a strange place to look for it, 
 seeing it cannot be found even amongst white colonists. 
 We must all admit that increase of capacity must neces- 
 sarily mean increase of power to do either good or evil ; 
 and the whole problem is whether the individualistic regime, 
 with its corollary of the fostering of the faculties, can be 
 justified on existing conditions. There is no reason for ex- 
 pecting the Kafirs to be free from the educational measles 
 and all the other childish complaints experienced all the 
 world over by educational immaturity. The so-called 
 " educated " Kafirs are in no adequate sense educated. 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 167 
 
 We are just beginning to educate them : that is all. No 
 doubt those natives who with much difficulty have advanced 
 in their studies about so far as an English boy of twelve 
 years of age imagine themselves to be prodigies of learning. 
 So they are when compared with the kraal Kafirs ; so they 
 are not when compared with the most ignorant white man. 
 We call them " educated " in a complimentary sense and 
 out of courtesy ; for there are but few natives that really 
 deserve to be called educated. When a small boy, who 
 has just put on his first pair of trousers, pulls himself up 
 to his full height, and says, " See, I'm a big man now, with 
 trousers ! " we humour him and say in baby-language, 
 " Yes, you are indeed a man now." Even so, we smile 
 and tell the " educated " Kafirs that they are men of 
 education and culture. Why should it be thought that 
 Kafirs should spring, Minerva-like, fully educated out of 
 the head of some educational Zeus ? The prehminary 
 stages of a process can never be taken as indicative of the 
 end aimed at. No process is ever justified by its beginning, 
 and it is absurd to expect the preliminary stages of the 
 education of the Kafirs to be taken as a criterion of 
 the whole process. It is ever from the end of a process 
 that we learn its value, for it can never be justified by its 
 early stages. It therefore follows that we cannot fairly 
 judge of the whole problem of educating the natives by 
 the few specimens to be met with away from Mission 
 circles. The critics are often not even sufiiciently fair 
 to take the trouble to go and visit the chief educational 
 centres such as Lovedale and Amanzimtoti, but judge the 
 process from any chance half-baked Kafir they meet in 
 towns. The missionary might go on to point out that 
 
168 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 what we have to do with in this workaday world is practical 
 politics. The Kafir is going to be educated because his 
 heart is getting increasingly bent on it. He will not stop 
 and ask us for our opinion on the subject. Contact with 
 civilisation in the mine, on the farm, and in domestic 
 service opens his mind, and he wants to know how he, 
 too, can do the cunning things the white man does. It is 
 useless to imagine that a forward race can exploit a back- 
 ward one for financial purposes and yet deny it other 
 civilised advantages. A forward race is bound to educate 
 the backward one it comes in contact with, just because 
 the forward race imagines that its own progress is largely 
 due to its own education. To say that the Kafir must not 
 be educated is as idle as to say he must not breathe, or that 
 he must not be exploited by civilised nations. 
 
 Though the missionary might make out a very good case 
 from his own point of view, yet I think he would do 
 the cause of education a grievous injury if he refused to 
 admit that there was much truth in the indictment of his 
 work. There is a cause for the undoubted phenomenon 
 of colonial hostility to Kafir education. If the missionary 
 were to raise the question of method, and if he were to 
 admit that there is room for improvement in this direction, 
 he would take a step that would prove the most progressive 
 he has ever taken. At present he is apt to put down 
 colonial hostility to mere prejudice, and thereby loses all 
 the stimulus he might receive from level-headed criticism. 
 By admitting some failure, the missionary would short- 
 circuit much current opposition. The moment he asked 
 his critics for advice as to how the system of education 
 could be improved, he would discover to them the fact 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 169 
 
 that many of them had no constructive policy to suggest. 
 But very few people would care publicly and seriously to 
 suggest that the natives should be left alone. The man 
 who advocated such a poHcy would at once call public 
 attention to his own lack of education, and would write 
 himself down as uncultured. Not a little of the popular 
 hostility of the colonists towards educating the Kafir is 
 due to the fact that some of the men who are loudest in 
 their objections are suspiciously weak in education them- 
 selves : their education was stopped at a prehminary 
 stage, and they are scarcely the best people in the world 
 to raise the whole question of the value of education. Men 
 are cowards and take colour, like chameleons, from their 
 surroundings. So one objector makes a dozen others. 
 The cure for some hostility to education is more educa- 
 tion of the enemy and more independence of thought. 
 I have noticed that very few highly educated people in 
 South Africa condemn the work of missions, though they 
 frequently see the weak points in the missionary's methods. 
 The Press in South Africa is becoming more and more in- 
 chned to side with education of the natives, though it would 
 — very wisely, in my opinion — urge that there should be 
 much more industrial work and much less book-learning 
 undertaken. 
 
 The missionary, by refraining from showing resentment 
 under hostile criticism, and by offering the other cheek — 
 to drop metaphor, by asking for advice how to improve 
 matters — would put his critics in a quandary. The 
 moment any one tries to suggest alterations in educational 
 methods, he either gives ad vice which does much to strengthen 
 the case for education by impro\ang its quality, and by 
 
170 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 showing that it can be conducted with good effect, or he 
 is forced to admit that he has no constructive pohcy to 
 suggest, and that very little change can be made, since 
 most of the evils he has complained of are due, not so much 
 to education as to the inherent quality of the human nature 
 of the people educated. Thus without resorting to a tu 
 quoque, and without pointing out that it is partly the 
 disturbing presence of the white man that makes the 
 education of the Kafirs so difficult, the missionary would 
 educate the European objector, and would, perchance, 
 teach himself that his own methods in the past had been 
 faulty and defective. Perhaps that is the most important 
 lesson the missionary could learn ; and he is not the mis- 
 sionary's best friend who allows his sentiment to cover 
 over the grave errors made in educational methods to-day. 
 
 By adopting the line of defence pointed out above, the 
 missionary would cease to throw the glamour and irradia- 
 tion of his sentiment over the subject in dispute, and would 
 at once lift the argument out of the heated atmosphere in 
 which it is usually discussed ; and he would be prevented 
 from making that most pitiful of all errors — the mistake 
 of imagining his educational methods to be incapable of 
 improvement. 
 
 III. The Causes of our Success and Failure 
 
 It has been said that to muddle is to labour with effects 
 without paying regard to causes. If that is so, then we 
 must admit that we have muddled considerably in South 
 Africa ; for we have not even taken the trouble to make 
 quite sure about the effects we complain of. Until we are 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 171- 
 
 quite certain as to symptoms, we are not likely to make 
 a wise diagnosis or discover causes. 
 
 It is symptomatic of nothing but childhood and im- 
 maturity to contend that all educated Kafirs are extremely 
 good or extremely bad. It is natural for children to sec 
 the salient features of things, and to fail in observing the 
 half-tones, for they see things largely in masses and in 
 outUne, and adopt refreshingly simple systems of classifica- 
 tion. To them, men are good or bad — never middling. 
 But those who are busy educating the Kafirs cannot be 
 classified into good teachers or bad teachers, for most of 
 them are very indifferent teachers, just as most of the 
 educated Kafirs are very indifferently educated Kafirs. 
 Colonists are far too exacting in their demands about 
 education : they are like many an old Kafir I have seen 
 who has come along to learn to read, and who, after half 
 an hour, has left the missionary saying indignantly that it 
 is all nonsense : books don't talk to him as they do to 
 white men. 
 
 It is essential to recognise two things in coimection with 
 the education of the Kafir. The first is that a wise educa- 
 tion can do as much as or more than any other single factor 
 to elevate the man. The second thing is that educational 
 work must, from the nature of the case, be largely carried 
 on by missionaries. When one million white people have 
 to see to the education of their own children under pecuhar 
 difiiculties, it is idle to expect them to be able to take entire 
 control also of the education of the children of many 
 millions of black people. It is not practicable, as yet, to 
 dispense with Mission schools. We must recognise the 
 fact that missionaries freely give to the country an immense 
 
172 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 amount of energy, and are in actual possession of the field. 
 It may be possible to insist on a larger amount of govern- 
 mental oversight in education, but at present this can only 
 be obtained by increasing educational grants to existing 
 schools. Since there is a limit to what the white man is 
 willing to pay for the education of the Kafirs, there must 
 be a limitation of his control of that education, unless it 
 be decided that the problem is so important that emergency 
 legislation is called for. 
 
 There has been a tendency in modern times for Govern- 
 ments to control many human activities which in past ages 
 were freely open to people devoid of the necessary quahfica- 
 tions. Public opinion demands certified efficiency in its 
 doctors, lawyers, hospital nurses, chemists, as well as in 
 other trades and professions. In England we do not care 
 to have inefficient people in positions of trust, but demand 
 certain certificates of capacity or of adequate training in 
 those who administer to our bodily or mental needs. 
 But here we are deaUng with that most difficult of all 
 problems, the government and progress of a backward 
 race, and we allow the most inefficient teachers, whose 
 only quahfication for the difficult work is their own kind 
 hearts, to form the character of the rising generation and 
 to complicate immensely our difficulties. We might as 
 well try to cure cancer by kindness as to educate savages 
 by it. The quality of the education we give to the Kafirs, 
 probably more than anything else, decides the entire future 
 of the natives : and yet, while there are many excellent 
 and efficient Mission schools, we also allow the most in- 
 efficient people to mis-educate the Kafirs. I know not a 
 few missionaries who deliberately choose to go without a 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 173 
 
 Government grant so that they may perpetuate the 
 system of education they imagine to be best for the 
 natives. I do not ask, has a State the right to prevent 
 this sort of thing, but has a State the right to allow 
 unquahfied people to intensify national problems in this 
 gratuitous fashion ? The future of the Kafirs is, in some 
 cases, being decided by people with the narrowest 
 outlook. 
 
 On the other hand, we allow, in some cases, utterly 
 unsuitable traders to complicate the problem in a different 
 direction. Many traders, like many missionaries, are 
 good, average people : but there are undesirable traders as 
 there are unwise and unsuitable missionaries. If we are 
 going to rule parentally — and surely there can be but little 
 doubt that this is our duty — we should do so firmly, 
 and have the courage of our convictions. An aboriginal 
 race emerging from barbarism is an exceptional thing — 
 as even John Stuart Mill admitted in his famous work 
 on " Liberty " — and it is also a very dangerous thing : 
 if ever special circumstances called for special treatment, 
 they would seem to do so in the case of the natives, for 
 the destiny of the country is at stake. The Kafirs say that 
 pots are made while the clay is in good condition : if we 
 delay much longer, we shall one day awake only to find 
 that some of the irresponsible people who are moved by 
 bhnd moral impulse have given ungainly and dangerous 
 form to the pots. When once the clay is baked, it is useless 
 to mourn over the shape of the pot. 
 
 We must now consider a few details in connection with 
 the education of the natives, for destructive criticism is 
 much easier to supply than constructive advice. 
 
174 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 (1) The Governments should start a number of their own 
 institutions for training teachers. At present it is proposed 
 that such training institutes should be worked through 
 existing missionary agencies. This is, of course, better 
 than nothing, but it will ine"vatably lead to the retention 
 of some undesirable elements. It is, perhaps, impossible 
 to overrate the value of religious instruction in the case 
 of the Kafirs, and it would be a grave mistake for the 
 Government to ahenate the sympathy of the missionaries, 
 who at present have the educating of the Kafirs in their 
 hands. But the missionaries would listen to reason. If 
 the Government started a training institute for both 
 white and black teachers, and gave increased grants of 
 money to schools that employed such certificated teachers, 
 it would begin to control native education. 
 
 It would be well for State schools to be started in suitable 
 centres so that the Government might experiment as to 
 the efficiency of various educational methods. If it were 
 once demonstrated to the colonists that education could 
 be devised so as immensely to improve the Kafir as a 
 labourer, there would be an end to the common talk against 
 native education. 
 
 (2) We should give the natives a very simple and yet 
 very varied kind of education. The stimuli we have ap- 
 plied have been too complex and too violent. We should 
 apply a greater variety of very simple stimuli, never 
 over-pressing one form. Instead of pinning our faith 
 to books, we should call to our aid every conceivable form 
 of training that has been found useful in the education of 
 the feeble-minded in Europe and in America. We should 
 reduce book-education to a minimum. We might almost 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 175 
 
 as well return to the methods of the old schoolmen and set 
 the natives discussing how many angels can stand comfort- 
 ably on the point of a needle, as teach them Latin or force 
 them to repeat pages of unintelUgible English jargon parrot- 
 fashion. For many a day our work would be cut out for 
 us if we would but begin to train intelligently the muscle- 
 nerve mechanisms by simple kindergarten work, and by 
 the most elementary exercises. If we could but see that 
 the object of education is to draw out and develop the 
 existing faculties, and not to cram into the child's head 
 an indigestible mass of ready-made learning, we might do 
 the Kafirs some good. We should make full use of the 
 immense educative value of play. Thus we should make 
 the school hour a dehght instead of a burden ; and the 
 children, whose parents refused to allow them to go to 
 school, would become envious of those who had a better 
 fortune. 
 
 The subject of child-study has been sadly neglected in 
 South Africa. When wishing to publish a book on " Savage 
 Childhood " I was astonished to find that there was no 
 book in English treating of the subject of the Kafir child. 
 This is an amazing fact, and it shows how little we have 
 studied causes. We are never tired of saying that the 
 child is father of the man ; we say we are anxious to 
 create good men, and yet we have not studied the children ! 
 If this does not reveal a pohcy of muddle, it would be 
 interesting to know what could indicate such a pohcy. 
 To educate wisely we need to study origins and ends. 
 Until we know exactly what sort of product we wish to 
 turn out, we are not likely to turn it out : until we 
 know the capacity and the tricks of the clay, we shall not 
 
176 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 be very likely to make the vessels we desire. Now, 
 missionaries and colonists differ as to what it would be 
 good to turn out : no wonder they differ as to their 
 verdicts of what is actually turned out. 
 
 So long as we look at the children, we see no reason why 
 many of them should not become very intelligent and 
 active. They are brimful of life and of energy, being fully 
 as hvely as white children. They are smart and intelligent 
 within certain limits and in certain directions ; and when 
 wisely taught, they keep pace with white children for many 
 years. But just when we hope to produce a good result, 
 the mental development seems to become arrested, and 
 the children return at puberty to the kraal and disappoint 
 all our hopes. There are exceptions, but there is little 
 doubt as to the general rule. Now, what is the cause of 
 this arrest of the development of the higher powers ? After 
 puberty the body continues for years to develop splendidly, 
 but the mind, the imagination, the logical processes, the 
 higher regions of intelligence, all seem to suffer from a 
 blight. Is it not possible that if we discovered the cause 
 of this arrest of development, and if we discovered the 
 reason why some Kafirs do not deteriorate after puberty, 
 we might be able to overcome the difficulty ? 
 
 The savage child lives under conditions that lead to a 
 great development of the lower faculties. As a result, 
 he can make a clever bird-trap at an earlier age than can 
 a white child. He can throw sticks at birds, and hit them 
 while flying in a way very few white children can. He 
 can follow a spoor, and can come to sound logical con- 
 clusions from insignificant trifles, such as the attitude of 
 a leaf, a blade of grass, or a piece of stick, in a way that 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 177 
 
 would seem magical to a white child. The Kafir child 
 lives entirely in a region of sense-perceptions and is trained 
 to a high degree in certain kinds of observation. Within 
 a very narrow compass it can perceive sensations and argue 
 from them to definite and limited conclusions. All its 
 nervous energy is diverted through the channel of its 
 animal needs. The black child can detect a buck in the 
 veld more readily than can a white child, not because it 
 has better eyes, but because it has trained its sight in this 
 direction. But in the kraals children are discouraged from 
 asking questions ; and parents throw cold water on any 
 inquiring mind. In other words, the child has not been 
 trained in reflection. The faculty of sense-perception is 
 highly trained, while other faculties are neglected. The 
 memory is wonderfully strong and keen, and impressions 
 are retained very tenaciously. This is a great asset to the 
 teacher, but also a great snare. I entirely agree with the 
 following foot-note found in a translation of Rousseau's 
 " Emile " : 
 
 " With respect to reason and judgment, and what may 
 be called the higher life of the mind, the memory is a 
 subsidiary and subordinate faculty, but a faculty without 
 which these higher activities cannot be maintained. The 
 very possibility of education is dependent on memory. 
 We must not only remember what we have understood, 
 but we must remember in order that we may understand ; 
 the memory must hold not only the finished products of 
 thought, but also the crude materials for thinking." 
 
 But if there is a faculty in the Kafir child that does not 
 need developing it is the memory. No sooner, however, 
 does the child go to school than the teacher, who does not 
 
178 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 think out his method, catches hold of this faculty, and 
 saves himself endless trouble by working it for all it is 
 worth. Lessons are learned by rote, though the child 
 often has not the remotest idea what it is repeating. It 
 would repeat lessons in Hindustani or Chinese equally well, 
 without knowing the meaning of a word of either language. 
 Thus the teacher develops the apex, or the most de- 
 veloped faculty of the child : the result is very showy and 
 seems to reflect great credit on the teacher. Sometimes 
 the pupil exposes the sham, when showing off, by not quite 
 knowing where to begin or end in his lesson ; but that is 
 thought a trifle to be laughed at. Instead of teaching the 
 child to reflect, the teacher has trained it to remember. The 
 lesson has therefore not only had no educative value, 
 but it has done the child harm, for it confirms a bad 
 habit and deepens the channel of the child's plastic thought 
 in a vicious manner. 
 
 " The apparent facility with which children learn is the 
 cause of their ruin. We do not see that this very facility is 
 the proof that they are learning nothing. Their smooth and 
 pohshed brain reflects hke a mirror the objects that are 
 presented to it ; but nothing remains, nothing penetrates 
 it. The child retains the words, but ideas are reflected." 
 In these words Rousseau has pointed out a fact often for- 
 gotten in South Africa. He has also (in the following 
 passage), with fine insight, drawn attention to the way 
 teachers are misled by the seeming dulness of some of their 
 most promising pupils. " Nothing is more difficult than 
 to distinguish, in infancy, real stupidity from that apparent 
 and deceptive stupidity which is the indication of strong 
 characters." The whole book (" Emile ") from which 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 179 
 
 these extracts are taken should be studied by every school 
 teacher in South Africa. 
 
 Another fault is that the teacher keeps the child far too 
 long at one thing : he repeats and drones away until the 
 child gets dazed. The immature mind gets tired, then 
 listless, then weary, and finally exhausted. The teacher, 
 intending to be thorough, literally inhibits all development. 
 The pupil gets accustomed to the sound and forgets, if 
 he ever knew, the sense. A habit is formed ; and when 
 a lesson is repeated by sheer habit, it has ceased to have 
 any educative value. The mind gets clogged, and it 
 becomes more difficult than ever for the child to reflect 
 and think. The child comes to mix up names and things 
 in a general jumble, and confuses sound with sense. It 
 is, in other words, thrown back on sense-perceptions, and 
 even has these confused for him. 
 
 Now this is what Mr. William Harris, the American 
 educationist, has called " A training in idiocy." " For," 
 asks Mr. Harris, " what is an idiot but one who sees all 
 things in their superficial relations — confuses things with 
 names, and causes with effects ? " The logical reflective 
 and imaginative faculties have become, in too many cases, 
 crushed or atrophied through the ignorant actions of the 
 very person whose duty it was to develop them. 
 
 "We come to a further cause of trouble. In England 
 one does not need to point out that too much occupation 
 with the emotions and sentiments inhibits intelligence. 
 We have only to listen to sentimental questions asked in 
 the House of Commons to see that imdisciphned and over- 
 developed emotion is not to be found in people of high 
 intelligence. We never find a well-balanced statesman 
 
180 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 asking some trivial and sensational question : it is always 
 the little men who do that. When a Kafir reaches the 
 age of puberty,* emotions of the most turbulent nature 
 awake within him, and there is great danger that his intelli- 
 gence should be crowded out in the struggle for nutrition. 
 The boy's nerve-energy is all drained ofi away from the 
 brain-centres whose function is reflection. The master 
 has not developed the boy's power of reflection — or his 
 imagination — sufficiently to resist the degenerative changes 
 that set in. The boy leaves school, too often, at this critical 
 age, and is so undeveloped in brain that future progress 
 amid the kraal-life is impossible. His mind dwells ever 
 on sex, for he listens to talk of but little else in the kraal. 
 He becomes engrossed with his emotions, and thus his 
 higher mental activity is inhibited. He settles down into 
 an ordinary sort of Kafir, having just sufficient veneer of 
 education to make him really objectionable. No wonder 
 the colonist can see little good in him. 
 
 Now if we contrast with this dismal picture I have drawn 
 — and I have seen it so often that I am sure I am not exag- 
 gerating — the method by which the native is educated at 
 the most enlightened training institutes, we find a great 
 difference. In proportion as the defects pointed out above 
 
 * With regard to the onset of puberty, Rousseau has offered the 
 following most suggestive hint : 
 
 " The instructions of nature are tardy and slow, while those of men are 
 almost always premature. In the first case, the senses arouse the 
 imagination ; and in the second, the imagination arouses the senses 
 and gives them a precocious activity which cannot fail to enervate and 
 enfeeble, first the individual, and then, in the course of time, the species 
 itself. A more general and a more trustworthy observation than that 
 of the effect of climate is that puberty and sexual power always come 
 earlier among educated and refined people than among ignorant and 
 barbarous people." — "Emile." 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 181 
 
 are avoided, so far is the education truly educative in 
 tendency. And in so far as the boys can be kept at school 
 after puberty so as to give the higher faculties a chance to 
 ripen, and in so far as they can be kept away until their 
 character is sufficiently developed not to be ruined by the 
 conversation of the kraal, and in so far as they are taught 
 to work at trades or at industrial employment so that their 
 minds may be healthily occupied — so far are they able to 
 continue to rise in the scale after puberty ; their faculties 
 have had an all-round development and are able to with- 
 stand the mentally blighting dawn of strong emotion at 
 the period of puberty. If at that critical stage the growth 
 of the boy's faculties becomes arrested, all his nervous 
 energy flows along the line of least resistance, and those 
 who know the Kafir know what that direction is. That is 
 why, I think, the natives who are taken to Europe for their 
 education rise higher than those who stay at home : they 
 are brought into an environment vastly different from that 
 which they would live in even at the best industrial school 
 in South Africa. Unfortunately, a voyage to England is 
 very apt to give the Kafir a swollen head, and to make him 
 unsuited to South African life. It is therefore not well to 
 send a few natives home, for such a voyage raises aspirations 
 that cannot be satisfied in South Africa. It also separates 
 the native too much from his fellows ; and the pampering 
 he receives at home by well-meaning but injudicious friends 
 proves a cruel kindness in the long run. Every here and 
 there a Kafir passes through the ordeal safely, but far more 
 are marred than improved by residence in Europe. It is 
 not fair to the Kafir to subject him to the process. To 
 send Kafirs to England for their education is not a practical 
 
182 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 solution of the difficulty : the natives must be educated 
 in their own country. 
 
