A Century of Wrong. Francis William Reitz

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       BROTHER AFRICANDERS!

      Once more in the annals of our bloodstained history has the day dawned when we are forced to grasp our weapons in order to resume the struggle for liberty and existence, entrusting our national cause to that Providence which has guided our people throughout South Africa in such a miraculous way.

      The struggle of now nearly a century, which began when a foreign rule was forced upon the people of the Cape of Good Hope, hastens to an end; we are approaching the last act in that great drama which is so momentous for all South Africa; we have reached a stage when it will be decided whether the sacrifices which both our fathers and we ourselves have made in the cause of freedom have been offered in vain, whether the blood of our race, with which every part of South Africa has been, as it were, consecrated, has been shed in vain; and whether by the grace of God the last stone will now be built into the edifice which our fathers began with so much toil and so much sorrow.

      [Sidenote: The alternative of Africanderdom.]

      The hour has struck which will decide whether South Africa, in jealously guarding its liberty, will enter upon a new phase of its history, or whether our existence as a people will come to an end, whether we shall be exterminated in the deadly struggle for that liberty which we have prized above all earthly treasures, and whether South Africa will be dominated by capitalists without conscience, acting in the name and under the protection of an unjust and hated Government 7,000 miles away from here.

      [Sidenote: The necessity of historical retrospect.]

      In this hour it behoves us to cast a glance back at the history of this great struggle. We do so not to justify ourselves, because liberty, for which we have sacrificed everything, has justified us and screened our faults and failings, but we do so in order that we may be, as it were, sanctified and prepared for the conflict which lies before us, bearing in mind what our people have done and suffered by the help of God. In this way we may be enabled to continue the work of our fathers, and possibly to complete it. Their deeds of heroism in adventures with Bantu and Briton shine forth like guiding stars through the history of the past, in order to point out the way for posterity to reach that goal for which our sorely tried people have made such great sacrifices, and for which they have undergone so many vicissitudes.

      The historical survey will, moreover, aid in bringing into stronger relief those naked truths to which the tribunal of impartial history will assuredly testify hereafter, in adjudging the case between ourselves and our enemy. And the questions which present themselves for solution in the approaching conflict have their origin deep in the history of the past; it is only by the light of that history that it becomes possible to discern and appreciate the drifting straws which float on the currents of to-day. By its light we are more clearly enabled to comprehend the truth, to which our people appeal as a final justification for embarking upon the war now so close at hand.

      History will show convincingly that the pleas of humanity, civilisation, and equal rights, upon which the British Government bases its actions, are nothing else but the recrudescence of that spirit of annexation and plunder which has at all times characterised its dealings with our people.

The Cape of Good Hope.

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       The cause for which we are about to take up arms is the same, though in somewhat different form, as that for which so many of our forefathers underwent the most painful experiences centuries ago, when they abandoned house and fatherland to settle at the Cape of Good Hope, to enjoy there that freedom of conscience which was denied them in the land of their birth. In the beautiful valleys lying between the blue mountains of the Cape of Good Hope they planted the seed-germ of liberty, which sprang up and has since developed with such startling rapidity into the giant tree of to-day – a tree which not only covers a considerable area in this part of the world, but will yet, in God's good time, we feel convinced, stretch out its leafy branches over the whole of South Africa. In spite of the oppressive bonds of the East India Company, the young settlement, containing the noblest blood of old Europe as well as its most exalted aspirations, grew so powerfully that in 1806, when the Colony passed into the hands of England, a strong national sentiment and a spirit of liberty had already been developed.

      [Sidenote: The Africander spirit of liberty]

      As is forcibly expressed in an old document dating from the most renowned period of our history, there grew out of the two stocks of Hollanders and French Huguenots 'a united people, one in religion, united in peaceful reverence for the law, but with a feeling of liberty and independence equal to the wide expanse of territory which they had rescued as a labour of love from the wilderness of nature, or from its still wilder aboriginal inhabitants.' When the Dutch Government made way for that of Great Britain in 1806, and, still more, when that change was sealed in 1814 by a transaction in which the Prince of Orange sold the Cape to Great Britain for £6,000,000 against the wish and will of the inhabitants, the little settlement entered upon a new phase of its history, a phase, indeed, in which its people were destined by their heroic struggle for justice, to enlist a world-wide sympathy on their behalf.

      [Sidenote: England's native policy.]

      Notwithstanding the wild surroundings and the innumerable savage tribes in the background, the young Africander nation had been welded into a white aristocracy, proudly conscious of having maintained its superiority notwithstanding its arduous struggles. It was this sentiment of just pride which the British Government well understood how to wound in its most sensitive part by favouring the natives as against the Africanders. So, for example, the Africander Boers were forced to look with pained eyes on the scenes of their farms and property devastated by the natives without being in a position to defend themselves, because the British Government had even deprived them of their ammunition. In the same way the liberty-loving Africander burgher was coerced by a police composed of Hottentots, the lowest and most despicable class of the aborigines, whom the Africanders justly placed on a far lower social level than that of their own Malay slaves.

      [Sidenote: Slachter's Nek.]

      No wonder that in 1815 a number of the Boers were driven into rebellion, a rebellion which found an awful ending in the horrible occurrence of the 9th of March, 1816, when six of the Boers were half hung up in the most inhuman way in the compulsory presence of their wives and children. Their death was truly horrible, for the gallows broke down before the end came; but they were again hoisted up in the agony of dying, and strangled to death in the murderous tragedy of Slachter's Nek. Whatever opinions have been formed of this occurrence in other respects, it was at Slachter's Nek that the first bloodstained beacon was erected which marks the boundary between Boer and Briton in South Africa, and the eyes of posterity still glance back shudderingly through the long vista of years at that tragedy of horror.

      [Sidenote: The missionaries.]

      This was, however, but the beginning. Under the cloak of religion British administration continued to display its hate against our people and nationality, and to conceal its self-seeking aims under cover of the most exalted principles. The aid of religion was invoked to reinforce the policy of oppression in order to deal a deeper and more fatal blow to our self-respect. Emissaries of the London Missionary Society slandered the Boers, and accused them of the most inhuman cruelties to the natives. These libellous stories, endorsed as they were by the British Government, found a ready ear amongst the English, and the result was that under the pressure of powerful philanthropic opinion in England our unfortunate people were more bitterly persecuted than ever, and were finally compelled to defend themselves in courts of law against the coarsest accusations and insults. But they emerged from the ordeal triumphantly, and the records of the criminal courts of the Cape Colony bear indisputable witness to the fact that there were no people amongst the slave-owning classes of the world more humane than the Africander Boers. Their treatment of the natives was based on the theory that natives ought not to be considered as mature and fully developed