Nor Have The Boers
Any Wish To Conceal The Meanness Of Thus Employing Unpaid Labor;
On The Contrary, Every One Of Them, From Mr. Potgeiter And Mr. Gert Krieger,
The Commandants, Downward, Lauded His Own Humanity And Justice
In Making Such An Equitable Regulation.
"We make the people work for us,
in consideration of allowing them to live in our country."
I can appeal to the Commandant Krieger if the foregoing is not
a fair and impartial statement of the views of himself and his people.
I am sensible of no mental bias toward or against these Boers;
and during the several journeys I made to the poor enslaved tribes,
I never avoided the whites, but tried to cure and did administer remedies
to their sick, without money and without price. It is due to them to state
that I was invariably treated with respect; but it is most unfortunate
that they should have been left by their own Church for so many years
to deteriorate and become as degraded as the blacks,
whom the stupid prejudice against color leads them to detest.
This new species of slavery which they have adopted serves to supply
the lack of field-labor only. The demand for domestic servants
must be met by forays on tribes which have good supplies of cattle.
The Portuguese can quote instances in which blacks become so degraded
by the love of strong drink as actually to sell themselves;
but never in any one case, within the memory of man,
has a Bechuana chief sold any of his people, or a Bechuana man his child.
Hence the necessity for a foray to seize children. And those individual Boers
who would not engage in it for the sake of slaves can seldom resist
the two-fold plea of a well-told story of an intended uprising
of the devoted tribe, and the prospect of handsome pay
in the division of the captured cattle besides.
It is difficult for a person in a civilized country to conceive
that any body of men possessing the common attributes of humanity
(and these Boers are by no means destitute of the better feelings
of our nature) should with one accord set out, after loading
their own wives and children with caresses, and proceed to shoot down
in cold blood men and women, of a different color, it is true,
but possessed of domestic feelings and affections equal to their own.
I saw and conversed with children in the houses of Boers who had,
by their own and their masters' account, been captured,
and in several instances I traced the parents of these unfortunates,
though the plan approved by the long-headed among the burghers
is to take children so young that they soon forget their parents
and their native language also. It was long before I could give credit
to the tales of bloodshed told by native witnesses, and had I received
no other testimony but theirs I should probably have continued skeptical
to this day as to the truth of the accounts; but when I found
the Boers themselves, some bewailing and denouncing, others glorying in
the bloody scenes in which they had been themselves the actors,
I was compelled to admit the validity of the testimony, and try to account
for the cruel anomaly. They are all traditionally religious,
tracing their descent from some of the best men (Huguenots and Dutch)
the world ever saw. Hence they claim to themselves the title of "Christians",
and all the colored race are "black property" or "creatures".
They being the chosen people of God, the heathen are given to them
for an inheritance, and they are the rod of divine vengeance on the heathen,
as were the Jews of old. Living in the midst of a native population
much larger than themselves, and at fountains removed many miles
from each other, they feel somewhat in the same insecure position
as do the Americans in the Southern States. The first question
put by them to strangers is respecting peace; and when they receive reports
from disaffected or envious natives against any tribe, the case assumes
all the appearance and proportions of a regular insurrection.
Severe measures then appear to the most mildly disposed among them
as imperatively called for, and, however bloody the massacre that follows,
no qualms of conscience ensue: it is a dire necessity for the sake of peace.
Indeed, the late Mr. Hendrick Potgeiter most devoutly believed himself to be
the great peacemaker of the country.
But how is it that the natives, being so vastly superior in numbers to
the Boers, do not rise and annihilate them? The people among whom they live
are Bechuanas, not Caffres, though no one would ever learn that distinction
from a Boer; and history does not contain one single instance
in which the Bechuanas, even those of them who possess fire-arms,
have attacked either the Boers or the English. If there is such an instance,
I am certain it is not generally known, either beyond or in the Cape Colony.
They have defended themselves when attacked, as in the case of Sechele,
but have never engaged in offensive war with Europeans.
We have a very different tale to tell of the Caffres,
and the difference has always been so evident to these border Boers that,
ever since those "magnificent savages"* obtained possession of fire-arms,
not one Boer has ever attempted to settle in Caffreland, or even face them
as an enemy in the field. The Boers have generally manifested
a marked antipathy to any thing but "long-shot" warfare,
and, sidling away in their emigrations toward the more effeminate Bechuanas,
have left their quarrels with the Caffres to be settled by the English,
and their wars to be paid for by English gold.
-
* The "United Service Journal" so styles them.
-
The Bakwains at Kolobeng had the spectacle of various tribes
enslaved before their eyes - the Bakatla, the Batlokua, the Bahukeng,
the Bamosetla, and two other tribes of Bakwains were all groaning
under the oppression of unrequited labor.
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