 So important is this subject of arrest of faculty at 
 puberty that it must be referred to again in a later 
 chapter {see pp. 236-241). 
 
 A common complaint brought against educated Kafirs by 
 people who are truly interested in them is that they show 
 so little originality. They all conform to type, and merely 
 imitate white men. The cause of this is worth hunting for. 
 
 One of the most fundamental things about mental 
 activity is its spontaneity. We see this in the play of 
 children. The spontaneity of play has great value in 
 developing the sense of personality. In the kraal, custom 
 throws its spell over the children at an early age, and 
 spontaneity is thus checked, with the consequence that 
 the latent sense of personality is nipped in the bud. The 
 child goes to school and finds he must also conform to 
 type. Here too, any spontaneity or originality is stamped 
 out of the pupil by the teacher who conducts a large class. 
 All the children are set droning away at their lessons. If 
 much more kindergarten exercise was indulged in, the child 
 would get more scope for spontaneity, together with a 
 certain amount of discipline. Curiosity and imitation are 
 two principles that can be of infinite use in education, for 
 curiosity is very strong in savages, and leads to attention 
 and concentration of the mind. If work were made more 
 interesting to the children, and if kindergarten exercises 
 were used as a sort of break between the kraal-life and 
 the school-life, the curiosity and pleasure of the child would 
 greatly help the teacher. Tumultuous excitement is bad 
 from an educational point of view, as it dissipates attention ; 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 183 
 
 but great educationists have ever sought to win over the 
 cm'iosity of their pupils. Socrates would produce a pain in 
 his hearers while at the same time he let them see that he 
 intended slowly to remove ir and to turn it into a pleasure. 
 He thus riveted the attention of his wriggling victims, much 
 to their profit as well as the enjoyment of future ages. 
 
 By remembering that an idea has motor-force, we can see 
 how we may use the imitative faculty for our ends. Instead 
 of nagging at the children and telling them what not to do 
 (as so many native teachers do), we should show them the 
 right action, and would find that the children imitated 
 the action half unconsciously. But the white teacher 
 should decide as to what is to be imitated. Unfortunately, 
 the Kafir wants to lay down the law as to what he shall 
 be taught. In some institutions there is a rule that all 
 natives shall put in a certain number of hours' work 
 every day at industrial pursuits : but too often the Kafir 
 dislikes the regulation, and ofTers to pay something extra 
 to be let off the manual work. Some missionaries, most 
 weakly, permit the Kafirs to decide this question, and 
 feebly say that if they insisted on the manual labour, the 
 Kafijs would go to other institutions where their whims 
 would be given way to. Thus it comes about that the 
 taught dictate to the teachers and largely decide what is 
 to be learned. The desire to learn is sometimes very great, 
 and Kafirs often are willing to pay more for the education 
 of their children than are white people. But if missionaries 
 cannot combine to save the Kafir from himseK, then they 
 must be prepared for poor results, for if the Kafirs can 
 decide the type of education they are to receive, the results 
 will be lamentable. We must allow room for spontaneity, 
 
184 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 but must not mistake mere whim for that excellent quality. 
 The Kafir wants to imitate the last educated native he 
 saw, and if possible to surpass him in glitter. He loves 
 book-education best : it is this that he hankers after. 
 Unfortunately it is the missionary who has set the fashion, 
 for he is so anxious that the native should be able to read 
 the Bible. As a result, the fashion is stereot}']3ed in custom, 
 and the Kafir is bent on reading books, even though he 
 does not understand what they are all about. But book- 
 education does not open the mind of the native in a healthy 
 way, for there is an immense amount of work to be done, 
 as all scientific educationists know, before the mind can 
 profit by such education. The natives should be treated 
 as if they were mentally deficient, for that is what they 
 actually are. They should be trained by experts in the art 
 of curing feeble-mindedness and arrested mental develop- 
 ment. They cannot be truly compared with European 
 children, for they have been trained differently from the 
 cradle. When we have to train a feeble-minded child, we 
 have an immense amount of work to do before we can set 
 the child to book-work. The nervous system wants train- 
 ing and discipline, the nerve-centres need co-ordinating, 
 and the entire nature requires strengthening so as to 
 supply a solid base on which to build the future edifice. 
 In the case of those feeble-minded people, the Kafirs, all 
 this is largely neglected ; the pace is forced ; and book- 
 education leaves the higher powers of the mind vacant, 
 and the hands idle. 
 
 Yet when missionaries train the natives in industrial 
 pursuits, the colonists — especially " labour " colonists — 
 too often cry out and say that the white man's work will 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 185 
 
 be taken from him : they say it will lead to competition, 
 and that the native will cut out the white labourer. In 
 one breath such a colonist says the native is lazy, is no 
 good and cannot rise in the scale : in the next he says 
 the native will rise far too high and will be too active. 
 What does he mean ? Does he know himself what he 
 means ? As the Trade Unions develop in South Africa 
 they will more and more knock their heads against this 
 knotty problem, for to boycott the Kafir will be impos- 
 sible. To prevent the colonist from grumbling about the 
 way the Kafirs threaten to cut out the white working 
 man, some teachers are apt to withhold industrial traiiiing 
 and to give the native a book-education. But all in vain : 
 the colonist refuses to rejoice or lament no matter whether 
 the missionary pipes or mourns. As a result of this lop- 
 sided education the political agitator obtains ready to his 
 hand just the material he wants. He finds it easy to instil 
 into the mind that is empty, swept and garnished the 
 pernicious seed of discontent. 
 
 (3) We should advance slowly. Time is nothing to 
 savages : it has no value in their eyes, for they are scarcely 
 conscious of its flow. W^hile people are in a primitive stage 
 of culture they should be given ample time for the lessons 
 to soak into their minds. Hurried education does but 
 confuse simple-minded folk. There are many people, even 
 in England, who would not be benefited by advanced 
 education. George Gissing, basing his remarks on fact, 
 makes Henry Rycroft say of his excellent old servant : 
 " I find her one of the few women I have known who merit 
 the term excellent. She can read and write — that is all. 
 More instruction would, I am sure, have harmed her, for 
 
18G THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 it would have confused her natural motives without supply- 
 ing any clear ray of mental guidance." If there are 
 thousands of excellent people in England at that stage, 
 must there not be hundreds of thousands of Kafirs in the 
 same position ? But with a lack of discrimination, some 
 teachers insist on giving the Kafirs a wholly unsuitable 
 education that simply passes over their heads. Nay, it is 
 worse than that : the education these natives receive is 
 just sufficient to lead them to question their old categorical 
 imperative of clan-restraint, while it does not give them 
 any clear ray of guidance to take the place of the old 
 familiar rules of conduct. It will be ages before higher 
 education will supply the Kafir with any guidance in the 
 perplexities that a hasty education raises. If we give the 
 Kafirs a very simple and elementary education, we shall 
 not spoil them by making them unfit to remain good, 
 sensible members of Kafir society ; but the hastily and 
 half-educated mother will neglect her home and will want 
 to ape the white woman ; while the hastily educated men 
 will be fit for nothing. It is our impatient insistence in 
 cramming unsuitable knowledge into the thick skulls of 
 the Kafirs that guarantees a maximum of risk to us and 
 a minimum of good to the natives. If, instead of seeking 
 to hurry a few Kafirs through centuries of growth within 
 the space of a few years, we were to recognise the limits 
 of their capacity, and were to give a larger number of 
 Kafirs a more simple training, we should at least minimise 
 our risks. There are to-day thousands of simple-minded 
 Kafirs who are good, honest folk, and who serve their day 
 and generation according to their lights and capacities : 
 but we are ruining them by forcing them into our wretchedly 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 187 
 
 unsuitable European mould, and one day we shall turn 
 them out as useless, crippled members of society. A very 
 little simple education would improve them, but more 
 education would at the present stage undermine their 
 very virtues.* 
 
 (4) The training should be largely industrial. While 
 book-education seems in too many cases to close the mind, 
 or to open it in a distorted fashion, industrial work has 
 an excellent effect. I have sometimes given a native a 
 piece of wood and a few tools, and have allowed him to 
 experiment with them. It is striking to notice how contact 
 with such physical things opens the mind. The Kafirs 
 who work in iron (I refer to the tribal blacksmiths) are by 
 far the most intelligent of the natives. Their work has 
 educative value, for it makes them think. If a native is 
 set to learn a trade, it is impossible for him to make such 
 apparent profit out of his memory as he can do when 
 reading books. We have made too much flashy profit 
 out of the memory of the natives, and have in consequence 
 crippled their intelligence. The Kafirs who are educated 
 chiefly by books do not seem to lose their crudity in the 
 
 * Speaking of the failure of civilisation in Russia, Rousseau says : 
 " The Russians will never be civilised, because they have been civilised 
 too early. Peter had an imaginative genius ; he had not the true genius 
 that creates and produces anything from nothing. Some of his measures 
 were beneficial, but the majority were ill-timed. He saw that his people 
 were barbarous, but he did not see that they were unripe for civilisation ; 
 he wished to civilise them, when it was necessary only to discipline them. 
 He wished to produce at once Germans or Englishmen, when he should 
 have begun by making Russians ; he prevented his subjects from ever 
 becoming what they might have been, by persuading them that they 
 were what they were not. It is in this way that a French tutor trains 
 his pupil to shine for a moment in childhood, and then to be for ever a 
 nonentity."—" The Social Contract," Tozer's trans., p. 139. 
 
188 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 way natives do when they are taught by industrial methods. 
 The good memory of the Kafirs is an educational snare — 
 a sort of " booby-trap " for the unwary teacher. The 
 native scholar may get full marks in an examination 
 though he has but the remotest idea of the meaning of 
 what he repeats by rote. His education has not led to 
 the development of his logical, imaginative or intellectual 
 faculties. But the fellow cannot play tricks on nature 
 in the same way as he can on the too lenient and often 
 unobservant teacher. It is a striking fact that every one 
 in South Africa has a good word for the Trappists, who, 
 above all others, make use of industrial education. 
 
 There are many trades at which the natives can do 
 passably well. They make fairly good compositors in 
 the printer's trade, and take to the work well, for they 
 have infinite patience ; they can be made into moderately 
 good gardeners if suitably trained ; they can be trained 
 as blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, painters. The women 
 can be taught washing, ironing, sewing and other suitable 
 occupations. But in all these departments of labour they 
 need white supervision, a fact which seems to point to the 
 conclusion that more and more the white man will be a 
 highly paid controller and director of labour rather than 
 a moderately well-paid labourer. It would not be wise, 
 therefore, from this point of view, to flood the country 
 with unskilled white labourers. That policy will be but 
 the lapng up of gigantic evil for the days to come. As 
 soon as we frankly recognise the fact that the Kafirs are 
 going to rise in the scale of civilisation, and yet are not going 
 to become imitation white men, we shall be able to adopt 
 a sensible and far-seeing policy, and shall be saved from 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 189 
 
 the need of listening to home journals that, without 
 having adequate knowledge of all the conditions of the 
 country, press on South Africa theoretical and impossible 
 solutions of their difficulties. 
 
 (5) I should like to see every school holding an ignorance 
 class once every week. One of the gravest defects of the 
 present type of education given to the natives is the way 
 it leads to conceit as to mental capacity. As soon as a 
 native can read and write, he swaggers in a most aggravating 
 manner. Who has not seen one of these fellows (who has, 
 perhaps, been to a night school at Johannesburg or Durban) 
 as he takes up his position where he can attract public 
 attention ? The fellow, anxious to show all the wealth 
 of his wit in a moment, takes his book out of his pocket, 
 and, with prodigious show, points with his clumsy finger 
 to some word which he spells out aloud : he tries to read 
 a few words, every now and then looking up from his book 
 to see how many white people are remarking what a clever 
 fellow he is. Or he stands gazing at a shop windovv, and 
 reads out aloud any words he can find printed on show- 
 cards. He blocks the way while some white person wishes 
 to pass on the narrow pavement ; and, instead of thinking 
 himself an intolerable nuisance, he shows by his peacock 
 vanity that he imagines himself to be a paragon of 
 knowledge. If these people were taught regularly how 
 infinitely insignificant is their little stock of learning, it 
 might save them from making themselves so peculiarly 
 and unnecessarily offensive to white men. 
 
 In the ignorance class, the simplest things might be 
 taught to the Kafirs. They might have pointed out to 
 them how they were ignorant of even the superficial wonders 
 
190 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 to be found in the very weeds in their kraal. The simplest 
 lesson in botany might be given, not to teach the natives 
 that science, but to show them how infinite was their 
 ignorance of the commonest things. And aspects of nature 
 might be chosen in which the natives thought they saw 
 caprice : if the simplest of natural processes were explained 
 to them, they might come to see that Nature was orderly, 
 and that the belief in magic was based on defective observa- 
 tion. Hitherto the type of education given to the Kafir 
 has proved most ineffective for the removing of the belief 
 in magic. 
 
 At these ignorance classes we need only teach the Kafirs 
 the sort of thing an English child of ten years of age knows. 
 In fact it would be a good plan to tell the " educated " 
 natives that they were to be taught some of the things, 
 now hidden from them, that were known to small children 
 in Europe. Such ignorance classes would prepare the people 
 for more positive education later on ; for the newer know- 
 ledge would then no longer be some wholly incongruous 
 mixture taken from a book, the understanding of which 
 demands an immense amount of previous knowledge, and 
 which is at present unrelated to the rest of their informa- 
 tion. I know some highly intelligent " educated " natives 
 who have been open-mouthed with wonder when I explained 
 to them some elementary fact that a small English child 
 of ten would not need to be told. If instead of seeking 
 to educate the apex of the mental nature, we set to work 
 to enlighten the mind where its ignorance is densest and 
 most dangerous, we should be doing the Kafirs a good 
 turn, though we might not have any showy results to 
 point to. By ignorance classes we might break down the 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 101 
 
 pernicious idea that the native is the equal of the white 
 man. 
 
 In these ignorance classes the children might be taught 
 the outlines of their own history, and might thus come to 
 see how very backward and primitive they are. Their 
 mental poverty might be emphasised by telling the children 
 one of their own primitive nursery tales, and by contrasting 
 it with a more imaginative European fairy story. This 
 might stimulate the imagination. 
 
 (6) Latent aptitudes and capacity should be developed. 
 Who that has seen the children making small clay models 
 of oxen, horses, sheep and other animals, can doubt but 
 that much educational advantage could be taken of such 
 a natural aptitude ? The faculty of imitation is very 
 strong in the children, and this could be used along the 
 line of the plastic arts. Wood-carving affords an excellent 
 training method ; Kafirs take to it keenly. It is not that 
 the results would have any value : it is the 'process and 
 training that would be so important and advantageous. 
 The school should foster all the hobbies that, from the 
 nature of the case, cannot thrive in the kraal. Existing 
 industries, such as basket-making and pottery manufac- 
 ture, could easily be improved, but where does one find a 
 missionary who thinks this work worth the while ? 
 
 (7) We should teach the people the value of thrift. At 
 present an immense amount of grain is absolutely wasted 
 in a few weeks after harvesting, for enormous beer-drinks 
 are held with prodigal waste. No wonder the people find 
 " famine beginning to gnaw " before the next season's crop 
 is ripe. If we could but make the Kafirs realise the value 
 of a good crop, we might do much to foster improvements 
 
192 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 in methods of agriculture. We can generally appeal to 
 Kafirs through the stomach, though missionaries are apt 
 to regard that unruly member as beneath their notice. 
 
 Improvidence is one of the minor vices of even the highly 
 educated natives : as a result they arc for ever running 
 into debt : they have to borrow money as best they can 
 when in acvite difficulty, and not unnaturally find that 
 exorbitant rates of interest are demanded because the 
 security is uncertain. This last factor in the problem is 
 beyond their comprehension, for the educated natives are 
 now turning round — Dube has done so — and demand that 
 the Government should fix the limits as to the rate of 
 interest. The Kafirs have the solving of the problem in 
 their own hands, but they seem unable to overcome their 
 own improvidence. Did they but treat the cause, and did 
 the missionary (some missionaries are doing so) but help 
 them to do so, the trouble would soon vanish. But 
 educated Kafirs are apt to demand that the Government 
 should tinker at effects, while they themselves leave the 
 causes unchanged. There is thrift and thrift, and the 
 grace can become a curse ; but since the whole past training 
 of the Kafir prevents him from becoming niggardly, it 
 would be well to develop his nature so as to make the man 
 more provident. 
 
 It is, perhaps, useless to go further into details, for what 
 I am contending for is the adoption of rational principles 
 that might be worked out in detail with infinite variety 
 according to local need. I have tried to show that we are 
 bewildering the native, not by our naughtiness — that bug- 
 bear of the sentimentalist — but by the very complexity 
 of the benevolent civiHsing process. We expose savages 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 193 
 
 to the highly complex stimuli of individualism, labour 
 demands, economic pressure, violent legal changes, trade, 
 clothing, industries, a lofty spiritual religion : and to all 
 these we add a wholly unsuitable system of book-learning, 
 which in itself affords a complexity of stimuli of a varied 
 nature : and then we are surprised when colonists tell 
 us that the native is being spoiled. We are in danger of 
 causing spasm by the very complexity of the stimuli. If 
 we could but grasp the fact that there is no virtue in every- 
 thing that goes by the name of " education," but that the 
 value is to be determined by the suitability of the means to 
 reach the desired end, we should be saved on the one hand 
 from unreasoning dislike of education, and on the other 
 from the idolatry of books. 
 
 Most of us cherish the splendid faith that the freedom 
 of the Press is, on the whole, a good thing. Faith in the 
 future of the educational process in the case of the natives 
 is an equally heroic one. Those who are at present educat- 
 ing the Kafir seem to take it for granted that such education 
 will ever remain in their own hands ; and that they will 
 for ever and a day be able to decide what books the natives 
 shall, and what books they shall not, read. But one of 
 the very first effects of education is to make the natives 
 anxious to manage their own afiairs : they will soon demand 
 the right of directing their own education, and after that 
 the deluge. 
 
 As soon as Kafirs begin to publish their own literature, 
 and to organise their own educational societies, they will 
 adopt many most pernicious books. Missionaries may 
 have it all their own way now, and may flood the coimtry 
 with the " Pilgrim's Progress " and the " Peep of Day." 
 
 N 
 
194 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 But do they fondly imagine it will be ever thus ? Father 
 Waggett has told us how a Kafir chief puzzled his missionary 
 by a reference to Darwin's books. When the educative 
 process has advanced a little more, it will pay the destruc- 
 tive societies in Europe and America to flood the country 
 with cheap, agnostic, atheistical and anarchist literature. 
 The missionaries are but preparing the people to arrive at 
 a state in which they will be able to appreciate the most 
 clap-trap arguments against Christianity. When Kafirs 
 begin to discuss the Higher Criticism, the missionary will 
 be most embarrassed. To the natural race-hatred of the 
 raw native will be added the race-envy of the educated 
 Kafir. The Ethiopians have shown us something of the 
 sort of thing we may expect ; but this movement is mild 
 compared to other movements that must perforce spring 
 up — especially if we are too indifferent to prevent the 
 natives from going to America for special inoculation with 
 a virulent virus of race-hatred. Only the stupid, easy- 
 going, liberty-loving spirit of the Briton would sufier this 
 American peril. 
 
 Since it is the odd and the bizarre that especially appeal 
 to the half-educated native, the effect of unsuitable litera- 
 ture will probably be ruinous ; it will be much more 
 dangerous than in the case of Indian races, which have 
 more sense of balance and of proportion, to say nothing 
 of delicacy of thought and feeling. Clever natives will 
 catch at the idlest, and most irresponsible, and unpatriotic 
 of questions asked in the House of Commons by some 
 sentimentaHst, and will spread the silly questions into 
 every South African kraal. 
 
 Another danger looms ahead. We hear much about 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFIR 195 
 
 the " inconsequent " Kafir, which really is based on 
 little more than the inconsequence of the white person 
 who writes on a subject that he or she has not studied 
 carefully. But even if the Kafir be so inherently in- 
 consequent as is made out, our education must modify 
 that trait, for it is largely the result of ignorance, difference 
 as to data, point of view and lack of training. Our 
 education must of necessity be directed to the development 
 of the imaginative powers — so pregnant with good and 
 evil — of the Kafirs ; for if it deals chiefly with what Carlyle 
 called the arithmetical understanding, it will prove sterile ; 
 it will be found to be essential to plough deep into the 
 imagination of the people. When missionaries find this 
 out, education will produce strange effects. Unless we 
 have disciplined the man's nature, we shall develop the 
 imagination of the Kafir for one purpose, and he will, prob- 
 ably, use the quickened capacity for quite another. At 
 present the Kafirs have not the imaginative grasp neces- 
 sary to think-out the necessity for a carefully designed 
 plan for a long campaign. They have not yet the imagina- 
 tive power required to appreciate the disproportion between 
 black and white men. The raw Kafirs think in a vague 
 way that the white man can do anything by his strong 
 medicine and powerful magic. But even a little education 
 dispels this idea, and the slightly educated Kafir thinks 
 himself quite as capable as the developed white man. A 
 half-educated Kafir would gaily offer to run the British 
 Navy — or Empire, if necessary. We have therefore the 
 immediate danger that the half-educated Kafir may rise 
 in rebellion, in the vain idea that the white man can easily 
 be driven into the sea. The immediate result would be a 
 
196 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 massacre of the whites ; but this would be followed up by 
 a decimation of the native races, who are not yet ready 
 finally to expel the white man. But in the long run, as 
 the imagination becomes developed, a graver danger will 
 arise. War against the whites would then be thought 
 out seriously, and plans would be laid more carefully. The 
 result would be much more serious. It is some such 
 ultimate risk we must run if we educate the Kafirs. Our 
 greatest blunder would be to live in a fool's paradise and 
 to ignore the dangers connected with our policy. The 
 risks must be taken ; but, equally, they must not be 
 ignored. 
 
 It has been suggested by the friends of education that 
 it would be better for us to have to bargain with educated 
 rather than with uneducated natives ; that the educated 
 natives would listen to our proposals more readily ; that 
 we should get better terms out of them ; that we could 
 bring them to their senses more quickly. The argument 
 seems to betray a lack of insight into Kafir character. It 
 is probable that we should do much better for ourselves 
 if we were bargaining with the raw Kafirs, for they are 
 more moderate in their demands, more balanced in their 
 judgments, and more open to appeals to common sense 
 than are the educated Kafirs. 
 
