The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction

If the imperial Government accept the retention of a South African Army Corps as part of the home establishment, it is worth while considering how best this new departure in army policy can be used to further the interests of South Africa herself, and those wider imperial interests which are daily taking concrete shape and casting their shadow over local politics. Leaving for a moment the question of imperial forces, we find in South Africa a local military activity which, though less completely organised than in some of the older colonies, is yet well worth our reckoning with. The war brought into being a large number of irregular corps, most of which have now disappeared. In Cape Colony the permanent force is the Cape Mounted Rifles, which has an average strength of 1000 men, enlisted for five years, and sworn to “act as a police force throughout the colony, and also as a military force for the defence of the colony.” Since the war the town guards and district mounted troops, the former limited to 10,000 and the latter to 5000 men, have been placed on a permanent footing. They are loosely organised volunteer forces, enlisted for no fixed period, and bound to serve in the one case in the neighbourhood of the towns, and in the other within their own districts. There are also a number of ordinary volunteer corps, composed chiefly of mounted infantry, and field and garrison artillery, and a number of mounted rifle clubs for local defence. All types of corps included, there are probably not less than 20,000 men undergoing some kind of military training and pledged to some form of service in Cape Colony alone. Natal presents a very similar picture. Her regulars are the Natal Police Force, with a strength, including the Zululand Police, of between 500 and 600 men, enlisted for three years, and including both mounted and foot divisions. There is a considerable volunteer force, with artillery, infantry, and mounted rifles, two companies of naval volunteers, and a number of rifle clubs with a strength of over 2000. We may put the defensive strength of Natal, which, considering her size, is remarkable, at a little under 5000 men. The British South African Police, which is stationed in Southern Rhodesia, has a strength of a little over 500, and the Southern Rhodesia Constabulary and volunteers increase the forces of that district to nearly 2000 men. In the new colonies the chief force is the South African Constabulary, with a nominal strength of 6000 men, of which two-thirds are stationed in the Transvaal. It is an expensive force, each man costing on an average £250 per annum; but there is reason to believe that the figure may soon be reduced to £200, or even less. In the Transvaal a volunteer force has been organised of nine regiments. No ultimate strength has been fixed, but 10,000 may be taken as a fair estimate. In April 1903 the force numbered fully 3000, and as the country becomes more populous there is little reason to doubt that the maximum will be reached.⁴⁰

There is thus a force of over 40,000 men engaged in local defence throughout South Africa, and of this the 8000 police are for all practical purposes regular troops. At the present moment the command of this force is split up among the different colonial governments and is wholly dissociated from any connection with the command of the imperial regulars. We have seen that the situation is full of grave difficulties for the regulars themselves, since there is no place in colonial policy for an alien garrison force. But the strongest argument in the present system lies not in the difficulties which it involves but in the advantages which it forgoes. We have in South Africa a population which, to use Napier’s famous distinction, is not only bellicose but martial, with a natural aptitude for soldiering and a keen interest in all details of military organisation. Until the regular command is brought into line with the local forces this genius will expend itself on casual volunteering, and when we next call for colonial aid we shall have the same haphazard units, instead of colonial regiments drilled and manœuvred on one system and forming a part of some regular division. The arguments for a federation of the whole South African command are difficult to meet, and there is little danger of opposition from the local governments. The danger lies in the fact that it would necessarily involve some reconstruction of our whole military system, and military conservatism is slow to depart from the traditions of the elders.

If imperial defence means anything it must include the provision in every great colonial unit, in Canada, Australia, South Africa, – particularly in South Africa, – of a force on the lines of the Indian army, with an elastic organisation, embracing both imperial regulars and local troops. Granted the sanction of the imperial Government, there is no special difficulty in the machinery required to create it. If South Africa were federated it would be simplicity itself. All that would be wanted would be to bring the general officer commanding the imperial troops, since his command has been unified, into relation with the Federal Ministry of Defence, and unite in his person the functions which Sir Neville Lyttelton now exercises in South Africa and those which at present belong to Lord Dundonald in Canada. But, pending federation, we must have recourse to one of those intercolonial representative bodies which form the thin end of the federal wedge. The general commanding would be given the command of local forces by an act of the local legislature, subject in all questions of policy, finance, and organisation to the authority of an intercolonial committee of defence.⁴¹ Each colony would elect two or more representatives, on the lines of the present Intercolonial Council of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony; the council thus formed would be empowered by the legislatures which elect it to decide what share of the cost was to be borne by the separate colonies, to arrange for combined manœuvres, to supervise appointments, and, in case of local wars, to decide what force should be sent to the front, and in the event of an imperial war, to say what local forces should be lent for service. The general commanding would be responsible to the War Office for moving imperial troops, subject to its direction, and for the internal discipline and organisation of the imperial divisions. There would, thus, be clearly defined limits of authority for both the imperial and local Governments, and at the same time every inducement to co-operation. In so far as he was in command of the whole of the South African forces, the general commanding would be subject in South African matters to the defence committee; while, in so far as he was in command of imperial troops, he would take his orders on imperial questions, such as a foreign war, from the Home Government. The present officers in command of colonial police and volunteers would, of course, come under his authority precisely on the same basis as officers of regulars.

