The Black Man's Place in South Africa by Peter Nielsen

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Nature having cast upon the male the duty of winning and holding the
females of his species it is easy to see why the racial feelings of
jealousy and ill-will are more positive and more active in the man than
in the woman, and this explains, as far as these things can be
explained, why white men will allow themselves to cohabit freely with
black women to whom they feel naturally attracted but will "see red" and
commit murder as soon as they find a black man attempting to gain the
favour of a woman of their own colour. "Un adolescent aime toutes les
femmes" say the French, and it is generally accepted that man is by
nature more inclined to polygamy than woman is towards polyandry, still
man and woman are both swayed and motived by the same elemental jealousy
that is born of fear of losing something valued; the emotion which
Descartes has so well defined as "une espece de crainte qui se rapport
au desir qu'on a de se conserver la possession de quelque bien."

It is, no doubt, true that the thinking white woman, no less than the
thinking white man, is led to feel dismay and even resentment against
the Natives by apprehension of the possibility of danger to white
civilisation through fusion of white and black, but this is a feeling
caused by intelligent appreciation rather than by instinctive
apprehension, and as such liable to be dispelled by argument tending to
show that no real danger threatens. During a recent agitation against
miscegenation in Rhodesia a number of letters written by white women
appeared in the press from which it was easy to gather that the chief
concern of the writers was not the possible degradation of the whites,
though this was not overlooked, but rather the simple fact that some
white men were cohabiting with black women to the prejudice of the
matrimonial chances of eligible women of their own race.

But it is unwise to dogmatise in the realms of social and racial
psychology; we have not yet discovered the means for analysing with
precision the subtle elements of the human soul. I have used the word
instinct here in the sense given to it by William James, who defines it
as "the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends
without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the
performance," but when we reflect upon the transitoriness of human
instincts, as compared with those of animals, and recognise that the
human instincts are, as James also says, implanted in us for the sake of
giving rise to habits, and then to fade away, we see how difficult it is
to draw a line between the instinctive and the acquired or habitual mood
or feeling.

If we believe that racial antipathy is caused by the feeling of jealousy
that arises instinctively, so to speak, from man's inner nature, then it
is safe to say that it will last as long as the substance from which it
springs, and as long as the racial difference which provokes it remains,
but this belief is not firmly established in the general mind. The
whites, as a whole, feel far from sure about the permanence of their
cherished pride and prejudice of race; they are, more or less
consciously afraid that the antipathy upon which they rely may become
weakened and eventually dissipated by close contact of the two races in
places where economic pressure has reduced both to the same level of
life. We shall do well to remember the words of Renan when we try to
estimate the truth of this matter, "La verite consiste dans les
nuances," for both estimates may be true; the racial instinct may have
to yield here and there to the superior force of economic pressure, and
may yet in the main prove powerful enough to prevent the contact that
tends to render it of no effect.

The racial feeling which we are considering is undoubtedly much stronger
at present in the whites than in the Bantu, but there is reason to
believe that the awakening desire for racial self-assertion which we
call pride of race will grow and increase in the Bantu as it has done
in the Negroes in the Southern States of America, and elsewhere. General
education, so far from hindering the growth of nationalism and racialism
seems in some sort to subserve and foster that growth; witness the
strident self-assertion of the newly-constituted little nations in
Europe, and the cult of "Nationalism" in South Africa to-day. It is
natural for birds of feather to flock together and screech together, and
in the same way throughout mankind particular groups of people tend
naturally to keep together and to marry among themselves separately from
the rest of the community by which they happen to be surrounded, and
this ethnic instinct, if so it may be called, is seen to operate even
where, as among the Italian immigrants in America, there is no great
racial difference between them and the Native-born inhabitants, and,
much more markedly, in the Southern States of America where, according
to a recent observer, the present tendency is not towards but away from
miscegenation, so that the ultimate blending of colour is not likely to
take place there in the course of nature.[23]

The normal Native man does not hanker after white women, and the normal
Native woman is not, as a rule, anxious to mate with a white man, but
this normal disposition is apt to be disturbed by the familiarity which
is bred by the close contact that occurs in towns and other centres. It
is not, therefore, safe to deny the possibility that with advancing
industrialism in congested areas there will be some white women ready to
marry or cohabit with Native men who are either in positions of relative
superiority or in possession of more money than their white
fellow-workers or neighbours, making it possible for them to outbid
these in the providing of comparative ease and luxury, which things have
always appealed strongly to women of all races. Yet I think that those
who prophesy the speedy merging of the two races in South Africa do not
give sufficient weight to the fact of the collective consciousness of a
racial entity which, being strongly established in the European section,
is also being fostered and increased in the Natives by the civilisation
which is now spreading among them, so that it seems reasonable to expect
that the European aversion from racial blending will be reciprocated
from the Native side more and more as time goes on, and that this
reciprocal feeling will go far towards keeping the two races
biologically intact. I think, therefore, that despite the conditions
that conduce to miscegenation, the factor of the growing and reciprocal
desire in both races to remain ethnically separate will gain the day.