 In so far as the educated Kafir has proved unsuitable, 
 it is partly our fault, and partly the fault of the man's 
 nature and antecedents. We cannot hope to make a silk 
 purse out of our sow's ear, and we had better give up the 
 attempt. When the Kafir receives a sensible education, 
 he shows a most unexpected capacity for responding to 
 our stimulus. If taught to work, he will show himself 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE KAFHl 197 
 
 industrious, as the confessions of Durban and Johannes- 
 burg merchants given above show. If he is given too much 
 book-learning by a stupid teacher, he will be utterly ruined 
 by his faulty education. The reason that so many white 
 men denounce native education lies largely in the fact that 
 they do not see the best results produced, for the mission- 
 aries keep their best Kafirs for their own purposes. But 
 even if we adopt the wisest methods of education, we shall 
 but build up for ourselves an edifice that may at any time 
 fall about our ears. We shall produce a class of reliable 
 Kafir workers who will, undoubtedly, replace some of the 
 inefficient, lazy, drunken Trade Union white men who 
 shirk a good day's work ; and shall thus foster race-antago- 
 nism of a very pronounced type ; for it will be the least 
 intelligent and least self-disciplined white men who will 
 cry out. A faulty education will lead to endless trouble, 
 and the more rapid the process of education the greater 
 the risks we run. Looking far ahead it is difficult to see 
 how we can stay the tide of education, or avoid the ultimate 
 clash that must ensue when educated Kafirs will form so 
 large a body that they will threaten to drive the white man, 
 either by peaceable or warlike means, out of the country. 
 It will be our democratic ideals, our individualism, and 
 our good intentions that will be our undoing. We 
 start by making the Kafirs the victims of our benevo- 
 lence, and shall probably end up by being ourselves the 
 victims of this policy. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN? 
 A BIOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 
 
 The final issue of the conflict arising from the clash of 
 Western Individualism with Kafir Socialism obviously 
 depends in a large measure on the capacity of the natives 
 to rise in the scale of civilisation — in metaphorical language, 
 on the ability of the Ethiopian to change his skin. Our 
 native policy will, naturally, be affected by our ideas on 
 this subject ; for if we are convinced that the Kafirs are 
 doomed either to extinction or to permanent degradation, 
 we shall adopt one type of policy : if we think they will 
 increase in numbers, and also in intelligence and culture, 
 we shall adopt another. The question is therefore intensely 
 practical ; and a mistake in presuppositions will be fatal. 
 
 Of all answer-begging questions, the words at the head 
 of this chapter would be difficult to surpass. To ask the 
 question is a picturesque method of stifling all discussion 
 by an appeal to the gallery. Like jesting Pilate, the man 
 who asks the question stays not for an answer. 
 
 The words ask three very different questions : First, 
 Can the Ethiopian become a European ? Secondly, Can 
 the individual Ethiopian rise immensely higher than the 
 average of his race succeeds in doing to-day ? Thirdly, 
 Can the race evolve to something vastly different from 
 what it is at present ? We shall have to take these three 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? IDO 
 
 questions in order. But before we do so, we need to ask 
 a preliminary question, Will the Backward race survive in 
 contact with the Forward one ? This question is most 
 important, for many races have died out when brought 
 into contact with European civilisation ; and unless it 
 seems probable that the Kafirs will survive, it is not 
 much use to discuss the question of their capacity to 
 change and develop. 
 
 In problems of racial contact there are but four possi- 
 bilities. These have been summed up by Mr. Bryce in his 
 " Romanes Lecture " as follows : " When two races differing 
 in strength, that is to say, either in numbers or in physical 
 capacity, or in material development, or in military 
 resources, come into political or social contact, some one 
 of four possible results follows. Either the weaker race 
 dies out before the stronger ; or it is absorbed into the 
 stronger, the latter remaining practically unaffected ; or 
 the two become commingled into something different from 
 what either was before ; or, finally, the two continue to 
 dwell together unmixed, each preserving a character of its 
 own." * Let us glance at each of these four possible results 
 and see which will most probably hold in the case of the 
 Kafirs. Let us consider first the possibility of the weaker 
 race becoming absorbed into the stronger. 
 
 This can only take place by intermarriage. In the case 
 of Kafirs and Europeans any such conmiingling of stocks 
 appears to lead, not to a loss of Kafir character, but to a 
 third type of thing, that tertium quid the half-caste. 
 Opinion is divided as to whether in such hybrids characters 
 blend or tend to segregate : but even if it should be found 
 * Loc. cit. pp. 10, 11. 
 
200 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 that they do segregate, it would be practically impossible 
 to prevent the constant appearance of fresh hybrids. We 
 do not enter on the stage of prophecy when we say that 
 the Kafirs will not be absorbed into the European popula- 
 tion and lose their distinctive elements. We have experi- 
 ment in the past, and not mere unsupported speculation 
 as to the future, on which to base our conclusion. 
 
 The second theoretical possibility is that both the races 
 may lose their distinctive elements, and may blend, and 
 so become fused into a conglomerate type intermediate 
 between the original stocks. Mendelism may, or may not, 
 have much to say as to the physical aspect of a problem of 
 this nature ; but when we note that there is an element of 
 sentiment in the question, and when we further remember 
 that this element of sentiment has for centuries kept the 
 races from intermarriage, we are bound to conclude that, 
 with the increased friction that now obtains owing to the 
 clash of racial interests, there is no practical possibility 
 that the problem will be solved by the elimination of the 
 European and the Kafir in the formation of an all-embracing 
 half-caste population. 
 
 We are therefore left with but two possible endings of 
 the problem. Either one of the two races will be exter- 
 minated by disease or war, or else both will survive and live 
 side by side with differing aims and ideals. To believe that 
 the two races should permanently live on side by side 
 seems at first sight a splendid faith too difficult to hold. 
 We therefore postpone it for the present, and ask what 
 chance there is of the Kafir's dying out in the blighting 
 presence of civilisation. 
 
 As we look round the world we see aboriginal races 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 201 
 
 dying out in the presence of civilisation ; we note how the 
 ship that carries the missionary and the Bible into the 
 South Seas also carries the germs of diseases that decimate 
 the natives. We see the Hottentots and the Bushmen 
 vanishing before the advance of the Kafirs or of civilisa- 
 tion, and we want to know whether the Kafirs will follow 
 the example of all such races. 
 
 Disease, Drink and Clothing form Civilisation's trinity 
 of evil, in so far as the physical well-being of most savage 
 races is concerned. European diseases Idll far more savages 
 than European rifles. There is no lack of evidence on this 
 point. For example, R. L. Stevenson wTites : " The tribe 
 of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred 
 when small-pox came and reduced them by one-fourth. 
 Six months later a woman developed tubercular consump- 
 tion ; the disease spread like wild-fire about the valley, 
 and in less than a year two survivors, a man and a woman, 
 fled from the newly created solitude. . . . Early in the 
 year of my visit ... a first case of phthisis appeared in a 
 household of seventeen persons, and by the end of August, 
 when the tale was told me, one soul survived, a boy who 
 had been absent at his schooling." 
 
 We see in this case what frightful havoc an imported 
 disease causes in races that have never known it 
 before. Dr. Archdall Reid, from whose " Principles of 
 Heredity " I have taken this extract, says : " The Caribs 
 of the West Indies are almost extinct. The Red Indians 
 are going fast, as are the aborigines of cold and temperate 
 South America. The Tasmanians have gone. The Austra- 
 lians and the Maoris are but a dwindling remnant. As 
 surely as the trader with his clothes or the missionary with 
 
202 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 his church and schoolroom appears, the work of extermina- 
 tion begins on the Polynesian Islands. Throughout the 
 whole vast extent of the New World the only pure aborigines 
 who seem destined to persist are those who live remote 
 in mountains or in the depths of fever-haunted forests, 
 where the white man is unable to build the towns and cities 
 with which he has studded the cooler and more ' healthy ' 
 regions of North and South." * 
 
 It matters but little what the newly imported disease 
 is, so long as it is lethal. In 1876 some forty thousand 
 of a population of one hundred and fifty thousand in 
 Fiji were killed off by measles. The trouble, which with 
 us is but a moderately mild children's disease, becomes 
 a devastating plague in countries where it is introduced 
 for the first time. Small-pox and whooping-cough can 
 tell the same tale. Wherever a lethal disease makes its 
 appearance for the first time in a virgin soil, the loss of 
 life is enormous. 
 
 While there may be much that is still obscure in connec- 
 tion with the varying capacity of different races to resist 
 disease, a few main principles seem to be fairly well estab- 
 lished. It is impossible in this place to go fully into the 
 scientific aspect of the matter ; those who wish to do so may, 
 as a preliminary, study Dr. Reid's book on " Heredity," 
 and especially his chapters on Evolution against Disease, 
 The Origins of Zimotic Disease, and Bacteria as Empire 
 Builders. With regard to ihe special problem of the 
 Kafirs, it may be briefly summarised that when a new 
 disease is imported into a region where it has hitherto 
 been unknown, a certain number of the people succumbs 
 * Op. cit. p. 151. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 203 
 
 at once to the disease, while a certain number is able to 
 resist it. Those least fit to persist under the changed 
 conditions of environment die off, and fail to reproduce 
 their stock : those who resist the disease best have the 
 most offspring ; and thus, in course of time, through the 
 action of natural selection, the race becomes able to resist 
 the malady. In England every person is exposed to infec- 
 tion from tubercular trouble,* and yet, owing to our past 
 familiarity with the disease, we are moderately capable of 
 resisting it, or have such resisting power that we are able 
 to recover from slight attacks. An enormous number of 
 people have some slight tubercular lesions. Professor Sir 
 Clifford Allbutt recently stated in an address : " I am guilty 
 of no extravagance when I suggest that one-third of you 
 who hear me, wittingly or unwittingly, are, or have been, 
 infected with tubercle." At the other end of the scale 
 come the races of the New World, which, as we have seen, 
 suffer the most fearful havoc when phthisis first appears 
 in their midst. Negroes have not had so much experience 
 of the disease as have Europeans, but they have had 
 much more experience of it than have the races of the New 
 World. Consequently they come between the English 
 and the inhabitants of the New World in their capacity 
 to resist the disease. Says Dr. Reid : "No colony of 
 Africans has ever succeeded in Europe or Asia, where the 
 mortality from tuberculosis grows so great that the immi- 
 grants soon become extinct. Nevertheless, even in West 
 African forests negroes have undergone some evolution 
 
 * In the case of pulmofmry tubercular trouble, 39'9 in every 10,000 
 persons died of this disease in 1838 ; 27"7 in every 10,000 in 1855 ; 11 "5 
 per 10,000 in 1906. The diminishing rate is significant. 
 
204 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 against tuberculosis. It was not enough to enable them 
 to persist in densely peopled parts of Europe and Asia, 
 but it was enough to enable them to persist under the 
 conditions they found in the islands and on the main- 
 land of America. In America, tuberculosis, as compared 
 to its prevalence in Southern Europe and Asia, has as 
 yet spread but little. The slaves were taken to the warmer 
 parts of the country and employed mainly in agriculture. 
 They had a special start, and were placed under conditions 
 that grew worse only very slowly as the density of the 
 population slowly increased. As a result they underwent 
 evolution, and are now able to persist even in towns and 
 cities of the United States, though, as their high mortality 
 shows, with difficulty." * 
 
 Phthisis has been taken as an example, but many other 
 diseases, such as small-pox or measles, might just as well 
 have been chosen. As Dr. Reid says : " In 1841 Catlin 
 wrote of the United States : ' Thirty millions of white men 
 are now scuffling for the goods and luxuries of life over the 
 bones of twelve millions of red men, six millions of whom 
 have fallen victims to small-pox.' " "j* 
 
 And almost any other race might have been chosen to 
 illustrate the principle. Thus : " In New Zealand phthisis 
 has made frightful ravages among the natives, and has 
 been one of the chief causes of the gradual extinction of 
 
 that race." | 
 
 * Op. cit. p. 184. t Op. cit. p. 182. 
 
 X Hirsch, quoted by Dr. Reid, op. cit. p. 147. It is, perhaps, not fair 
 to Dr. Reid to quote from his pages on this subject without at the same 
 time giving the following passage, which lies at the base of his whole 
 argument : 
 
 " There is not an iota of evidence that any race whatever has under* 
 gone degeneration through the action of any disease, nor that the acquire- 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 205 
 
 Whether or not the Kafirs, who have had a moderate 
 acquaintance with phthisis, will die off from the disease, 
 seems, therefore, to depend on the local condition of the 
 environment ; where that is favourable, and where the 
 daily occupation takes the Kafirs into the open air, the 
 natives can persist : where the surrounding population is 
 too great, or where the conditions of work are unfavour- 
 able, and where the natives are deprived of sunlight and 
 of fresh air, the chance is that they will suffer extremely. 
 Dr. Reid quotes from Bartolacci's work on Ceylon as 
 follows : " It is a remarkable fact that of 9000 Kafirs 
 (negroes from the East Coast of Africa) who had been 
 imported at various times by the Dutch Government into 
 Ceylon, and had been drafted into regiments, scarcely a 
 trace of their descendants remains ; and they would 
 certainly not be recognised at all among the present popula- 
 
 ment of immunity during any number of generations has resulted in an 
 evolution of inborn immunity. On the contrary, every race that has 
 been exposed to a lethal disease is resistant to that particular disease 
 precisely in proportion to its past experience of it. When the disease is 
 one against which immimity cannot be acquired, the race has imdergone 
 an evolution of inborn immunity ; thus Europeans who have suffered 
 severely from tuberculosis for thousands of years resist infection by it, or 
 when infected recover from it more easily than African negroes who have 
 suffered less, and much more easUy than American Indians, who until 
 lately had no experience of the disease. When the disease is one against 
 which immunity can be acquired, the race has undergone an evolution of 
 the power of acquiring immunity, never of inborn immunity ; thus 
 English children, whose race has long been afflicted by measles and 
 whooping-cough, contract those maladies as easily as Polynesians to 
 whom they were famiHarised only durhig last century. But whereas 
 English children, as a rule, recover readily, Polynesians perish in great 
 numbers. ^\Tien the disease is non-lethal no effect on the race can be 
 observed. Thus Polynesians are infected as easily and recover as easily, 
 but not more easily, than Englishmen, from chicken-pox." — Op. cit. 
 p. 135. 
 
206 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 tion of the island. In the years 1813 and 1810 the British 
 Government imported three or fom: thousand negroes from 
 Mozambique into Ceylon to form into regiments ; of 
 these, in December 1820, there were left just 440, including 
 male descendants." And in a second reference to this 
 quotation, Dr. Reid adds : "All the rest had perished 
 mainly from tuberculosis." * 
 
 Now, the mining industry at Johannesburg supplies the 
 worst possible conditions for the Kafirs with regard to their 
 resistance to tuberculosis. The men who, owing to contact 
 with Europeans, are exposed to infection, work under- 
 ground ; they come up perspiring profusely, and then sit 
 in cotton blankets in the wind so as to cool down. As a 
 result they are peculiarly susceptible to pulmonary com- 
 plaints and to infection from phthisis, which is also com- 
 plicated by " miner's phthisis," brought on by the irritating 
 dust derived from rock-drilling. The Kafirs, who are igno- 
 rant of sanitation, expectorate freely, and thus become 
 a source of increased danger to themselves and to the 
 white population on the Rand, The natives suffering from 
 the disease go home to their kraals and spread it every- 
 where. It is possible that the bacteria become especially 
 virulent when they find a suitable medium in which to 
 propagate themselves. The resident medical attendant 
 at an Open-air Home in Natal assured me a short time 
 ago that he noticed that Europeans who contracted the 
 disease in South Africa nearly always succumbed to it, 
 for in such cases it seemed to be especially virulent ; while 
 those who visited South Africa with tuberculosis contracted 
 in England seemed to do remarkably well. If for a 
 
 * Op. cit. pp. 141, 149. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 207 
 
 moment we may consider the problem of imported labour 
 at Johannesburg from a non-party point of view, we 
 must heartily wish we could find some substitute for 
 Kafir labour on the Rand. We must not forget, more- 
 over, that even if we manage to reduce the enormous 
 death-rate of Kafij labourers at the mines, it does not 
 follow that all is going well. We may still be sending 
 back to the kraals thousands of Kafirs suffering from 
 tuberculosis. 
 
 By seeking to introduce a great number of cheap white 
 labourers to work alongside the native miners, we should 
 probably do much to spread tuberculosis all over the 
 country ; and since the disease when contracted in South 
 Africa seems to be so fatal, we should be doing a grievous 
 wrong to the colonists. But in this matter, as in so many 
 others of vital importance, we are in need of fuller and more 
 reHable statistics. Nothing has been said about the very 
 obvious danger of our introducing Bovine Tuberculosis 
 by the cattle we import to improve the stock in Kafir 
 cattle-kraals. Yet we must never shut our eyes to the 
 danger. 
 
 t Tuberculosis does not appear to have affected the birth- 
 rate of the Kafirs to any great extent, nor have the natives 
 become alive to the insidious dangers to their health that 
 they meet at the mines. When they leave the mine infected 
 with tubercle, and return to their open-air life in the kraal, 
 they may recover, though with difficulty. But they must 
 infect others during their convalescence. When the con- 
 sumptive natives remain on at Johannesburg as house- 
 boys, the case is even worse, for the crowding of a number 
 of such servants in small and ill-ventilated rooms — and 
 
208 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 how ill-ventilated they are is beyond telling * — must make 
 them a source of infection to the European population. 
 The moment the Kafirs awake to the fact that Johannes- 
 burg is a death-trap — and the native editors will make a 
 point of using this fact to show how wicked the white 
 man is — there will be an end to native recruiting. 
 
 We are now ready to answer the question as to whether 
 we can expect the Kafirs living in their own country to 
 be swept off by our imported diseases. We find that they 
 have been for so long in contact with us that they have 
 developed a certain stock that is moderately well — but 
 only moderately well — able to resist our imported diseases. 
 Small-pox still causes considerable loss of life, but the 
 natives on the whole are sensible enough to see the value 
 of vaccination, though they naturally dislike submitting 
 to any small operation at the hands of a white doctor. If 
 some native editor were but worked upon by some anti- 
 vaccination faddist, the result might be deplorable ; for 
 it would be easy to appeal to every particle of superstition 
 and fear of the white man so as to get the natives to refuse 
 to submit to vaccination. 
 
 The natives showed that they were peculiarly susceptible 
 to plague, t when the country was threatened some time 
 ago, and it might seem that some such disease might 
 decimate the Kafirs. But the white man will do so much 
 
 * It is quite a common thing for such house-boys to paste strips 
 of brown paper round the windows so as to keep out all draughts. 
 Three boys may occupy the room ; but as often as not they have 
 three or four friends sleeping with them. To make the room warmer, 
 the natives i)ut mats or old coats up against the door, and so stop all 
 ventilation. There is need for strict municipal regulations on this 
 point. 
 
 j Possibly this was due simply to unhygienic environment. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 209 
 
 to prevent such diseases as plague, or cholera, or sleeping- 
 sickness from taking hold of the country that we may 
 reasonably hope no such diseases will ever get the 
 chance of decimating the natives. The one real danger 
 lies in the possible spread of tuberculosis through the 
 crowding of natives at the Rand. 
 
 To bring home once more to the reader the serious- 
 ness of the question, I will give another quotation from 
 Dr. Reid : " The British conquest of North America and 
 Australia resembles the Saxon conquests of Great Britain. 
 The natives have been exterminated within the area of 
 settlement. It is in sharp contrast to their conquests in 
 iisia and Africa. Both in the Old World and in the New 
 the subjugation of the natives was accompanied by many 
 wars and much bloodshed, and probably the conflicts in 
 the former were more prolonged and destructive than 
 those in the latter. But in no part of the Old World 
 have the British exterminated the natives. They do not 
 supplant them, they merely govern them. Southern Asia 
 and East and West Africa are defended by malaria. The 
 British cannot colonise them,* and the natives have under- 
 gone such evolution against tuberculosis that they are 
 capable, under favourable conditions, like the American 
 slaves, of resisting the hard conditions imposed on them 
 by modern civilisation. In South Africa, where there is 
 little malaria, Europeans share the land with the natives, 
 but the latter are likely to remain an overwhelming majority. 
 If history teaches any lesson with clearness it is this, that 
 conquest to be permanent must be accompanied with 
 
 * We may, however, possibly destroy the seed of this disease even if 
 it takes too long to improve the soil of the white races. 
 
 O 
 
210 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 extermination ; otherwise in the fulness of time the natives 
 expel or absorb the conquerors." * 
 
 The second of the evil trinity that accompanies civilisa- 
 tion is dress ; and while it is accountable for a vast 
 amount of illness in the case of the Kafirs, it does not 
 seem appreciably to diminish the native population. 
 The trade in cheap cotton blankets is a most lucrative 
 one, especially to the English manufacturer : but it 
 is responsible for not a little Kafir mortality. In this, 
 as in other matters, the natives will soon learn to take 
 better care of themselves, and much of the evil that 
 results from the importation of European clothing will 
 be overcome. 
 
 There remains then but to discuss the question as to 
 whether the natives may not be exterminated by drink. 
 It is certain that, if we were to withdraw the restrictions 
 about liquor, an immense number of natives would drink 
 themselves to death in a comparatively short period. 
 Kafirs have practically no self-control in this matter. 
 When at a beer-drink it takes a prodigious quantity of 
 the native small beer to make the men drunk. The natives 
 do not become quarrelsome on the first twelve hours' 
 debauch, though they drink gallons of beer. It is on the 
 second or third day of continuous drinking (with alternate 
 periods of perspiring in the sun) that beer-drinking leads to 
 serious intoxication. When the natives get raw spirits, they 
 therefore drink the most disastrous quantities, and become 
 so much the slaves of the drink habit that resistance is out 
 of the question. I have frequently been in traders' stores 
 up-country when natives have come in, and, not being able 
 * Op. cit. pp. 185, 186. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 211 
 
 to buy brandy, have bought large quantities of eau-de- 
 cologne, which they swallowed by the bottleful on the spot. 
 The removal of the restrictions as to the sale of liquor 
 would lead not only to innumerable deaths, but also to a 
 falling off of the birth-rate. 
 
 A moderate amount of well-diluted alcohol seems to 
 suit the natives very well. Possibly they would be better 
 off without it ; but it is utopian to ask them to discontinue 
 its use. They are accustomed to it from of old, and their 
 native beer seems to be wholesome and to have some slight 
 antiscorbutic properties. It is both food and drink, for 
 it is something hke a thin gruel. But the introduction 
 of European spirits leads to hopeless consequences. The 
 restriction of the sale of liquor to the natives is therefore 
 our very sheet-anchor, and we must not listen to educated 
 natives like Dube, who demand the removal of liquor 
 restrictions. On no consideration whatever must existing 
 restrictions be tampered with unless we want to kill oS 
 the native races. If our liquor restrictions were removed, 
 the natives might exterminate themselves rapidly, and 
 so terminate the Native Problem. But it is impossible to 
 regard such an ending as in any true sense a " solution " 
 of the difficulty. It would be a national crime for us to 
 allow such a disaster : and I would here repeat the warning 
 given in an earlier chapter, namely, that a wide extension 
 of the franchise must one day lead to a lessening, or removal, 
 of liquor restrictions. 
 
