Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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It is that one bunch that has been denied to the Boer.

For to the young Boer, growing up on an African farm and speaking nothing but the "Taal," this culture in solitude was impossible. If travellers passed, they might be Frenchmen, Germans, or Englishmen, but even their conversation was not comprehensible to him; if they left behind them book or newspaper, he could not decipher it; and the most brilliant effusions of an Amsterdam writer could reach him almost as little as an article in the Figaro or The Times. If his mother turned out of the old wagon-chest volumes brought from Holland or France by her grandmother, they could awaken no curiosity in him; they were not in the speech he used daily. The Dutch of Holland was as little a means of communication between himself and the outer world as the Greek of Plato is to a modern Greek peasant. If his mother taught him his letters, he had small use to make of them; even the great family Bible was in Dutch; and fifty years ago there was not one frontier Boer in thirty who could read or write, though he knew many passages of the Bible by heart and could repeat them with the book open before him.[23] Many could not even do this. If he had found himself in any great city of Holland or France he would not only have found himself alone, but an unintelligent barbarian. The Boer seldom came in contact with even the smart Colonial townsman of Dutch descent but he shrank from him, and crept back to his own people, who understood his speech, with more and more of clinging: they were his humanity, his world; beyond them was nothing.