Many people think that the coloured people in South Africa, who are most
numerous in the vicinity of Cape Town, but are also scattered all over
the country, will form, as it were, a bridge between the two sections of
the population for their eventual coalescence. But when this conclusion
is closely examined it is seen to rest on debatable premises, for it is
admitted that by far the greater part of the miscegenation that is now
going on is between white men and coloured or black women and not
between coloured or black men and white women, from which it follows, as
has been pointed out by Boas,[24] that, as the numbers of children born
does not depend upon the numbers of men but upon the numbers of women,
the result will be a bleaching of the black element, here and there,
and not a darkening of the whites in South Africa.

Statistics have, indeed, been quoted which show that between the year
1904 and the year 1911 the coloured population increased in the Cape
Province by fifteen per cent, while the total population increased by
only six and a half per cent., but these figures do not show how much of
the coloured increase is due to propagation among coloured people
themselves and how much to unions between white men and coloured women.
When it is noted that in the year 1911 the European increase over the
year 1904 in the whole Union of South Africa was 14.28 per cent., and
that of all non-European elements only 15.12 per cent., it will be seen
that although the black increase is on a larger basis it hardly
justifies alarm over an imagined flood of overwhelming coloured numbers.

If the coloured increase is due chiefly to propagation among the
coloured people themselves then it forms a good argument against those
who assert that the half-caste is relatively inclined to sterility,
while if the increase is found to be due to cohabitation of white men
with coloured women then it is a fair illation that the coloured section
is in process of absorption by the whites. This assumed process of
absorption will, no doubt, entail the presence of a certain, even a
large, number of coloured people for many generations to come, but this
number will grow smaller, and not greater, as time goes on because there
is no reason to doubt that the white women of South Africa, as a whole,
will refrain in the future as they have refrained in the past from
cohabiting with black men, so that the observed tendency towards the
diffusion of the coloured element back into the parent streams will be
allowed to continue.

But let us for a moment look calmly, and as far as possible without
prejudice, at the people who in South Africa are said to furnish the
awful example of the alleged evil of the crossing of white and black.
The fact that the denunciation of these people is based on opposite and
contradictory arguments shows that it is not the result of clear
thinking. On the one side it is vehemently asserted that the coloured
man is a physiological misfit, a sort of hybrid unfit for the society
of either white or black and an alleged relative sterility of his kind
is advanced as proof of this assertion. On the other side it is said,
with equal vehemence, that the coloured people are mongrels, unfit to
mingle with the pure parental breeds, and that this is proved by their
excessive fecundity. The coloured people are also accused of being
inferior in physical constitution when compared with either of the
parent races, and therefore undesirable.

My own observations, corroborated by the opinions of many other
observers, leads me to believe that the fecundity of the coloured people
is neither greater nor less than that of other people--white, black or
yellow--whose birthrate is not artificially restricted, and that their
general physical constitution, when not undermined by disease or stunted
by underfeeding, is as strong as that of any other human variety. The
great naturalist, Wallace, has insisted that some degree of difference
favours fertility, but that a little more tends to infertility, and by
applying this hypothesis to the facts as I have observed them I am led
to believe that there is no biological difference between the Bantu and
the European of a degree sufficient to produce any difference, one way
or the other, in the fertility of the offspring of the two races, but
proper statistics, continued over several generations, will, of course,
be required to prove or disprove this conclusion.

The gravest, and, as I think, the most unjust of the many charges
brought against these people by an unthinking public, is that the
half-caste, wherever he is found, partakes of all the vices but of none
of the virtues of his parents. When we remember that in the towns of
South Africa the coloured people of necessity form the class that in the
nature of things is peculiarly exposed to the temptations of
prostitution and crime, then it becomes a matter for wonder that these
people are as good and as law-abiding as indeed they are. People who
know South Africa will admit that the coloured girl is from childhood
exposed to the temptation of loose-living far more than either the
Native girl in the kraal or the European girl in her home, and that the
coloured boys and youths, by reason of the lack of the right kind of
home-influence, which is the result of the unfavourable position in
life of the bulk of their parents, naturally gravitate towards the
levels where it becomes difficult to avoid crime. But despite all these
adverse conditions that press so heavily against them the coloured
people of South Africa, taken as a whole, stand justified of the
calumnies uttered against them. The coloured people as a whole are not
behind the whites in anything except in the lack of opportunity for
education and self-improvement, a lack caused not by themselves, but by
their inimical surroundings.