 Those who will study Dr. Reid's book on " Heredity " 
 will find an illuminating chapter on narcotics and drink. 
 Some of his conclusions are strongly opposed by men as 
 well informed as Dr. Reid, but there is, to say the least, 
 
212 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 very much evidence that points to the fact that the races 
 living round the Mediterranean have eliminated by natural 
 selection those strains in their stock that are peculiarly 
 susceptible to drink. Travelling up the East Coast, I was 
 talking to the Austrian doctor on board, and he told me 
 that the sailors employed by the Austrian Lloyd Company 
 were selected from races along the coasts of the Adriatic, 
 and that none of them ever drank to excess. When asked 
 by British travellers to " have a drink," they invariably 
 replied that they did not care to drink between meals. 
 Their ancestors had, through heavy drinking, apparently 
 weeded out all the strains in their stock that were peculiarly 
 susceptible to the charms of alcohol. This method may 
 be the only final solution of the drink problem, but we can 
 scarcely submit the Kafirs to the process. In England 
 the process of weeding out of our bad stock is going on 
 now, but in South Africa it has not fairly commenced 
 amongst the Kafirs. The initial stages of such drastic 
 natural selection mean the decimation of a people, and 
 a race has to be under favourable conditions if it 
 is to recuperate itself and propagate healthy stock. 
 We cannot hope that the Kafir will become able to 
 drink with impunity for at least a dozen generations, 
 and therefore we may conclude that there can be no 
 relaxation of the liquor laws in our days or in the days 
 of our grandchildren. 
 
 When we combine together the progress of science, the 
 moral consciousness of the forward race, and the Kafir's 
 past acquaintance with, and consequent capacity for 
 resisting, disease, we must but conclude that the natives 
 are not likely to die out from the attacks of imported 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 213 
 
 diseases. The birth-rate does not seem to be appreciably 
 affected by the contagious diseases brought in by the white 
 men. We conclude therefore that the Native Problem 
 will not be solved by the dying out of the natives ; if the 
 Kafirs are to vanish, it must be through military exter- 
 mination. There is left but one possible ending of the 
 problem, and that is, that the whites and blacks have got 
 to live on together in South Africa as best they may, 
 without any intermingling of stocks. If the two races 
 do not live together amicably, either the whites will have 
 to exterminate the natives by war, or the blacks will, by 
 sheer increase of numbers, squeeze out the Europeans. 
 It is therefore well worth discussing the capacity of the 
 Kafirs for improvement. 
 
 We are ready now to pass on to a consideration of the 
 three questions contained in the ambiguous words. Can 
 the Ethiopian change his skin ? We proceed to discuss 
 these questions in order. 
 
 (1) Can tJie Ethiopian become a European ? — When we 
 seek to put all race-prejudice aside and examine the 
 capacity of the Kafir to absorb and assimilate Western 
 civilisation in such a way that he shall practically cease 
 to exhibit the peculiarities of the negro, and shall become 
 Western in thought and feeling, I think we must admit, 
 from cases before our very faces to-day, that he can appa- 
 rently sometimes do this to a much greater extent than 
 is thought by most people to be possible. But yet there 
 seems to remain something — is it in the texture of the 
 man's mind ? — that prevents him, even in the best cases, 
 from becoming altogether Western. It is doubtful whether 
 he can quite adopt the European standpoint in anything, 
 
214 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 for he seems to lack that indefinable something -which, after 
 all, makes so much difierence even in the best instances. 
 There is lacking a subtle quality, illusive and difficult to 
 define, that somehow or other makes us say, 
 
 The little more, and how much it is ; 
 The little less, and what worlds away. 
 
 And it is difficult to believe that this illusive x could 
 be gained — I doubt whether it could ever be gained — 
 without a greatly preponderating loss of some essentially 
 good Kafij qualities. I am talking of to-day's practical 
 politics, and do not pause at present to ask whether this 
 difficulty might not be overcome in, say, ten more centuries 
 of help from the white man. At present the individual 
 Kafir may occasionally rise very high, and yet he does not 
 cease to be a Kafir. Progress is a social product, and it 
 may be that in the absence of the " evolution of his environ- 
 ment" no educated Kafir has yet enjoyed the stimulating 
 atmosphere, formed by a sufficient number of his equally 
 educated and congenial fellows, which might enable him 
 to rise to greater heights. And I do not think that it 
 would be a good thing to place a few Kafirs in a hothouse 
 so that they might outstrip the rest of their race in their 
 mental growth. 
 
 The average colonist feels that " Exeter Hall " ambitions 
 and methods lead but to a coating of Western veneer over 
 the savage nature. He asks what can be the good of such 
 an accretion of an unabsorbable civilisation which leaves 
 the savage still a savage at heart. Even in the preliminary 
 stages, this philanthropic elevating of the Kafir tends to 
 make the most immature native think he is equal to the 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 215 
 
 white man. While a few exceptional Kafirs have advanced 
 surprisingly high, the average educated Kafir has, of course, 
 not in the slightest degree changed his nature : he has 
 only added to it some highly unsuitable and discordant 
 elements of a very superficial character. He has put on 
 something over his skin — usually dirty clothes — rather 
 than made a change beneath it. But though we recognise 
 that this has been the result of our philanthropy in the 
 great majority of cases, we need not jump to the conclusion 
 that the few exceptional natives who have been wisely 
 handled, and who have enjoyed most favourable environ- 
 ment, have not advanced as far beyond the average Kafir 
 as they are yet behind the average white man. And, once 
 more, it does not follow because we believe the Kafir to 
 be capable of advancing very far toward Western ideals 
 that therefore it is wise for us to help a few natives to do 
 so at once. It may be better to help on a larger number 
 to a lesser degree. What may be good for the individual, 
 viewed in the abstract, and in isolation from his race- 
 duties, may be bad for him when this iromensely important 
 aspect of the matter is considered. But because one does 
 not wish to see a few Kafirs educated far beyond the bulk 
 of their fellows, one need not deny that they are capable 
 of such development. And it is important to recognise 
 what I beUeve may safely be called a fact, namely, that 
 the Kafir cannot as yet advance much if left to himself 
 without European guidance. WTien free from that guid- 
 ance he will ape the white man in mere externals ; and 
 this can be stated definitely, not by appealing to analogy, 
 and by showing that it is what has actually occurred in 
 Hayti where Black rules White, but, because the Kafir 
 
216 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 in South Africa has actually done so when left to himself. 
 The Ethiopian movement shows how utterly superficial, 
 pernicious, and bizarre is the civilisation of the natives 
 who break loose from European guidance. 
 
 I, for one, am not inclined to blame the colonist for 
 being sceptical as to the Kafir's capacity to develop. 
 Very much has been done by friends of the Kafirs to 
 break down colonial belief in the capacity of the Kafir, 
 The renowned Dr. Philip was a very pugnacious man, 
 and he fought the colonists most rigorously — not to say 
 cruelly — about the Kafir, In Mr, Theal's words, he 
 " laid down a theory that the coloured races were in all 
 respects, except education, mentally equal to the European 
 colonists, and that they were wrongfully and cruelly 
 oppressed by the white people and the Government. 
 With this as a professed motive for exertion, he stood 
 forth as their champion." * Later on in life he found 
 out how disastrous had been his advocacy — even from 
 the standpoint of Kafij interests. " After he had enjoyed 
 almost unlimited political influence, and had seen the 
 schemes which he devised result in bloodshed and con- 
 fusion, he became a comparatively gentle old man, and 
 abandoned politics," | He was but an example of the 
 man who willed the good, and yet who thereby wrought 
 the bad. Apart from the immediate suffering his mis- 
 taken philanthropy brought to the Kafirs, he did very 
 much, by his intemperate advocacy of the natives, to 
 wreck colonial behef in the capacity of the Kafirs to 
 advance at all. That the average colonist should, in the 
 
 * " History of South Africa," vol, 1795-1834, pp, 345, 34G. 
 t Op. cit. p. 345. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 217 
 
 face of the extreme advocacy of Kafir equality to the 
 whites, run to the opposite extreme, and say that the 
 Kafir is scarcely capable of any improvement at all, 
 is very natural and very human, even if it is not fully 
 accurate. 
 
 In answer to our first question, I should be tempted to 
 reply that there is good evidence for saying that while the 
 individual Kafir can, nay, does now and then in exceptional 
 cases under suitable white guidance, reach a surprisingly 
 close approximation to the European, yet at present he 
 always falls short, and moreover falls short in some strange 
 way that makes it quite impossible for the most kindly 
 critic to regard him as the equal of the white man. In 
 this sense the Ethiopian, probably, can never change 
 his skin. 
 
 (2) Can the individual Kafir rise immensely higher than 
 the average of his race ? — It is certainly a pity that our race- 
 prejudice should sometimes hide from us the fact that it 
 is immensely to our interest that the Ethiopian should 
 change his skin. Unless he can do so, it will be a very 
 bad look-out for the white man in South Africa : if the 
 native is to remain, for example, as ruthless as he was 
 during the Border Wars, if he is to foster for ever 
 the hatred of the white man that he now imdoubtedly 
 cherishes, if he is to continue to become top-heavy and 
 unbalanced when educated, then the fate of South 
 Africa is sealed, for it is only a matter of time before the 
 whites will either be massacred or squeezed out of the 
 country. But if the Ethiopian can change his skin there 
 is hope. 
 
 It is most interesting to read what an American negro 
 
218 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 has to say on the latent capacity of the black races to rise 
 in the scale of civilisation, Du Bois, at least so I have been 
 told by an old friend of his, is more white than black, and 
 yet glories far more in his negro than in his European 
 inheritance. Perhaps it is not fair to take him as a specimen 
 of the height to which the average Kafir may hope to 
 attain. Yet it is instructive to read what he has written 
 as to the capacity of the negro to rise. 
 
 " The silently growing assumption of this age is that 
 the probation of races is past, and that the backward races 
 of to-day are of proven inefiiciency, and are not worth 
 saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples 
 irreverent towards Time, and ignorant of the deeds of 
 men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily 
 possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to 
 prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such a 
 dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea 
 of blonde races ever leading civilisation. So woefully 
 unorganised is sociological knowledge that the meaning 
 of progress and the meaning of ' swift ' and ' slow ' in 
 human doing and the limits of human perfectibility are 
 veiled, unanswerable sphinxes on the shore of science." * 
 Yet we are sometimes told by colonists in South Africa 
 that the individual Kafir comes of a bad stock, and " in- 
 herits " no civilised traits or " characters," and therefore 
 cannot make up for his hopeless handicap. It will be 
 interesting to seek to trace where the truth lies in this 
 matter. 
 
 Those who have studied recent developments of biology 
 do not need to be told that an organism has great, and 
 
 * W. E. Du Bois, " The Souls of Black Folk," p. 262. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 219 
 
 often unsuspected, capacity for responding to suitable 
 stimuli. Nature is fuller of resources than our imagination, 
 or the lack of it, would sometimes lead us to believe ; and 
 we are coming to perceive that the individual can respond 
 to stimuli far more than we had thought. There are 
 three factors to be considered in all questions of possible 
 progress in the animal kingdom : these are heredity, 
 capacity for variation, and the power of the environment 
 to modify the organism : but for the present let us con- 
 fine ourselves to the subject of heredity, for we shall 
 approach the two other subjects at a later stage of our 
 argument. 
 
 Popular thought on the subject of heredity has been so 
 misled by the exuberant, though inexact, fancy of novelists 
 that people are slow to listen to and grasp the facts that 
 have been observed by trained biologists. It is popularly 
 thought that we " inherit " our culture and civilisation 
 through parents who pass on to their children the " modifi- 
 cations " they have acquired during life. The word 
 " inherit " is used in the vaguest way by popular writers, 
 and would cover the inheritance of a quick temper as well 
 as that of money or lands : but in biological circles the 
 word has a very definite connotation which must be 
 explained. The " characters " of an organism are divided 
 into two distinct categories. On the one hand we find 
 inborn characters which are passed on from generation 
 to generation by the germ-plasm, and on the other hand 
 the modifications or acquired characters that are the result 
 of individual use or of the environment. These acquired 
 characters are the result of the play of the environment, 
 or of personal habits, on the stock of previously inborn 
 
220 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 characters. All inborn characters take their origin from 
 the germ, while all — or nearly all — acquired characters 
 seem to be acquired by the individual by his own direct 
 action, and are but modifications of inborn characters. 
 It is becoming more and more clear that — at least in 
 animals — acquired characters — or " use-acquirements " or 
 " modifications " as they are often called — cannot at the 
 present stage of evolution be passed on by heredity. The 
 term " heredity " is therefore used to connote the pass- 
 ing on of characters by the germ-cells. Civilisation and 
 culture are use-acquirements and not inborn characters : 
 therefore, on our hypothesis, they cannot be passed on by 
 germinal means, and so are not hereditary. " Man," says 
 Dr. Reid, " has not evolved into a civilised being ; he has 
 merely developed into one. The change in him consists 
 solely or principally in a change of mental acquirements, 
 not in a germinal change. He transmits his civilised 
 habits by tradition and not by inheritance." This would 
 seem to be the reason why a high state of civilisation was 
 difficult, if not impossible, to attain until man had invented 
 some method of writing that would render tradition more 
 permanent. Had culture been passed on by heredity, 
 the progress of mankind should have been enormously 
 rapid. The fact that, previous to the invention of writing, 
 human progress was so slow would seem to be corroborative 
 evidence of the hypothesis that acquired habits are not 
 hereditary. 
 
 Mr. Lock, in his most interesting work, " Variation, 
 Heredity and Evolution," says : " The principles of heredity 
 teach us that education and training, however beneficial 
 they may be to the individuals, have no material effect 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 221 
 
 upon the stock itself. If they have any effect at all, this 
 is undoubtedly unimportant in comparison with the effect 
 which would be produced by the selection of individuals 
 which exhibit desirable qualities." * 
 
 Man has for countless ages made that complex compound 
 of use-acquirements that we call speech : yet he has not 
 passed on to his offspring the power of speaking without 
 exertion, training, and exercise on the part of every fresh 
 individual. Every child has to make these use-acquire- 
 ments for himself so that he may modify or train the 
 inborn characters that he derives from his parents : he 
 inherits the inborn capacities but not the use-acquirements 
 of thousands of ancestors. When once this basal fact is 
 grasped, the whole problem of heredity is taken out 
 of the atmosphere of fog in which popular writers have 
 immersed it. 
 
 We start then with the idea that the personal gains 
 acquired during life by the individual are not passed on 
 to the offspring because, presumably, they do not affect 
 the germ-cells. Let us take the case of a child born of 
 exceptionally musical parents. The little boy does not 
 inherit the benefit of his father's years of practice at five- 
 finger exercises, but has to begin at the very start, and 
 must learn to play his scales. The father's diligence or 
 sloth in this matter affect but himself — not his offspring. 
 The child has to train his nerve-muscle mechanisms just 
 
 * p. 258. In somewhat more technical terms. Professor A. J. 
 Thomson has pointed out that " modifications " (acquired characters) 
 " are exogenous, somatogenic changes, as contrasted with endogenous, 
 blastogenic changes " (or variations). They are the direct result of 
 peculiarities in " nurture " as contrasted with inborn changes in the 
 inherited " nature." — '• Sociological Papers," 1906, p. 164. 
 
222 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 as his father had to before him. What he can inherit 
 is the delicate structure (the inborn character) that is 
 capable of profiting by exercise. The use-acquirements 
 (or neglect) of the parents are not stored up and passed 
 on to the child, but die with the individual. But the 
 delicacy of nervous constitution — which lies at the root 
 of ability, or of the capacity to acquire special skill — is a 
 germinal character : it was received by heredity, and is 
 capable of being passed on by heredity. 
 
 All this holds good with regard to culture, which is the 
 matter in hand in the case of the Kafirs. The literary man 
 inherits a nature that makes him peculiarly susceptible 
 to the charms of literature : he spends his life over books 
 and his mind consequently becomes highly cultured. He 
 only passes on to his child the peculiar nervous structure 
 which is at the base of his susceptibility for profiting by 
 reading good literature, that " runs in the family." He 
 does not pass on to his child the knowledge he has acquired 
 by the use of his brain. The son has to learn his alphabet 
 just as any other child, for he does not " come into " his 
 father's accumulated knowledge as he may " come into " 
 his father's money. The child may inherit such a delicate 
 and sensitive constitution that he is enabled to learn his 
 alphabet much faster than other children. He inherits the 
 ability or the nervous constitution that is at the base of his 
 capacity for acquiring culture rapidly : he does not inherit 
 the culture itself. Use-acquirements are gains, solely, or 
 almost solely, to the individual. " At the present day 
 the consensus of opinion among experts is undoubtedly 
 to the effect that acquired characters are not inherited 
 at all, except in so far as better nutrition may lead to 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 223 
 
 more vigorous offspring. And it seems clear that such 
 an effect as the latter cannot go on accumulating for 
 more than a few generations." * 
 
 At first sight all this may seem to offer but a depressing 
 and pessimistic view of life, for an appalling amount of 
 individual effort thus seems to be ephemeral. Is this, 
 we ask, the fate of all the " struggling sighs of sacrifice " ? 
 But a little further reflection will show us that there is a 
 very bright side to this hypothesis. First, no man is 
 hopelessly doomed to cultural poverty because his ancestors 
 have been slack. No Kafir can be pronounced incapable 
 of rising simply because his father did not rise. "We cannot 
 say the stock is bad until successive generations have had 
 a fair chance, for mental capacity can lie dormant for ages 
 and yet ultimately awake to life. Secondly, the hypothesis 
 indicates to us how to set to work. Philanthropists in 
 the past have thought they could quickly improve the 
 stock by educating the individual : they were therefore 
 apt to work at a high tension for a short period, and then 
 to leave their ^proteges to stand or fall by themselves. The 
 moment they saw a slight improvement in the individual, 
 they mistakenly thought they had permanently improved 
 the stock. But germinal changes are very slowly brought 
 about ; and we now see that if we would directly improve 
 the stock, we must pay attention to artificial selection rather 
 than to education. To this subj ect we shall return presently. 
 Thirdly, we now know that, when we look away from the 
 stock to the individual, we can, by maintaining through 
 successive generations a sort of external heritage of culture — 
 
 * R. H. Lock, " Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity 
 and Evolution," p. 115. 
 
224 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 a very laborious process that must never be relaxed — uplift 
 eacb successive generation ; for men everywhere possess 
 much more capacity for making acquirements, when placed 
 under suitable conditions, than they can ever hope to make 
 use of in their lifetime. But we see that this culture 
 does not affect the germ-plasm, and so it is essential that 
 we should not relax our stimulus. We cannot make human 
 nature perfect, and then leave it to take care of itself, for 
 each successive generation must see to its own culture. 
 Civilisations have waxed and waned because cultural atmo- 
 spheres are easily destroyed. And past civilisations have left 
 no impress on the germ-cells, for it is not in the power 
 of culture to effect such changes. Yet the individual, if 
 rightly handled, is capable of almost endless advance 
 because he possesses enormous, and somewhat unlooked- 
 for, capacity for responding to suitable stimuli. Science 
 joins hands with poetry at this point, and Browning's 
 " Rabbi Ben Ezra " will occur to all : 
 
 All instincts immature, 
 All purposes unsure 
 That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's account. 
 * * * * * 
 
 All I could never be. 
 All men ignored in me, 
 This was I worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 
 
 If a child should be permanently deprived of the use of 
 both its hands, it will often learn to use its toes to a marvel- 
 lous extent, and can even be taught to thread a needle, 
 or to hold its paint-brush with its toes.* It will not pass 
 on such use-acquirements (or its mutilations) to its offspring, 
 
 * Some twenty years ago the writer saw the well-known artist at 
 Antwerp— or was it Brussels ? — who had lost both his arms and used to 
 paint with a brush held between his toes. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 225 
 
 who will not be able to thread needles with their toes 
 because their parent did so for many years. If they wish 
 to perform such marvels they will have to exercise their 
 own toes. If culture were based on a germinal change, 
 and if it could only be passed on by heredity, progress 
 would be very unequal, and the world would become 
 a very patchy place. A few lucky strains that happened 
 to be nature's favourites, or that happened to get a start 
 in the race, would soon become by such accumulations 
 nature's millionaires, while the bulk of people would be 
 doomed to cultural poverty. 
 
 Instead of saying that the individual KaJGu- cannot rise 
 above the level of his race, we must admit that if he can 
 respond to stimuli — and if suitable stimuli can be applied 
 — there is every hope that the individual thus stimulated 
 may rise surprisingly high abjve the present low level of 
 his fellows. And all the Kafirs may be raised enormously, 
 though to different degrees, if all are suitably stimulated. 
 The capacity for responding to stimuli varies with the 
 personal equation ; and one Kafir, like one white man, 
 can rise higher than another. Each man has to work up 
 his own cultural fortune, and we can never say that the 
 individual Kafir cannot rise until we have exhausted every 
 kind of stimulus that might help him to do so. In this 
 matter we must be empiricists, and indeed pragmatists, 
 seeking to make real and actual what we now suspect to 
 be but a latent possibility. The individual Kafir is not 
 doomed to remain a savage because his ancestors were 
 savages. The only thing that could condemn him to 
 remain a savage would be his own individual incapacity 
 to respond to a stimulus. It is idle, therefore, to say that 
 
 P 
 
226 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 the individual Ethiopian cannot change his skin until 
 we have tried all possible methods for enabling him to 
 do so and have failed in our attempts. And I submit 
 that we have tried the experiment in the past, though in 
 the most bungling and unintelligent fashion ; and yet 
 amidst the many failures we have, as a matter of fact, 
 produced educated Kafirs who seem centuries ahead of 
 the bulk of the people. The average colonist avoids 
 educated Kafirs, and has of course never met such men ; 
 he therefore does not know the facts of the case. 
 
