# Littell's Living Age/Volume 149/Issue 1927/The Boers at Home

Originally published in Contemporary Review .
The Boers at Home
"But one heart beats from Table Mountain to the banks of the Limpopo." Such were the words of President Burgers when addressing a crowd of sympathizers on his way towards the Transvaal Republic. And they were true; for excepting some English settlements, isolated and relatively small, south Africa is peopled by but one white race, of mingled French and Dutch descent, having in common the same language, habits, and religion, and being by perpetual intermarriage all brothers, cousins, or near kinsmen — the Boers.
It thus happens that when I describe one south African village in the far interior I describe them all, whether built in the vast Karroo, the Orange Free State, or the Transvaal. There will be differences in the local surroundings of each, according as they lie amid the sands of Namaqualand, the greener wastes beyond the Vaal River, or the deserts everywhere else; but the people inhabiting them are the same, and the local institutions are alike. At the present time, when the Transvaal Boers are in rebellion against us, it may be interesting to know something more respecting the customs, modes of thought, and ways of living of their race than is to be met with in the guidebooks or in the notes of those who have passed a few brief weeks in the show places and the busier centres of our south African colonies. As a contribution towards this knowledge I am about to picture a village — for village it is usually called although the seat of a magistracy and the capital of a division — which was founded by Boers, is almost entirely inhabited by them, and which has a local self-government of its own, in a population of six hundred there are not a dozen Englishmen, nor a dozen other Europeans of any kind, although the Germans rival the English as to numbers. The place is, therefore, racy of the soil. Scarce thirty years old, grey-headed men amongst its founders can remember the days when they fought with Bushmen and had adventures with lions. Its annals are brief. Like many of its congeners it had its origin in the spiritual needs of a people who profess but one form of religion — the Presbyterian — and that religion the very leaven of their lives. Similar "Church towns," as they are called, are still established ever and anon. The process is a simple one. Weary of living two days' journey from a place of worship, the farmers of a region large as an English county resolve to build one in their midst. They memorialize their presbytery and raise funds. A farm is bought. Now a farm means a tract of ten thousand acres, often of more, with a spring upon it. This forms the site and commonage of the future town. A suitable spot is surveyed and marked out in streets and squares. Lots are sold on some great auction day, after a series of religious services. The bidding is enthusiastic, and fancy prices are realized. With the sum thus raised, in the present instance something over £20,000, a church, parsonage, and schoolhouse are erected, and the foundation of a good endowment fund is started. Each lot or erf is charged with an annual payment for Church purposes; and thus, whilst European politicians are busy abolishing tithes and endowments, rising communities in south Africa are as busily creating analogous imposts. There is also a rent charge for water service — an important item in a land so desiccated as the Cape. Some of these lots, intended for building purposes only, are dry and barren, whilst others have an hour's right to an irrigating stream of water twice weekly, and will soon be fruitful gardens. The purchasers are mostly Boers, who will build town houses wherein to lodge when they ride in to church, once or twice a month, from their distant farms, with a large posse of servants and children; but some are storekeepers, — often German Jews, — and some artisans, who buy with a view to future trade. A small army of brick-makers, bricklayers, carpenters, and painters makes its appearance in due time, and retreats again to some more favored spot a few years later, when the first fervor of building has passed away. A minister sufficiently young and sufficiently popular receives a call. After due delay, sometimes after delay deemed very undue and unreasonable, government appoints a resident magistrate, who is also civil commissioner, with a suitable staff, including a clerk, a district surgeon, a gaoler, and some Kafir constables; and the town thus established pursues an existence at once useful, uneventful, prosy, and dull.
