The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction

In every community which is worth consideration we find two forces present in some degree – the force of social persistence and the force of social movement. Critics of Johannesburg would have us believe that the second only is to be found, and in its crudest form: the truth is that, considering the history of the place and its novelty, the first is remarkably strong. The point is worth labouring at the risk of tediousness. It must be some little while before a mining city shakes off the character of a mining camp. Men will long choose to live uncomfortably in hotels and boarding-houses, looking for their reward on their home-coming, discomfort none the less unpleasant because it is tempered with unmeaning luxury. To its inhabitants the place is no continuing city, – only a camp for the adventurer, who, when he has made the most of it, returns to enjoy the fruits of his labour in his own place. And then, after many years, there suddenly comes a day when a man here and a man there realise that they have lost the desire to return: they like the place, settle down, and found a home. Whenever there is any fair proportion of this class in a mining city, then we have a force of social persistence. The tendency is found in every class of society. At one time the miner from Wales or Cornwall saved his earnings and returned home; now he has his wife out and settles for good. There is also a large commercial class, traders and small manufacturers, who belong as thoroughly to the place as the South African born. And with the more educated classes the same thing is true. The price of building sites in the suburbs and the many pretty houses which have arisen show that even for this class, which was most nomadic in its habits, domesticity has become a fact.

This, then, is the cardinal achievement of Johannesburg, an unparalleled achievement in so short a career. She has in a few years changed herself from a camp to a city, acquired a middle class and a decent artisan class, – both slow and difficult growths, – and shown a knack of absorbing any species of alien immigrant and putting them on the way to respectable citizenship. She has but to point to this solid achievement as a final answer to the foolish calumnies of her enemies. The mines are her staple industry, but the mines, so far as she is concerned, are an industry and not a speculation; and she is creating a dozen other industries of quite a different character, and may well create a hundred more. She has become a municipality, with all the traits, good and bad, of a nourishing municipality at home. She has become colonial, too, – as colonial, though in a different way, as Melbourne or Wellington. Formerly she was a mixture of every European capital plus a little of the Dutch dorp: now she is English in essence, the most English of all South African towns.

The future of the chief municipality of South Africa cannot be without interest, for most problems will concern her first, and receive from her their colour and character, and, possibly, their answer. She must continue to represent one of the two foremost interests, and though it is idle to distinguish political interests by their importance when both are vital, yet we can admit that Johannesburg has for the moment more obvious difficulties in her problems, and that her answer will be more stormily contested. So far her development has been continuous. The difficulties which she met with from the Kruger régime were a blessing in disguise, being of the kind to put her on her mettle. But the present stage in her history is more critical. Formerly the question was whether she was to remain a foreign cesspool or rise to the status of an English city. Now it is whether she will go the way of many colonial cities, and become vigorous, dogmatic, proud, remotely English in sentiment, consistently material in her outlook, and narrow with the intense narrowness of those to whom politics mean local interests spiced with rhetoric; or, as she is already richer, more enlightened, and more famous than her older sisters, will advance on a higher plane, and become in the true sense an imperial city, with a closer kinship and a more liberal culture. The question is a subtle and delicate one, as all questions of spiritual development must be. A year ago much depended on the attitude of England. Johannesburg had suffered heavily in the war. Time and patience were needed to repair the breaches in her fortunes, and to permit her to advance, as she must advance, if the Transvaal is to become a nation. She was rightly jealous of her reputation and future prosperity. If taxation was to be crudely imposed, if her just complaints were to be met with the old nonsense about a capitalists’ war, if she was to be penalised for her most creditable industry, then there was a good prospect of a serious estrangement. There was no issue on the facts. She never denied her liability, and she was willing to pay cheerfully if a little common tact were shown in the handling. A man who may have his hand in his pocket to repay a debt will withdraw it if his creditor tries to collect the money with a bludgeon. Happily the crisis has passed. A scheme of war contribution was arranged which, while still bearing heavily, almost too heavily, on the country in its present transition stage, is yet a small sum if contrasted with the lowest estimate of her assets. But much still depends on the attitude of England. A little sympathy, a little friendliness, a modest diminution of newspaper taunts, some indication that the home country sees and appreciates the difficulties of its daughter, and is content to trust her judgment: it is not much to ask, but its refusal will never be forgotten or forgiven. For Johannesburg in this connection represents the country on its most sensitive side, and acts as a barometer of national feeling.