 It is now our business to discover why we often failed, 
 why we sometimes succeeded, and how we may test the 
 effects of the stimuli we apply in the future to the natives. 
 If those of us who are interested in the Kafir could but 
 be induced to moderate the pace, and could be persuaded 
 to seek to find out in what direction we are going and 
 ought to go, it would be a good thing. We are like people 
 riding on horses (hobby-horses) we know not whither. 
 We keep calling to one another to "keep moving"; and 
 when some one halts and says, " But whither are we 
 going ? " the others shout out, " Never mind that : just keep 
 moving and all will come right." We have been going on 
 so unintelligently that the illustration that seems suitable 
 is that of a little child who has been given a number of 
 toys, on hitting a certain part of one of which a bell sounds : 
 the child, ignorant of the causes of the sound, aimlessly 
 hits everything within reach so as to produce a repetition 
 of the noise : every now and then it happens accidentally 
 and half-unintentionally to hit the right thing, and points 
 to its occasional good luck as a sign of its cleverness and 
 success. We have stimulated hundreds of thousands of 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 227 
 
 Kafirs with our tangled mixture of stimuli arising from 
 
 civilisation, education and religion : we simply daze and 
 
 bewilder most of them, but every now and then by some 
 
 lucky accident a Kafir responds to the confused mass of 
 
 stimuli and shoots out far ahead of his fellows. We do 
 
 not know why he did so : one of us thinks it was the 
 
 stimulus of religion, another that it was the stimulus of 
 
 education or political propaganda, a third that it was the 
 
 stimulus of civilisation that produced the result. But we 
 
 know so little as to how the result was produced that we 
 
 cannot go on producing similar cases at will. It is this fact 
 
 that the Kafirs have shown every now and then that they 
 
 are capable of reacting to our stimuli that is both our hope 
 
 and our despair : it is our hope for the Kafir, because the 
 
 result happens too often to be looked on as a case of a 
 
 " sport " ; it is our despair as to our own lack of wisdom, 
 
 because the result happens too seldom to give us any reason 
 
 for thinking that our methods are rational, intelligent, and 
 
 suited to the mass of the Kafirs. There is evidently some 
 
 factor in our methods that is radically faulty. To discover 
 
 it would possibly be the work of ages in the case of isolated 
 
 men working at the problem ; whereas an Ethnological 
 
 Bureau that organised research might possibly hit upon 
 
 the source of all our trouble in a very short time. When 
 
 the Kafirs can throw up not a few striking characters, they 
 
 must surely have some latent capacity lurking somewhere 
 
 in their nature. And it is a question whether the occasional 
 
 geniuses that have been thrown up have not appeared 
 
 rather in spite of our mistaken methods than as a result 
 
 of them. A Kafir renaissance is not altogether a Utopian 
 
 hope. The few bright cases of Kafirs who rise show that 
 
228 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 the nerve-tissue of the Kafir is not wholly degenerate or 
 incapable of high development. But the Kafir certainly 
 does not respond to our educational methods as we had 
 hoped. It is easy to put all the blame to the Kafir — pos- 
 sibly some causes of failure lie in the nature of the man — 
 and none to the unsuitable nature of the stimulus ; but 
 it is not very sensible. 
 
 There certainly seems to be a sort of general simmering 
 of latent faculty amongst the members of most of the Kafir 
 tribes. It is not merely the fact that there is one Kafir 
 who can understand, let us say, the Nineteenth Century, 
 but that there are perhaps fifty who can do so, that gives 
 us hope. At the same time the fact that out of the tens 
 of thousands of educated Kafirs there are not thousands 
 who could do this is a pregnant fact, which throws light 
 on the inadequacy of our methods of elevating the natives. 
 It would seem as if the Kafirs required some peculiar 
 correlation of stimulus and environment before they could 
 profit by our benevolent efforts. 
 
 I have referred above to but one aspect of progress. 
 I might take any other point, such as military or musical 
 capacity. Those who have listened to the monotonous 
 jingles of the Kafirs in the kraals, and who have felt how 
 elementary is the sense of melody as distinguished from 
 the dehght in rhythm, and who have further heard a Kafir 
 like John Knox Bokwe of Lovedale play his own musical 
 compositions on the piano, must admit that the Kafir is 
 capable of rising in this matter. Bokwe's compositions — 
 it is a doubtful com, liment — are quite up to the level 
 of our modern drawing-room songs. As I listened to 
 Bokwe, it was difficult to believe at first that a black 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 229 
 
 man actually composed the tunes he was playing. My 
 race-prejudice certainly received a well-merited rebuff by 
 the experience. 
 
 If we take the subject of oratory, we find the Kafir of 
 the kraal quite up to the level of the European, and indeed 
 often very much beyond him. Yet how little is being done 
 to use this special aptitude for cultural purposes. It is 
 being exploited by Ethiopian agitators for political and 
 hostile ends, but we are doing practically nothing to make 
 use of it for good ends. I was once at a native debate at 
 a Mission station in Basutoland where the French mission- 
 aries showed their great, and usual, good sense by fostering 
 this faculty. The educative effect of the debate, which 
 was on the question as to whether man gets more pleasure 
 through the eye or the ear, was obvious. The function 
 of public speech in the education of the Greeks is a favourite 
 theme of philosophical historians : yet the use of oratory 
 for educating the Kafirs is confined to but a very few 
 Mission stations. 
 
 The Greeks are a most interesting example as to the 
 unexpected capacity that can lie dormant in human 
 nature, ready to be awakened by a suitable stimulus. 
 They were to start with but a race of barbarians devoid 
 of any special intellectual promise. Suddenly they threw 
 up a number of intellectual and artistic giants, only to 
 revert in a few generations to a condition of mediocrity. 
 There can be little doubt that this amazing efflorescence 
 was not due to a germinal change, but to the direct influence 
 of the fuiest educational system the world has ever seen. 
 Another example is found in the case of the Maoris : under 
 a suitable training they emerged in a generation or two 
 
230 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 from a state of cannibalism to a high condition of civilisa- 
 tion. It is superfluous to point to the Japanese, for every- 
 body is talking about their sudden awakening through a 
 suitable education and political policy. The Kafirs have 
 not risen to a high state of culture ; but it is difficult to 
 see how they, or any race, could have done so with the 
 faulty kind of education to which they have been subjected. 
 The negative fact of the Kafirs' failure to rise is in no sense 
 a proof that they are incapable of rising : the fact that 
 some Kafirs have been elevated to a very high state of 
 culture seems to indicate that the fault has been not in 
 the germ but in the environment. 
 
 It is also necessary for us to remember that progress is 
 a social product, and that we cannot expect amongst the 
 Kafirs Beethovens, Newtons, or Shakespeares, who did but 
 give expression to the simmering ideas and emotions of their 
 age, until we lift up the low average of the Kafirs as a whole, 
 so that it may be somewhat comparable to the state of Euro- 
 pean society when it threw up such men. These men were 
 but the mountain peaks arising out of national mountain 
 ranges or table-lands. They did not rise in isolation out of 
 the ocean. Until we lift up the general level of the Kafirs, 
 we cannot expect to find some of them towering above the 
 ordinary European, for all they can do is to tower above their 
 submerged fellow Kafirs. And a mountain peak arising out 
 of a submerged bed of ocean may seem a mountain peak to 
 creatures living on that bed, though it is not conspicuous 
 to people living far above that level. We think of Caliban 
 upon Setebos, or of the young witch in " Pauhne," and 
 remember how her blue eyes drew down a god, who said 
 even in his perishing, " I am still a god — to thee " : and 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 231 
 
 we begin to see that, though the Kafir genius may be no 
 genius to us, he may be one to his fellows. 
 
 I conclude, therefore, that in this second sense of the 
 words the Ethiopian can change his skin. He may not 
 be able to become a European, but he can become a 
 Super-Kafir. 
 
 (3) Can the Kafirs as a race be elevated ? And if so, how ? 
 — Before discussing some interesting theoretical aspects 
 of this question, let us ask what history has to teach us 
 about the natives' racial capacity. We know that since 
 the sixteenth century the Kafirs have not progressed in 
 civilisation to any marked degree. If anything the native 
 races of South Africa have sunk in the scale. Even if we 
 take into consideration the effect of our civilising efforts, 
 the result must appear very unpromising. We have 
 already pointed out in a previous chapter that our contact 
 with the backward race has led, not to a marked increase 
 of any original capacity, but rather to the inhibition, or 
 stifling, of what little enterprise the natives once possessed. 
 Civilised ideas are not absorbed by the mass of the Kafirs : 
 they are held as accretions to be put ofE or on as if they 
 were external things, such as clothing. The conspicuous 
 failure of the natives to develop anything in the nature 
 of architecture, art, poetry, writing, music, religion or 
 philosophy has been pointed out, and must be emphasised 
 once more to prevent the reader from imagining that the 
 present writer is under any illusion as to the seemingly 
 inherent defects of the Kafir's nature. It certainly looks 
 at first sight as if the natives were on the down-grade, for 
 we can almost see the degenerative process at work before 
 our very eyes. The Kafirs still live in the same rude type 
 
232 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 of hut that their ancestors lived in centuries ago, and have 
 lost much of the arts and crafts in which they once excelled. 
 If ever there was a people that seemed inherently opposed 
 to progress and indissolubly wedded to conservative modes 
 of life, it is the natives of South Africa. Certainly a very 
 strong case can be made out for the belief that the Kafirs 
 as a race are incapable of rising in the scale. There is no 
 need to labour this aspect of the matter. 
 
 There are, however, very weighty considerations to be 
 stated on the other side ; and since it is these that are 
 generally neglected, I propose to give fuller consideration 
 to them. Nothing so strikes the traveller who starts at 
 the Kei River and journeys up to Lake Nyassa as the 
 progressive increase of intelligence in the natives he meets 
 on his overland journey. Very few white men have made 
 such a journey, and consequently the fact is not well known. 
 In Pondoland one finds the very lowest rung of the ladder. 
 The Pondos are very low in the scale with respect to intel- 
 ligence and culture. Crossing into Natal one finds the 
 natives much more intelligent and energetic. When close 
 to Delagoa Bay the natives are found to be considerably 
 smarter than the Zulus, though not so fine in physique. 
 The natives in Gazaland are yet more intelligent than the 
 natives around Delagoa Bay. On the Zambesi the Sena- 
 speaking natives are immeasurably above the Pondos, 
 and much superior in intelligence when compared with 
 the natives of Gazaland. Again, proceeding north we find 
 that in the Shire Highlands the natives are yet more bright 
 and quick at entering into the new ideas of the white man. 
 My own personal observations stop at Blantyre ; but those 
 who have lived on the shores of Lakes Nyassa and Tangan- 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN 233 
 
 yika have assured me that the farther north one goes the 
 more intelligent do the natives become. It is a matter of 
 general knowledge that the Uganda natives are very far 
 advanced in a civilisation of their own,* and have shown 
 by their social and civil administration how superior they 
 are to the natives living far down south. 
 
 So much for a brief sketch of the strange rise in mental 
 capacity that is to be found in the natives as one travels 
 north from the Umtata River. 
 
 There can be little doubt but that the Kafirs have come 
 down from the north at some remote period : in this the 
 natives and ethnologists are agreed. But how shall we 
 account for the very striking fact of this graduated lessening 
 of intelligence and of culture to be observed in the tribes 
 as one travels south ? There must be a cause for this 
 effect. We have little but conjecture to help us here. It 
 looks as if, brain being a stronger force than muscle, the 
 more intelligent tribes expelled the less intelligent ones, 
 who, however, were their superiors in physique. Did 
 some degenerative mental process set in amongst certain 
 of the tribes so that they became incapable of resisting 
 the more intelligent ones ? Was it a germinal change due 
 to the effect of the faulty, or of too close (or not sufficiently 
 close), inter-breeding ? We know the Kafir is not pure 
 negro, but that he has a mingling of other strains in his 
 stock. Did the excessive multiplication and isolation of 
 tribes lead to unwise narrowing of the area from which 
 new and energising strains might have been secured ? 
 Did the marriage customs adopted lead to the breeding- 
 
 * A missionary assured me that the Uganda natives have completely- 
 salved the drink problem. 
 
234 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 out of intellect and the breeding-in of physique ? Or did 
 the mere fact of migration necessitate the breaking up of 
 the cultural environment and the consequent loss of stimulus 
 in the case of individuals ? Did incessant wars make the 
 culture of the arts of peace impossible, until — in the absence 
 of written records — the races forgot their past achieve- 
 ments ? If this be the case, then, since the change is one 
 of nurture rather than of nature, there is every hope that 
 by supplying a suitable stimulus we should elevate the 
 Kafirs. These and many similar questions that rise to 
 our lips cannot be answered, largely because we have not 
 seriously tried to accumulate the facts or evidence that 
 would lead us to the answer. Carefully conducted research 
 in connection with the customs, traditions, folk-lore and 
 history of the natives might possibly supply us with most 
 valuable information that would enable us to trace the 
 faults made by the Kafirs in the past, and, by avoiding 
 them, to improve their stock. 
 
 Before we can decide the question as to whether or not 
 a backward race can rise, we need to understand how such 
 a rise could be brought about. We can then discuss the 
 question as to whether we can fulfil the necessary condi- 
 tions in the case before us. In other words, we need to 
 study the horse before we study the cart. 
 
 A race can be elevated in two ways : first, by attending 
 to the culture of the individuals composing the existing 
 generation, and by repeating that process in every succeed- 
 ing generation ; and secondly, by working a permanent 
 improvement in the stock (germ-plasm) through the agency 
 of Artificial Selection. Let us take these two points in 
 order. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 235 
 
 (A) Imjyrovement of the Individual. — This is a social and 
 educational problem. Man, as we have seen, passes on 
 his culture, not by heredity, but by tradition : he makes 
 a cultural atmosphere which influences all those who come 
 within its reach. This may be a very rapid process, for the 
 gains accumulate ; but it is a laborious process, because 
 it has to be maintained by incessant and strenuous effort, 
 since it produces no germinal change which is passed on 
 by heredity. Professor Thomson has suggested that this 
 process " may be so effective that its results come almost 
 to the same thing as if acquired characters were trans- 
 mitted. They are re-impressed on the bodies and minds 
 of successive generations, though never ingrained in the 
 germ-plasm." * . . . " The useful fact to emphasise is 
 that man, though slowly or slightly variable, is rapidly 
 and exceedingly modifiable, and that social organisation 
 provides a means — an external heritage — whereby the 
 results of modifications may be practicably transmissible, 
 though not organically entailed." f However, the draw- 
 back to this method of elevating a race consists in the 
 necessity of the maintenance of the social and educative 
 process. Many a civilisation has waxed and waned 
 because nations have first of all built up a suitable cultural 
 environment, and then have had that environment broken up 
 by war or by some other accident. They neglected eugenics, 
 and so the gains were but ephemeral. The very fact that 
 past civilisations have absolutely vanished, leaving behind 
 them no impress on the germ or stock, is an eloquent fact. 
 But the advantage of elevating a race by the culture of its 
 individuals is that a backward race need not be left alone to 
 * " Sociological Papers," 1906, p. 165. t ibid. p. 163. 
 
236 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 fight its way unaided, because a forward race can supply it 
 with a cultural environment and so give it a splendid start. 
 
 In educating native children it is essential to ensure that 
 the gain they receive through education shall not be lost 
 and turned into an evil thing owing to the premature 
 break-up of the elevating environment under which they 
 have been placed. Too often we prematurely send back 
 the educated native child to live in the kraal, which does 
 not provide an environment that will foster and perpetuate 
 the new life received. We have produced no effect that 
 is able to withstand the blighting influences of kraal-life : 
 too often we leave the Kafir just at the one supremely 
 important period of his life, namely, the stage that follows 
 the arrival of puberty. Thus our initial success is followed 
 by a subsequent deep demoralisation and degeneration 
 which often leaves the individual in a far worse condition 
 than that in which we found him. 
 
 I believe this is the secret of our past failure. In those 
 cases in which we have been able to save the boy or girl 
 from the blighting influence of the incessant talk about 
 sex which forms the atmosphere of the kraal, we have been 
 wonderfully successful in raising the individual. Where 
 we have sent the sharp and intelligent little boy back to 
 the kraal at puberty, he has lost, and often more than lost, 
 all we have given him. His sharpened intelligence may 
 even be an extra snare to him, as his quickened imagination 
 dwells in an atmosphere of incessant talk about sensual 
 things, Tiyo Soga, who stands out as one of the most pre- 
 eminent of educated Kafirs, was, as we have seen, taken 
 to Scotland when a lad, and was shielded from kraal-influ- 
 ences until long after puberty. He continued to develop 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 237 
 
 in mental vigour long after that period, and did not dwindle 
 in capacity as do nearly nine-tenths of the Kafirs, But 
 we cannot send all Kafirs to Scotland for their education, 
 nor would it be a good thing to do so if we could. At the 
 present state of affairs it is not good to get a few Kafirs 
 far ahead of their fellows, for all sorts of side-effects are 
 produced, and these tend to alter the total of the account. 
 If we want the race to advance as a race, then we must 
 clearly educate them at their homes and not in Europe 
 or America. 
 
 It is generally recognised in scientific circles that the 
 
 development in the individual is a sort of " recapitulation " 
 
 of the development of the species. It has been said wittily 
 
 that every individual has to climb his genealogical tree. 
 
 To put it in more technical language, the ontogenetic 
 
 development follows the line of phylogenetic development. 
 
 Professor Mark Baldwin has published an interesting 
 
 volimie on the subject, under the title of " The Mental 
 
 Development in the Child and the Race," and he points 
 
 out some suggestive gaps in the " recapitulation " of the 
 
 individual. Now, Mr. Andrew Lang has advanced certain 
 
 reasons for supposing that Zulu myth and religion indicate 
 
 that the race has fallen from a higher state of culture, and 
 
 that the Zulus are therefore a decadent or degenerating 
 
 race. The problem thus opened to us is of vital importance 
 
 in a treatment of the Native Problem, and a careful study 
 
 of the children of the Kafijs might throw a flood of light 
 
 on the probable past history of the natives, and might 
 
 either support or negative Mr. Lang's most important 
 
 suggestion. The short study I have written on " Savage 
 
 Childhood " certainly seems, when coupled with Mr. Lang's 
 
238 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 hypothesis, and with the doctrine of " recapitulation," 
 and also with the progressive lessening of mental capacity 
 shown in the tribes as they journeyed southwards, to throw 
 some light on the matter. Since the Kafir is at his best, 
 intellectually, emotionally and morally at the age of the 
 onset of puberty ; and since he begins, as a rule, to dete- 
 riorate in all these directions after the development of his 
 sexual nature has become established — it seems probable 
 that in past generations the race of the Kafirs had reached 
 a much higher stage of development than the individual 
 Kafir does to-day. The child, urged from within by the 
 forces that tend to the " recapitulation " of phylogenetic 
 development, shoots beyond the level he finally attains as 
 his normal experience. The tendency to recapitulate 
 the past experience of his race forces him to a temporary 
 efflorescence of faculty which he cannot now permanently 
 sustain amid the unsuitable environment which surrounds 
 him.* He therefore sinks back after puberty to a lower 
 stage than he had reached at that crisis. This apparent 
 over-shooting of the mark in the individual, when coupled 
 with the fact of the increasing degeneracy of the tribes as 
 they came down south, seems therefore to lend support 
 to Mr. Lang's idea that Kafir religion and culture are 
 decadent, and that the Kafirs once attained a far higher 
 development. And it further seems to indicate the prob- 
 ability that it is the faulty environment, and not a germ- 
 plasm change, that is accountable for the low state of the 
 average Kafir. If it could be proved that this speculation 
 
 * I have noticed that sexual customs seem to become grosser the 
 further south the tribe has migrated. This would possibly account for 
 much of the unsuitability of the environment referred to. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 239 
 
 were sound, it would be of immense importance to us in 
 our future legislation, for we could seek to trace in the 
 child the line of a past development, and, if we were to 
 discover this, we might adopt it as the path along which 
 to travel in our attempts to regain the comparative Paradise 
 Lost. The Kafir being, on this hypothesis, a fallen creature 
 might be capable of redemption. But at present all this 
 line of things is so neglected by our administrators, who 
 seem content to legislate in spite of their ignorance, that 
 it is but thin speculation. It is to our shame that it is 
 nothing more than speculation, for knowledge is within 
 our reach if we would seriously set to work to study the 
 subject. 
 
 I have suggested in a previous chapter that this strange 
 arrest of capacity at puberty may be due to the bad environ- 
 ment the adolescent finds in the kraal. The everlasting 
 talk and thought about matters of sex draws ofi the imagi- 
 nation from more healthy topics. The formation and 
 retention of culture depend largely on the maintenance 
 of a suitable atmosphere or environment. Most Europeans 
 believe that puberty sets in two or three years earlier in 
 the case of the Kafir than it does in the case of a white 
 child : but I think this is a mistake. Delayed puberty 
 or prolonged childhood are of great value to a race, and the 
 dulness of the Kafir can hardly be accounted for along 
 that line, if my observations as to the age at which puberty 
 sets in amongst the natives be correct. To change the 
 environment of the adolescent, and to make the kraal a 
 more wholesome place for the growing lads and maidens 
 to live in, is a difficult problem ; but if some of the attention 
 that is now paid to less important things were diverted 
 
240 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 to this channel it would be well. We might at least set 
 to work to produce evolution of the environment if we are 
 too prudish to set to work to institute evolution of the germ- 
 plasm by eugenics. That we should sit with folded hands 
 and watch generation after generation of smart little Kafir 
 children developing into dull men and women is a most 
 grievous shame ; it is a discredit to our national intelligence 
 and a loss to the Empire. 
 
 It is difl&cult to over-estimate the practical importance 
 of knowing for certain whether the arrest of mental faculty 
 at puberty is due to defective environment or to some 
 radical defect perpetuated through the germ-plasm : for 
 if it be the latter, then it is hopeless to seek to cure the 
 trouble by altering the environment ; for the trouble, in 
 that case, could only be overcome by selecting those 
 individuals who showed that they could develop mentally 
 after puberty ; we should thus give them every advantage 
 in propagating their special stock, while we made it difficult 
 for the bad stock to multiply. We should thus by Artificial 
 Selection breed-out the bad stock and breed-in the good. 
 But if, on the other hand, investigation showed clearly that 
 the difficulty was wholly created by the bad environment 
 of the kraal-life, then we should pay but little thought to 
 Artificial Selection, and should direct all our attention to 
 the question of environment. It is really of but little use 
 to go on blundering without studying the causes of the 
 trouble : for while we may accidentally stumble on a solu- 
 tion, we are much more likely to waste time, energy and 
 money, only to harm the very people we wish to improve. 
 In this matter accurate investigation is an absolute essential. 
 
