Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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Does such a germ exist?

We believe the most temporary survey will prove that it does not.

Short as is the time at our disposal, let us rapidly glance at a few of our states to see if any germ of national life lies at their core.

Let us take first the Cape Colony, as the oldest, best organized, most important, and most powerful of our divisions; one whose boundaries, except at the north-east, are tolerably well defined, and which has a centralized form of political government. There are in the Colony, roughly speaking, a million and a half of men.

One million of these are natives, Hottentots, and half-castes, but mainly Bantus, of the Chuana or Kaffir races; the remaining half million are divided between men of English and other European descent speaking English, and the men of Boer descent, often speaking the "Taal." Now not only are these peoples who form our population not united to each other by race, language, creed or custom but, and this is a far more important fact, each division forming our population is far more closely connected by all these ties to masses of humans beyond our borders than to their fellow Cape Colonists within. Thus, our Bantus and Chuanas are absolutely one in race, language and sympathy with countless of thousands of Kaffirs and Chuanas of Kaffirland, Basutoland, the Free State, and even Transvaal. They are far more closely bound to these fellows of theirs in other states than to the white men in their own. The same may be said of the white population. Not only are they not bound to the native population in their state, but the Cape Colonial Englishman is absolutely identical with those in the Transvaal, Zambesia, Free State and Natal; and the Boer of the Cape Colony is absolutely identical with the Boers of these different states; he is only artificially divided by a political line from his friends and kinsfolk in the Transvaal, Free State or Natal. Race, language, creed, tradition, which in the true national state form centripetal forces, binding its parts to one centre, in such a state become centrifugal, driving them from it; and the political boundaries are so crossed and recrossed by these lines of union that they are rendered void.