Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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This little book is something far less pretentious, and wholly different.

Born in South Africa, I felt from my childhood a wish to set down what I thought and felt about my native land. After I was grown up, but in my youth, I went to Europe for ten years, living in London but visiting the Continent continually.

When at the end of those ten years I came back to my native land, it was with an even added interest that I looked at its people and its problems and its physical features, and the wish became stronger to jot down what I thought and felt with regard to it.

This little book is the gratification of that wish.

It is not a history, it is not a homily, it is not a political brochure—it is simply what one South African at the end of the nineteenth century thought, and felt, with regard to his native land: thought and felt with regard to its peoples, its problems and its scenery—it is nothing more than this; but it is also nothing less.

I do not think, simple as such a book is, it need be necessarily quite without interest for any but the writer.