I have spoken of the place as peopled by Boers; I should rather have said by Boers and their colored retainers, who, as a matter of fact, outnumber their masters, and form a servile class as utterly separate as tradition or social custom can make them; but who are, from the contact of many generations, imbued with the same ideas, and who flatter the superior race by an imitation that is simply perfect. But between the two there is a gulf which is impassable. The whitest half-caste would not presume to seat himself in the presence of the Boer, nor the poorest Boer demean himself by marrying the prettiest half-caste. Neither do they worship together in the same churches; nor are they buried in the same cemeteries. In one case only that I can now recall, that of a Kafir of special and exemplary piety, did a Boer congregation follow a negro to his grave. This was, however, dug in an open common, and the funeral proceeded from an outhouse.
Of similar ancestry, and often of near kindred to the Boers, but of better education and relatively better birth, are the Africanders who hail from Capetown and the western districts, and who form the professional classes, the leading merchants, and the gentry of the colonial born. Some, descendants of the Huguenots, bear the proudest surnames of old France, and some count early governors and half-forgotten judges amongst their forefathers. Such men will show you ancient seals engraven with their coats of arms, and tell quaint legends of the landrost or physician, the major or the chaplain, who owned it in the days when the colony was young. True, every white man born in civilized south Africa claims to be an Africander, but in the more restricted sense of the word it applies especially to the older colonists of the better classes. Some of these are found amongst the leading spirits of every township, often amongst leading officials. Dutch is the language spoken in their households, and the Boers regard them with an affection and respect which in the very nature of things could scarcely be accorded to the English settler, who comes amongst them a stranger and a foreigner at best.
Our village lies alone in the wilderness, a long day's journey from its nearest neighbor. A broad fringe of mountains passed, and the whole interior of the colony and the country far beyond its borders forms one great desert of stones and dull red soil, with small, hard bushes grey or brown, scattered scantily about it. Here and there rise ugly hills or ugly mountains, black or russet as the case may be. This country is parcelled out into farms larger than English parishes, varying, as they do, from six thousand to twenty thousand acres of land. Each farm has its one spring of water where the homestead lies, and, if the spring be strong enough, a garden and cultivated land which it irrigates. There are rivers so dry that no drop of moisture can be found within their beds, and yet so large that the bridging them is expensive to the point of prohibition; so deep and rapid when it rains that no living creature can cross them. Along these rivers in the warmer, low-lying districts stand thousands of mimosa-trees; leafy sometimes, when rain falls and the right season has come; but bare otherwise, and with innumerable thorns as long as bodkins and sharp as skewers. Then, again, you come to patches of ground, an acre in size or more, smooth and bald through lack of vegetation, nothing growing in the saline clay; a soil absolutely waterproof, and used for roofs of houses and leaking dams accordingly. The roads are tracks across the country, made by wheels of passing wagons, but patched and improved by the contractors, good, indifferent, or bad, — mostly the latter, — employed by the divisional councils. As it seldom rains, these roads are very tolerable after all, save where deep rivers have to be crossed or where picturesque scenery has made the engineering difficult. Following a highway like this, we come, say, in the summer, when the leaves are green, upon the village I would speak of. Tired with neutral tints and the perpetual waste, the eye lights gladly upon a gardened hamlet lying four-square on the barren plain. There are many fruit trees, interspersed with willows and an occasional cypress, which half conceal low, one-storied houses, and a steepled church, white and stiff, of meeting-house Gothic and with iron roof. Beyond this line of herbage is the business quarter; red brick houses mostly, and bare, earthy, reddish streets. And farther off, with sufficient space for wind between it and the town's nobility, a negro location of beehive huts, backed by a quarry on a hillside and a tomb-like structure which forms the powder magazine. The village is flanked by a white-walled graveyard, and the water-furrow leading from the distant river may be noted by a narrow line of verdure. It is overlooked by a well-marked eminence, whose lichened boulders are a rusty brown, and whose top is dominated by a flagstaff.