In this imperfect world there can be no development without attendant disorders. A dead body is never troublesome, but a growing child is prone to exasperate. A young city which is perfectly reasonable and docile deserves to be regarded with deep mistrust, for it is likely to continue in a kind of youthful sensibility till it disappears. Ferment is a sign of life, and the very crudeness of the ideals which cause the ferment is a hopeful proof of vigour. Municipalities since the beginning of time have been the home of aspirations after self-government, however ill-suited they may have been to rule themselves. At this moment the Transvaal is a Crown colony, which is to say that a mode of government devised for subject races is being applied for a time to a free and restless British population. The justification is complete, but we need not be shocked when we find Johannesburg chafing at her fetters. The less so when we reflect that in one aspect she is a colonial city, full of the exaggerated independence of the self-made. The fastidiousness which comes from culture and tradition, the humour which springs from unshaken confidence, must necessarily be absent in a municipality which is still diffident, still largely uneducated. Politics must begin with the schwärmerisch and the vapid, – “that vague barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges with the spirit of a martyr into an ocean of generalities.” Embryo cities are drunk with words, with half-formed aspirations and vague ideals; wherefore the result must be sound and fury and little meaning till by painful stages they find themselves and see things as they are. So far this unrest has taken two forms – a continuous and somewhat unintelligent criticism of the Administration, and an attempt by means of numerous associations to give voice to popular demands in the absence of representative institutions; and the beginnings of a labour party. The first is as natural as day and night. Many grave matters, chiefly financial, are being decided above Johannesburg’s head, and it is reasonable that she should wish to state her own case. This is her strong point: the weakness of her position is that it is also a criticism of a reconstruction which is still in process, still in that stage when the facts are far more clearly perceived by the man on the watch-tower than by the crowd in the streets below. A pawn in a game is not the best authority on the moves which lead to success. Patience may be a distasteful counsel, but why should she disquiet herself when all things in the end must be in her hands? “The people,” to paraphrase a saying of Heine, “have time enough, they are immortal; administrators only must pass away.” But we cannot complain of this critical activity, however misplaced. It is a sign of life, and is itself the beginnings of political education. The second form of agitation is less reasonable and more dangerous, though perhaps less dangerous here than anywhere else in the world. There must exist on the Rand, in mines, railways, and subsidiary industries, a large white industrial population; and the imported agitator will endeavour to organise it in accordance with his interests. There is little theoretical justification for the movement. There are no castes and tyrannies to fight against in a country which is so new and self-created. The great financial houses will not develop into Trusts on the American model; and even if they did, the result would have small effect on the working man, either as labourer or consumer. There are dozens of false pretexts. The working man of the Rand may try, as he has tried in Australia, to stereotype his monopoly and prevent the influx of new labour; or he may use the necessary discomforts of a transition stage as a lever to raise his wages; or the idle and incompetent may grumble vaguely against a capitalism which has been built up by their abler brothers. The pretexts are light as air. He lives in a free society, and within limits can secure his comfort and independence beyond a chance of encroachment. But unhappily it does not require a justification in reason to bring the labour agitator into being. That type, so well known in Australia, has already appeared, the unreasoning obstructionist, who, armed with a few platitudes and an entire absence of foresight, preaches his crude gospel to a class which is already vaguely unsettled by the intricacies of the economic problem. There is almost certain to be an attempt to organise labour on Australian lines, and to create a party like the Sand Lot agitators in San Francisco, in order to do violence to the true economic interests of the land on behalf of a prejudice or a theory. Yet I cannot think that there is more in the prospect than a temporary inconvenience. No labour party can be really formidable unless it is based on profound discontents and radical grievances; and the annoyances of the Johannesburg proletariat are, as compared with those of Europe, like crumpled rose-leaves to thorns. There is too strong a force of social persistence in the city to suffer it ever to become the prey of a well-organised gang of revolutionaries; and if such a force exists, the experience of Victoria in its great railway strike of 1903 would seem to show that in the long-run no labour war can succeed which tends to a wholesale disorganisation of social and industrial life.

