The Characteristics of South Africans.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 916, 20 September 1889, Page 8

The Characteristics of South Africans.

Of the many nations which England is Blowly throwing off, there is one of which, as a nation in the future, we seldom or never hear, the nation which has as yet no name, its natural appellation, Africander, being used for no other purposes, the nation of white colonists in South Africa. We hear more and more frequently of ‘ the Australian ’ and his separate characteristics, his courage, ambition, love of adventure, and peculiarities of hopefulness and chseriness. The Englishmen in Australia is becoming differentiated in physique, fch-s usual or average man of the Southern Continent, showing himself tall, sallow, or rather greyish, with a tendency to black hair, and a look iu his eye of gazing at distance, that is not quite European, and all travellers begin to attribute to him a separate character. The-usual. coaceptiqij .gf him may , ~ be wrong, probiiblySHtf s wrohferr^thh fdms ?i A has been insufficient, but a conception is growing up of a very definite kind. The

novelist or tlie dramatist who has brought forward au Australian, he himself not knowing Australia, would depict him as an American, but with a trace in him of the x joyousness, an i breeziness, and freedom from the pressure of neighbours’ opinions which the American is apt to lack. The Australian would display the tolerance in judgment and the largeness in design which distinguish his rival, but he would have neither the strength nor the strict limitations which the New Englander derives from hiß Puritan ancestry, would be a grower and drinker of wine, and would try most questions by, a standard other than a painful conscientiousness. The Australian is more ready to spend than the American, though not more ready to give, and regards the possession of money more as a means to an end, and with less of the disposition to look upon * a pile ’ as a barometric test of success. Neither descendant has the English freedom from sensitiveness to criticism ; but where the American grows angry, nob to say savage, the Australian is apt to develop a certain humorous scorn, as of one who is affronted, but is also too full of-belief in his country to care much for verbal depreciation. Both ‘ blow ’ tremendously, but the Australian has a vision of a happy, full-fed, a d slightly careless population, when the American is thinking of a mighty community which no man may seriously oppose, but which is in no way free from ‘ life’s endless toil and endeavour,' but is rather proud that it and that life is nevertheless endurable. The best American does not repel the knglishman at all, is rather to him a subject of admiring study j but the worst Australian attracts him somewhat, a difference curiously marked in the judgment passed on the American and the Australian criminal of the violent sort. Nobody in the world is worse than the Australian bushranger, usually a convict of the most evil type conceivable; but the British public has not the feeling about him it has about the European or American brigand. It recegniseH something about him with which itquite involuntarily sympathises, some quality which entitles him to be shot in a skirmish instead of being hauged. Half-a-century hence, the Australian will be as thoroughly completed a figure in the popular imagination as the * Yankee ’ now is, and will be carioatured in Punch under as well defined a pictorial formula, which we venture to say will not strike Australians as displeasing. The Canadian, too, is becoming a definite figure to the British imagination, a little less real, we think, and lifelike than the Australian, but still distinct. Influenced by an instinct difficult to explain, the liomestaying Briton, though he likes the French Canadian, taking him to be a simple, hard-working, feckless kind of being, given to cheerfulness and Catholicism, and wonderfully free from the American spirit of innovation, still insists on overlooking the French share in the Dominion, and pictures the Canadian to himself as a sort of frost-bitten Scotchman, intelligent, sober, good-humoured, but without the. Yankee energy of going ahead. All novelists, so far as we know, draw the typical Canadiau as fair —which he is not any more than the Englishman is - pleasant, and in his nature good, but reserved, cautiouß, and the least thing depressed, the latter, we feel sure, a traditional belief derived from Judge Haliburton's descriptions, once so universally known, and now suddenly and entirely forgotten. Canadians will write to us, we fear, entirely ridiculing this conception, and will probably have reason on their side ; but it is a popular conception none the less, and one which has a definite influence on emigration. Our people expect kindliness in Canadians, and a kind of slow-footed judgment, and if they saw one on the stage, would look for him among the good people of the piece. A bad Canadian would seem to them somehow unnatural and unreasonable, —a fancy due, we believe to the intense, »Dd so far as our experience teaches us, the well-founded impression that Arctic voyagers are exceptionally free from vice. The notion that is a vast country, with ioe for its chief product, is by no means extinct yet, and the qualities of Arctic voyagers are read into Canadians. The people ! have caught the troth that Canadians are a reasonable natiop, free in