The advantages of such a scheme are many, both from the standpoint of policy and of military efficiency. It would please the colonies, who would have an army of their own, drilled on regular lines and affiliated to the imperial army, and at the same time would feel that they had a share in the control of the forces and the military policy of the Empire. It would ensure the efficiency of local troops, and would prepare them for co-operation with the regulars, – not the clumsy partnership of troops tagged on to a division which cannot use them, but the true co-operation which follows on absorption in a larger unit with which they have been trained. It would provide an easy means for the transfer of colonial officers to imperial regiments, and would act as a magnet for colonial recruiting. In the case of local wars, as I have said, the whole force would be ready to take the field under the orders of the general commanding. In the case of a foreign war the imperial Government would direct the distribution of the regulars, and it would be for the committee of defence to say what local troops should be lent for foreign service.⁴² Beyond this, the only duties of the War Office would lie in the selection of staff officers and the general commanding – a matter in which the concurrence of the colonial governments might be obtained as a matter of courtesy. On the financial side it is probable that the scheme would considerably lessen the burden of defence. The only way in which the colonies can ever be expected to contribute to the cost of imperial defence is by providing armies and navies of their own. To pay for that which does not directly concern you is a form of tax, and so hostile to the letter and spirit of our colonial traditions. But if local governments are given a direct interest in an imperial army in which their own troops are subsumed, and whose policy they largely control, I do not think they will be ungenerous. There is no reason why they should not meet the cost of the general and his staff, and contribute part, if not the whole, of the extra pay which the regular troops in the South African command must receive, and the bonus to the volunteer corps which are held ready for foreign service. Such payments, once the federation were effected, would no doubt come as a spontaneous offer. Decentralisation and centralisation are, by way of becoming catchwords, repeated without understanding to justify the most diverse schemes. But every true policy must include both, since in certain matters it is well to decentralise, and in others unification is imperative. Such a scheme as has been sketched combines the sporadic colonial forces in one effective unit of organisation, and at the same time relieves the tension at imperial headquarters by relegating detailed administration to the local authorities, who are best fitted to supervise.

The military is, as a rule, the most difficult aspect of a federation, but in our circumstances it is likely to be the simplest. We have a federal nucleus in the imperial command, and a strong impulse in the fact that the local volunteer and police forces have already served side by side with regulars in the field, and are inspired with a military spirit which may soon disappear unless fostered and utilised. A federation of local forces exists in Canada and in the Australian Commonwealth; a union of the imperial forces exists in South Africa. The problem is to federate the local forces in advance of a political federation, and to unite them with the imperial command in a system which, though a new departure in military policy, contains no detail which has not been somewhere or other already conceded. If the scheme in itself is worth anything, the practical difficulties are small. It is unlikely that the colonial governments will offer any opposition; and so far as South African interests are concerned, the foundations would be laid of a true federation. From the point of view of imperial politics the step would have an even greater significance, for a type would be created of a new army organisation which would provide for a federated imperial defence; and the precedent having once been created, the other colonies would readily follow suit.

CHAPTER XIX.
THE FUTURE OUTLOOK

The problems discussed in the foregoing chapters have been concerned chiefly with the new colonies, for it is to them that we must look for the motive force to expedite union. They must long continue to be the most important factor in British South Africa, partly from their accidental position as the late theatre of war, and more especially from their wealth, the intricacy of their politics, the high level of ability among their inhabitants, the splendid chances of their future, and the delicacy of their present status. Union, if it comes, will come chiefly because of them; and in any union they will play a great, if not a dominant, part. Whither they pipe, South Africa must ultimately follow. But this is not because there can be any differentiation in value between the states, since all are self-subsistent and independent, but because in the new colonies the problems which chiefly concern South Africa’s future are already naked to the eye and focussed for observation. The Transvaal will be important because within it the fight which concerns the whole future of the African colony will be fought to a finish. It will add to the problem some features which concern only itself, but the general lines it shares with its neighbours. The economic strife, the amalgamation of races, the native question, the movement towards federation, with all its many aspects, and, last but not least, the intellectual and political development of its citizens, – this is the problem of the Transvaal, and in the gravest sense it is the problem of South Africa’s future.