That many of the coloured people are immoral and shiftless need not be
denied; the same may be said about the "poor whites," who as a class
perplex well-meaning legislators, but neither of these proved
accusations give reason for thinking that either of these classes is
inherently inferior to their more favourably-placed fellow-beings. We
must always remember the tremendous handicap of being reared in the
depressing surroundings of sloth and squalor. I have seen hundreds of
poor whites--as white as any blond German could wish to be--who seemed
utterly unfit for the complexities of civilised life, but I have also
seen many of the children of these people who, after being removed from
their home surroundings, have risen to positions of usefulness and
trust, in which they have earned reputations for integrity and capacity.
The trenchant saying of a British working-man is in point, "Treat a man
like a dog and he will behave like a dog," and the corollary is equally
true, that if you treat a man as a man he will, as a rule, rise and quit
himself like a man.

The familiar cry that once white blood is diluted with black it is "all
up" with our civilisation is not convincing when we remember that the
ground-work of this civilisation was built up by races that were not
"pure white"; that the white civilisation during the dark ages sank to a
very low level through no dilution of African blood, and that it was a
mixed race, the Moors, who brought back into Europe the lost principles
of Aristotelian science on which the crumbling structure of European
culture was rebuilt. To believe that the people of Asia and of Africa
may be capable of attaining to Western civilisation, but that the
offspring produced by the crossing of these races with whites will not
have the necessary capacity therefor is to me impossible. So far from
being deterrent to mental growth it would seem that an infusion of
African blood in the European serves rather to increase mental capacity;
at any rate, those who know South Africa well will not deny that an
unmistakable tincture of African blood in a white family is often
associated with marked intellectual ability. Against this concession it
has indeed been alleged that, while it must be admitted that a small
admixture of black blood in a white race enriches it, a small admixture
of white blood in a black race degrades it, but this fanciful notion has
not been supported by scientific data. The truth of the matter is that
as the blacks are the underdogs, the half-breed becomes a racial and
social bastard, as indeed he is openly named in South Africa, a man
condemned before he is tried, handicapped from birth in a way that would
drag down and keep under most of those who shout loudest about their
racial superiority. It is his condition and not his nature that keeps
the coloured man underneath.

To the man who in face of the facts of history and of to-day believes
that all we have of civilisation we owe to the Teutonic or to the
Nordic type of man, and that nothing good can ever come out of coloured
Nazareths, the possibility of the whites in South Africa becoming
browned by the selective agency of tropical light or by an infusion of
African blood, no doubt, seems an evil to be prevented at any cost, but
those who, like myself, have seen coloured women working in their homes
as thriftily and self-sacrificingly as the best of our own women, and
coloured men labouring steadily against heavy odds to improve their
condition, have become convinced that the coloured people of South
Africa suffer under no inherent disabilities when compared with the
whites, and for this reason we cannot join in the general wail over a
predicted evil which we regard as exaggerated in itself and not,
moreover, likely to happen. I would not, however, be taken to advocate
the inter-breeding of white and black. Those who have witnessed the
misery and suffering which the coloured people have to endure for being
coloured will welcome any fair means of preventing miscegenation in
South Africa. Proscriptive legislation has been advocated by both the
detractors and the defenders of the half-breed, as a means of
preventing what both schools, for their different reasons, regard as
wrong and undesirable, but I cannot agree that it can ever be right or
expedient to penalise and make criminal a natural act which under
existing conditions is in many places unavoidable.

There can be no doubt that the evil of miscegenation in South Africa has
been greatly exaggerated, both in respect of its nature and its extent,
but, nevertheless, so long as the racial prejudice of the white man
remains as strong as it is to-day--and there is nothing to show that it
is likely to decrease in the future--so long will it be the duty of all
good citizens to discourage by persuasion and precept the production of
children for whom the ruling race has no love and little pity. Even
those among the whites who, in a spirit of good will and tolerance urge
that the coloured people should receive preferential treatment because
of the white blood which is in them, cannot escape having their point of
view warped by their racial prepossession, for, surely, it is not
because of a man's class or colour that he is treated as a man to-day
but because of his being a civilised member of a civilised community.
Nevertheless, the day when civilisation shall be the sole qualification
for full membership of the civilised community of South Africa is not
yet.

I say, therefore, in answer to the question whether, without the full
fraternity which seems impossible here, the white and the black races
may not live together in South Africa in political liberty and equality,
that the trend of events leads to the belief that the established pride
of race of the whites, and the growing pride of race among the Natives
will conduce to voluntary separation wherever this is possible, and that
in this way the coming generations will contrive to live territorially
separate under a common governance, founded upon political equality and
liberty.

CONCLUSION.

The evidence before us leads inevitably to the conclusion that there is
nothing in the mental constitution, or in the moral nature of the South
African Native, to warrant his relegation to a place of inferiority in
the land of his birth, but the same evidence also leads to the
conclusion that the racial antipathy which prevails to-day will remain
unaffected by this admission, seeing that this racial animosity is
caused not by alleged mental disparity but by unalterable physical
difference between the two races.