the main from Southern defects, and have given them what would be, we suspect, their true character if they were precisely what they wish themselves to be, aud if they were not, as a people, so sharply and unmistakably divided. No one, however, even thinks of the South African English as a nation. No national character is assigned to them even in fiction, and toe draughtsmen of Punch would not attempt to draw one of them without adding explanatory description, either literary or pictorial. We doubt if the idea that there is ’a South African’ has penetrated the popular mind, or that it expects of such a man any defined character at all. That particular colonist and his locality are not correlated, and there are few men who even recollect that such a person as an English man, born aud bred in South Africa may exist. The Boer is known, and in a way understood—-the grand mistake about him being au entire forgetfulness that he may be Huguenot by blood and not necessarily Dutch and is disliked to quite an'extraordinary degree, as a cruel person who despises Englishmen for kindness to coloured men ; but the idea of the English ‘ Africander,’ as he ought to be called, has never fully presented itself to the general British mind. He is not a separate individuality, much less a well-known one needing no description. Yet it would be no matter of wonder if a hundred years hence there were a nationality in South Africa, aud if, of all the nationalities whioh by that time will trace their lineage to this island, it were the most distinctive. Gold, diamonds, brosd farms, easy communication, and a curious kind of interest which in its origin is literary, are drawing Englishmen fast to South Africa; and who stay there tend to develop as a separate type in character as in physical appearance. The marchment colour of the Yankee, the greyness of the Australian, the frosty purple of the Canadian, the wind-blown redness of the New Zealander of fifty, are replaced in the South African by an even drabness or brownness, which is often perfectly unmistakable. lie has lived in a dry atmosphere under a fierce sun, and yet has worked energetically ; that is the tale his face usually tells, and the character is as separate. Its note is that of a man who has been forced to make an unpleasant decision, and has made it. There is no trace of the Australian gladness in the Englishman of South Africa, or of the American tolerance. He has had a harder life, and a more strenuous contest with a less conquerable Nature, has come in contact with more disagreeable circumstances, has had to endure a more trying climate, has been surrounded by people he disliked more, and he has been altogether more sharply annealed by his destiny. He has had, as it were, to drive oxen instead of horses, aud has felt the resulting-necessity for severity and patience to the centre of him. The English South * African is altogether a harder man than any other colonist, has less pity for himself or any one else, and is, in the way of steady, persistent endurance, perhaps a stronger one. His very courage, which is splendid, is differentiated by the presence of an extra quantity of determination, of resolve to contend with something which he admits to be almost too strong for him. He has very little cheeriness, but also very little disposition to give way. Take his vhw of his country. The English South African does not ‘ blow ’ like the Australian, and has not the sensitive pride of the American ; but he has, all the same, an intense feeling about ‘ Africa,’and looks forward to planting there a powerful nationality. He talks less of the future than most colonists, and is more disposed to see the gloomy side ; yet he will probably, be the first, in a spirit rather of dourness than of hope, to decline further British protection, and set up for himself. He catches rather readily the Dutch dislike for the Britisher at home, and has a contempt for his ignorance of African affairs, not qualified by any perception of bis other capacities. Allowing for a brighter intelligence and a constitutional freedom from pitilessness, the Englishman in South Africa tends to become a Boer, that is a Teuton made hard and persistent, and energetic in endurance, if you can under.

stand that description of his variety of energy, by pressing and unploasant circumstances whioh he never for a moment forgets. Twenty millions of such people will make a very formidable nation, and one which will, we think, be distinguished among the Euglish nations, by hardness, decisiveness, and want of attractive sympathy. It may be, probably will be, a great people, equal to that marvellous destiny which should lie before it in the sway of all Africa up to the Equator, but it will hardly be an agreeable one.