We enter this oasis, whose vegetation is due to constant irrigation, and see lines of well-kept streets, bordered with quince hedges bending beneath a wealth of large, yellow fruit, and with watercourses on either side. The streams are intermittent, for every drop of water is meted out to the gardens, each plot of ground having its special hour, day and night, alternately; unalterable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians. In the dry allotments sold for building purposes reside the half-dozen Englishmen and the half-dozen Germans who do the business of the place. There are stores, not much to look at, with ploughs and agricultural machinery standing on the stoep, or pavement, outside them, and with everything that Boer humanity can require to be sold within. Great bales of wool are piled up in a shed adjacent, and skins of divers kinds of cattle, salted and stretched, lie drying on the ground. Somewhat ambitiously planned, this portion of the town is but partially built upon, unsightly gaps separate many of the best houses, and some erections stand distant and solitary, dreary sentinels that mark the direction of future improvements. Here is the courthouse, one-storied like its neighbors, in whose inner chambers the resident magistrate and his clerk peruse much periodical literature, newspapers included, and dream of higher salaries and less exacting duties. In the audience chamber or court-room, a bare, whitewashed basilica indeed, sits, amidst piles of newspapers, the chief constable, conjuring up, in his turn, visions of less work and better pay. On the stoep, which is a kind of terrace, paved, but very unpretending, before each house, in policeman's clothing, spick and span, reposes a Kafir constable, tall, stalwart, and handsome in his way, but exercised, so far as his easier philosophy will permit, with speculations anent the less tardy accumulation of the wages he delights in hoarding, and the amelioration of hardships generally. Far be it from me to hint that the even tenor of official life is never varied by stormier passages. Sometimes there are taxes to be collected; sometimes thefts or breaches of the peace to be investigated; now and then a murder; and once a month accounts are made up, and all kinds of salaries paid, when the hapless officials groan beneath the extra work, and, greatly worried, reduce to order a chaos of ledgers, abstracts, vouchers, and reports.
The administration of justice under English rule is much the same in south Africa as it is everywhere else. The thief has a bad time of it, the murderer stands his chance, and the ruffian comes off scot free, or thereabouts. Public business is transacted in the English language, and the sworn translator is a necessary functionary at every sitting of the court. This is one of the events of the week, and, next to services and prayer-meetings, the favorite resort of dilettante Boers, who sit patiently through long-winded investigations, and find, in the dull but living scenes enacted in this humble forum, a faint reflection, though they know it not, of excitements yielded by the drama. The resident magistrate, who is often of Africander and sometimes of Boer descent, is mostly popular, and may even share a divided empire with the predikant of the adjoining church. In the majority of cases the district surgeon is a young Cape doctor or a German, and not unfrequently a Jew. The very frequent transfer of property arising from the old Roman-Dutch law of inheritance, which divides estates amongst the children at the death of either parent, has given rise to a race of inferior lawyers known as "enrolled agents," whose one and sometimes only qualification is the preliminary payment of ten pounds sterling to the government. Some of these agents are respectable Africanders of good family and education, but local satirists have made themselves merry at the early struggles and the ultimate success of less eligible pretenders. Conceive our land flooded with quasi-solicitors of this description! Still, as a matter of fact, they do get through their work somehow, live like gentle men, as the saving is, and often end as moneyed men, or consummate an insolvency which is as good almost as a fortune.
I have said but little of the Boers themselves. Let us visit one of the many homesteads in the gardens. The white-walled house, although but one-storied, is well elevated, and its roof is iron. Outside shutters of a pleasant green flank the two windows, and the door between them is green and panelled. There is, indeed, some pretence to architecture, and the whole is well-kept and substantial. The stoep is high and approached by steps. The watercourse beneath it is masoned out with solid stone and bridged with the same material. Leafy trees of divers sorts shade the place and the stables and outhouses in its rear. We enter a voorhuis, or front room, very lofty and but slightly furnished. Its walls are lined by benches, and a table stands in the middle. There are pictures, it may be, very quaint and old-world; scenes in the life of the prodigal son, or limnings of the manger at Bethlehem, or the cross on Calvary. A new piano may be noted, and a good harmonium, and pious books with Dutch titles lie scattered about. And there are flowers on table and on mantelpiece, photographs and albums, for there are daughters in the house. In some place of honor lies a great old Bible, a massive folio bound in leather and with brass clasps; it is printed in foreign-looking type on ancient-looking paper, and full of the strangest pictures that ever delighted the antiquary or mystified the child. A companionable book upon a dull occasion, but disappointing, inasmuch as its date discovers it to have been printed but the other day. Spittoons stud this chamber's floor, for it is the great reception-room, and visitors sit round it and smoke their pipes at times and seasons of conference and waiting; and many such times there be.
