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 “BLACK CAPS AND RED FEATHERS IS A CAREFULLY WROUGHT PLAY, A
NOTABLE CONTRIBUTION TO THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD. THE AUTHOR’S
EXPERIMENTS IN THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND SURREALIST TECHNIQUES
PROVIDE THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY THEATRE WITH SOME OF THE MOST
CHALLENGING ROLES.”

Black Caps and Red Feathers

Bole Butake, Professor of African Drama, University of Yaounde 1

Black Caps and Red Feathers

“ANCESTRAL EARTH IS A PLAY THAT PROPOSES AN AFRICAN SOLUTION TO
GLOBAL WARMING AND OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES. THE GRAPHIC
UNFOLDING OF THE EVENTS AND THE STIMULATING DIALOGUE CELEBRATE AS
WELL, THE RICH AFRICAN LORE AND CULTURE.”
Professor Shadrach Ambanasom, Author of Education of the Deprived: Cameroon Anglophone Literary Drama

“ANCESTRAL EARTH IS THE SEQUEL TO, IF NOT THE FLIPSIDE OF BLACK CAPS
AND RED FEATHERS WITH A CAUSAL THEMATISATION OF BLEAKNESS AND
HOPE.”
Dr Mbuh Tennu, University of Yaounde 1

In Black Caps and Red Feathers the reader is taken into Creature’s subconscious
on the garbage heap where he is tenant, and where he recounts his
multitudinous and gruesome experiences in Traourou’s underground
prisons. Ancestral Earth, set within a traditional African background,
indicts Akeumbin, the king and custodian of the earth of Allehtendurih,
who is caught in the dilemma of stopping a plague caused by the reckless

Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

exploitation of the earth and showing affection for his fiftieth bride. In
compliance with the Princes of Earth, the women who are the principal

John Nkemngong Nkengasong

victims, bring pressure to bear on the King who condescends to the
urgency of appeasing the Ancestral Earth. The common denominator in
both plays is communal grudge against irresponsible leadership and its
fallouts of indiscriminate victimization that allow for the anticipation of a
new or renewed consciousness.

John Nkemngong Nkengasong is currently Associate Professor of Literature at

the University of Yaounde1.

Langaa Research & Publishing

Common Initiative Group
P.O. Box 902 Mankon
Bamenda
John Nkemngong Nkengasong
North West Region Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Cameroon
 Black Caps and Red Feathers
And

Ancestral Earth
(Two Plays)

John Nkemngong Nkengasong

Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

Langaa Research & Publishing CIG

Mankon, Bamenda

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Publisher:
Langaa RPCIG
Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group
P.O. Box 902 Mankon
Bamenda
North West Region
Cameroon
[email protected]
www.langaa-rpcig.net

Distributed outside N. America by African Books Collective

[email protected]
www.africanbookcollective.com

Distributed in N. America by Michigan State University Press

[email protected]
www.msupress.msu.edu

ISBN: 9956-578-38-X

© John Nkemngong Nkengasong 2010

Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

DISCLAIMER
All views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the views of Langaa RPCIG.

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 For
Cameroonians
who survive
by the compassion of the garbage heap
- for shelter, food, clothing, etc.
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Table of Contents

Introduction iii

Play 1: Black Caps and Red Feathers 1

Dramatis Personae 3
Act One 7
Act 2 27

Play 2: Ancestral Earth 49

Dramatis Personae 51
Act 1 52
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

ii

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduction

The two plays in this publication, Black Caps and Red Feathers
and Ancestral Earth, have an ancestry of works that challenge
traditional postcolonial binaries, given the fluid boundaries of
Cameroon’s postcoloniality. This distinction is necessary in
order to better appraise the complex nature of overlapping
concepts that Anglophone Cameroon literature in particular
encompasses. Our culturally relative encounters with art in
general become even more demanding in any assessment of
what is simplified as ‘Cameroon literature’ because of the
country’s unique postcolonial identity into which sister
analyses of say the Canadian example cannot quite fit.
Nkengasong’s works fall within this amoebic space and
problematise the very notions of identity, belonging, and
self/collective responsibility that are flagged in postcolonial
discussions.
In-between the two plays here, we have a subtly
articulated The Call of Blood that couches the cultural,
ideological, and sectarian vibrations that we experience before
and after it in a personalised and domesticated invocation of
mystical fantasising after the allure of power and its
consequences. The play unravels similar conspiracies of a
status coterie within the Country’s People Democratic
Murderers party as in The Widow’s Might, and therefore
circumvents public spaces and their advertised ideologies into
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

Efenze’s private horrors that recur with a hellish nuisance.

Vengeance becomes the site for the vicious circle around
which ‘the call of blood’ is enacted. Although madness is not
directly the consequence of political manoeuvres, Efenze and
Manka’s eventual migration to the garbage heap fulfils the
retributive strategy that the play maps out from sentiments
that bracket Lady Macbeth’s calculating brutality in Macbeth
with Sartre’s refraction of hell-in-life or otherwise, in No Exit.
With this ‘limitation’, I find it very convenient, therefore, to
read Ancestral Earth as the sequel to, if not the flipside of
Black Caps and Red Feathers with a causal thematisation of
iii

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 bleakness and hope. The common denominator in both plays
is communal grudge against irresponsible leadership and its
fallouts of indiscriminate victimization that allow for the
anticipation of a new or renewed consciousness.
Black Caps and Red Feathers is an acutely pathetic
enactment of contingent Cameroon and her leaders as they
confront and try to circumvent the inevitability of history –
Truth – revisiting them. It is a scary play whose even more
scary characters in their abstractness epitomise the
enthronement of bastardom as political logic. Creature, the
main character, with a rather over-deterministic will, provides
the uncensored medium through which the shameless
betrayal of the clan and its citizens is revealed. As a significant
representative of people whose ‘tongues are barbarous’ to the
halo of political convenience in the clan, Creature is the
characteristic political prisoner who has been abused in
detention into insanity. His life now, as a ‘free’ man, is a long
reverie of pain and horror, as he recalls every second of his
incarceration, the inhuman cruelty against him that has been
trivialised into popular normalcy, and from which even a
prophet (as the quasi-Greek Chorus character, Lunatic, calls
him) can emerge, broken. His words are the archetypal
ranting of Everyman whose collective unconscious is the
implicating realm of woe, rot and obnoxious cannibalism.
And even then, Creature still targets the blunt claws of such
tyranny that ends up ruining its own potentials through a
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

sadistic insistence on collective submission.

In the confrontation, a pro-socialist vision is pitted
against the negating hangover of imperialism, recalling the
nationalist uprising of the 1960s when militants of the Union
des Populations du Cameroun, UPCists, challenged the infected
foundations of the neophyte nation. In the play, as a
consequence, Womba ‘[faces] a butcher squad because he had
turned terrorist when he was [only] out to save the clan’;
while on his part Ganje ‘wanted to see the people’s green
lawns, their green fields and rubbish heaps swell out fruits for
the people themselves’. The line between history and art is
iv

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 therefore a very thin one in the play and in this way it
attempts a redefinition of Cameroon’s national image as a
justification, for and/or against those who partook in shading
its changing cycle.
It is in this way too that the play fits within the emerging
context of Cameroon Anglophone Drama, to meaningfully
vindicate opponents of a Bjornson generalisation against the
impact of this localised genre. For, from Musinga to
Nkengasong the picture becomes clearer with each new play
that is placed on the shelves, and more focused in
ascertaining the fertility of such a phenomenon that does not
seek to flatter incumbency with Chococam-coated phrases.
The consciousness is unique and interestingly so against the
cookies of epicurean fallacy, in its strident estimation of what
was, and of what is supposed to be, an embracing whole. ‘My
two countrymen’, Creature laments, were ‘lured to the other
side of the Great River’ by the arch tyrant-deceiver,
Traourou, ‘with throngs of men to betray and cut their
heads’. The representative victim is Bobe Khom, and
reminiscent of Bate Besong’s ‘Grain of Bobe Ngom Jua’
whose local constituency was the Kom clan in the
Anglophone North West Region of Cameroon, the lament is
acrimonious: the traitors did not only ‘sell’ their people, but
also ‘changed the course of the Great River’ (one of them
confesses), only to be rewarded with menial jobs: ‘They
assigned me to wash the latrine and kill cockroaches’, the other
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

concurs. In this way, then, Nkengasong is concerned with the

signposted mentality of a people, which survives even the
crudest form of osmotic stereotyping and vindicates them as
it were, in history books as fodder for change. It is a mentality
that must survive, of necessity, to tell its own story without
gloss, a task that is examined in the novel Across the Mongolo by
the same author, that deals with the conflicting consciousness
of crossing ‘the Great River’. The mentality resists imposed
definitions and fights to conquer the insinuations of fear in a
desperate moment of enslavement, which Creature as lord
over his remnant possession regenerates in the significant
v

