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250       THE CRISIS

happen to come into contact with them;—but we do not talk of a White Peril when our neighbor's house is burgled, or even if a murder takes place in the next street. If we begin to compare criminal statistics, the number of convictions per head in Cape Colony and Natal compares favorably enough with the figures for Great Britain, especially when we consider how large a proportion of the former should never have been placed under the heading "crime" at all; e. g., such offences as failure to pay the dog-tax or contravention of incomprehensible forest regulations. 

If a Black Peril does exist, I cannot believe that it is only or chiefly the "Blacks" who are responsible for it. If, as some writers complain, "the black man has lost awe of the white," whose fault is that? Nothing is more pathetic than the belief in English justice which has survived one disappointment after another, as witnessed by the deputation which came over in 1914 to appeal to the King against the Lands Act passed by the Union Government.

It is undeniable that cases of the kind more particularly intended by those who use the expression—that is, outrages by black men on white women—have occurred in South Africa; perhaps that they have, as some assert, increased of late years. We may doubt, however, whether they are relatively more frequent than outrages by tramps on lonely English roads. Of course there are native criminals, just as there are European ones,—but it is utterly false to say, as some do, that the native, as such, is more likely to be a criminal than not. On the contrary, a careful study of the magistrate's annual reports conveys the impression that the bulk of the population, away from the towns, is, if anything, exceptionally peaceable and law abiding.

It is agreed on all hands that "outrages" in the conventionally specialized sense were unknown in the early days of our South African colonies, when settlers were few and more defenceless, in relation to the "savages" surrounding them, than they are
now. Women may sometimes have been killed in the border frays of the old times,—the Boer women were wont to share the fortunes of war with their men—but, as a rule, both Zulus and Cape "Kafirs" were careful to spare them.  For white women as captives, the Zulus had, emphatically, no use.  This arose partly from superstition, but also in a measure from racial self-respect. The Zulu has his own pride of race, and, without implying any depreciation of the white, his feeling, on the whole, is that "it is best each should keep to his own."

A word must be said as to the part played by superstition in this matter. The more we know about the ways of primitive peoples, the less reason we find for the supposed necessity of killing women before allowing them to fall into the hands of such. That is, speaking broadly, and without references to tribes who seem, like some of the Amerindians, to have been in the habit of torturing their captives. This is not the rule in Africa—if it occurs, there are special circumstances which need investigation. Where the sex relation in its most normal and legitimate form is a matter of dread and mystery, and surrounded by stringent taboos, the stranger woman will be avoided rather than sought, even when in the power of her captors. Even so comparatively advanced a culture-stage
as that of the Hebrew legislation required a system of elaborate ceremonies to be gone through before the captive could be safely
taken to wife. Perhaps Arab influence has done something towards breaking down this feeling in East Africa, where the system of
harem slavery has been responsible for some peculiarly horrible cases of violence and wrong.

In Nyasaland, as I knew it, an Englishwoman who respected herself was perfectly safe among any number of "savages," and the same is true of other parts of Africa where conditions are at all primitive.

I would not be understood as saying that one ought to encourage superstition as a safeguard and deliberately try to keep up the mystery; but one can at least see to it that respect does not diminish on closer acquaintance. Natives are discriminating critics of morals and manners, even where standards differ in detail.

Zulu girls, before marriage, are very carefully looked after, though without any idea of restraint or seclusion. They never go to a distance from the kraal unattended, and should they come into town it is in troops of a dozen or more, attended by one or two matrons and perhaps a male relative. A woman walking alone may seem to invite familiarity by neglecting reasonable precautions. But this risk diminishes as the distance from European contact is increased.


THE SO-CALLED BLACK PERIL IN SOUTH AFRICA   251

In Nyasaland, for instance, or in remote parts of East Africa, it seemed to me that the Englishwoman traveling alone was accepted as illustrating one more vagary of an unaccountable race, and allowed to pass as such. True, I heard myself described with unflattering directness, though with no intentional lack of respect, as "an aged person"; but others, of whom as much could not be said, have had the same experience. Why, then, do we hear so much of this particular danger in South Africa?

I would remark, in the first place, that many cases are wholly imaginary—the outcome of preconceived erroneous notions and momentary panic. I remember one case when an excitable woman, walking home with her husband, on a Sunday evening, fancied that a passing native, who may or may not have accidentally brushed against her, had touched or was about to touch, her arm. She screamed; the native, finding attention called to him, and knowing only too well what was likely to be the result, took to his heels, thereby establishing his guilt in the eyes of the bystanders, who immediately gave chase. Fortunately he was the better runner, and no one present knew him—as there was no case in court. At Kimberley, five years ago, a circumstantial story gained currency, which on inquiry proved to be entirely imaginary.

Mr. Douglas Blackburn's "Leaven"-ghat work of fiction crammed full of fact-contains a scene which, if not actually as it stands taken from life, shows, at least, how such charges are sometimes manufactured. The mistress of a boarding house, whose kitchen-boy has become possessed of a diamond, persuades him to give her the stone "to take care of" and afterwards denies all knowledge of it. When he persists in asking for it, she raises the alarm and brings the whole house down on him; and he is nearly lynched by enraged boarders before being handed over to the police. In court he has not the ghost of a chance and receives a heavy sentence.

If the whole question in impartially examined, the number of these alleged cases will have to be materially reduced. For those that remain, we have to remark:

(1) Familiarity, as already implied, has bred contempt. Closer acquaintance has dispelled the mystery investing the white man and shown him to be no supernatural being, but of like passions with the black-if not, on occasion, actually worse-for the African is not deliberately cruel. There is no need to dwell on what the unspoilt native learns in towns, in mining camps and compounds, in gaol (he sometimes lands there while still unspoilt)- or to discuss how much the men, and still more the women whom he meets are able to by way of increasing his respect for their race. What can be the moral effect produced by Europeans who make money out of the "Kafir" by the sale of alcohol and of objectionable photographs?

(2) The native working in a town is not only exposed to the risks of evil association and example but removed from all the restraining influences of home and tribal life. We talk as if it were inevitable and nobody's fault that, with the advance of "civilization" the natives should be spoilt and degraded. This, at least, has been done, and done of set purpose:- we have tried out best to break up the tribal organization and destroy the power of the chiefs. We are finding it out too late-in South Africa-elsewhere, it may be, just in time.

(3) Something must be allowed for retaliation. There is a consensus of testimony in this respect. Take that of Sir Liege Hulett, who said at Verulam (Natal) in April, 1906, that the (white) mounted police were "detested throughout the native locations on account of their immoralities." Or take the strong language used by Justice Dove-Wilson in the Barend Nel case (1911), when a white man charged with violence to a Zulu girl was acquitted by the jury. Shortly before this, another white man had been tried in the Orange Free State on a similar charge. He pleaded consent, which his victim denied, and was discharged.

In the same year occurred the famous Lewis case at Bulawayo, when a white man had killed a native for "alleged indecent suggestions to his daughters (no acts were even alleged) the white community guaranteed his bail of £3,000 five times over; other white men through South Africa sent him telegrams congratulating him on his confessed act." (S.T. Plaatje in An African World, July 8, 1911). Putting these cases side by side, one finds it difficult to sympathize with a zeal for morality which is so conspicuously confined to one direction. 

I am aware that cowardly attempts are