At the back of this voorhuis is the dining-room, entered by large and even handsome folding-doors. In both apartments the walls are painted light blue, or green, or mauve; in both the ceiling is raftered and wooden, varnished and dark. The great feature of the dining-room, apart from the usual furnishings, is a small table near the window, with a chair on either side. Upon this table stands a coffee-urn with chafing-dish beneath it; and the day has scarcely turned before this urn begins to steam and to bubble. On its dexter side is seated the lady of the house, who pours out coffee for all comers, and, with feet well planted on a box-like footstool, rules and manages her household. Children play around her, a colored girl sits watchful at her feet, and at favorable moments her lord and master occupies the corresponding chair, utters familiar maxims and remarks, and his friend, sitting hard by, carries on an intermittent conversation between wary mouthfuls of the scalding beverage. He is a well-built man, not unlike the English farmer of our early days, but more sallow and less cheery, more Puritanical and staid. His ancestors came from France and Holland, but in this wondrous climate of the Cape, perchance for animal life the finest under the sun, their offspring have developed into a race sui generis, nobly grown and quite unlike the typical Hollander or Frenchman. We converse in Dutch, the only language he cares to speak, although his children are apt scholars in the English tongue, and by-and-by he takes us into his garden.
A shady place this is, with groves of peach-trees, apricots, and almonds, a stray apple-tree here and there, and pears, walnuts, and nectarines, all in excellent bearing. Here a vineyard, there a patch of tall Indian corn rising far over our heads. At our feet a wilderness of gourds and water-melons — a veritable "garden of cucumbers." There are white-hearted cabbages which would fill a bucket, and cauliflowers that would puzzle a boiler to cook them; enormous potatoes, and carrots large as our mangold-wurzel. Scarcely a weed to be seen: the ground was a desert before the water came there, and grows only what is planted there by man. Twice weekly the place is carefully flooded, and our friend rises in the middle of the night for one of these hebdomadal spells of water-leading. The region is hereabouts too cold for oranges, but in many a district from Capetown to the far Transvaal these beautiful and fruitful trees lend a romance and pleasantness of their own to the orchards of the Boers.
The poorer Boer lives in a humbler dwelling, with floors of hardened mud consolidated by frequent washings of liquid cow-dung. His rooms are ceiled with reeds laid cunningly on rough beams of yellow-wood. The attic beneath his comfortable thatch is a very storehouse of vegetable products, dried and housed for winter use. His furniture is ruder and of home construction. His walls are whitewashed, and in shelved recesses stand favorite pieces of crockery, mysterious bottles, and well-thumbed books of devotion. He spends his leisure in making boots of untanned leather, which he sews together with the sinews of animals which he has previously prepared for the purpose; and in mending the bottoms of his chairs and benches with leather thongs he has also manufactured to that end.