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 symbol of fire. This is the hope that never dies even in
betrayal, and explains why Creature’s heap of rubbish is still
vital and coveted. The death of Bobe Khom, then, is just an
attempt to kill such hope, after all, since as the personification
of ‘life’, ‘history’, and ‘posterity’, his corporeal existence is in
fact not necessary for the ultimate realization of the dreams
for which he was killed. The rubbish heap metaphor is thus
richly ambiguous from both ‘national’ and ‘regional’
perspectives and in the latter case in particular, the freedom
for which Creature craves is an obsession, which like identity,
cannot be bargained.
Desire is therefore a powerful motif in the play, and is
dramatically juxtaposed with fear and resistance. The
consequences of such desire enrich the irony of the play
against the bloating excesses of Traourou and the ‘weakling
boy’ he had groomed as a successor. They have perfected the
art of dosing out terror to those who dare to desire the
feathered cap of leadership since, ironically, ‘to wear the black
cap and feather [...] you must use your cuffs on ghosts’. Such
raw dictatorship energizes the instinct to breed more fear
against real and imaginary opponents. At the same time, those
overtly targeted by oppressive brunt of leadership develop
resistance tactics that ultimately become lessons for such
leadership: ‘A king in the clan is supreme but his subjects are
more supreme’, we are told instructively. And this is where
Creature as the custodian of Truth is vulnerable. Apart from
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

conventional threats, he also has to confront and try to

overcome, domestic and matrimonial recollections especially
when he is expected to ransom his wife, Ngwi, and children,
by denouncing the truth for which he stands. And as he
concludes with characteristic stoicism that defines his
communal symbolism, ‘the people can’t change their minds
even for a million crowns’ even if individuals like the two
traitors from Shwaart and Mbrouhngwi, do so for thirty
pieces of silver.
But the characterisation of leadership in the play is not
logical with the unfolding of the plot. The contemporary
vi

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 moment of the play’s action is in the aftermath of Traourou’s
fall from power and it is only his shadow that hangs over the
action as a significant backdrop for Creature’s rich insanity.
But the voice of Traourou’s ghost (he had been buried
abroad) seeks to impose itself on the present, which is
inconsistent with historical fact on which the play itself is
patterned. On the whole the latter part of the play, especially
with the entrance of Voice, weakens the thematic verve by
resorting to, and ‘recounting’ the raw material of history
rather too closely, especially with a shift in tense-use at this
point. It is perhaps the inevitable consequence of such drama,
yet it taxes the poetry of the earlier part of the play into a
colloquial medium of blunt, casual fact.
For all that, however, the inconsistency suggests an
absurdly amorphous variety of leadership, which is as blindly
nonchalant as it lacks a basic definition of itself and vision.
For, in Black Caps and Red Feathers is conjured a synonymous
picture with Butake’s Psaul Roi in Dance of the Vampires as
victims of corrupt and corruptible power, institutionalised
and celebrated as the outrageous landmark of political
drudgery. Psaul Roi is the supreme Cause while Creature is
the predictable Consequence in a dispensation of antithetical
sentiments whose common denominator, nevertheless, is the
dismal absurdity of the human endeavour to lead with brute
force and resistance to being led as such.
The play ends on an apocalyptic note when Creature
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

swoons and we get these ‘blasts of thunder’, significantly

suggestive of the moment of parturition that should usher in
‘some clansman who can count his ancestors from the
beginning of time’; and who will then ‘lead [a] procession to
the ancestral shrine’. It echoes a theme that is increasingly
dominant in Cameroon Anglophone literature, namely a
movement back to the roots to recognise collective self and
re-find identity in a moment of spiritual atonement, ‘wailing
at ancestral graves’ in the hope that ‘we might be safe again’.
This is the particular achievement of Nkengasong’s vision in
Black Caps, a rallying call for militant introspections into
vii

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 perceptive postures. As Lunatic, the Narrator-Chorus
cautions, ‘go home and cook your herbs/ get colanuts,
palmwine, salt/ swines, goats, njieh, nkeng [...]/ go to
Fuandem’s shrine/ and in a rite/ weep in the nave till the
rocks trembles’.
In Ancestral Earth the identified grudge against tyrannical
leadership is again communal and rendered (this time)
through the women who almost replicate the Chorus in
Greek drama – just as Creature recalled the tramps of the
Absurdist tradition – and who then wonder ‘if this Earth is
the same in which our mothers buried our umbilical cords’. It
is through these women that we feel the pulse of political and
sexual exploitation epitomized by Akeumbin the King. For, in
a significant nuancing of themes, even the men in the land are
raped into cowardice and submission by the ‘native’
personification of a neo-colonial nightmare. Drought, disease,
and death are the consequences of this situation, with an
inscrutable King, ‘man beyond man’, who ‘sits like […]
stones’. Even the Princes who serve as spiritual pillars of the
land are now powerless. ‘This matter has teeth’, one of them
confesses, and it is the women who persist in their demands
for audience with the King. In doing this, they draw on Ma
Kusham’s oath of sealed lips in Butake’s Lake God and then
go beyond Mboysiy’s lone-soldier militantism in The Survivors,
and reintroduce Woman as a key partner in the reassessment
of a functional leadership.
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

For people who express such strong emotions against the

King in his absence, and yet go on to pour praises on him
once he appears on stage, it is possible to conclude that they
are also complicit to their destitution, duplicating as it were,
mannerisms of hero-worship. However, the need for change
from which anger rises also implies that they are disappointed
with the recalcitrance of leadership and not with its symbol or
personification. It was Victor Epie Ngome who reminded
Cameroonians more than two decades ago that a people get
the leadership it deserves. This philosophical insight of ‘The
Rambler’ over the then Radio Cameroon explains not just the
viii

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 balkanized polity that is narrated in his allegorical
representation of Cameroon, What God Has Put Asunder, but
also anticipates in a general sense, the nature of Anglophone
Cameroon theatre in its specific focus on the ruinous
arrogance of leadership. Nkengasong’s play, as already
suggested, cues in perfectly from this and those of Victor
Musinga through Bate Besong and Bole Butake, to depict a
gruesome canonization of such a state of tragedy. Akeumbin
confesses how, with the assistance of his ‘foreign friends’ he
has ‘cut down the forests, and opened the land so that [the
people] can work freely on the soil’. This loaded confession
translates from the misapplication of globalisation in a
political economy that stymies its potential into a dependency
status and the best that can be hoped for is a crass, neoliberal
‘improvement’ on the primary state of the economy.
Deforestation becomes the political capital for a leadership
that is ignorant of the environmental hazards that attend such
gross exploitation, even when the price in human terms
confounds any casual observer. And all of this in exchange
for trifles such as ‘a gun’ which is symbolic of the King’s
oppressive vigour, and ‘ornaments’ for the King’s young wife.
After fifty years of ‘flag independence’ during which time
the postcolonial writer and critic has deciphered every
anathema of the globalising world system for a resistance
strategy, we are still burdened in Ancestral Earth with the
retarding evidence of a jumpstarting momentum. At best, it
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

would remain a monotonous hobbling on the same spot, if

tyranny is not checked in time. But Akeumbin whose
stubbornness pulls the community to the very edge of a
precipice, is also vulnerable to both the sensual and plebeian
constituencies of his authority, and consequently vacillates
between them in a near terminal confrontation with his own
sense of invincibility.
The eternal question of the other woman, which almost
every strand of feminism glosses over, manifests in this play
not in its traditionally antagonistic trajectory, but as an
awareness-bringing moment when Afingong exploits her
ix