 Only when we know what can, and what cannot, be done 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 241 
 
 by environment, shall we see the problem clearly enough 
 to develop a wise policy of education. We cannot hope 
 for this great pubertal difficulty to be overcome by a 
 germinal change, if the difficulty is, as I believe (perhaps 
 wrongly), wholly a result of bad environment at that stage 
 of life. To recognise this fact — if it be such — immensely 
 simplifies our problem. If what I have written above about 
 " recapitulation " and the great efflorescence of the higher 
 faculties up to the time of puberty and their subsequent 
 degeneration be correct, then the individual and the race 
 are capable of a much greater elevation than is generally 
 thought possible. If the Kafir could only be kept as bright 
 and intelligent and withal as quick at assimilating good 
 influences as he is before puberty, it would be a splendid 
 thing for the race. Wherever that portentous period is 
 reached and passed in safety there is immense hope for 
 the individual's subsequent continuous and further progress. 
 The more I study the subject and look ahead, the more do 
 I feel that this is after all the crux of the educational — 
 and possibly of the native — problem. If we can overcome 
 the pubertal difficulty, we shall be able to mould the Kafir 
 into a most excellent member of the Empire. If we want 
 to deal with the environment of the Kafirs at all, then this 
 is the period at which we should do so. And if that period 
 is the most critical one in the case of school-boys in Europe, 
 where the masters can call to their aid every good influence 
 of rehgion and moral tone, how much more critical must 
 it be in the case of the Kafirs, where a missionary has to 
 control his pupils with all the evil influence of the kraal, 
 and all the evil influence of the boy's companions, and all 
 the ipameasurably stronger sexual nature of a Kafir ranged 
 
 Q 
 
212 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 against him. It is a subject that must be dealt with if we 
 would see our hopes for the Kafirs fulfilled. But we must 
 hasten on. 
 
 (B) Improvement of the StocJc. — We have seen that the 
 educational environment and social atmosphere are of 
 immense importance to us when we seek to raise the level 
 of the existing members of the race. But we have also 
 seen that we do not affect the stock by such processes. We 
 now ask whether it is possible to help matters by producing 
 advantageous and permanent germinal changes in the 
 race. It is easy to see how we can get at the individual 
 so as to improve him : but how can we get at the stock 
 or stirp so as to improve that ? We can do so by attending 
 to eugenics — either direct or indirect. The direct method 
 works through the intelligent selection of suitable parents : 
 the indirect method works through a number of seemingly 
 trifling causes that together indirectly and yet profoundly 
 affect the stock. Let us consider these latter first. 
 
 {a) The Indirect Method.— Like the Frenchman who was 
 surprised to find that he had been talking prose all his 
 life without knowing it, we awake with astonishment to 
 the fact that we have been unconsciously and unintelligently 
 experimenting in indirect eugenics for countless ages. It 
 is merely proposed that we should do intelligently, and 
 for the highest motives, what we have been doing bunglingly 
 for less worthy ones. Our social customs exert an immense 
 infiuence on the qualities lovers seek and prize in one 
 another. People are complaining that our existing genera- 
 tion is sadly weedy as to the legs. Why, we are asked, do 
 we find a falling off in shapely calves ? Instead of looking 
 somewhere in the skies for the answer, it would pay us to 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 243 
 
 look at our social customs. Novelists may be poor teachers 
 of science, but they are good recorders of passing social 
 custom, for they hold the mirror up to society and are 
 rewarded with great popularity if their mirror catches 
 the superficial aspect of things. If we would know what 
 values ruled in the matrimonial market in early Victorian 
 days, we need but read our Dickens or our Thackeray 
 and we shall see, for example, how the piano was used by 
 every scheming mother to give additional matrimonial 
 value to her daughter. The dress of past centuries gave 
 a distinct matrimonial advantage to the men who had 
 shapely legs. Novelists, such as Fielding, Richardson and 
 Thackeray, make a great amount of literary capital out 
 of allusions to the subject. But we hide the legs and so 
 prevent a fine limb from exerting its attraction. Nowa- 
 days we worship money, and physical excellences are but 
 secondary concerns. As a result, the man with atrocious 
 legs, but with a good income, stands a better chance of 
 being accepted as a lover than the man who has merely 
 magnificently shaped calves. Our ancestors put a premium 
 on shapely legs : we have taken of? that premium, and 
 have so put a stop to the secondary sexual attraction of 
 fine legs. The unfit in this respect stand as good a chance 
 as the fit : and we consequently breed-in poor legs and 
 breed-out fine ones. Doctors complain to-day about the 
 prevalence of varicose veins. What Greek or Roman — 
 or what Kafir — with varicose veins stood a chance of 
 winning the finest wife, or indeed any wife at all ? When 
 the leg was exposed, all deformities were visible, and a 
 defect of a striking nature placed a man at a great dis- 
 advantage in comparison with those who were possessed 
 
244 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 of beauty of form. Our social customs have changed all 
 that, and people with varicose veins stand as good a chance 
 of perpetuating their stock as the man vnth. sound veins 
 does of propagating his. We are apparently breeding-in 
 varicose veins owing to our social customs in connection 
 with dress. There may be other factors also at work ; 
 but the idea was suggested to me by a medical man 
 who is a student of genetics. 
 
 The bandaging of Chinese feet is a striking object-lesson 
 to us as to how not to do things. The Chinese admire 
 small feet, and yet they have set to work in the most 
 wrong-headed manner imaginable to produce them. For 
 countless ages the Chinese have been bandaging the feet 
 of the children, in spite of the endless pain the process 
 has entailed. They have tinkered at symptoms and 
 have ignored causes. Perhaps they thought that acquired 
 mutilations would become hereditary. Had they worked 
 according to knowledge, they would have adopted the 
 very opposite process, and would have exposed, rather 
 than have bandaged, the feet. Had they done this, they 
 would have allowed the secondary sexual attraction of 
 small feet to work, and those fortunate women with the 
 smallest feet would have become the favourite wives, 
 while women with large, ungainly feet would have had 
 but a poor chance. As a result of exposing the feet the 
 Chinese would have bred-in small feet and would have 
 bred-out large ones : thus they would have gained their 
 end without submitting millions of human beings to utterly 
 unnecessary and excruciating pain. The acquired mutila- 
 tion of the feet cannot be passed on by heredity ; but 
 sexaal selection can give handicap to the coveted smallness 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 215 
 
 of foot. The extent to which they could have reduced the 
 size of the foot would, of course, have depended on the 
 amount of capacity for variation possessed by the foot — 
 probably a strictly limited quantity. 
 
 Why do we so rarely find any kind of deformity, or 
 physical defect such as hare-lip or cleft-palate, amongst 
 the Kafirs ? Partly because they adopt the most drastic 
 of all direct eugenic methods, and kill off deformed children 
 so that they may not propagate their deformities ; partly 
 because a Kafir with any defect stands a poor chance in 
 life — and especially in matrimony. But it would seem 
 that the chief reason why personal blemishes, such as 
 varicose veins, do not occur, consists in the social custom 
 in virtue of which the body is left undraped. A Kafir 
 woman scorns to marry a man with any defect of a con- 
 spicuous nature, and the man is unable to hide the defect. 
 The Kafirs thus adopt unconsciously a powerful indirect 
 method of eugenics. By taking this fact into consideration 
 we might do much to maintain Kafir physique, which is 
 now threatened by our stopping of inter-tribal wars (through 
 which natural selection once worked), by inventing a 
 suitable and rational dress for the civilised natives. Our 
 European clothing is bad for them from many points of 
 view. We should thus counteract one of the evil conse- 
 quences of civilisation. Again, why should we not seek 
 to affect Kafir custom so that mental superiority should 
 also be recognised as a valuable trait in a man or woman ? 
 
 In England we are all, by virtue of our social judgments, 
 working every day of our fife at indirect eugenics ; for 
 every person who rightly values physique and mental and 
 moral qualities is giving such things extra marriageable 
 
246 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 value. Those who set the fashion in exalting beauty of 
 face above all other qualities are doing their part to preserve 
 beauty in our descendants. Chivalry in olden days did 
 much to preserve stock that possessed beauty, grace, 
 courage, bravery and manliness ; and the result is visible 
 to-day. Had chivalry but placed a greater premium on 
 brains as well, it would have been the means of untold 
 good. We are working at eugenics every day of our life, 
 and the only question is as to whether we shall do this 
 sensibly and with knowledge or stupidly and by blind 
 impulse. In an inaugural address delivered at the London 
 School of Economics, Professor Westermarck is reported 
 (the Times, December 18, 1907) to have said that legislators 
 and lawyers might well profit by the comparative study 
 of social institutions — how laws should adapt themselves 
 to the social environment, and how they had a tendency 
 to survive the conditions under which they were devised. 
 It was something to know how laws might be improved, 
 even if we had to learn something from savages. It had 
 been said that the suggested law to prevent undesirable 
 persons from contracting marriage was impracticable. 
 Yet many savage tribes had tried the experiment and 
 had succeeded. 
 
 The importance of marriage customs can scarcely be 
 over-estimated. By such means we can indirectly affect 
 the stock. " Isolation " is the term generally applied to 
 the narrowing of the radius of inter-crossing. Professor 
 Thomson has said that : "It tends to the segregation of 
 species into sub-species, it makes it easier for new variations 
 to establish themselves, it promotes prepotency or what 
 the breeders call ' transmitting power,' it fixes character. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 247 
 
 . . . There seems much to be said for Reibmayr's thesis 
 that the establishment of a successful race or stock requires 
 the alternation of periods of in-breeding (endogamy) in 
 which characters are fixed, and periods of out-breeding 
 (exogeny) in which by the introduction of fresh blood new 
 variations are promoted. Perhaps the Jews may serve to 
 illustrate the influence of isolation in promoting stability of 
 type and prepotency ; perhaps the Americans may serve 
 to illustrate the variability which a mixture of different 
 stocks tends to bring about. In historical inquiry into 
 the difficult problem of the origin of distinct races, it seems 
 legitimate to think of periods of ' mutations ' — of dis- 
 continuous sporting — which led to numerous offshoots 
 from the main stock, of the migration of these variants 
 into new environments where in relative isolation they 
 became prepotent and stable." * 
 
 Professor Thomson has also given the following example 
 of the way some great change in the species may be brought 
 about, especially if it be favoured by in-breeding or some 
 form of isolation : "It seems certain that a definite breed 
 of cattle may arise in a single farm-yard, may be in-bred 
 until it obtains dominant prepotency, and may after a 
 while persist in its integrity in spite of occasional inter- 
 crossing. If this be so, we can better understand how a 
 particular human strain — such as the ' Celtic type ' — may 
 be so prepotent that it persists as an important social 
 factor in spite of much mingling of stocks?. On the other 
 hand, a genius is a transilient variation who usually does 
 not come to stay, except as an immortal spirit embodied 
 in literature or art." | 
 
 * " Sociological Papers," 1906, p. 184. f ^^'<^- P- 1^3. 
 
248 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 But not only do we work at indirect eugenics by social 
 custom : we also experiment by means of legislation. When 
 we pass legislative measures that handicap the inefficient 
 in morals, in brains, in energy or in physique, we work at 
 pernicious and inverted " eugenics " — a sort of kakogenics 
 — for we foster and aid the multiplication of the worst 
 elements in our stock. When we seek to remove the 
 symptoms of poverty or crime without paying regard to the 
 causes, we too often do but shield and screen the inefficient 
 and the vicious so that they may propagate their inefficient 
 and vicious stock at the nation's expense. We remove the 
 evil symptom that distresses our sentiment, but, not seek- 
 ing for causes, we feed the disease and ensure the continu- 
 ance and increase of the evil by our ill-chosen methods. 
 The present Liberal Government seems to be intent on 
 this kakogenics, for by its ill-considered legislative measures, 
 freighted with socialistic tendencies, it is screening the 
 unfit and the vicious from the consequences of their unfit- 
 ness, improvidence and laziness. They propose granting 
 old-age pensions rather than seeking to prevent old-age 
 poverty. By unwise State interference in the feeding of 
 children, and by discriminative legislation in favour of 
 the least desirable of our population, we shall but aggravate 
 the diseases we deplore. We so relieve the distressing 
 symptoms of poverty that we manufacture a larger number 
 of paupers, and perpetuate the disease to cause us fresh 
 and increased distress in the future. We are treating 
 symptoms and leaving the causes untouched. It is becom- 
 ing increasingly easy for the improvident and the vicious 
 to burden the State with the bad stock they propagate so 
 quickly. It is important to remember that the biologically 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 240 
 
 fit may be the sociologically undesirable. A worthless and 
 vicious member of the pauper community — a man who is 
 extremely fertile and biologically fit — can marry at eighteen 
 and cast the burden and care of his children on to other 
 shoulders ; yet many of our professional classes — men 
 who are sociologically desirable — cannot marry till thirty, 
 and even then cannot af?ord to have as large families as 
 can the improvident, the unintelligent and the feckless ; 
 for they have too much self-respect to cast the responsibility 
 of providing for their children on to others. When we re- 
 member further that it is possible that highly individuated 
 and sociologically desirable stock is less fertile than the 
 more animal and biologically fit stock, it appears that our 
 best stock is being doubly handicapped ; first of all by 
 nature, and secondly by the bungling of our politicians. 
 There is therefore placed a double premium on parental 
 neglect and improvidence, and a double penalty on self- 
 respect, providence and brains. Why should we not 
 remit taxation in the case of some of our struggling men 
 of ability ? They are, comparatively speaking, poorer 
 than the " poor," for their self-respect makes them aim 
 at maintaining a higher and costlier and worthier type of 
 civilised life. Of course starving children must be fed ; 
 but equally they must not so be fed as to increase the 
 number of hungry children. By wise legislation no one's 
 sense of delicacy would be offended, for who would realise 
 that we were working at eugenics ? Every Member of 
 Parliament is to-day working at indirect eugenics, though 
 he might possibly be astonished and not a little scandalised 
 if he were told that fact. The only question, then, is. 
 Shall we plan our legislative measures on the basis of sound 
 
250 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 knowledge, and with definite ends in view, or shall we 
 muddle along unintelligently as in the past ? Possibly 
 we hide behind our prudishness and say that sentiment 
 should not be ignored. We forget that it is the best stock 
 that already has the best sentiment : but in their case 
 our artificial statecraft hinders them from giving effect 
 to their sentiment, while it favours the low sentiment 
 of the undesirable. There are thousands of excellent 
 people who have the needed sentiment, but who lack the 
 needed fmancial means for marriage. 
 
 We see then that we can improve the stock indirectly by 
 attending to such things as social custom and legislation. 
 Moreover, we can use these forces in one of two ways : we 
 can adopt such methods to prevent the multiplication of 
 our worst stock on the one hand, or else to improve the 
 quality — and quantity — of our best stock on the other. 
 It would seem as if we should do both these things at one 
 and the same time, working simultaneously at each end 
 of the scale. We now pass on to see how we can improve 
 the stock by more direct methods. 
 
 (6) Direct Eugenics. — With regard to improving the stock 
 by direct eugenics, a few years ago we could have done 
 little more than feel our way by rule of thumb or by guess- 
 work ; but owing to the advances made recently by biolo- 
 gists, owing also to the studies (amongst many others) 
 of Mr. Francis Galton, Professor Karl Pearson and Dr. 
 Archdall Reid, and to the recent re-discovery of Mendelism 
 — we at last see the main bearings of the problem. Genetics, 
 from being a mass of rules of thumb, is becoming a science. 
 It is perhaps hopeless to seek to explain the present position 
 of the subject adequately in a few pages, for in a popular 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 251 
 
 statement nine-tenths of the technical terms generally 
 used must be left out : but all the same, some rough attempt 
 must be made to indicate the chief problems concerned, and 
 also the lie of the land. The consideration of the deepest 
 well-being of posterity is surely a department of human 
 thought in which our highest patriotic, social, moral, and 
 religious duties unite, and it is worth while taking a little 
 trouble to bring our knowledge up to date. A nation can, 
 within certain limits, decide the destiny of the unborn 
 generation. To say, " After us the deluge," is to show a 
 callous spirit that few of us would care to exhibit, for it 
 would expose our bad citizenship, our selfishness, and our 
 irieligion. But our practical indifference to the interests of 
 posterity is only too palpable, and betrays us at every poinc. 
 
 If we do not possess sufficiently accurate knowledge to 
 enable us to make, with certainty, as many experiments 
 in direct eugenics as we could wish, we at least know the 
 lines of the necessary investigation and experiment. We 
 can get clear knowledge if we take the trouble to do so — 
 and that is a great point gained. 
 
 We are most of us more or less familiar with the epoch- 
 making work of Darwin, and know that individuals of a 
 single species vary ; and that nature, by means of natural 
 selection, has weeded out the unsuitable variations and 
 preserved those that are beneficial. The biologically fit 
 survive and perpetuate their stock, while the unfit are 
 handicapped. Certain variations had survival- value or 
 selection- value, and in the struggle for existence individua 
 which possessed them were at an advantage compared 
 with organisms that were less fit, or whose variations had 
 no such value. Biologists are not yet agreed as to whether 
 
252 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 the variations that have been selected were those that 
 differed but slightly or those that differed largely from 
 the mean. The former slight variations are sometimes 
 technically called fluctuations, while the latter are called 
 mutations, discontinuous variations or sports. Some 
 Mendelists are inclined to think that species were largely 
 formed owing to the selection of these mutations or dis- 
 continuous variations : while many selectionists maintain 
 that such mutations are practically never selected by 
 nature for they seem to be accompanied by an instability 
 of the equilibrium of the organism. We can, however, 
 retain such mutations (in plants) by artificially cultivating 
 and shielding the plant, which shows these great variations, 
 from the struggle for existence. When such plants are 
 placed under natural conditions, the modifications we have 
 artificially fostered tend to vanish. 
 
 When we come to the case of man, we find it very difficult 
 to determine whether improvement in the stock should 
 be expected through the summation and accumulation of 
 slight fluctuations from the mean, or whether we should 
 seek for the greater variations. According to Mendelism, 
 " characters " in an organism tend to segregate and to 
 get sifted out from one another. But many biologists 
 think that " characters " in man tend to blend and not 
 to segregate. The difference of opinion exists solely 
 because we have not yet collected sufficient evidence (or 
 made experiments) to test the truth of these opposed 
 hypotheses. We are all familiar with the patent fact 
 that when white races mate with black ones, the hybrid 
 shows a blending of colour. If Mendelian principles obtain 
 in the case of man as they do in the case of plants, and if 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 253 
 
 the colouration of skin, the form of hair, and the distinctive 
 features are Mendelian " characters " that segregate, it 
 should be possible, by suitable interbreeding, to take a 
 mass of half-castes, and in the course of a few generations 
 to sift out from them the two original stocks from which 
 they sprang — thus eliminating the half-caste. The interest 
 of this question is very great, and the dispute that is now 
 going on amongst the two difEerent schools of biologists 
 could easily be settled by observation and experiment. 
 
 It would be hopeless to point out in this chapter the 
 principles that Mendelians are seeking to establish, for it 
 would take pages to explain the meaning of allelomorphs, 
 gametes, heterozygotes, and all the other technical terms 
 necessary to a discussion of the subject. But it is possible 
 to give an example of the sort of practical problem in 
 horticulture that can now be solved by using Mendelian 
 principles of intercrossing. Mr. Lock, in his work on 
 " Heredity," supplies for our consideration several 
 examples, from which I extract the following facts. 
 
 There are very many kinds of wheat that can be grown 
 in England, and yet none of them fetch so high a price as 
 several varieties of grain grown in America. On seeking 
 to grow American varieties in England, most of them are 
 found rapidly to lose their good qualities, though one of 
 them continues to give a good grain. Unfortunately this 
 variety yields in England too small a crop per acre to make 
 it worth while cultivating. A Mendelian worker attacked 
 the problem, and by cross-breeding an American and an 
 English variety was able to produce a wheat that showed 
 all the good qualities of the American grain as well as the 
 desirable qualities of the home-grown varieties. " The 
 
254 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 problem has therefore been completely solved, and there 
 can be little doubt," says Mr. Lock, " that when these 
 new types are brought into general cultivation the profit 
 obtaining from the growing of a wheat in this country 
 will be increased by several shillings to the acre of crop 
 grown." * 
 
 This solution of the problem was not obtained by mere 
 rule of thumb, but was the result of a definite following of 
 what are called Mendelian principles. But a still more 
 striking achievement has been effected. Many millions 
 of pounds are lost annually by the attack of rust, which 
 ruins the wheat crop. Certain varieties of grain are practi- 
 cally immune to this rust, though they are wanting in other 
 very desirable qualities. It seemed too good to hope that 
 a variety might be obtained by cross-breeding that would 
 be rust-free and yet possessed of the desirable qualities. 
 Experiments were carried out on the Cambridge experi- 
 mental farm, and Mendelian principles were again adopted. 
 A variety that was practically rust-free was crossed with 
 another variety that was excellent in all points except 
 that it invariably suffered from rust. By crossing these 
 varieties, and by selecting, according to Mendelian prin- 
 ciples, certain of the young plants, and by cultivating 
 these alone, it was possible to produce a stock that bred 
 true, and that was both rust-free and possessed of all the 
 other desirable qualities. Acting according to principle, 
 and not by rule of thumb, this feat was performed in only 
 three generations. 
 
 It might be thought — indeed it has been suggested — 
 that what holds good in the case of plants should hold 
 * " Variation, Heredity and Evolution," pp. 218, 219. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 255 
 
 good in the case of man. It by no means follows that 
 they do hold good in this case. If these principles were 
 found to hold in the case of man,we might be able to produce 
 the most extraordinary developments in human nature. 
 But as yet we do not know for certain whether any valuable 
 human "characters" blend or whether they segregate 
 according to Mendelian principles.* At present the dust 
 of battle is raging ; and we must wait until those who are 
 now, along with observers such as Mr. Mudge, investigating 
 the question of the intercrossing of races have completed 
 their observations. It would be of great interest to collect 
 evidence and pedigrees of half-caste families in South 
 Africa, as well as to test the effect of intercrossing between 
 South African tribes, such as, say, the Fingos and the 
 Basutos, each of which is noted for a somewhat different 
 type of intellect and physique. f 
 
 With regard to the question as to the latent capacity 
 for variation possessed by the Kafirs, we can at present 
 neither affirm nor deny that they have bred-out or exhausted 
 their capacity for variation. There is much evidence to 
 lead biologists to think that variation was once much 
 more ample and abundant (and evolution more rapid) 
 than it is to-day. Nature has been at work for ages, 
 and by natural selection has weeded out useless variations 
 and has stereotyped the useful ones. Thus she has 
 standardised her patterns, as it were, and is now 
 working in such a way that variation is of much less 
 selection-value or survival-value than formerly. The 
 
 * It would seem as if disadvantageous variations, such as hare-lip, 
 cleft-palate, &c., behaved as Mendelian characters. 
 
 t There are several types of colouration in the case of the Kafirs — 
 a fact that might be borne in mind by investigators. 
 