It is important that this distinction be grasped for it goes to the root
of the matter. It is the marked physical dissimilarity of the black man
that rouses the fear and jealousy of the white man, and not any inherent
mental inferiority in him. And we must take human nature as we find it,
inscrutable and immutable as it is; wherefore we must reckon with, and
not hastily condemn, the imponderable purpose of a fundamental instinct
which is older than speech and deeper than thought, so that, although we
admit that this racial antipathy is not justified by logical reasoning,
we may nevertheless recognise it as a feeling grounded in man's inner
nature--in his heart, so to speak--hardening it against other men whom
he feels he cannot receive and entreat as brothers; in other words, we
may say that this feeling is not the result of ratiocination but of
forces that are deeper and more elemental than reason; that it is a
hardening of heart rather than a mental conviction, in which sense we
may apply the words of Pascal "Le caeur a ses raisons que la raison ne
connait pas."

Now if I am right in thinking that this racial feeling is engendered
instinctively by physical dissimilarity only then we may not expect it
to be removed or even lessened by the increased and general advancement
of the Natives, for although we may hope that the whites will gradually
come to recognise the abstract justice of the civilised Natives' claim
to full racial equality we must, at the same time, remember that the
increasing competition of the black man in every walk of life is bound
to bring into play and accentuate the natural race prejudice of the
white man whereby the tolerance and good feeling that might otherwise
result from a growing recognition of the civilised Natives' mental and
moral worth will be more than negatived. The present state of affairs in
the Southern States of America is a warning against easy optimism in
this respect. We must expect clashing and growing ill-will rather than
social serenity to be the outcome of a continued policy of drift.

To condemn the wrong of repression would to-day be like preaching to the
converted. Most people now admit that the Africans are entitled, no less
than the Europeans, to develop themselves as far and as fully as they
can, but the question remains how they can be allowed to do so without
intensifying present antipathy on both sides. Parallelism is a word that
has been used a great deal of late to signify an attitude of mind, as I
take it, rather than a definite policy or plan of action, through which
it is hoped that separate scope for civilised activity and development
may be given to the Natives on lines parallel to those along which the
whites pursue their separate course, but without any forced territorial
separation of the two people. Metaphor of this kind is undoubtedly
useful to the political speaker in that it enables him to be apt without
being exact, and thereby frees him from the possibility of being pinned
down to a stated position, but in serious discussion exactness rather
than aptness is desired, and to the thinking man the figure of speech,
by which the notion of two lines running always parallel without meeting
is applied to the course of development of two races living together in
one country, is not convincing.

This idea of parallelism is based on the presumption that the ruling
race can so rule itself that by the mere exercise of its collective
will-power it can refuse always to mix socially with the growing numbers
of civilised Natives living and working in the same localities, and
thereby--in a manner not yet explained--avoid always the clashing and
ill-will that seems inseparable from the close contact of two dissimilar
races competing against one another in one country. The advice offered
from afar is that the whites should allow the Natives equal
opportunities with themselves in all the ways of civilised activity,
but--should not invite them home to dinner. Being based on an
unwarranted presumption parallelism here begs the question, for it is
precisely the ability of the ruling race to follow this counsel of
perfection that is in doubt. It is easy to urge that the Europeans must
maintain their position in South Africa as "a benevolent aristocracy of
ability," but we want to know how this can be done. A recent contributor
to the general question of colour has stated that the true conception
of the inter-relation of white and black races should be "complete
uniformity in ideals, absolute equality in the paths of knowledge and
culture, equal opportunity for those who strive, equal admiration for
those who achieve; in matters social and racial a separate path, each
pursuing his own inherited traditions, preserving his own race-purity
and race-pride; equality in things spiritual; agreed divergence in the
physical and material."[25] But, again, we want to know how this
abstract conception is to be put into actual practice in this world of
things as they are.

I have said that the Natives do not hanker after intimate social
intimacy with the whites, but this does not mean that the civilised
black man who has risen to the economic and educational level of the
European remains indifferent whenever his claim to ordinary social
recognition is denied or ignored. He would not, indeed, be human if he
did not feel hurt whenever he is slighted and treated with contempt by
people from whom he differs only in his physical appearance and colour.
In one of his essays, dealing with Native matters, Professor Jabavu, a
Native, describes how "high" feeling arose among the Native teachers and
boys in a certain training institution in South Africa at which he had
been invited to lecture because he was not allowed to see the inside of
the European principal's house, despite the fact that he had ten years
of English university life behind him.[26] Such feeling is only natural
and must tend always to create ill-will, and, knowing how strong is the
convention of the whites against social recognition of the educated
Native, we must expect increased bitterness in the future, rather than
growing good-will.

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