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 characterisation as the King’s Achilles’ heel and ‘crosses over
to join the other [protesting] women’. This decision is a
definitive mark in the politics of dualised leadership of
male/female components that the play hints at. In his
confrontational treaties, The Anatomy of Female Power,
Chinweizu concedes that men may rule the world, but
women rule the men who rule the world. Afingong (whose
name is suggestive of a traitor first against the less privileged
women and then against the King in order to bring the
polarised camps together) justifies Chinweizu’s position by
rehabilitating Akeumbin, whose phallic imagination (drawing
on his own name, perhaps) finally wilts in acknowledgement
of people power.
Ancestral Earth thus ends as both a continuation and
fulfillment of issues that are raised and suggestively addressed
in Black Caps and Red Feathers. The ritual demands of the priest
in the latter play hope to revive the land in the aftermath of
autocratic blunders; but in Ancestral Earth there is a necessary
cathartic moment on which the past and the present are
reconciled. The King’s fiftieth wife is the linchpin to this
dramatic development, the revived hub of communal
consciousness that can no longer be accorded sub-status in
the final assessment of cultural mores. While Western-
Christian theories of leadership have successfully eclipsed the
woman’s balancing centrality in this domain, to the extent
that even Dan Brown’s gnostic and cross-cultural conjectures
Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

in The Da Vinci Code have been ridiculed by the conservative

bloc, it is interesting that Black Caps and Red Feathers and
Ancestral Earth attempt a revival of roots spirituality within a
postcolonial space, and how this can be negotiated as a vital
intersection with leadership in a deconstruction of Liberation
Theology. Identical ritual ‘ingredients’ in both plays announce
– in the second – ancestral voices of a long-awaited
renaissance in cultural identification and differentiation that
commentators like Franz Fanon and Ali Mazrui had
pioneered and popularized respectively as an intertextual
crossroads. Even with the overwhelming, and often brutal,
x

