Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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Not infrequently his national feeling is intensified by transplantation. Nowhere on the surface of the globe were toasts to the health of the Queen and the Royal Family, and to the success of old England, more heartily drunk than by the British settlers of 1820, when they ate their first Christmas dinner, beneath the blazing South African sun, under the kunee trees of Lower Albany. To these men, as to the English colonists all the world over, the strength and dignity of their position lay in the fact that they, a minute portion of the great English nation, had come to this new land to implant themselves, a branch from the old stock, which should in time take root and grow to be a giant worthy of its parent tree. They felt themselves the ambassadors of a great people, the bearers of a flag which waved over every quarter of the globe; the representatives of a power which they believed to be the most beneficent and powerful on earth.[14] So these men named their little villages and their districts after the men and places of the old country—"East London," "Port Alfred," "King William's Town," "Queen's Town," "Lower Albany"—and their farms bore often the names of the homes in England from which they came. Socially, religiously, and more especially politically, they strove to reproduce, line by line, as accurately as circumstances would permit, the national life they had left. "So-and-so things are done at home." That settled, as it still to-day to a large extent settles, all argument. To-day the third generation of these men has arrived at adult years; but consciousness of national identity with the parent people is hardly dimmed. The young English African who has never been in Europe may boast that South Africa is the finest country on earth, and swagger of its skies, and wild, free life or, ridiculously enough, boast of the civilization which it has attained; he may resent bitterly any interference with what he considers his material rights on the part of the "Home Government." But turn to the same man and ask him what his nationality may be, suggest that he may possibly be of any other race than his own, and you will not twice repeat your question—