Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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Let us look at the Transvaal. We have here a great state. Its vast native population is absolutely identical with those immediately beyond its borders; and its small white population is far more deeply tied to its fellow race, men beyond its boundaries, than to blacks or even to white fellow Transvaalers. Its largest and most powerful city, Johannesburg, is the most truly cosmopolitan city in South Africa. It is called the Boer Republic, but if the Boer or Dutch Huguenot element is to be sought for in its highest perfection, it must be looked for not in the Transvaal towns, but in the beautiful villages of the Paarl and Stellenbosch, in the old Cape Colony. The lines which divide the newly arrived European of Johannesburg from the newly arrived European of Kimberley, Cape Town and Durban, and the Boer of the Transvaal from the Boer of the Paarl, are necessarily fictions in any but the most superficial sense.

All that has been said holds yet more in the Free State. We have here a small republic whose population is absolutely one with the populations on all sides of it. The Basuto of the Free State is divided by absolutely nothing but a political line, the result of a political agreement, from the Basuto of Basutoland. The Boer farmer is absolutely one with the Boer of the Colony on the one hand and the Transvaal on the other; the Englishman of the towns are the Englishmen of the Colony and the Transvaal. Between the towns of Beaufort West, Harrismith and Pretoria there is no difference, except that the last is a little more English than the first.