Black Caps and Red Feathers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
yet seen or her rule the most enduring; the conquests of Rome,
when she had attained her widest empire, had not cost so many
lives as many a barbarian conquest which depopulated whole
territories and passed like a smoke or a pestilence leaving no mark
behind; the Roman Empire attained to that endurance and power it
held because Rome was not a upas-tree to the races she came into
contact with, but because, if in a partial and incomplete manner, yet
more than others, where she planted her standard, she sought to
raise and instruct, not to exterminate. No one can study the history
of that great folk in imperial growth without feeling that behind all
lay a dim perception of something higher than mere national
expansion; and in those wise methods, which in the hour of her
greatness she ordained, through which men of all nations and
creeds might in time and by merit become Romans and by her
medium spread everywhere the arts, the knowledge and the
advantages peculiar to herself, we see the germ of the true idea of
universal empire fitfully trying to incarnate itself. Rome fell because
she herself became corrupted by wealth and the inequality of
possession, but it took her three centuries to die, and it must never
be forgotten that there were Gauls, Spaniards, Asiatics and Germans
who fought as desperately in her cause at last as the children of the
Seven Hills: so real a fact had been her empire, so true was her
absorption of all peoples into herself. The Gaul, the Thracian, the
Illyrian died generation after generation fighting for the Roman flag
because it had conferred on them something that they valued, and
rather than lose which they would die. It is not because she
slaughtered but because she raised, not because she crushed but
because she protected, that Rome reigned; and she is to some
extent immortal and among us to-day still, not because of the men
she slaughtered, which any savage or wild beast might have
accomplished as well, but because she had something new and large
to teach mankind, and she taught it to the race. There is not upon
the earth to-day one pure blood Roman any more than there is one
pure blood Greek, but Rome lives still in our institutions, in our
learning, in our habits of thought; she has her part in every civilized
individual; and, while the race continues on the planet and continues
to grow, she will have her part in that growth, because, like Greece,
she was one of the early forces which fed and shaped it; and her
language, spoken by none, is still preserved because of the treasure
imbedded in it; and in that large ultimate race of humanity she also
will have her share because, while her blood will be fractionally
represented in it, her thought will have played a large share in its
creation.
Such empire and such immortality, only infinitely wider, deeper, and
more indestructible, is that which we desire and hope for the English
race, and language. We believe that we also have our contribution to
make to the growth of humanity. We believe that our sense of the
importance of individual liberty, irrespective of individual conditions,
is a larger contribution to the wealth of the race on earth than any
folk has yet made; and we believe that our desire to impart it is a
more potent means of extending our true empire, and with it our
speech over the surface of the globe, than any mere strength of arm
or valour in slaughtering. We believe that it is not impossible that the
day will come when from north to south, from east to west, over the
globe, our English spirit will have spread; when, as the art of reading
and writing which was once the discovery and possession of some
prehistoric race but which is to-day becoming the property of the
globe, so that in a hundred years' time no child on the globe will be
without it, so our English freedom will spread and the day will come
when in that large united people of the future every man will say:
"In that I am free I am English," and the language, when even
possible freedom has been preached all the world over, may form
the foundation of the world's speech.
We look forward to no time when our brilliant little Japanese brother
with his love of flowers and beauty and simplicity and his keen
intellectual insight, when our Russian mate with his idealism and
grim intensity of emotion, and even the Kaffir with his high sense of
honour and justice and his almost abnormally developed sense of
social unity and obligation, shall have passed away for ever from
among the things of earth and when we shall reign in his stead. Our
dream of the future of our race is of no John Bull seated astride of
the earth, his huge belly distended with the people he has devoured
and his teeth growing out yet more than ever with all the meat he
has bitten and looking around on a depeopled earth and laughing till
all his teeth show and the peoples' bones rattle in his belly: "Ha! I
reign alone now. I have killed them all out!"
If such a consummation were within the remotest grasp of
possibility, the best thing the peoples of earth could do would be to
combine and kill the ogre while there was yet time. But no such
consummation of his fate is conceivable. The North American has
indeed died out before us as the Bushman almost died out before
the Dutch and will utterly die out, unless with great care and at
much expense we have the taste and the wisdom artificially to
preserve him for future ages and to complete as far as possible the
links in the chain of life; but we have not really killed them, they had
not the power unless they were artificially preserved to grasp the
conditions of a more complex existence. Negro, Indian, and even
Irishman, they all tend to increase, not to die out, under our rule.
Our dream of the future empire of our race is not of an empire over
graves but in and through living nations. The future of our race is
never prefigured in our minds by the upas but as a huge tree,
among whose shelving roots and under whose protecting shadow,
endless forms of life may spring up and flourish that might otherwise
be destroyed, and in whose wide umbrageous branches every form
of bird and creature shall find resting place and nourishment, a tree
of life and not of death. We do not dream of our language that it
shall forcibly destroy the world's speeches and all they contain,
reigning in solitary grandeur, but, as gold in a ring binds into one
circle rare gems of every kind and some of infinitely greater beauty
than itself, so we dream that our speech being common may bind
together and bring into one those treasures of thought and
knowledge which the peoples of earth have produced, its highest
function being that of making the treasures of all accessible to all.
We think of the great race of earth, which shall be in the future, not
as composed of English blood with all the beauty and strength of
other races and peoples excluded; but rather we figure it as a great
temple reared up of material of every size and colour, from marble
and alabaster to ebony and starred porphyry, but in which every
stone and doorpost shall be cemented with the freedom that is the
gift of our people. We look for the future growth of England not as
the result of the merciless slaughter of mankind or the use of force,
but because, as time passes and we become freer ourselves, we
shall spread our freedom wherever our foot touches, and whoever is
trampled, oppressed or feeble on earth will gather to us and grow
up under our shelter to strength; we look for the spread of our
language, not because it is of necessity the finest and most complex
and expressive instrument of thought, though, after our instinct for
freedom, it is the noblest outgrowth of our race, having perchance
not the music of the Italian, the exact brilliance of the French, the
ready power of expressing deep and powerful emotion of the
German, or the multiple advantages of other forms of speech, yet,
like some great and complex organ with understops and pipes which
skilfully managed may produce almost any effect, being fitted to
equal and perhaps surpass any language in its breadth of power,[81]
but because in this tongue will be preached the most valuable lesson
humanity has yet to learn; because, wherever a people has come
into contact with it, it has meant for them freedom and advance.
There is an old saying that a slave cannot breathe in the air of
England because the moment his foot touches the shore he is freed.
We look for an enlargement of this old parable in the future. We look
for the time when it shall be said: "Slavery, injustice, the oppression
of the weak by the strong, cannot exist in any land where an
Englishman breathes; the moment his foot touches a shore, they
pass away before him." And in this will lie the Englishman's power to
dominate and his claim to immortality.
In the great nation that shall govern and cover the whole earth there
may be found not one pure-blooded Englishman, any more than
there is to-day one Greek or Roman on earth. He will as little be
found in three hundred years' time in London or New York, as in
Pekin or Yokohama. But what was great in him we believe will have
encircled the globe; and English freedom will extend from Greenland
to Borneo when the Englishman shall have melted into something
larger.
We know that this consummation is not inevitable or certain; dreams
as large as this have been dreamed by races before and come to
nought. We are not unaware that to carry this conquest out the
English race must first free itself before it can consciously or
unconsciously accomplish its missionary enterprise. During the last
years there seems a pause in the generous outflow of English
inspiration, and, where we appear to be bent on suppressing a slave
trade, it will be manifest to the least observant looker-on that our
Government is merely making that project a shield for financial and
national aggressions. The truth is that all English-speaking countries
are in the throes of a great effort demanding not less of the vital
energies of our people in England, America and the Colonies than
the old internal struggles which resulted in the freedom of Barons as
opposed to the Monarchy, the freedom of the men of the middle
class as opposed to the hereditary powers. What the future of the
English race will be depends on the result of that conflict. If it results
as we who share in its struggles believe, it will show the world when
the strife is over, for the first time, a perfectly free land in which the
superficial differences of sex and class shall be sunk in the greater
personality of the human creature, in which every creature from its
birth shall stand free and untrammelled and the inequalities between
men shall not be those of artificial construction but of inherent
deficiencies or powers; in which a new aristocracy shall be formed
out of the great labour of the head or hand and not of those of great
possessions, of those who give much to their fellows and not those
who receive; when the child will be told to take off his hat and bow
to the labourer who for sixty years has worked in the field for the
community, or has thought for it in his chamber, and not to the
woman who lies back in her carriage, consuming and having
consumed without return the labour of hundreds, or the man who, in
the gambling of the roulette table, the stock exchange or the share
market, has made his millions. It may be that the arrest in our
outward efforts to extend our freedom and humanity's may be the
result of this internal trouble and that when, before the race is
exhibited for the first time in the history of the globe an absolutely
free civilized people in which the individuality of the male and
female, the powerful and the weak, are respected, we shall take up
our work with renewed ardour, and, almost whether we will or no,
the freedom we have attained for ourselves will infect all the race
and constitute us its leaders. This may be; this is what there is some
promise of ultimately being—but it may also not be. We may have
become so much degraded by the ideal of existence which has been
held before us, that the strife of our women and masses, which now
seems an ennobling strife for more and nobler fields of labour, shall
degenerate into a demoralizing strife after universal inaction and
that our ideal as a race will be what is now merely the ideal of a
class, existence on the labour of others without exertion—and then
the English race will be degraded, as many have been before it, and