In the preceding pages the separate questions have been briefly considered. But here we may note one truth which attaches to them all – the settlement of no single one is easy. Each will defy a supine statesmanship, and in each failure will be attended with serious disaster. Patience and a lithe intelligence can alone ensure success, and it is doubtful if that happy Providence which has now and then taken charge of our drifting and muddling will interfere in this province to save us from the consequences of folly. Every question stands on a needle-point. Mining development – if the wealth of the country is to be properly exploited – must continue as it has begun, utilising the highest engineering talent, and straining every nerve to extend the area over which profits can be made. The labour question requires tact and patience, prescience of future interests, a recognition of the needs of the complex organism of which it is but one aspect. The native question shows the same narrow margin between success and failure, and demands a degree of forethought and statesmanship which would be an exorbitant requirement were it not so vital a part of the social and economic future. Agriculture and settlement can only be made valuable by a close study of facts, and an intelligence which can correctly estimate data and bring to bear on them the latest results of experimental science. Finally, in its financial aspects the problem has a near resemblance to the most complicated of recent economic tasks, the re-settlement of Egypt. Burdened with a heavy debt, the country is speculating on its future and living on its capital. For the next few years it will in all likelihood achieve solvency; but the margin may be small, and the result may be secured only by the retention of certain revenue-producing charges at an unnatural figure. A considerable part of the debt will be applied to services which will make a good return in time, but for a little while revenue may barely cover disbursements. In finance, above all other provinces, there is need of a severe economy, coupled with a clear recognition of the country’s needs and a judicious courage. It is a gamble, if you like, but with sleepless and ubiquitous watchfulness the odds are greatly in our favour. The very forces which fight against us, the complexity of economic and social interests, will become our servants, if properly understood, and will solidify and preserve our work, as the house fashioned of granite will stand when the building of sandstone will crumble. The shaping force of intelligence remains the one thing needful. Of high and just intentions there can be little doubt, but in the new South Africa we are more likely to be perplexed by the fool than the knave. Will the result, as Cromwell asked long ago, be “answerable to the simplicity and honesty of the design”? Neither to the one nor the other, but to that rarer endowment, political wisdom.

So much for administrative problems. A country whose future is staked upon the intelligence of its Government and its people is an exhilarating spectacle to the better type of man. England has succeeded before on the same postulates and in harder circumstances. But there are certain subtler aspects of development, where the same high qualities are necessary, but where the end to be striven for is less clear. There is the fusion of the two races, an ideal if not a practical necessity. As has been said, a political union already exists after a fashion. There seems little reason to fear any future disruption, for on the material side Dutch interests are ours, and all are vitally concerned in the common prosperity. Administrative efficiency will make the Boer acquiesce in any form of government. But that which Lord Durham thought far more formidable, “a struggle not of principles but of races,” may continue for long in other departments than politics, unless we use extraordinary caution in our methods. The very advance of civilisation may militate against us by vivifying historical memories and rekindling a clearer flame of racial resentment. The Dutch have their own ideals, different from ours, but not incompatible with complete political union. Any attempt to do violence to their ideals, or any hasty and unconsidered imposition of unsuitable English forms, will throw back that work of spiritual incorporation which is the highest destiny of the country. They have a strong Church and a strong creed, certain educational ideas and social institutions which must long remain powers in the land. And let us remember that any South African civilisation must grow up on the soil, and must borrow much from the Dutch race, else it is no true growth but a frail exotic. It will borrow English principles but not English institutions, since, while principles are grafts from human needs, institutions are the incrusted mosses of time which do not bear transplanting. It is idle to talk of universities such as Oxford, or public schools like Winchester, and any attempt to tend such alien plants will be a waste of money and time. South Africa will create her own nurseries, and on very different lines. If we are burdened in our work with false parallels we shall fail, for nothing in the new country can survive which is not based on a clear-sighted survey of things as they are, and a renunciation of old formulas. Let us recognise that we cannot fuse the races by destroying the sacred places of one of them, but only by giving to the future generations some common heritage. “If you unscotch us,” wrote Sir Walter Scott to Croker, “you will find us damned mischievous Englishmen,” and it will be a very mischievous Dutchman who is coerced into unsuitable English ways and taught sentiments of which he has no understanding. When a people arise who have a common culture bequeathed from their fathers, and who look back upon Ladysmith and Colenso, the Great Trek and the Peninsular War, as incidents in a common pedigree, then we shall have fusion indeed, a union in spirit and in truth. Nothing which has in it the stuff of life can ever die, and there is something of this vitality in the Dutch tradition. Our own is stronger, wider, resting on greater historical foundations, and therefore it will more readily attract and absorb the lesser. But the lesser will live, transformed, indeed, but none the less a real part of the spiritual heritage of a nation where there will be no racial cleavage. The consummation is not yet, and, maybe, will be long delayed. It will not be in our time; perhaps our sons may see it; certainly, I think, our grandchildren will be very near it. Such a development cannot be artificially hastened, and all that we can do is to see that no barriers of our own making are allowed to intervene. Meantime we have a de facto political union to make the most of.

