There is also one insignificant matter I should like to notice. It has been said I love the African Boer. That is true. But it has been given as a reason for my doing so that I share his blood, and that is not true. One could not belong to a more virile folk, but I have no drop of Dutch blood.
My father was a South German, born in Würtemberg, who studied at Basel, and when only twenty-one years old came to London, where he married my mother, of purely English blood; and together with her came to Africa as a missionary about the year 1836.[1] My training was exclusively and strongly English. I did not begin learning any other language till I was eight and have never gained the complete mastery of any other. It is my mother speech and England is my mother land.
Neither do I owe it to early training that I value my fellow South Africans of Dutch descent. I started in life with as much insular prejudice and racial pride as it is given to any citizen who has never left the little Northern Island to possess. I cannot remember ever being exactly instructed in these matters by any one, rather, I suppose, I imbibed my view as boys coming to a town where there are two rival schools imbibe a prejudice towards the boys of the other school, without ever being definitely instructed on the matter. I cannot remember a time when I was not profoundly convinced of the superiority of the English, their government and their manners, over all other peoples.
One of my earliest memories is of walking up and down on the rocks behind the little Mission House in which I was born and making believe that I was Queen Victoria and that all the world belonged to me. That being the case, I ordered all the black people in South Africa to be collected and put into the desert of Sahara, and a wall built across Africa shutting it off; I then ordained that any black person returning south of that line should have his head cut off. I did not wish to make slaves of them, but I wished to put them where I need never see them, because I considered them ugly. I do not remember planning that Dutch South Africans should be put across the wall, but my objection to them was only a little less.
I cannot have been more than four years old when a Boer family outspanned their ox-wagon on the veld near our mission house. As I was walking past it a little girl of about my own age, wearing, like myself, a great white cotton kapje, climbed off the trap at the back of the wagon and came towards me holding out her hand. In it was a little fistful of dark-brown sugar, a treat to up-country children in the wilds where sweetmeats were rare. She held it out to me without saying a word. I was too polite to refuse to take it, but, as soon as I had gone a few steps, I opened my hand behind me and let it drop. To have eaten sugar that had been in the hand of a Boer child would have been absolutely impossible to me. Often, in later years, I have seen those two small figures standing there in the African afternoon sunshine in their great white kapjes, as in a way allegoric of the whole relation between the Anglo-Saxon and the Boer in South Africa.