the Russian, the Japanese and even the Kaffir must lead the world's
people in their march; we cannot. We do not pretend there are not
certain signs which suggest the possibility of ultimate failure, and
make us fear for it. In a country like South Africa we see that, where
the English and in truth any branch of the white race comes into
contact with a more primitive dark, there is a hideous tendency at
once to degenerate. We will not work. The most feeble and unrichly
brained man or woman who could be worth their keep to humanity
and perhaps as richly productive as a hand worker, but never as
anything else, refuses the one order of labour he is fit for, and
prefers a hideous dependency on society, which in Africa is
ultimately a dependence on the dark races, rather than to undertake
the one form of labour for which nature has fitted him. We see a
hideous tendency to leave all the work of life to the dark races; for
the moment this seems to leave us free for higher efforts, but as
time passes surely it will enervate; like a rotten aristocracy we shall
die out, and the hands which for generations have made our roads,
planted and reaped our fields, built our houses and tended our
children, will at last be united to the brains that make the laws and
govern the land, and we shall fade away. That the day may be far
distant does not make less clear and painful the first symptoms of
the disease of which all great conquering nations of the past have
ultimately died. Again our hope, that the English working man and
the woman when freed will impart their gain to all the world and so
rule over life, is belied at least by two symptoms—that the man who
is trying to free himself from the tyranny of class still does in certain
instances strive fiercely to maintain that of sex, and that, as he gains
or thinks he is gaining his own freedom, he strives jealously to
exclude men who are not of his blood from sharing it. These are
perhaps the two ugliest symptoms in the modern movement; and if
it means anything but the action of a man who, nearly drowned,
wrings the hands of his fellow off him and throws him back into the
water, only that he may be able to gain the shore and return with a
rope for his fellow—it is the most hopeless symptom that has
appeared in our social growth for many years. In South Africa,
where our national English greed for speedy wealth without exertion
has made us, not satisfied with the dark labour of the country,
introduce yet more from Asia, then when they have served us and
filled our pockets, we attempt to refuse them the rights of citizens
and labourers, the English love of freedom and fair play does not
seem growing. There are countless other symptoms which give us
cause for consideration and most anxious doubt. We are going to
spread freedom and justice over the earth, but in Africa at present
our doom seems to be to drag its natural wealth from its bowels,
and to expend it in intensifying the luxury of the old world. We
prefer, as a great South African millionaire once said, "the land to
the Natives," and for a time that part of us which seeks to rule over
nations and permeate the peoples seems silenced by that part of us
which desires to fill its hands with the fruits of the land and the
labour of its people—and then desires nothing more.
All this we see and see clearly. That a tree is full of buds does not
prove that there will ever be fruit; that a child moves beneath its
mother's heart is no certain promise that there will ever be a man;
and, seeing clearly many conditions which may check its progress
and even symptoms of conditions which may ultimately terminate its
existence, nevertheless, while the buds are on the tree, we do not
fail to dig and water, and, while the child is in the womb, we do not
cease to prepare for its coming because of the possibility of its
abortion.
To those of us who take this view of conditions, functions, difficulties
and possible future of the English race, it is not very difficult to
determine what in the little South African world our relations and
course of conduct towards the black man and the alien races should
be. The man who holds to the upas-tree function of the English race
and the possibility and desirability of our exterminating and using
entirely for our own advantage all the peoples of earth is not more
confident as to what his line of action should be than we. Nay, we
believe we are a little more confident, because we believe there lies
in every Englishman, behind his philistinism and jingoism, something
that makes the upas-tree line of action a little difficult to him.
We are not unaware of the difficulties and complexities of our
position in this country, but upon all matters small and large we
know our course. We are asked sometimes: "Well, but what do you
intend this country to be, a black man's country or a white?" We
reply we intend nothing. If the black man cannot labour or bear the
strain and stress of complex civilized life, he will pass away. We need
not degrade and injure ourself by killing him; if we cannot work
here, then in time, wholly or in part, the white man will pass away;
and the one best fitted to the land will likely survive—but this we are
determined to do: we will make it a free man's country. Whether the
ultimate race of this country be black, white or brown, we intend it
to be a race permeated with the English doctrine of the equal right
of each human to himself, and the duty of all to defend the freedom
of it.
If it be suggested to us that the Natives of the land are ignorant, we
have the reply to make that we are here to teach them all we know
if they will learn—if they will not, they must fall.
If it be asked whether we think them our equals, we would reply:
Certainly in love of happiness and their own lives—perhaps not in
some other directions; but we are here to endeavour to raise them
as far as it is possible; we are determined to make them a seed-
ground in which to sow all that is greatest and best in ourselves.
If it be asked whether we are negrophiles, we reply: "No—we are
trying to be but we are not yet. The white man in us yet loves the
white as the black man loves the black. It would be a lie to say that
we love the black man, if by that is meant that we love him as we
love the white. But we are resolved to deal with justice and mercy
towards him. We will treat him as if we loved him: and in time the
love may come. When you pick up a lost child in the streets covered
only with rags and black with dust, you have first to take it home
and wash and dress it and then you want to kiss it. When we have
dealt with the dark man for long years with justice and mercy and
taught him all we know, we shall perhaps be able to look deep into
each other's eyes and smile: as parent and child."
If it is said to us that our idea of the function of the English race is
all very well, but in reality all that races seek is self-aggrandisement,
we reply that we are fully aware of this tendency to the most blatant
self aggrandisement in our people, but we know also other
tendencies; and Washington, Lincoln, John Brown, Florence
Nightingale, Josephine Butler, John Stuart Mill, Howe, Livingstone,
Moffat, and the multitudes who harmonize with and follow them, are
not less truly English. In every land where the English race is
growing, in Australia, New Zealand, America, England and even
South Africa, side by side with its less specialized elements we have
this broad humanitarian element, as surely and unfailingly developed
in every land, and on this we build our hope. This element, which we
believe to be ultimately the dominant and vital element in our
people, is animated entirely by one instinct and works to one end.
We do not follow ultimately either the Union Jack or the Stars and
Stripes. Over our heads waves always a larger and wider flag,
inscribed with that one word, "Freedom," which being fully
interpreted means justice and liberty for all, or, being yet more
simplified: Do unto all men as you would they should do unto you.
Under that standard we range ourselves to conquer. We regard it as
the true flag of our race, beneath which we are willing to die, but
which, British, American, Australian, New Zealander or even South
African, we are never willing to see fall. It is this English standard
which alone we would see planted in every country of the earth. It is
this unseen flag, waving over our heads, which stimulates us to
persevere in our course; it is this which we believe constitutes the
ultimate glory of the English people.
If we are asked how we can expect any folk ever to dominate in the
world as a power everywhere spreading freedom and imparting its
benefits to all, when in all the history of the past such a thing is not
recorded of any people, we reply that it is useless to talk to us in
Africa of what has been, as though it of necessity limited what shall
be in the world of human growth. Outside our doors, even as we
write and think, sits cowering the little human ape Bushman, and,
when we turn from him to the Kaffir working in our kitchen and the
bust of Shakespeare on the mantleshelf, we do not only hope and
believe but we see physically before our material eyes the infinite
growth of humanity, the unmeasurable power of change and the
arrival of entirely new traits which is possible in the human creature.
You may as well try to stop a great people on its line of growth by
telling it that no people has ever done before what they are
attempting to do, as you could stop the creative mind of a genius in
its labour by telling it that work had never been done before.
"Exactly so," replies the artist, "I know man has never seen the face
I see and am trying to paint or the fact I see and am trying to
record; that is my joy, I am doing an entirely new thing and through
me humanity grows a little in a new direction."
It is exactly because we believe no nation on the earth has ever
manifested just this desire, not only to be free, but to make free,
that we are filled with an almost infinite hope as to our function and
future. This is why we value it more highly than all the qualities we
share with other peoples. It is our stroke of genius, our new
contribution to human growth.
If we are asked how, looking round on the little world of South Africa
to-day, we dare to entertain such lofty conceptions of the function
and future of our race, we reply: "Yes, we dare." We are not blind to
the self-seeking and injustice which surround us on every hand. We
are not for a moment blind to the fact that sometimes, where we
seem to be defending the Native, we are merely using him as a rod
with which to strike our white brothers of another speech; we do not
forget that English hands have in this country flogged men to death
and that, because the man killed was of a dark race, we as an
English community have not dared to do more than inflict a fine. We
are aware how devoid of any consciousness of large racial function
are a mass of our English-speaking folk and how completely devoid
of any aim but that of self-betterment are numbers of our units; but,
looking these facts directly in the face and allowing all they mean,
we yet do not give up hope.
Is it absolutely nothing that in this country there are to be found
men who, whether as judges or when serving on juries, are not only
incorruptible before the forces of gold or personal interest but before
the much more terrible corruption of racial prejudice and passion? Is
it nothing that there are men among us in whose hands the most
miserable feeble Bushman or Hottentot is as sure of rigid justice as
though he were a royal prince or millionaire? Is it not something that
there is throughout the length and breadth of the land hardly an
Englishman who dares to use the power of a dominant people
without making for himself a screen of lies, behind which to hide
from his conscience when she comes to seek for him, that there is
hardly a man or woman among us who dares to act to one of the
subject races as they could not be acted to without first shielding
themselves behind an excuse? Is it nothing that, poor as our rule is,
at least while the people of England have still held rule in the land,
the Native races have drawn to our standard, and at least,
comparing us with others, have recognized that our flag meant
justice and freedom for those who stood under it? Is it nothing that
in the space of fifty years England has sent out to us at least once a
man who in his capacity as ruler bent with an unfeigned solicitude
over every element in our complex people and endeavoured to