What manner of men are the citizens of this new nation to be? They will have the vigour which belongs to colonial parentage, the freshness of outlook and freedom from old shibboleths. But they should have more. They start as no colony has ever started, with the echoes of a great war still in their ears, with a highly developed industry and the chances of great wealth, and with a population showing as high a level of intelligence as any in the world. The nature of their problem will compel them to remain intellectually active, and as the eyes of the world are on them they will have few temptations to lethargy. They may take foolish steps and be beguiled into rash experiments, but I do not think they will stagnate. And for this people so much alive there is the chance of an indigenous culture, born of the old, when they have leisure to make it theirs, and the freshening influences of their new land and their strenuous life. South Africa cannot help herself. She must play a large part in imperial politics; her views on economic questions will be listened to by all the world; a political future, good or bad, she must accept and make the most of. But behind it all there is the prospect of that intimate self-development, that progress in thought, in the arts, in the amenities of life, which, like righteousness, exalteth a nation. The finest of all experiments is to unite an older civilisation with the natural freshness of a virgin soil, and she, alone among the colonies which have ever been founded, has the power to make it. Not only is it a new land, but it is Africa, a corner of that mysterious continent to which the eyes of dreamers and adventurers have always turned. The boundaries of the unknown are shrinking daily, and where our forefathers marked only lions and behemoths on the map, we set down a hundred names and a dozen trading stations. The winds which blow from the hills of the north tell no longer of mystic interior kingdoms and uncounted treasures. We know most things nowadays, and have given our knowledge the prosaic form of joint-stock companies. But the proverb still justifies itself.⁴³ Africa is still a home of the incalculable, not wholly explored or explorable, still a hinterland to which the youth of the south can push forward in search of fortune, and from which that breath of romance, which is the life of the English race, can inspire thinkers and song-makers. Girdled on three sides by the ocean, and on the fourth looking north to the inland seas and the eternal snows of Ruwenzori – I can imagine no nobler cradle for a race. I have said that a structure built with difficulty is the most lasting. Her complex problems will knit together the sinews of intelligence and national character, and the great commonplaces of policy, so eternally true, so inexorable in their application, will become part of her creed, not from lip-service but from the sweat and toil of practical work. If to these she can add other commonplaces, still older and more abiding, of civic duty, of the intellectual life, of moral purpose, she will present to history that most rare and formidable of combinations, intellect and vitality, will and reason, culture guiding and inspiring an unhesitating gift for action.

There is already a school of political thought in South Africa, a small school, and thus far so ill-defined that it has no common programme to put before a world which barely recognises its existence. It owes its inspiration to Mr Rhodes, but its founder left it no legacy of doctrine beyond a certain instinct for great things, a fire of imagination, and a brooding energy. Its members are very practical men, landowners, mine-owners, rich, capable, with nothing of the ideologue in their air, the last people one would naturally go to for ambitions which could not be easily reduced to pounds sterling. But they are of the school: at heart they are pioneers, the cyclopean architects of new lands. It is one of South Africa’s paradoxes that there should exist among successful and matter-of-fact men of business a hungry fidelity to ideals for which we look in vain among the doctrinaires who do them facile homage. And they are also very practical in their aims. Mr Rhodes never desired a paper empire or that vague thing called territorial prestige. What filled his imagination was the thought of new nations of our blood living a free and wholesome life and turning the wilderness into a habitable place. He strove not for profit but for citizens, for a breathing-space, a playground, for the future. The faults of his methods and the imperfections of his aims, which are so curiously our own English faults and imperfections, may have hindered the realisation of his dreams, but they did not impair that legacy of daimonic force which he left to his countrymen. You may find it in South Africa to-day, and if you rightly understand it and feel its hidden movements you will be aghast at your own parochialism. It is slow and patient, knowing that “the counsels to which Time hath not been called Time will not ratify.” But with Time on its side it is confident, and it will not easily be thwarted.