But if Johannesburg shows a certain unrest, she also reveals a curious solidarity – the strength of narrowness and exclusion, which is partly natural and due to the struggle for self-conscious existence, and partly accidental and based on a profound disappointment. Her citizens believed that the end of the war would begin a golden age of unprecedented prosperity. Money was to flow into her coffers, her population to grow by many thousands each year, and she herself was to stand out before an envious world as a type of virtue rewarded. She miscalculated the future, and the facts left her aghast. Conservative estimates, a few years back, put the value of the gold output in 1902 at between 20 and 30 millions: the actual figures during the first year of peace show little over 10 millions – a reduction on the output of 1898. Hence the almost hysterical concentration of interest on the one great industry. Men who in other matters are remarkable for their breadth of view, are to be found declaring that everything must be made subordinate to mining development, – not in the sense in which the saying is true, that the prosperity of the country depends in the first instance on the mines, but in the quite indefensible sense that any consideration of other things, even when there is no conflict between them and the mining interest, is a misapplication of energy which should go to the greater problem. It is fair to argue against a programme of public works which might draw native labour from the mines, because, unless we cherish the goose, there will be no golden eggs to pay for our programmes. But to condemn schemes of settlement which are no more a hindrance to the gold industry than to the planetary system, is to show a nervous blindness to graver questions, which is the ugliest product of the present strain and confusion. This trait, however, cannot be permanent; and we may look to see the gold industry in time, when its own crisis is past, become that enlightened force in politics which the ability of its leaders and the weight of its organisation entitle it to be. For the other form of narrowness, which consists in the limitation of citizenship, there is ample justification in present circumstances. A new city must begin by drawing in her skirts and showing herself, perhaps unwarrantably, jealous and sensitive. More especially a city which has hitherto been rather a fortuitous gathering of races than a compact community, is right in straining after such compactness, even at the cost of a little injustice. The only danger lies in the perpetuation of this attitude when its justification has gone.

The fault of Johannesburg, to sum up, lies for the moment in a certain narrow hardness of view: her hope is in the possession of rich elements unknown in most new cities; while her greatest danger lies in the fact that she cannot yet honestly claim those elements as her own. She is apt to judge a question from a lower point of view than the question demands – to take up a parochial standpoint in municipal affairs, a municipal standpoint in national affairs, a national standpoint in imperial questions. In spite of her many splendid loyalties, she will find it hard to avoid the assertive contra mundum attitude which seems inseparable from flourishing colonial cities – a dogmatism natural, but unfortunate. On the other hand, her history and her present status give her a chance beyond other new cities. She starts on her civic career already rich, enterprising, the magnet for the first scientific talent of the world. A fortunate development might give her a cultivated class, true political instincts, and the self-restraint which springs from a high civilisation, without at the same time impairing that energy which she owes to her colonial parentage. The danger is that her ablest element may continue alien, treating the city as a caravanserai, and returning to Europe as soon as its ambition is satisfied. So far the intellect has not been with the men who have made the place their home, but, subject to a few remarkable exceptions, with the men who have never concealed their impatience to get away. If she fails to make this class her citizens, then, whatever her prosperity, as a city she will remain mediocre. Nothing can deprive her of her position as the foremost market; but if she is to be also the real capital of South Africa, she must absorb the men who are now her resident aliens. There are signs, indeed, that the process has begun in all seriousness. As she becomes a more pleasant dwelling-place, many who find in the future of the country the main interest of their lives will find in Johannesburg the best field of labour for the end they desire. And the growth of such a leisured class, who take part in public life for its own sake and for no commercial interests, will not only import into municipal politics a broader view and a healthier spirit, but will do much to secure that community of interest between town and country by which alone a united South Africa can be created.