In the Boers we have the remarkable spectacle of a nation holding but one religion, strict conformity to which is essential to respectability of any sort; whilst the devotee or active professor alone can hope for social leadership among them. In the district of which our village is the only town there are three thousand souls. On the occasion of a revival some years since, a religious paper stated there were but fifty persons of the number who had not been converted. The district was founded in order to support a place of worship, and the village is known technically as a "Church town" A scoffing European suggested it should bear a kirk rampant for its coat of arms. Nine thousand pounds were expended on the church and parsonage. The former much resembles a Dissenting chapel, but is dignified by steeple and bell, and by a town clock which strikes the hours. At a cost of £500 and more an organ was added. The purchase was made in Germany. At a cost of £200, again, the building was lighted with hanging lamps. The parson age — pastorie is the local word — large, low, convenient, and handsome, stands in a garden, with long, vine-roofed walks and peaches of admirable flavor. The Dutch minister or predikant — often a man of good Cape family who has studied at Utrecht or at Leyden — is the spiritual leader and director of his flock, subject only to the mild and hesitating control of his deacons and his elders. No English rector enjoys a higher social status. A bishop of Grahamstown, witnessing the comfort and the unlimited influence of such an one, ejaculated almost unconsciously, "You are little popes." Not only are the ministers great men, but ecclesiastical discipline reigns supreme. Woe to the unlucky couple who have married too tardily for absolute propriety, to the young man who has been sowing wild oats, or to the jolly old fellow who has taken a glass too much! One and all are hauled up before the Consistory, in full conclave assembled, and publicly censured and punished. An accused person whom the solicitor-general had refused to prosecute for lack of evidence was summoned before the Kerkraad witnesses were examined, and the culprit was regularly tried and condemned.
Church and people being thus identical, the first-class undenominational school is really a very denominational institution indeed. The head-master with his £350 a year, the head-mistress with her £200 or more (a young lady from Capetown, who is sure to be persuaded into matrimony by some ardent and eligible bachelor, almost before the year is out), and their subordinates are managed and chosen to all intents and purposes by the Dutch congregation and its leaders. Nor could it well be otherwise. To the Boer stripling, even to the Boer child, school-going is a passion — a relief, it may be, from the monotony of home. Holidays are deplored, and the end of a vacation is hailed with delight. Dullards there are, of course, but some of the pupils make admirable progress. Some aspire to the ministry, and the university of Capetown is besieged by eager candidates from the haunts of the springbok and the ostrich. Young girls, too, some very sweet and lovable, more enthusiastic than their brothers, proceed to local examinations, and pass with éclat. Learning is the fashion, and a good one; and the professions begin to teem with scions of Boer houses who have sought pursuits more ambitious and eventful than the watching of harvests or the herding of sheep.
The colored people have a minister and a chapel to themselves, nominally autonomous, but practically managed and mostly paid for by the Boers. Their services are more emotional and often more interesting than those of their pale-faced masters. Their minister is a kind of curate, socially inferior to the predikant of the Boer congregation; nor is he permitted to ascend the pulpit of the white man's church. He, too, has his elders, deacons, and churchwardens — Kafirs, Hottentots, or the mixed descendants of Malay slaves. Now these poor negroes have a passion for religious worship and for school. You will see men and women seated amongst the children, slate in hand; and boys and girls give up everything for their lessons. Servants will desert you at the school-hour and neglect their duties to con their spelling-books. The tyranny of some of their teachers is almost worthy of a school board, but it is backed by the scholars themselves, and the much-enduring employer of labor has only to grin and bear it as best he can.
Foremost among the local magnates is the wealthy landowner — a Boer, as are all the up-country landowners, but whose intelligence, hospitality, and common sense would be a credit to any nationality. He owns a first-class house in the town, which he inhabits on Sundays, coming on the Saturday with his entire family and riding off again on the Monday; a house which rivals his country residence in the excellence of its furniture and appointments. All kinds of people call to ask his advice or his assistance, to do business or to evidence their friendship. All drink his coffee, shake hands round the circle of his family, and call him "uncle" or "cousin" as the case may be; and with show of reason too, for the district is peopled by his kindred. The town is filled with such houses, whose closed shutters have a dreary aspect all the rest of the week. Such a rushing and plunging of horsemen, a rumbling of wagons drawn by trains of oxen, a whirling of tented carts, as Saturday comes round; such buying and selling in the stores; such throngs of men and women in the streets, where grass would grow at other times if the growth of grass were possible in such a desert; such crowded services at church; such crowded and hearty prayer-meetings; such pleasant converse at those evening gatherings on the stoeps; such thrilling love passages between the young and such cordial greetings amongst the old; such fuss, noise, sensation, and life as we have long forgotten in these old and jaded communities of Europe.