tighten the reins of sympathy between Englishman, Boer and Native,
and to see, unblinded by that intense passion for their own people
which all deep natures feel but which high natures control, the
needs and the failings and the sufferings of each section and sought
to remedy them? Is it nothing that, at least once, we have had an
English ruler who possessed all passion for impartiality and humanity
which characterizes a race fitted to rule over empires of varied
peoples, and that among men more closely South African we have
one who, though a Jew by name and descent, was an Englishman
by language and education, through a long life consistently and
without intermission sought to enforce practically the ideal of English
rule as a great freeing impartial force? Is it nothing that, in addition
to the names of such men as Sir George Grey and Saul Solomon
upon our South African record, and with the story of such lives as
Livingstone and Moffat mingled with that of our English occupancy
of the country we have also the names of at least a few hundred
individuals less known but following in their steps and animated by
the same principle?
Have we not heard it said again and again by the Boer: "You
Englishmen know no difference between one man and another; you
treat a black man as if he was yourself"; and in that one saying have
we not ground for hope?
But it may be asked us whether we do not see a possibility of our
hopes for the English race and its future falling to the earth; we
reply: "We do; we recognize that it is possible that we may not even
kill out the black races of Africa but that, a seething and ignorant
mass, they may live under us, at last infecting us and dragging us
down to themselves; we know it is possible that our conception of
the English race, as possessed of a vast fertilizing and liberating
power which shall spread from it till it permeates the whole race,
may be mistaken and the result of national egoism and mental
refraction; we know that the twentieth century, instead of being, as
we dream, the great blossoming time of the English race, as the
fourth century before Jesus was of the Greek, may be the century of
our decay; that the spread of the consciousness of the unity of all
men and the importance of their individual freedom may be not for
us to spread but for some other people; and that when we have
shown the world how lucifer matches can be made for one penny
the gross by girls who work for three shillings a week; and that, if
you can make guns which discharge so many bullets a minute, you
can bring down so many unarmed black men in a minute; and that,
if a few men can gain a grant of the mineral wealth of half a
continent, they can buy mistresses, palaces, titles, governments, and
roll in gold as if it had been water—then our work will be done. We
know that this is possible, and I suppose there are moments of
horrible bitterness when to all of us it has seemed almost more than
possible."
If it be asked us: Even if our view be true and the function and
destiny of the English race be what we hope it, what after all is the
use of our striving to bring it nearer; may we not in our individual
action be mistaken, and, where we believe ourself to be helping a
great race to walk in the path which shall serve all humanity, we are
simply sacrificing ourselves to no purpose? we reply: "We know this.
Under the sea millions of insects work, and, as the ages pass, they
raise at last a bank that in time becomes an island on which great
trees grow and the sun shines. The work of no one insect is
necessary to the growth; the almost invisible speck of coral he
makes may be broken off and crushed to powder, and the work yet
grows; but by just such an infinite accretion of specks the island
rises, and the wide instinct which compels all to contribute their part
builds at last the island.
"So we work, only not quite unconsciously. If our individual addition
be worthless and be broken off—well—we are obeying the deepest
necessity of our being; we are working on in the only direction we
know of, and, unlike our fellow insects of the sea, we, where we
work, have dreams of the future land, not that will be, but that may
be—and which we believe we are building."
A man far out at sea on a dark night, struggling with the waves in
his small boat, sees far away a light he thinks to be the harbour light
and strikes towards it; knowing he may be mistaken, and that long
before daybreak man and boat may be engulfed, he still strikes
towards it, labouring without certainty of ever reaching it but with
unalterable will and determination, because it is the only light he
sees.
So we, realizing the possibility that we are mistaken, and knowing
the chances of failure, yet strike for what seems to us the largest
possibility open to our race and to ourselves as part of that race.
In the South Africa of to-day the three varieties of Englishmen, those
indifferent to the future of their race and those consciously labouring
for it, with opposing ideals and conceptions of the ends to be
sought, are working out, whether we will or no, the future of the
land, and dealing with the vast twentieth-century problem of the
mixture and government of mixed peoples; the verdict upon our
solution of which cannot be pronounced by the men of this age, but
only by the future.
 NOTE A
THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATION
(1900).
The events of the last nine, and especially the last seven, years have
thrown a curious light upon two statements in Chapter I, written in
1892:
Firstly: the statement that the political division of South Africa into
separate and self-governing states are divisions "of immense
importance and by all means to be preserved."
Secondly: the statement that there does exist a subtle internal union
between all African states, which causes them to be, in spite of their
complex and mixed structure, in a profound sense, one, and makes
it impossible to attack and injure any one state without injuring all.
South Africa forms naturally one national and distinct entity, widely
dissevered from any other national entity, European or otherwise. It
may be said that Australia, Canada, and New Zealand contain also
the germs which will ultimately develop into distinct national entities;
and this is undoubtedly true. As no sane man supposes that an
infant will remain perpetually unweaned, or that a healthy sapling
will not ultimately form its own bark, so it is inevitable that all
healthy off-shoots from European peoples must ultimately form
independent nations. But the position of these young countries is not
analogous with that of South Africa; and as regards Australia, and
especially New Zealand, it is in some respects fundamentally unlike
our own.
This difference lies in the groundwork of our national structure, and
must be manifest to anyone who has given a few years to the
impartial study of the problems which beset European races planted
in new lands.
One is probably not very far from the truth in stating that, roughly
speaking, out of every thirty men and women born in Australia and
New Zealand, from twenty-five to twenty-eight will be found to be of
purely or almost purely English descent—using the word English as it
is popularly, though misleadingly, used to include Keltic Irishmen and
Scots.
In South Africa, from the Zambesi to the mouth of the Orange River,
southward to the sea, there are roughly calculated to be about
8,000,000 (eight millions) of souls. Now, out of this population,
about 800,000, roughly speaking, are whites, about 400,000 being
Dutch-Huguenot, about 260,000 British, and about 100,000 of other
European nationalities. As regards persons of unmixed English blood,
this is probably an over calculation, as a large number of persons
popularly passing as "English" in South Africa are of blended French,
Dutch, German and other extractions. But, accepting the persons of
Irish, Scottish and English descent even at 300,000, they comprise
about one-and-one-eighth of an Englishman in each thirty of the
population. Or, to put the matter in another and more obvious light:
Were to-morrow the entire population of purely or mainly British
descent to leave Australia and New Zealand, those lands would at
once be almost wholly depopulated. A few Maoris and quickly
dwindling Australian aborigines, with a handful of Frenchmen,
Germans, Swedes or Italians, and a sprinkling of Chinamen and
other Asiatics, would be all that would be left. Practically, the lands
would have been transformed into almost primeval solitudes. The
working man, who forms the bulk of all nations, would have
disappeared, and with him the farmer, the merchant, the
professional man and the speculator. There would be no Australia
and no New Zealand in the social sense, were all men of British
descent suddenly to leave those lands.
In South Africa, on the other hand, a condition entirely the reverse
would be maintained. Were every man and woman of pure British
descent to disappear to-morrow, no vital diminution in the entire
bulk of our population would have taken place. The vast labouring
classes who build our roads and bridges, cultivate our fields, tend
our flocks, perform our domestic labour and work in our mines,
would be left here almost entirely untouched in the persons of our
dark citizens, who form an element in our population rapidly and
always increasing, and of primary importance. From the Malay
fisherman, cab driver, or washerwoman, to the Bantu herdsmen and
mining hands and domestic servants, our labouring class, save in the
person of a few skilled overseers and workmen, would still be here
untouched. Our large white farming class would be but little
reduced, while more than half our professional class, our doctors,
lawyers, judges and civil servants would be left in numbers amply
sufficient for the needs of the country; and while, in our seaport
towns and mining centres, a large number of those engaged in
commerce and speculation would be gone, at least 100,000 Jews
and Europeans of all nationalities engaged in these occupations
would still be left, in addition to a good number of Dutch-Huguenot
descended inhabitants so employed.
An element of importance, indeed, would have been abstracted from
our complex communities, an element containing much of that which
is noblest and most valuable in our national life, and also much that
is sordid and unhealthy—but the South African people, the seed-
beds of the great South African nation of the future, would still
remain, as far as mere numbers are concerned, practically
undiminished and untouched. The removal of the Anglo-Saxon
element would affect South Africa as the sudden abstraction of its
Jewish inhabitants of Great Britain would affect that land. The nation
would be left intact, though an important and powerful element had
disappeared.
In eighty years' time, when New Zealand and Australia are powerful
and independent nations, probably infinitely exceeding in health and
virility the inhabitants of the little islands in the North Sea, from
which the first white Australians and New Zealanders came, their
inhabitants will differ profoundly from the inhabitants of Ireland,
Scotland or England, in manners, in appearance, and in tastes,
habits, and political and social institutions. They will certainly no
more dream of having their policy of peace or war dictated to them
nor their governors forced upon them by any of the electors of Great
Britain, than a healthy and sane man of forty allows his great
grandmother to dictate to him the hour of his retiring or the way in
which he shall spend his pence (even now an Australian-born man
may be distinguished almost at once from an Englishman born in
Britain, and a spirit of independence and self-respect has grown not
only in Canada, but in Australia and New Zealand); yet the
population of these countries may quite possibly, even in eighty
years' time, bear rather more resemblance to the inhabitants of the
British Isles than to any other folk.
In South Africa, on the other hand, in eighty years' time there will
also be a great and independent nation, but it will be unique. It will
be wholly unlike any other in the world. It will not be French or
Dutch, though a large proportion of the blood in the veins of its
white inhabitants will descend from these races; it will not be
Russian nor Jewish, though Russian Jews are plentiful here; it will
not be German, though German merchants, missionaries, doctors
and agriculturists are to be found in every corner of the country; it
will not be Scotch nor Irish, and assuredly it will not be English,