256 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 useless patterns have become discarded, and perhaps with 
 these ill-adapted patterns has gone the concomitant 
 capacity for variation. Fixity of type seems to have been 
 nature's goal, and so it has come about that forms are 
 now more stable than they were ages since. We have not 
 experimented or observed facts sufficiently to say whether 
 the human race has, or has not, nearly reached the end of 
 its tether in the matter of variation ; nor do we yet know 
 how long such capacity can lie latent without becoming 
 lost. Old races are certainly vanishing rapidly, and only 
 the fortunate ones that are wisely handled can hope to 
 survive. Civilisation has been as severe as natural selec- 
 tion, or has possibly been one of the tools natural selection 
 has employed to weed out the unfit races. 
 
 Discussing the question as to whether man's evolution 
 has ceased or not. Dr. Reid points out the two sides to the 
 matter. On the one hand it is possible to argue that man 
 is regressing, as most of the occasions for selection have 
 ceased to exist. Some of the races in the stone age seem 
 to have surpassed us in size of body as the ancient Greeks 
 seem to have surpassed us in intelligence. But on the 
 other hand there are reasons for thinking we have progressed, 
 since, for example, modern Norwegians are able to introduce 
 but one hand into the two-handed sword-hilts of their 
 ancestors, while the intellectual achievements of the Greeks 
 seem to have been due more to the excellence of their 
 mental training — to their environment — than to the great- 
 ness of their mental powers. The Greek youth was taught 
 how to think while we teach our youth ivhat to think : in 
 other words, the Greeks educated their youth while we stifle 
 their opening minds. Dr. Reid says : " Other writers 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 257 
 
 maintain that man is undergoing, not regression, but a great 
 and rapid evolution. They point, as proof, to his recent 
 wonderful advance in civilisation. But here the word evo- 
 lution is not used in its biological sense. The existence of 
 the steam-engine and the electric telegraph do not imply 
 any intrinsic change in mind or body. They belong, not 
 to human evolution, but to what has been termed ' evolu- 
 tion in human environment.' The truth appears to be 
 that the gradual cessation of the old causes of elimination 
 has caused, or is causing, human evolution on ancient lines 
 to cease ; but as yet the time has not been sufficient to 
 permit appreciable regression. Just as hands and feet 
 ceased to evolve hundreds of thousands of years ago, just 
 as heart and lungs ceased to evolve at a period still more 
 remote, so the evolution in size, strength and intelligence 
 has probably reached its term. In all these particulars 
 the race is so well adapted to the environment that the 
 amount of elimination which now obtains merely sustains, 
 but does not add to, the antecedent evolution. But if, 
 in the future, as modern socialistic tendencies seem to 
 indicate, the labourer receives, not according to the result 
 achieved, but according to the labour expended, if the 
 weak in muscle and brain survive and have offspring equally 
 with the strong, very slow regression will follow no doubt ; 
 unless, indeed, in an era more enlightened than our own, 
 Artificial Selection takes up the task which Natural Selec- 
 tion has laid down, and, by a careful selection of parents, 
 raises mankind to a pinnacle of strength and intelligence 
 as yet undreamed of." * 
 All this has several profound relations to our Kafir 
 * " Principles of Heredity," pp. 107, 108. 
 
 R 
 
258 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 problem, but only one point need be touched on here. 
 When discussing the Clan-System it was pointed out how it 
 was suited to a general low level of mediocrity. However, 
 there were tribal wars to ensure that there should be no 
 deterioration of muscle and of the lower animal faculties, 
 such as cunning. These tribal fights prevented the physique 
 from degenerating ; and our stopping of inter-tribal wars 
 will almost certainly lead to a falling off of physical stamina 
 in the Kafirs. But the Clan-System did nothing to stimu- 
 late the intellect, and Dr. Reid's words, " If the weak in 
 brain survive and have offspring equally with the strong 
 very slow regression will follow," might have been written 
 with a view to argue from the Kafirs. It may be argued 
 that unless we can so modify the Clan- System as to allow 
 excellence of brain to have survival- value, the system must 
 prevent the highest possible elevation of the natives. And, 
 indeed, the regression of the Kafirs, if it has taken place 
 in the distant past, as has been suggested above, may have 
 commenced with the institution of the present form of 
 the Clan-System and its marriage customs : in that case 
 the social, if not the socialistic, elements wrapt up with 
 that system may, after all, be the cause of the Kafir's pre- 
 sent low mental condition : for the natives would have been 
 handicapped, first of all by too much exogamous breeding 
 (which appears to tend to the production of a moderately 
 low average of the stock), and then also by their socialistic 
 organisation, which seems to tend to mediocrity. 
 
 There is another aspect of the whole problem. We know 
 that a species undergoes evolution only under somewhat 
 adverse conditions, and that it suffers regression in the 
 absence of struggle and consequent natural selection. 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 259 
 
 Superabundance of food-supply is a gain to the individual, 
 but it may prove a loss to the species ; for selection under 
 such conditions may not be sufficiently stringent to weed 
 out the individuals that are unfit. Disease is a loss to the 
 individual, and yet, owing to its drastic selective action, it 
 may be (if not excessive) a gain to the species by weeding 
 out the unfit. What is required is a balancing of these 
 two forces. It must also be remembered, once more, that 
 the biologically fit are not necessarily the sociologically 
 desirable. Unless there is a certain amount of shielding 
 from undue struggle, the arts and amenities of life have no 
 scope for development. We need first of all a broad basis 
 of stock that is biologically fit, so as to give physical strength 
 to the nation ; and having got that, we need to favour 
 those individuals who are sociologically desirable. In the 
 case of direct eugenics, as in that of indirect eugenics, we 
 can work at either end of the scale, preventing the forma- 
 tion of bad stock, or encouraging the formation of good 
 stock — or we can combine both these methods. 
 
 We have been experimenting in direct eugenics for ages, 
 and even those who are scandalised by the very word have 
 been working at eugenics, though it may have been in an 
 unintelligent fashion. Every time a self-respecting man 
 carefully considers the physical, mental, and moral cha- 
 racters of the woman who is to be the mother of his children, 
 he is working at direct eugenics ; and so is the woman who 
 bears these factors in mind when she receives an offer of 
 marriage. When the Vicar of Wakefield " began to think 
 seriously and chose his wife, as she did her wedding-gown, 
 not for a fine glossy surface, but for such qualities as would 
 wear well," he was also working at direct eugenics. When 
 
260 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 doctors persuade people not to marry epileptics or degene- 
 rates, they are working at the same science. It is therefore 
 absurd for people to cry out when it is proposed that what 
 is done feebly and often in a bungling fashion should be 
 done by combining accurate knowledge with sound scientific 
 sense so as to ensure the greatest possible amount of good 
 for posterity. There is much truth in the words of Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw when he says in his Man and Superman, 
 " Being cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of 
 philanthropy : being sluggards, we neglect artificial selection 
 under cover of delicacy and morality." These words apply 
 with peculiar force to our philanthropic efforts amongst 
 the Kafirs. We have deluged them with philanthropy, 
 but have done nothing to shield them from the inevitable 
 and evil side-issues of our propaganda. We even talk of 
 destroying the one custom that would make it unusually 
 easy to try experiments in direct eugenics in the kraals. 
 The custom I refer to is that of lohola, in virtue of which 
 a man gives a number of cattle to the father of the 
 girl he marries. The great bulk of the Kafirs do not 
 marry "for love," as we use that phrase. The average 
 young Kafir, like a primitive Vicar of Wakefield, looks 
 round the kraals for a good, fat, strong, hard-working, 
 restrained- tongue wench. He wants a woman who will 
 bear him healthy children, cook his dinner, hoe his fields, 
 carry his water, and attend to all domestic matters without 
 plaguing him with her tongue. So long as he can find a 
 few of these qualities combined in any woman, he is mode- 
 rately satisfied, and, like a man, pays up his ten head of 
 cattle to the girl's father. In nine cases out of ten, the girl 
 goes unquestioningly to the man who has bargained for 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 261 
 
 her. Every now and then men choose wives out of special 
 love, and every now and then a girl refuses to go to the man 
 she does not like. But the bulk of the people, who seem 
 to think that marriage was made for man and not man for 
 marriage, find the custom very convenient and satisfactory. 
 The educated natives dislike the custom, for, amongst 
 other reasons, they want to get their wives — as they want 
 to get so many other things — without paying anything. 
 
 It must be obvious that mankind can never expect to 
 have a better opportunity for stud\ang problems in direct 
 eugenics. This lohola custom * would enable us to start 
 investigations, for through it we could " arrange " suitable 
 marriages, even as we " arrange " the most imsuitable 
 money-marriages in English society. There is practically 
 no delicacy — except our own — ^to stand in the way, for 
 the investigations could be carried on without the natives 
 knowing what the strange white man was up to. The state 
 of our knowledge would hardly justify us in applying 
 immediately much heroic social surgery : for a considerable 
 time to come we should have to confine ourselves chiefly 
 to accurate observations of the effect of past marriages ; 
 and we could begin with very simple problems, for the 
 Kafijs would not present such complex tangles of numerous 
 emotional and intellectual factors as would be the case in 
 Europe. We should thus get a most valuable set of simple 
 observations to guide us in the more complicated problems 
 that must face us in the future. It would seem that the 
 nation that has the pluck to start experiments in direct 
 eugenics will have a good chance of ruling the world : and 
 
 * I have described this custom at some length in " The Essential 
 Kafir." 
 
262 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 it is not improbable that the Japanese will soon apply, 
 in this matter as in so many others, Western Science to 
 Eastern problems. 
 
 By experimenting with the Kafirs, we should not offend 
 their sense of propriety, for they have very little or none 
 in this matter. Indeed we should do something to redeem 
 the custom of lobola from some of its abuses, while at the 
 same time we should improve their stock from a physical 
 point of view. We seem scarcely justified in breaking up 
 native customs unless we are also willing to help the people 
 to adopt safeguards against some of the evils that follow as 
 a result of our action. If we were to cleanse the custom 
 of lobola we might stop, or lessen, some of the degenerating 
 defects of om- interference in Kafir affairs. By uprooting 
 the lobola custom, we should but offend Kafir sentiment, 
 destroy the black woman's one safeguard from ill-treat- 
 ment, and throw away our opportunity of improving the 
 stock of the people. We might at least take an initial step 
 to improve that stock if we wished, but we are, as Mr. Shaw 
 says, too cowardly or too sluggish to set to work at the 
 problem before us. Our sentiment prevents us from taking 
 the one precaution that would ward off some of the evil 
 effects caused by our sentiment and moral impulses. 
 
 The Kafirs happen to present us with a magnificent field 
 for such experimental work, for they are broken up into a 
 number of tribes, each of which has preserved for coimtless 
 years certain types that seem to breed true. They also 
 practise polygamy, which would enable us to make the most 
 valuable comparative studies which are obviously impos- 
 sible in Europe. In other words, the Kafirs, by means of 
 their tribal organisation and marriage customs, have been 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 263 
 
 for ages preparing the ground for experiments in eugenics. 
 We have thus a most fruitful field for experiment and 
 study. 
 
 We have now examined the horse — in other words, we 
 see more or less clearly the conditions that must be fulfilled 
 if the Kafirs are to rise. If we wish to know whether the 
 Kafirs as a race can rise, we have only got to ask ourselves 
 the questions : f.rst, whether we have tried to fulfil the 
 conditions, and secondly, whether we intend to try them. 
 I think it is obvious that we have never made the least 
 attempt to fulfil the conditions, and consequently cannot 
 be justified in maintaining that the Kafirs as a race cannot 
 rise. There would seem to be every reason for thinking 
 that they are capable of vast improvement : but it must 
 be confessed that when we think of the present condition 
 of South African politics and Home opinion, it is extremely 
 doubtful whether we shall adopt suitable methods. There 
 is, however, one thing we certainly might do : we might 
 collect accurate evidence and data, as well as reliable 
 pedigrees of half-castes and full-blooded Kafirs, so as to 
 pass on to a generation that we hope will be more intel- 
 ligent than the present one, reliable data on a subject 
 they will be certain to study. 
 
 It will perhaps make the drift of my biological argument 
 clearer if I sum up thus. It would seem that in the case 
 of the Kafirs, the race will not fuse with the whites and will 
 not die out through the importation of European disease, 
 but will Uve on and multiply side by side with the Europeans. 
 Further, it appears as if the individual Kafir, owing to 
 some idiosyncrasy of his stock, can never become the equal 
 of the white man, though he has a great and undeveloped 
 
264 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 capacity for progress. If left to himself, the Kafir will not 
 be able to rise very high ; for our civilisation supplies an 
 unsuitable environment, the evil of which he cannot resist 
 unless he is guided by the white man. Nevertheless, if 
 he is wisely educated by experts in education, he may de- 
 velop in intelligence, in moral sentiment, in industry, in 
 will-power, in religion, in art, and in most of the amenities 
 of civilised life far more than is generally thought possible. 
 Thousands of individuals may be raised possibly as high 
 above the level of the average Kafir of to-day as we are 
 above the worshippers of Woden. But this would take 
 time as well as very careful — and yet firm and bold — 
 handling of the Kafir. Left to the tender mercies of 
 amateur educationists, the natives would probably end 
 in something worse than what we contemptuously call 
 savagery. 
 
 With regard to the education of the Kafirs, we have a 
 magnificent object-lesson in Brooker Washington's Institute 
 at Tuskegge, where the attention is turned away from 
 politics and is chiefly centred on the formation of cha- 
 racter ; and where the negroes are taught trades, industry, 
 practical agriculture, honesty, thrift and self-reliance, 
 being given only as much book-education as will strengthen 
 and cement together the various items of the curriculum. 
 The esfrit de corps at that Institute has a most potent 
 influence ; for the students feel that they have a reputation 
 to live up to, and they find that they must work hard so 
 as to support themselves. Here, and not at the polls, lies 
 the work of the educated Kafir. If Ethiopianism could 
 be purged of its politics, and if it could be turned to the 
 forming of solid character — a work that does not glitter 
 
CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 265 
 
 half so much — it might be a truly valuable force in the 
 uplifting of each successive generation of the race, even 
 though such work will not produce a direct and permanent 
 effect in the stock. 
 
 With regard to the race (in distinction from the individtial), 
 we can by the adoption of wise social and political remedies, 
 indirectly affect the stock. But if we wish to produce still 
 more germinal change, we shall have to work at direct 
 eugenics, breeding-out the sociologically undesirable and 
 breeding-in the qualities we value. By combining educa- 
 tion, which afiects the individual, with social custom and 
 pohtical legislation and direct eugenics, which affect the 
 stock, we should elevate the Kafirs all round, and do our 
 simple duty : and it is difficult to say whether the Kafirs 
 or we ourselves would benefit the more. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS THE SOLUTION OF 
 THE NATIVE PROBLEM 
 
 There are a dozen important things we should do if we 
 would solve the Native Problem : but since this book is 
 only an introduction to the study of the subject, and since 
 its main object is to call a halt and to provoke inquiry, 
 it is not necessary to discuss at length the solution of the 
 problem. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether at the 
 present stage much good can result from the propounding 
 of " solutions," for we have not yet taken the most obvious 
 preliminary step. The Kafirs say that the Eye crosses 
 the full river : but the Body does not ; and until we have 
 taken the first step, it is scarcely worth while to let our 
 imagination go roaming while we discuss details of the 
 later parts of our journey. Beyond all reasonable doubt 
 the first thing that should be done — and it is an endless 
 cause for wonder that it was not done a century ago — is 
 to start an Ethnological Bureau which should discover 
 for us the basal facts of the problem. 
 
 I should be sorry if it were thought that in these pages 
 I have been scoffing at sentiment. The Native Problem 
 will no more be solved without sentiment than it will be 
 solved by it. I hold firmly that a strong, healthy senti- 
 ment, based on sound knowledge, is the only thing that 
 will give us the energy and motive-power to do our duty : 
 
THE SOLUTION OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 267 
 
 it is a soft efEeminate sentiment, based on hysterical fancies 
 and imaginings, and uncontrolled by intelligence, that I 
 regard as our greatest enemy. Let us have facts first 
 and sentiment afterwards. 
 
 The days of the devising of imaginative cures for diseases 
 have passed away. We are now aware that if we seek, 
 not a palliative, but a cure, we must do something more 
 than treat symptoms, the study of which is of value mainly 
 for diagnostic purposes. Our medical text-books consist 
 largely of a description of the nature, causes, consequences, 
 and diagnosis of disease ; and we are slowly beginning 
 to realise that we must follow a similar line of action with 
 regard to the diseases of the body politic. When we give 
 syrup of opium to quiet a restless child ; when we give 
 sixpence to a beggar who appeals to our pity ; or when 
 we, through the State, feed hungry children without 
 considering the causes that have led to their hunger ; we 
 do but treat symptoms, and as often as not aggravate and 
 propagate the diseases of poverty and parental indifference 
 or neglect. The danger of manufacturing paupers by 
 applying palliatives to lessen the distressing symptoms 
 of poverty is now fairly well recognised by the average 
 intelligent person ; though popular theories whose fallacies 
 have been exposed to all the world are apt to seek the 
 privileged shelter of the House of Commons, just as faiths 
 and philosophies go to Oxford when they die. But outside 
 the House of Commons and Party Politics no one believes 
 that we can cure national evils by sentiment, or doubts 
 the necessity of making an organised study of the causes 
 of trouble whether the subject be cancer, or crime, or 
 poverty, or the falling off in the birth-rate, or physical 
 
268 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 deterioration. The days in which some Paracelsus sought 
 to cherish his selfish ambition in solitary study so that 
 he might astound the world have well-nigh vanished ; for 
 we now recognise that progress in knowledge is a social 
 product. We therefore start societies and committees to 
 devise experiment, and to gather and collate evidence. 
 A hundred brains all work in imison, and each profits by 
 the experience of each ; the greater the problem, the vaster 
 the issues of our policy, the more intricate the problem, the 
 more necessary does it appear to us to co-ordinate the 
 investigations of many workers in the field. Only thus 
 can we hope to fmd a remedy. Yet, though we are in a 
 great measure responsible for the happiness and destiny 
 of millions of our backward fellow countrymen in South 
 Africa, we have done little, as a body of white rulers, to 
 study native thought, aspiration, and custom. Instead 
 of investigating facts, we have been occupied with opinions, 
 and have looked at the natives through the eyes of Home 
 sentiment or dividends. "At the present stage," writes 
 Dr. Haddon, the head and moving spirit of the Cambridge 
 Ethnological School, " knowledge will not be advanced 
 much by looking at laggard peoples through the spectacles 
 of old-world civilisation." Yet this is precisely what our 
 rulers persist in doing. Sir Harry Johnston, writing in 
 Nature (May 19, 1904), said : " It is a national humiliation 
 to us to reflect that as a Government we have been con- 
 nected with South Africa for more than a century, that is 
 to say, two-thirds as long as our Imperial connection with 
 India has lasted, and yet that by Government endeavour 
 or private research so little of value has been published in 
 the English language of the native human races of Africa 
 
THE SOLUTION OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 209 
 
 south of the Zambesi." The writer went on to point out 
 the main works published, but it is a meagre list, valuable 
 as are some of the books. Sir Harry Johnston has done 
 so much in his tenure of office in Central Africa to advance 
 the study of the native races we have to govern that his 
 remarks carry all the weight of a practical administrator. 
 But who will listen to them ? The verdict of the scholar 
 living remote from the hubbub of Colonial administration 
 is to the same effect. Dr. Frazer, the well-known author 
 of " The Golden Bough," has done much to explain the 
 ideas underlying primitive thought ; he recently wrote 
 in the Daily Mail* when reviewing an ethnological book : 
 "It is a pity that our Government, in its dealing with 
 native races, has no Bureau of Ethnology or advisory 
 board of anthropologists to consult. If it had, it might 
 have been saved from many blunders which have cost 
 the nation dear in blood and treasure." 
 
 Mr. Andrew Lang told us some years ago, when discussing 
 in the Morning Post Dr. Haddon's plea for an Ethnological 
 Bureau for Greater Britain, that the British had not suffi- 
 cient imagination to see that it would be worth while to 
 pay for such a thing ; for in England we do not value 
 abstract knowledge very highly. But he went on to point 
 out that : "In Africa it really would be money in our pockets 
 to understand the native law and custom, which is elaborate 
 and complex, and can scarcely be disregarded with im- 
 punity. When questions of dowry and property are mixed 
 up with witchcraft, an administrator must understand the 
 native point of view." 
 
 It is not suggested that sentiment should be banished 
 * November 24, 1906. 
 
270 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 from our view of the native race, for only the most petrified 
 and desiccated ethnologist of the study would have workers 
 in the field act as if Kafirs were so many apes or monkeys, 
 or would wish us to forget that the people examined are 
 throbbing with rich human blood. The sentiments, 
 customs, emotions, and ideas of the backward race are 
 precisely the subjects the ethnologist in the field would 
 study. We want common sense and knowledge to be 
 " touched with emotion," but only touched : it would be 
 most pernicious to swamp facts in an ocean of sentiment, 
 whether financial, political or " Exeter Hall." Nothing 
 so blinds the eyes as race-prejudice, religious enthusiasm, 
 and self-interest ; where they come in as disturbing factors 
 we need an impartial tribunal, composed of men specially 
 trained to sift knowledge, to determine and interpret the 
 facts. It is no cause for wonder that the Johannesburg 
 financier imagines that the Native Problem is in essence 
 a question of the economic development of the native 
 labour-supply; that the politician conceives it to be a 
 question of the suffrage ; that the missionary regards it 
 as chiefly a problem in religion ; that the teacher thinks 
 it is a question of education ; that the doctor insists that 
 it is mainly a problem of race-survival and disease. Where 
 shall we find a man so filled with the grace of detachment 
 as to form a dispassionate and impartial judgment of 
 values in a question where his interests or sentiments are 
 deeply engaged ? An ethnologist may not be perfect, but, 
 owing to training and freedom from personal interests, 
 he is at least more likely than most people to keep his 
 balance in this matter. He is sympathetically disposed 
 towards the race he studies — else he could never get the 
 
THE SOLUTION OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 271 
 
 information he seeks — and yet is alert and interested in 
 the broad aspect of all social problems. 
 
 I am aware that in tacitly assuming that the white man 
 in South Africa knows almost nothing, as he should know, 
 of the native races, I am running counter to the usual 
 colonial talk. This has been summed up by Mr. Lionel 
 Philips in his " Transvaal Problems." " English states- 
 men," he writes, " should bear in mind that the colonists 
 have an intimate personal acquaintance with the native " * 
 (p. 139). He also gives a good example of how politicians 
 talk when he adds : " The Native Affairs Commission has 
 gone fully into the tribal system, &c." (p. 140). I should 
 be the last to wish to underrate the most excellent and 
 valuable report of the Commission, but cannot help noticing 
 that the Commissioners gave but a few pages of very large 
 type to the subject. It would have been difficult for them 
 to have said more in the space at their disposal ; but for 
 the public to be told that the Commissioners " went fully " 
 into the subject shows how lightly politicians value such 
 matters. An Ethnological Bureau might find a hundred 
 times as many pages all too little for a full examination 
 of this most important subject. The Commissioners did 
 but touch the fringe of the subject, and they would be 
 the first to admit the fact. To devise a policy on the 
 insufficient knowledge we have of native thought and 
 character is to court failure : to think we know all about 
 the natives is to ensure it. 
 