The local supervision of the township is entrusted to a municipality, founded on European traditions and provided with regulations which have had the previous sanction of the government. Here again the members, from the chairman to the town clerk, are Boers and Africanders. The large town lands are admirably managed. No one can quarry stone or dig sand without a license. Each householder is allowed to depasture so many sheep, horses, or oxen, and no more. Special laws are enacted respecting ostriches and pigs. Sanitary requirements are not forgotten. But the great bone of municipal contention, if contention there be in so peaceful and united an assembly, is the control of the water supply. A special contractor keeps in working order the trench or canal which conveys a stream some two miles long from the higher level of the distant river bed; a stream on which depends the very existence of the town. Unpleasant for this functionary it is when the watercourse, which winds sometimes along hillsides and sometimes in deep cuttings, becomes choked with sand, or breaks its bank, or gets too palpably full of frogs and weeds. The public are aggrieved, and it is easier to worry a subordinate than to have it out with a drought or a water flood. Then there is a pound filled sometimes with stray cattle, and there are rather lively sales when the said cattle remain unclaimed. Gangs, too, of prisoners have to be superintended, who clean and level the streets and construct earthworks and dams. A municipality, slow but honest, of well-to-do middle-class men, untroubled by the warfare of politicians or the hectoring of demagogues.
Such, then, is a Boer village from Anguillas to Kuruman, from Capetown to the Portuguese frontier. In some the European population is much larger; in some anti-English feeling is more intense. In the Transvaal Republic the landrost took the place of the resident magistrate, Dutch was the language of the government as well as of the people, and the negroes were more palpably an inferior and subject race; but there the distinction ended. English communities of any size are only to be met with in the coast districts around Algoa Bay, in Natal, and at the Diamond Fields. British rule is fairly tolerated, if we except the older divisions about Capetown and the widespread settlements beyond the Orange River — and there we are hated with a hatred that affects no concealment. The causes of this dislike are not far to seek. We govern an alien race who hunger for the mastery. In their eyes England is represented by the unsympathizing stranger, the drunken navvy, or the quasi-aristocrat whose arrogant puppyism has made us a byword the whole world over. Their Church, with its pulpits filled by pastors trained in the universities of Holland, or by the pupils of these men, is a propaganda, passive it may be, of anti-English sentiment. Stern Puritans of the Cromwellian type, and the children of baffled slaveowners, they deem the negro a veritable Canaanite, doomed to the hewing of wood and the drawing of water to the end of time. This dream, so dear to their hearts, we have rudely broken. The savage, raw from his kraal, and the cultured European, hedged about by moral restraints innumerable, are both alike in the eyes of our government. The colored thief, vagrant, or laggard, smitten aforetime with over many stripes, we now tickle with punishments of farcical mildness; and, legally speaking, the quondam slave is as good a man as his master. It is not difficult to conceive how intolerable such a turning of the tables must have seemed to the Boers, many of whom were ruined by the process. At a date so recent that some of us can well remember it, thousands of them sold their farms for anything they could get, and crossed the Orange and the Vaal, if only to be rid of the hateful stranger. Shirking our responsibilities, we gave them autonomy, and with statesmanlike elaboration planted angry republics at our very doors. It was like the creation of another Ireland. To those new governments disaffected colonists have ever turned their eyes. When the Transvaal started into active life under the leadership of an enthusiastic and imaginative president, and made alliances with the Continental powers, Boer and Africander alike looked forward to the day, now dawning upon their vision, when the strong, young commonwealth should wrest the Cape from the wavering grasp of England. The annexation crushed these hopes for a while. To restore the independence of such a republic would be the renewal of a terrible blunder, postponing to a distant epoch the pacification and the advancing civilization of the whole land. The Cape Dominion we have been endeavoring to construct, when out of its tutelage, and leavened sufficiently with English influences, will form a noble country of the future. But no argument can be adduced for the premature independence of any portion of it that is not equally applicable to all the white communities of southern Africa.