though the blood of all these nationalities, Keltic and Teutonic, will
be blended in the veins of the white South African of the future—it
will be simply South African.
So also our vast dark South African race will not be wholly Negroid.
The blood of the brave Bantu folk may predominate, but it will be a
race largely blended of Asiatic and other peoples; there will be
strains of Dutch and French blood through the slave, of English
blood through the English soldiers, and the Malay, the Indian, and
even the Hottentot will have place in it. It will be simply the great
South African Dark Race, and assuredly not English. These two great
blended varieties, dark and light, will form the South African nation
of the future, their two streams of life, keeping, it may be, racially
distinct for ages, but always interacting side by side and forming our
South African nation.
Our South African national structure in the future will not and cannot
be identical with that of any other people, our national origin being
so wholly unlike that of any other; our social polity must be
developed by ourselves through the interaction of our parts with one
another and in harmony with our complex needs. For good or evil,
the South African nation will be an absolutely new thing under the
sun, perhaps, owing to its mixture of races, possessing that strange
vitality and originality which appears to rise so often from the
mixture of human varieties: perhaps, in general human advance,
ranking higher than other societies more simply constructed;
perhaps lower—according as we shall shape it: but this, certainly—it
will be a new social entity, with new problems, new gifts, new
failings, new accomplishments.
To-day, the different white elements of the South African nation are
already entering upon a stage of rapid combination; South Africans
whose ancestors were of English, French, German, Irish or Dutch
descent are so rapidly intermarrying that, not in eighty, but in sixty
years' time, if a man should pass through South Africa calling out for
Frenchmen, Englishmen, Dutchmen or Germans, he would hear
hardly a voice answer him; the reply will then be,—"We are all South
Africans here."
That we cannot be an English nation is certain; but in the past there
has appeared no reason why we should not ultimately be a nation
bound by ties of friendly feeling to England—as America might have
been, had England left her internal concerns untouched a hundred
years ago; as Australia and Canada may yet be, if she abstains from
interfering with their internal affairs and does not shoot down the
men born on their soil.
Personally, we have always desired that this should be so.
While it has always appeared that the first and most pressing care of
the far-seeing and balanced South African statesman must lie in
seeking to maintain the integrity and cultivate the individuality and
strengthen the internal organization of each of the separate states,
in order that each might have an individuality and an internal
organization strong enough to make local self-government a
sufficient counterpoise to the central power whenever federation
was attempted; while, on the other hand, the hardly, if at all,
secondary obligation upon the far-seeing South African statesman
must lie in the direction of labouring to produce such co-operation
and friendliness between the different South African states as might,
at the end of another forty or sixty years, find them in a position
naturally and spontaneously to federate upon equal terms: to
federate, as in the case of the Swiss cantons, where the different
divisions are not necessarily of one language or even race, but their
geographical position and their interest make them, as regards the
outer world, essentially one people.
The federation we desired to see would then have been of a nature
not strong enough to produce the incalculable evils of an over-
centralized and universal government extending over a vast and
diverse territory and over large numbers of diverse peoples, while
yet it would have been strong enough to have united the different
South Africa states against external aggression, to preserve internal
peace, and to have formed a powerful central court for arbitration on
all interstatal differences: a national structure which would combine
as largely as possible the advantages of large and small states.
All nations, all those organized bodies of men which have
contributed greatly to the advance of humanity, have been organized
in comparatively small numbers, and have occupied geographically
small spaces. To this rule there appears to have been no exception
in the past; and its cause is to be found deep in the psychologic
structure of the human creature.
Greece, which has probably on the whole contributed more to the
fund total of the human race on earth, intellectually and spiritually
than any other individual folk, was, even were all its states taken
together, not so large as a minute fragment of South Africa. And
even Greece was only Greece and enabled to accomplish that which
she did by the intensely individual and autonomous development of
minute separate parts. Athens, which territorially and in numbers
was hardly larger than the Cape Peninsula, and Sparta, no larger
than a small English county, have yet left the whole world immortally
richer for their individual existences, in a manner which would not
have been possible had they been more merged under one rule or
forced into a common form of organization. The Jews, while that
religion and literature were developing which has transformed
Europe and reacted on the whole world, were but a small closely
inter-bred tribe inhabiting a few stony valleys and plains. Holland,
when she took the lead for civil and intellectual freedom, and won it,
crushing to earth the unwieldy bulk of the Spanish Empire, was a
tiny folk buried among a handful of sand-dunes in a remote corner
of Europe, her whole territory so minute it might be carved out of
Russian or Chinese Empires to-day without sensibly abridging them.
England herself, when in Queen Elizabeth's reign she had already
produced that noble language which is one of her greatest
productions, and was developing those representative institutions
and that literature which are her pride, when she had produced
Chaucer, Shakespeare and Bacon, that England possessed neither an
Ireland nor a Scotland nor any spot of earth beyond her own
borders, and her entire population was no greater than that which
to-day may be found diseased, ragged, and on the border of
starvation, inhabiting the back slums of a few of her great Imperial
cities.
What humanity has attained in culture, in virtue, in freedom, in
knowledge, and in the fullest development of the individual, it has
owed to small, close, natural and spontaneous organizations of men
—small tribes, small states, and, oftenest, to mere cities organized
on a natural basis, with but a few miles of territory beneath their
walls, owning their sway. Great empires, which have always
originally sprung from such an individual, strong and healthful,
national organization, but which have finally begun extending
themselves by force over alien territories and over peoples not
organically and spontaneously or even geographically bound to
themselves, have always spelt decay and disease, not merely to
themselves as larger social organizations, but to the very individual
human creatures comprised within their bulky, unwieldy and
unnatural entities.
Rome, indeed, in the inflated and diseased days of her Imperial
expansion, produced a Marcus Aurelius, as an unpruned and dying
rose tree may produce one last gorgeous bloom; but, at the very
time she held within her city walls the vastest hybrid population
which had ever been gathered into one spot on earth, and her
enervated limbs stretched across the world, it is doubtful whether
she contained one-tenth as many individuals of civic virtue and
intellectual and moral virility as were once to be found within her
when her body social consisted of the small city on the seven hills
and the plains and hills about it, which a man might walk across in a
day.
An empire based on force and controlled from a centre may indeed
best be likened to an individual, naturally healthy and virile, who at a
certain stage in his existence absorbes more nutriment than he
requires, and who lays on a vast mass of adipose tissue, more
especially abdominally, thus weighting the centres of life, leading to
disease in the extremities, and finally ending in the death of the
whole organism through heart failure.
Mere size and weight, whether in the world of animal organization or
social structure, is never necessarily indicative of vitality and
longevity. The antediluvian creatures, whose bones alone are now
left us in the earth's crust, infinitely exceeded in size any extant
forms of life, but have had to give place to the more concentrated
birds and beasts of our day, as the hippopotamus is to-day passing
while the ant and the man remain. No madness more complete can
possess a human brain than the conception that mere accretion in
size and weight, whether in the individual or national organism, is
necessarily an increase in strength or vitality, unless there be an
increased interaction between all parts and an increase in the central
vitality. One jelly-like tentacle of the deep sea octopus measures
twelve feet, but the whole creature is lower in the scale of life, and
probably expends less nervous force, than the bee or the humming
bird. Increased size may, under certain conditions, spell increased
strength; it may also spell death.
Had it been possible, for example, in the days of Charlemagne for
one central power permanently to crush the diverse individual
nationalities which Europe has tended to divide herself into; had
England, France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland and Italy been
dominated over and crushed by one central power, so that their
individual course of evolution along diverse lines had been stayed,
and had they been forcibly bound under one rule into one large
organism; the loss to the human race on earth would probably have
been incalculable.
Europe during the last thousand years would probably not have
contributed much more to the sum total of human advance, in the
direction of freedom and many-sided intellectual growth, than the
vast Chinese Empire has contributed during the same period, or than
the Roman Empire contributed during the last long centuries of its
bloated existence.
The national organization, controlled from one point and comprising
a too vast multitude of humans, must, from that mere fact of size
alone and apart from any other defect, tend to become inert. Even
supposing free representative institutions universally to prevail, as
they never have in any empire, past or present—(for in the British
Empire of to-day a few million voters control the entire central
government of Great Britain, while in India alone there are over two
hundred millions of British subjects who have no representative
institutions whatever and who are dominated over by the central
body of voters)—and supposing each individual within a vast empire
to be endowed with a share in its government, the share of power
and control would be exceedingly minute and infinitesimal as regards
the central power, and the bulk of citizens would be, of necessity, so
far removed from that centre that that intensity of civic life and
consciousness of responsibility, which alone makes democratic
government healthful, and which exists easily in a small state or a
tribe, where the government is as it were under the eyes of all and
where each individual tells sensibly on the body politic, cannot exist.
Yet further, the inertness caused by mere excess of numbers under a
central rule is but one cause of the inefficacy and unhealthiness of
all vast empires. A central government, extending its sway over
widely severed and diverse parts of the earth's surface and therefore
over bodies of humans in diverse social and physical conditions, is a
yet more fertile source of social disease and of enervation and
deterioration to the individuals comprised in the body. The very fact,
that the government and institutions of a wide empire are exactly
suited to the wants of the original central dominant body, makes it
impossible that the same government and institutions should be
equally suited to peoples geographically remote and under socially
diverse conditions. Each shell-fish lives best and healthfully only in
the shell it has itself secreted; the cuttle-fish glides through the sea