 * If Mr. Philips only intended to convey the impression that South 
 African ignorance of Kafir thought and custom, when contrasted with 
 European ignorance on the subject, appeared to be deep knowledge, 
 then I agree with him. 
 
272 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 It is true that we have from time to time appointed 
 Native Commissions to investigate Kafir customs, and we 
 may well be thankful for the invaluable help these 
 reports have been to us. That fact alone is sufficient to 
 substantiate my plea ; for if one or two Commissions 
 have done so much good, what would be the effect of an 
 Ethnological Bureau ? But it must be borne in mind 
 that such Commissions have rarely been composed of men 
 who have had a scientific training, or who have been 
 taught to sift ethnological information, though they 
 may have been astute magistrates or lawyers. The legal 
 training and habit of mind that make a man an adroit 
 barrister, capable of worrying a witness until the worse 
 case appears the better, are poles asunder from the 
 scientific training and temper that enable a man to 
 ascertain the positive facts in an ethnological puzzle. 
 Therefore we may reasonably expect great results from 
 the founding of a Bureau. 
 
 The Bureau that I suggest would popularise accurate 
 knowledge as to native custom and thought, and would, 
 little by little, undermine hide-bound prejudices and 
 popular fallacies without the public being aware of the 
 fact that its opinion was being affected. Knowledge, 
 instead of opinion, would become the basis of our legislation ; 
 and as a result we should not continue to knock our heads 
 against hard facts. Until we are better informed than we 
 are at present, we may well hold our hand from making 
 drastic changes in our methods, and from devising a uinform 
 policy for all the different South African States, for we 
 have no guarantee that we should not but shift our building 
 from one patch of sand to another. There can, however, 
 
THE SOLUTION OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 273 
 
 be no conceivable danger in the immediate starting of the 
 Ethnological Bureau. 
 
 The following brief outline may show some of the advan- 
 tages that we might reasonably hope to gain from such a 
 Bureau : but we must remember that the mere creation of 
 an establishment, though it may supply us with informa- 
 tion, will not solve the problem. We must not expect, 
 savage-like, that a Bureau or anything else will act by 
 magical influence and save us all the trouble and responsi- 
 bility of clear thinking, sensible feeling, and strong willing. 
 In pointing out some of the results that we may expect, 
 there is a danger of imitating advertisers of patent medicines 
 who say that their remedies will cure " all the ills that 
 flesh is heir to " : yet some of the advantages of an 
 organised study of the natives may be enumerated. 
 
 (1) At present one of our greatest dangers consists in 
 the way politicians are seeking to solve the Native Problem 
 by fancy policies evolved from their own inner conscious- 
 ness. It is not so much the actual needs of the natives 
 that prompts these schemes as the exigencies of white 
 politics. There is not much likelihood that any of such 
 proposals will really solve the problem ; for the most 
 important person of all is the one person least considered. 
 By studying native custom and thought it may be possible 
 for us to trace symptoms until we arrive at causes, and so 
 get to the roots of the problem. There are few more diffi- 
 cult things than this, for natives do not readily supply to 
 men of an alien race information as to their inner thoughts 
 and aspirations. An illustration may be given. An ethno- 
 logist recently spent a few months studying a certam 
 race of primitive people. A missionary, who had been 
 
 S 
 
274 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 working amongst these people for more years than the 
 ethnologist had been working months, on seeing the results 
 of the ethnologist's work, said he felt ashamed and worth- 
 less ; here was a man who, without knowing the language, 
 had discovered more about the customs of the people in 
 a few months than he had during a whole lifetime devoted 
 to this special object. The one knew what to look for and 
 had been trained how to look for it, while the other had 
 bungled along, groping in the darkness and deceived by the 
 people amongst whom he was living. 
 
 (2) Starting with the study of Kafir children, we should 
 study the inborn capacities of the race as well as the 
 environment of the child ; and should probably discover 
 amongst many other equally important things why it is 
 that there is so often an arrest of progress at puberty. We 
 should study the " recapitulation " shown by the child, 
 and might thus get clues to many things that puzzle us 
 in the adult. 
 
 (3) We should watch the effect of educational methods, 
 and note whether they were defective or effective. Though 
 it may be impossible to-day, yet later on the Government 
 will have to take a greater control of native education. 
 The Bureau would study educational methods in Europe and 
 America — especially such excellent methods as those used by 
 Brooker Washington at Tuskegee — and test their efficacy in 
 the case of the Kafirs. They would also spread information 
 amongst missionaries as to recent educational methods. ; 
 
 (4) The Bureau would undertake anthropometric 
 measurements of the various races of South Africa, and 
 would apprise us of any incipient changes in physique, 
 or in other characters, as a result of changed environment. 
 
THE SOLUTION OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 273 
 
 By adopting a uniform system of measurement, the results 
 arrived at in the different tribes would be strictly compar- 
 able, and would be of immense value even in the study 
 of many European problems. It is difficult to estimate 
 the value of a series of such measurements of the adolescent 
 Kafir when compared with similar measurements that are 
 now being taken at such public schools as Eton. A series of 
 measurements of Kafir infants would also be of great value. 
 
 It is clear to us that we are suffering under great dis- 
 abilities simply on account of the indifference of a past 
 generation to anthropological and ethnological investiga- 
 tion : the least we can do is w see to it that we do not 
 similarly handicap our children, who will be faced with 
 a larger native population. If we have the least regard 
 for posterity we should set to work at once. 
 
 (5) The Bureau would not only increase our stock of 
 scientific knowledge, which would be of infinite value in 
 future ages ; it would also study problems of immediate 
 importance, such as the latent talent of the Kafirs for 
 industrial pursuits. Directly or indirectly it would foster, 
 and experiment in, native capacity for working in iron, 
 and it might revive this almost lost art that the trader 
 and missionary have unintentionally combined to kill. 
 It may show what natives can do in this direction if I 
 mention that on the Zambesi a friend of mine pointed out 
 to me a native who had welded into his self-made iron 
 hammer a steel facing made from old broken files. My 
 friend had been the chief engineer of one of the mines at 
 Johannesburg, and was extremely handy with his fingers, 
 being able to make everjrthing he required, from his 
 clothing to his house ; yet he said that he would not Uke, 
 
276 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 with the poor apparatus the native used, to attempt the 
 same feat. 
 
 In a somewhat similar way it would be possible to foster 
 the many existing native manufactures, such as mat- 
 making, basket-work, pottery manufacture, dyeing, cotton- 
 spinning, gold- and silver-smithing, weaving, &c., many 
 of which arts are only practised in a few isolated districts 
 I have seen all these arts carried to a considerable degree 
 of excellence in different tribes. It would seem probable 
 that what natives in one district can do, natives in other 
 districts could be taught ; but at present there is no 
 machinery for developing the native industries from a 
 common centre that is in touch with the scattered tribes. 
 When one has seen natives plaiting grass baskets that 
 will hold water without leaking, one cannot but feel 
 that a great deal more might be made of the dormant 
 industrial faculties of the people. 
 
 (6) It may be said that theoretically speaking the im- 
 provement of agriculture and pastoral pursuits is the 
 business of the Agricultural Departments of the various 
 Governments : but if the Kafirs have got to wait until 
 this theory is adequately turned into practice, they will 
 have to wait a very long time. Such Government Depart- 
 ments seem, not alone in South Africa, to be overburdened 
 and to get into ruts. If an Ethnological Bureau began 
 to experiment with the capacity of the Kafirs to improve 
 their stock or their methods of agriculture, they would 
 not only directly stimulate the Kafirs, but would probably 
 rouse the emulation of some sleeping Department, and so 
 lead indirectly to a surprising amount of energy. The 
 existence of a progi'essive tribe in one colony far out- 
 
THE SOLUTION OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 277 
 
 stripping another in a different colony, at present leads 
 to no stimulus for improvement ; but the Bureau could 
 use one tribe to inculcate a healthy jealousy in another 
 and more backward tribe : by arranging for a deputation 
 of the principal men of the backward tribe to inspect the 
 results obtained by another tribe, it would be possible to 
 stimulate all parties to do the best they could. Two or 
 three native head-men from Pondoland could with but 
 little expense be taken to Rhodesia, for example, to see 
 the methods used on a farm or on a cattle-ranch : and the 
 experience thus gained might mean the beginning of Pondo 
 progress. Tree-planting throughout the denuded native 
 territories might also be fostered by a Bureau that was 
 in far closer contact with the natives than is a Department 
 of Woods and Forests, which has done but little, compared 
 to what it might do, to help the raw Kafirs to take an 
 intelligent interest in the subject. Apart altogether from 
 the asset of the actual timber, the indirect effect would be 
 felt everywhere, creating even in the most unexpected 
 quarters a new interest in the Kafirs, It would also have 
 a reflex effect on the native community ; and the mere 
 fact that the mind of the Kafirs was kept occupied would 
 tend to make the people less restless, while it would lead 
 to their healthy social and economic development in a 
 way no amount of book-learning ever could. 
 
 (7) The Bureau might have a special department for 
 dealing with problems of commerce and trade, and would 
 thus serve as a sort of centre for the co-ordinating of informa- 
 tion concerning the native labour-supply, the possibility 
 of opening fresh markets, the introduction of new lines of 
 goods, &c. It could study the subject of the creation of 
 
278 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 fresh wants, whicli seems to be one of the central thoughts 
 of civilisation. 
 
 (8) The Bureau would form an expert body to be con- 
 sulted by people in the various States of South Africa. 
 It would prove helpful to most classes of society : magis- 
 trates, traders, mine-managers, missionaries, and, above 
 all, natives would find it of great value. It could keep an 
 eye on the Native Press, watch Kafir aspirations and ideals, 
 study changes in thought produced by Missions, labour 
 demands, commerce and economics, and generally act as 
 a sort of buffer between the native races and the white men. 
 Kafirs, who for obvious reasons are shy of the magistrates, 
 would soon come to open their minds about their difficulties 
 and their needs to men who understood them, but who had 
 no executive power, and who, above all, wished to keep up 
 kindly relations so as the better to gain the information they 
 sought. Ethnologists would take broader views of racial 
 customs than could financiers, missionaries, magistrates or 
 politicians with their more departmental interests ; and 
 natives would soon come to appreciate this fact. 
 
 (9) The Bureau, by enlightening Home opinion about 
 the Kafir, would form the best possible bulwark against 
 uninformed and unintelligent interference from home. 
 Time was when the world considered that a slave was a 
 person (a) who was forced to leave his country against his 
 will ; (6) who was not paid for his labour ; (c) and who 
 was not allowed to return to his home. We all knew 
 where we were in those days. Now a Political Party can 
 win an election and can affect the affairs of a Colony at 
 the other end of the world by so curious a procedure as 
 maintaining that a person (a) who leaves his country of 
 
THE SOLUTION OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 279 
 
 his own free will ; (&) who is well paid for his labour ; 
 (c) and who voluntarily undertakes to return home, at 
 his employer's expense, when his contract is finished, is a 
 slave. When that sort of thing can happen, the affairs of 
 the Colonies are in an unfortunate and perilous condition. 
 We may any day be faced by a popular party cry about 
 the Kafirs, almost as ridiculous as this contention about 
 the Chinese. An Ethnological Bureau would be a great 
 asset if such a thing were to happen. 
 
 (10) Finally, the Bureau could have an official and 
 corresponding member * in England who would be able 
 authoritatively to correct at a moment's notice the egre- 
 gious blunders and misstatements made about the Kafirs in 
 the Home Press. Let a fact thai; was mentioned above be 
 referred to again as an example , The other day a writer 
 in the halfpenny Press appealed to the democratic senti- 
 ments of the people at home by stating that the Kafirs 
 were a " pure democracy." A possible effect of such a 
 misstatement — which may have been the result of mere 
 ignorance — is not difficult to divine. A reader, wishing 
 to find ammunition for his warfare against his own kith 
 and kin in the Colonies, would put that paper down and 
 cry out : " Now just look here ! Do you see how the 
 brutal colonist is tyrannically smashing up the democratic 
 customs of these poor defenceless, voiceless, voteless 
 Kafirs ? Is it not time the Home Government interfered 
 and stood up for this ' pure democracy ' which is defence- 
 less before its tyrants ? Let us memorialise our Liberal 
 Premier, and in the sacred name of democracy put a stop 
 to this outrage on humanity." 
 
 * No Agent-General could possibly bo expected to fill this function. ■ 
 
280 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 Now what are the facts of the case ? There probably 
 never was a people on the face of the earth less friendly 
 to the whole spirit of individualism and democracy than 
 the Kafirs : it is the colonist who is inoculating him with 
 democratic ideals, and who is calling out for the abolition 
 of those tyrants, the chiefs. Not only would the corre- 
 sponding member of an Ethnological Bureau immediately 
 correct such a error, but also the knowledge of the fact 
 that there was a man fully informed as to native custom 
 and thought, ever on the alert to expose them to ridicule, 
 would make such irresponsible writers more cautious as 
 to what they published. If the Bureau could do nothing 
 else than keep the Home Press a little more straight in 
 such matters, it would pay for its unkeep several times 
 over. 
 
 Sir Richard Temple, when speaking about the relation 
 of ethnology to our success and failure in governing India, 
 remarked : " Tact is instinctive anthropological knowledge." 
 Unfortunately it is not every one who possesses such 
 instinctive knowledge : but there is not a single person 
 who could not, if he took the trouble to avail himself of 
 the information collected by an Ethnological Bureau, gain 
 acquired anthropological knowledge. Moreover, even in 
 the case of those fortunate people who have the instinc- 
 tive knowledge, the addition of definite information would 
 prove of immense value. 
 
 Professor Westermarck, in the address referred to in 
 the previous chapter, is reported to have said : " Another 
 class of persons to whom the study of social anthropology 
 would be most useful would be colonial officials and others 
 having to deal with alien races. It was amazing that no 
 
THE SOLUTION OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 281 
 
 knowledge of the customs of non-European peoples was 
 required of the persons who were sent to rule over them. 
 No error could be greater than to suppose that such officials 
 acquired the necessary knowledge in the course of their 
 duty. Ignorance had been the main cause of the trouble 
 that had occurred in European contact with native races." 
 
 A good deal more might be suggested as to the possible 
 results to be obtained from the institution of the Bureau. 
 I agree with Mr. Andrew Lang in thinking that there really 
 would be money in it : but the chief value would seem to 
 consist in the probability that the starting of such an 
 institution would be the dawn of a new day for both 
 natives and white men in South Africa. 
 
 The Americans are not generally supposed to be blind 
 to their own interests when driving a bargain, yet, though 
 they have but a very small number of aborigines in their 
 country, they spend a good many thousand pounds annually 
 in support of the Ethnological Department of their Smith- 
 sonian Institute. Moreover, their milhonaires support 
 independent ethnological work in a princely fashion, as 
 may be seen in the case of the Curtis Ethnological Survey 
 of the Red Indians, which is largely financed by Mr. Pier- 
 pont Morgan. The magnitude of the undertaking is shown 
 by the fact that the full series of volumes enshrining the 
 results of this undertaking is to cost about £600 per copy. 
 If the South African Governments cannot see the value of 
 an Ethnological Bureau, may we not look to some South 
 African millionaire to take a hint from America ? 
 
 It is strange how easy it is to forgec the native when 
 considering the Native Problem. The politician is so 
 slightly acquainted with the Kafir of the kraal, and lives 
 
282 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 so remote from him in an utterly different environment, 
 that he naturally thinks more of the political problem than 
 of the pawns or counters in the game. The philanthropist 
 is so close to his own work, and is so intensely conscious 
 of the evil symptoms of his patient, and also of the conflict 
 between his own love of " light " and the Kafir's love of 
 " darkness," that he, too often, finds little time or inclina- 
 tion for studying the object on which he is experimenting. 
 He is apt to regard Kafir customs as so degrading that he 
 hesitates to taint his own mind by studying the subject. 
 As Mr. Havelock Ellis has said, when speaking of the late 
 appearance of anthropology and psychology amongst the 
 sciences : " Men studied the stars, but their own souls 
 and bodies seemed to them too sacred or too shameful for 
 study." So few people seem to study the problem from 
 the point of view of the Kafir that the thoughts and ideals 
 of this most interested party get forgotten. The actual 
 kraal-Kafij is therefore voiceless in the discussion — for 
 no one can pretend that the educated native tries in the 
 very slightest to express the opinion of the kraal. 
 
 The treatment of the Kafir is a complicated question 
 because it is wrapped up with politics, religion, education, 
 civilisation, economics, ethics, social usages, as well as 
 with apparently ineradicable and incompatible differences 
 of temperament, tendency, ideal and outlook of several 
 races. It is grave, because a failure on our part to solve 
 the problem must end in a violent conflict and death- 
 struggle. If the clash of racial interest should ever end 
 in war, tens of thousands of lives will be lost, unimaginable 
 sufferings and barbarities will be inflicted on thousands 
 of innocent women and children ; incalculable damage 
 
THE SOLUTION OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 283 
 
 will be done to property ; immense sums of money will be 
 squandered in war ; and, no matter which side wins, a 
 whole sub-continent will be left in ruins. To put the 
 matter on the lowest plane, we cannot afEord the cost 
 of a united native rising. 
 
 Again, it is grave because in no other country in the 
 world, where the climate is suitable for the rearing of 
 healthy European families, has a coloured aboriginal race 
 been able to rise in the scale of civilisation, and permanently 
 to survive and increase, in contact with a white race. The 
 story is the same no matter what country we choose : 
 wherever the climatic conditions are suitable to the Euro- 
 pean, the natives suffer. America, Australia, New Zealand, 
 Tasmania, Canada — all tell the same dreary tale. As Mr. 
 Benjamin Kidd says : " The fate of all races occupying 
 territories of this kind has been identical. Whether wars 
 of extermination have been waged against them, or whether 
 they have been well treated and admitted to citizenship, 
 they have always tended to disappear before the more 
 vigorous incoming race." * No less an historian than 
 Mr. Bryce has told us that : " For the last three thousand 
 years this latter process (that of reducing the number of 
 types through the killing off or assimilation of the weaker) 
 has been the prevailing tendency over all or nearly all the 
 earth. It is more energetic to-day than ever before, for 
 barbarism was not more pitiless than is civihsation, even 
 where civilisation may wish to spare." f The Native 
 Problem in South Africa is therefore invested with a imique 
 interest because, since all other aboriginal races in healthy 
 climates have vanished, or are vanishing, before the 
 
 * " Social Evolution," p. 304. t " Romanes Lecture," p. 14. 
 
284 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 presence of tlie white man, it presents civilisation with 
 a last chance of atoning for the past, and of retrieving its 
 character. 
 
 South Africa is the one solitary exception to the melan- 
 choly rule of the destructive effect of civilisation. It is 
 surely nothing less than the irony of fate that it should 
 be the one country in the whole world to be picked out for 
 virulent abuse concerning its relation to its aborigines ; 
 and that Natal, in which the native population has increased 
 to the incredible — and I believe unparalleled — extent of 
 seventy-fold in seventy years * should be the one colony 
 in South Africa to be held up to peculiar scorn. All this 
 is the more remarkable since in South Africa the problem 
 is complicated in the most unique fashion. In no other 
 country have the conditions been so complex and adverse. 
 The fact that after more than a century of intimate contact 
 between the races in South Africa — I ignore the preceding 
 centuries so as to concede as much as possible to objectors — 
 the backward races are increasing in numbers more rapidly 
 than are the whites by birth and immigration combined, 
 is, on the one hand, an unanswerable, complete, and final 
 vindication of the moral character of the colonist, and, on 
 the other hand, the ground of gravest fears as to the future. 
 The South African colonist may well ignore the ignorant 
 and malicious libels recently levelled at him, for he is a 
 sturdy person well able to take care of himself : and he 
 may trust history, which judges racial problems not in 
 a peddling but in a broad manner, to take care of his 
 reputation. 
 
 * See the Report of the recent Native Commission, p. 5, where it is 
 stated that in 1838 there were in Natal about 10,000 natives, while in 
 1906 there were 700,000 — exclusive of Zululand. 
 
THE SOLUTION OF THE NATIVE PROBLEM 285 
 
 Since the Boer War, difficulties have multiplied rapidly— 
 partly owing to the excitement that war always awakens 
 in primitive peoples, and partly owing to increased Home 
 interference. No responsible colonist wishes to deny that 
 every colonial problem — in common with every Home 
 problem — ^has an Imperial bearing, for even a local parlia- 
 mentary election in the Transvaal, or a revision of taxation, 
 has such a bearing. However, that fact does not of necessity 
 imply the need of Home interference. But the colonist 
 says that the Native Problem is predominately a domestic 
 affair that cannot be understood in England in an adequate 
 manner. It is to be hoped that the Party in England 
 that has tried to make so much profit out of South African 
 affairs has learnt the unwisdom of making South Africa 
 an asset of Party politics, and will now leave her to solve 
 her own problems in her own way. The one thing that 
 the colonist needs is that steadying and sobering sense of 
 responsibility that ever arises when a man realises that for 
 better or for worse he must solve his own vital problems. 
 
 Dawn is breaking in the Dark Continent, and the Kafirs 
 are stirring in their sleep. Democratic Individualism is 
 disturbing the Socialism that has reigned undisputed for 
 ages. We need to be free from all embarrassing interference 
 from Home — which takes our eyes away from the main 
 problem, and fixes them on irritating side-issues — so that 
 we may be able wisely to help the Kafir to make the best 
 of his new day. South Africans are engaged in what is 
 perhaps the most difficult sphere of human activity — the 
 wise government of a backward race. Those who are 
 holding the reins, as they seek to negotiate their team of 
 horses round the curves of a dangerous pass, should not 
 
286 THE DAWN OF INDIVIDUALISxM 
 
 have their hands twitched by nervous passengers in the 
 back seat of the coach, even though such timid people 
 think the driver fails to see the danger. The safest plan 
 is to hold tight and trust the driver. Considering that 
 civilisation, with its somewhat disreputable reputation 
 with regard to its relation to the backward races of man- 
 kind, is faced with its last opportunity of redeeming its 
 character, we shall do well to stop hiding the real issues 
 of the problem by dragging it into the arena of political 
 strife, and to remember the sententious Kafir proverb 
 which says, the dawn does not come twice to awaken a 
 man. 
 
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