Excursions in colonial psychology are rarely illuminating, lacking as a rule both sympathy and knowledge; but on one trait there is a singular unanimity. The two chief obstacles to imperial unity, so runs a saying, are the bumptious colonial and the supercilious Englishman. I readily grant the latter, but is the first fairly described? A colonist is naturally prone to self-assertion in certain walks of life. If he creates an industry alone and from the start in the teeth of hardships, having had to begin from the very beginning, he is apt to lose perspective and unduly magnify his work. If he owns a bakery, it is the finest in the world, at any rate in the British Empire. He compares his doings with his neighbours’ within his limited horizon, and he is scarcely to be blamed if he brags a little. His bravado is only ridiculous when taken out of its surroundings, and at the worst is more a mannerism than an affection of mind. But on the intellectual side he is, in my judgment, conspicuously humble, a groper after the viewless things whose omnipotence he feels dimly. To the home-bred man history is a commonplace to be taken for granted; to the colonist who has shaped a workaday life from the wilds, it is a vast mother of mystery. Traditions, customs, standards staled to us by the vain emphasis of generations, rise before him as revelations and shrines of immortal wisdom. What to us is rhetoric is to him the finest poetry; and for this reason in politics he is prone to follow imaginative schemes, without testing them by his native caution. Our somewhat weary intellectual world is a temple which he is ready to approach with uncovered head. It is not mere innocence, but rather, I think, that freshness of outlook and optimism which he gathers from his new land and his contact with the beginnings of things. Truth and beauty remain the same: it is only the symbols and the mirrors which grow dim with time; and to the man who is sufficiently near to understand the symbols, and sufficiently aloof to see no flaw or tawdriness, there is a double share of happiness. The superficial assurance, the “bumptiousness” of the saying, is surely a small matter if behind it there is this true modesty of spirit.

A national life presumes union, but South African federation is simply a step to a larger goal. It may be objected that in the foregoing chapters the cardinal problem is treated as less the fusion of the two races than the development of South Africa on certain lines within our colonial system. Such has been the intention of the book. The Dutch have accepted the new régime; they will fight, if they fight, on constitutional lines under our ægis and within our Empire, and in a sense it may be said that racial union on the political side already exists. But the further political development of the country, as self-consciousness is slowly gained – that, indeed, is a matter on which hang great issues, good or bad, for the English people. Because the furnace has been so hot, the metal will emerge pure or it will not emerge at all. A new colony, or rather a new nation, will have been created, or another will have been added to the catalogue of our infrequent failures, and the loose territorial mass known as South Africa will become the prey of any wandering demagogue or aspiring foreign Power. Our late opponents will take their revenge, if they seek it, not by reviving the impossible creed of Dutch supremacy, but by retarding South Africa from what is her highest destiny and her worthiest line of development. Her future, if she will accept it, is to be a pioneer in imperial federation: a pioneer, because she has felt more than any other colony the evils of disintegration, the vices of the old colonial system, the insecurity of government from above, and at the same time is in a position to realise the weakness of that independence which is also isolation. This is not the place to enter upon so vast a question. To many it is the greatest of modern political dreams. Without it imperialism becomes empty rhetoric and braggadocio, a tissue of dessicated phrases, worthy of the worst accusations with which its enemies have assailed it. Without it our Empire is neither secure from aggression nor politically sound nor commercially solvent. Within it alone can any true scheme of common defence be realised. Moreover, it is the glamour needed to give to colonial politics that wider imaginative outlook which England enjoys in virtue of a long descent. Colonial politics tend to become at times narrow and provincial; in a federation they would gain that larger view and ampler pride which a man feels who, believing himself to be humbly born, learns for the first time that he is the scion of a famous house. Their kinship, instead of the long-remembered sentiment of a descendant, would become the intimate loyalty of a colleague. And home politics also would lose the provincialism, equally vicious, if historically more interesting, which lies somewhere near the root of our gravest errors, and in relinquishing a facile imperialism find an empire which needs no rhetoric to enhance its splendour.