better in its own coarse chalky shield than were it forced into the
most elaborate and gorgeous mantle that was ever developed by a
nautilus: and human institutions or governments are good or bad
exactly as shells are, not abstractedly, but as they harmonize with
the wants of the living creatures they are bound to. As even the
hermit crab, who makes his home in the shells he has not secreted,
can only live and develop on condition of his choosing his own shell;
forced between the pearled valves of an oyster or a mussel he will
die miserably; so even a noble and virile alien people, when
compelled to adapt themselves to the institutions and government
developed with regard to the needs of humans in other lands and
under distinct conditions, is bound miserably to decay if not to
become extinct.
The central government of a vast empire, if it spreads its control
over diverse or unlike territories or peoples, spells death and disease
to them, not necessarily because it is evil in itself, but because it has
not been gradually and spontaneously evolved with regard to the
needs of the diverse units themselves. The better the shell fits the
form of the creature who secreted it, the more deadly it may be
when forced artificially over another.
Freedom and health for a folk desiring a tribal head is the right to
possess him and to live and die for him; for a people with republican
instincts is the right to republican institutions; for folk with an
inclination towards monarchy, a monarchical rule; national slavery is
the compulsory participation in alien institutions. Were an empire
based on force yet ruled entirely by a desire to govern for the
benefit of the subject nations and not for the subject powers (as
none up to the present has ever been), it would still be a disease-
producing, freedom-limiting institution; but, based as all empires up
to the present have been, on self interest, Imperialism spells the
death of all healthful human readjustments and developments.
Even where the parts of a large body social are not held together by
merely external force, where a very great degree of real
homogeneity does exist between all its parts, the evils of a much
centralized rule are always manifest. It may be questioned whether
even France, which is essentially one entity in many respects, has
not suffered during the last century, and does not owe many of her
difficulties and political perturbations, to that system of over-
centralized control and uniformity of local institutions introduced by
Napoleon, which has not left sufficient autonomy and self control to
the really, in many minor respects, distinct provinces of France; and
it is more than open to question whether Germany, almost
compelled as she has been in self defence to sacrifice the
independence and individuality of her component states during the
last twenty years, has not intellectually and morally lost almost as
much as she would by foreign domination, by her more centralized
government: while in England the attempt forcibly to incorporate
Ireland with herself, and govern a closely allied yet differing people,
though divided only by a narrow strip of sea, has resulted in
centuries of social disease and suffering for Ireland and of moral
disease and instability for England.
Imperialism is the euphonious title of a deadly disease which under
certain conditions tends to afflict the human race on earth. It
increases in virulency in proportion as it is extended over more
distant spaces and more diverse multitudes, till it becomes at last
the death shroud of the nations.
It is undoubtedly true that the existence of more rapid means of
intercommunication have, during the last centuries, made possible
the existence of larger health aggregates than were possible in
earlier times, when the small tribe and the city with a few leagues of
earth about it formed invariably the largest national organization
which was compatible with full social health and the highest human
development. To-day, New York and San Francisco are in fact almost
as close to each other as Athens and Sparta were two thousand
years ago; but even to-day no vast social organism, large both as to
numbers and geographical extent, such as the United States of
America, could possibly exist with even tolerable healthfulness, were
it not for the fact of the complete internal autonomy, individual
organization and strength of its separate component states; and,
above all, for the important and controlling fact, that the bond
between the different states is not Imperial, is not the domination of
one central state over others, but an equal confederacy of all.
Had the United States of America been united on the Imperial basis
of one state dominating and guiding others, not even the more or
less homogeneous nature of its peoples, or the internal autonomy of
its separate states, could have kept its vast masses in even that
condition of social health and freedom in which we find them to-day.
And further, were the separate states of America not conterminous,
but widely scattered over the earth, that powerful and vital
confederacy as it now exists would be impossible. If New Hampshire
were in America, Maine in India, and Virginia in Northern Russia, the
band which to-day naturally and strongly unites them could not
exist.
Few persons who have not given special study to the subject appear
to grasp adequately the extent of variation which mere geographical
division and the exposure to extremely unlike physical conditions
produces in human individuals and in human societies, demanding a
corresponding difference in government and institutions. Were two
infants removed from each other at birth, the one to be brought up
in Finland and the other in India, the mere climatic and physical
differences would, at the end of forty years, have rendered them
highly dissimilar both in physical constitutions and in many
intellectual and material wants, while their descendants at the end of
six generations would certainly represent distinct human varieties,
for which distinct laws and institutions would be requisite. The
effects of geographical severance, dissimilarities in climate and
physical surroundings, can never for a moment be lost sight of, in
dealing with national questions, without fatal results.
Even in the United States of America, in spite of its territorial
continuity and the more or less homogeneous nature of its mixed
population and the strongly autonomous structure of its separate
states, it is still almost open to question (though this is a matter only
to be dealt with by one who has long and closely studied the
constitution of the United States from within) whether the political
life of that vast mass of humanity might not be healthier, its vitality
greater, and the individuality of the separate citizens more
strengthened, if the whole were divided into two or even three
federal bodies instead of one. This at least is certain, that if ever
America be tempted to lay aside her great fundamental principle of
Equal Federation and geographical continuity, and to adopt in her
corporate capacity the principle of Imperial rule by dominating and
subjecting distant lands and alien peoples whom she does not
absorb into her body politic on equal terms, then she will have
introduced into her national life an element which will first morally,
and finally materially, disorganize her and in the end lead to the
break-up of her great and at present virile body politic; and the
world will have to look elsewhere for the most advanced type of
social evolution.
Napoleon attempted to unite Europe by breaking down its states
with iron and re-cementing them with blood under the centralized
control of France. His attempt failed, as all Imperialistic attempts
must ultimately fail which seek to accomplish by force a union which
can only healthily come into being through internal necessity and the
gradual co-adaptation of ages. And if across the years the dim
outline of the Confederate States of Europe may already be seen
looming by the attentive eye, it is certain that not the Imperial
nightmare, but the noble dream of a free and equal union, will find
its realization in that confederacy.
If one turns further from the consideration of the separate states
and organizations as they exist to-day to the far wider inquiry, what
is the desirable and possible ultimate form of organization for the
entire human race? it has always appeared to us that there can be
but one answer.
Probably no powerful and far-seeing mind entertains as possible,
and still less regards as desirable were it possible, the existence in
the future of a world in which all the interesting and many-sided
varieties into which the human race has blossomed during its
evolution on earth are cut down and supplanted by any one single
variety, more particularly if that variety be not one to which the far-
seeing and powerful mind belongs! A Frenchized, Germanized,
Russianized, Englishized, Chineseized globe is a nightmare, perhaps
only seriously conceived of as a possible reality in the mind of the
ignorant man in the street of all nations, eaten up, as such minds
are, by a stupendous national egoism, such as might be entertained
by an ant who believed his noble ant heap would ultimately cover
the whole globe. The ideal of a one-nation-dominated globe can as
little satisfy a broad human intelligence as the ideal of a zoological
garden populated solely by hippopotami would satisfy a broadly
scientific one.
To ourselves it has always appeared inevitable that, if continued
growth and development of the race are to be maintained, and
humanity to blossom into its fairest and most harmonious
development possible on earth, progress must always necessarily be
along two lines. On the other hand, not only must the independence
and freedom of the separate individuals advance, but the
independence and individuality of each human variety must continue
to increase; while, on the one hand, a certain broad sympathy, rising
from an interchange of material and intellectual benefits and a
perception of the profound unity which underlies all human diversity,
must draw together the different human varieties and races; as to-
day the recognized bonds of the family and the nation unite diverse
individuals. As the loftiest form of individual relationship is not the
forcible bond which binds the slave and the animal to its master, nor
even the relation of individuals identical in blood or character, but
the noble companionship of persons wholly distinct, equally free,
equally independent, complementing by their diversity each other's
existence; so the ideal of international and racial relationships is not
one of subjection and dominance or of identity, but of
complementary interaction.
The ultimate chant of the human race on earth is not to be
conceived of as a monotone chanted on one note by one form of
humanity alone, but rather a choral symphony chanted by all races
and all nations in diverse tones on different notes in one grand
complex harmony. The vision of the Hebrew prophet when he cried
out that the lamb and the wolf should yet lie down together and the
weaned child put its hand in the cockatrice's den is the negation of
the desire that the lion, having consumed the lamb, should lie alone
switching his tail on his sand heap, and the cockatrice, having stung
the young child to death, should peer forth from the door of its den
on a landscape he had rendered desolate. Not in the extermination
of earth's varied races, or the dominance of any one over all, or the
annihilation of those complexities and varieties in humanity which
form its beauty, not in a universal Imperial rule, but in a free and
equal federation of all, lies the ultimate goal of humanity, which,
being reached, alone can its fairest proportion be attained.
It is difficult to believe that the first twenty-five years of the
twentieth century will have passed away before that wave of
exploitation and destruction, vomited forth by the nations of Europe,
led by England in her drunken orgie of Imperialism, based on
capitalism, and which now threatens to sweep across the earth,
disrupting and destroying its peoples and their individuality, will have
met with the command, "Hereto shalt thou come and no further!"
and the drenched peoples of earth, after their blood bath, shall
again lift up their heads.
Already, to-day, he who notes keenly may feel faintly and from afar
the first suck-in which is ultimately to withdraw that wave and leave
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