BLACK AND WHITE IN SOUTH AFRICA.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 19 April 1901, Page 4

BLACK AND WHITE IN SOUTH AFRICA.

The clause in the terms of peace offered to Botha which promised that the extension of the franchise to natives should be hedged with such restrictions that they should never be allowed to endanger the dominance of the whites, was only one of the measures which will probably have to be adopted to keep the black man in his place. An Australian war correspondent, who has returned with a fixed impression that the black qu-istion will be a burning political topic as soon as tne war is over, has a good deal to say about the mutual attitudes of the white men and the natives, his knowledge on the subject having been acquired at first hand during the war. With all an Englishman’s liberalminded views in regard to bis “black brother,” he has come back apparently imbued with, at least, some of the Beer’s feeling. “With the Dutchman the nigger,’’be says, “ranks as an inferior kind of doormat the sort of person to be kicked and spat upon. The Englishman Hatters himself that the darkey is to be led, not driven, and acts accordingly, until bo finds to bis cost that the average black will only obey the hand which carries a big mur-derous-looking sjambok.” In the correspondent’s opinion it pays to give any black in one’s employment a gentle thrashing at least once a day. At the Stellenbosch remount depot, where there were employed six blacks to every one white man, and natives began to think they “ ran the whole show,” and to knock off work whenever they felt like it, until the system of a regular morning flogging for some of the laziest was instituted. When they are in the mood the “ Cape boys ” are experts in handling mules, but it requires a number of white men to see that they do their work, and in anything like an emergency they are of no earthly use. This war correspondent had one as a driver who was always expressing Ids wish to have a shot at the Boers, but whenever his Cape cart came under fire he bolted for cover, and on one occasion, when the column was suddenly attacked, bo disappeared entirely, coming back an hour after the affair was over and declaring that he had been trying to find stones to throw at the enemy. The British have themselves greatly to blame for the increasing insolence and assertiveness of the blacks. Many of those employed during the war earned as much as £4 10s a week and they did not forget to remind Tommy Atkins of the great difference between thenpay and his own. Before the war, in all the chief towns of the two Republics, the blacks had to live in separate quarters and had to keep to them at night, while fine or imprisonment followed their infraction of the by-law forbidding them to walk on the footpaths. Since the British occupation of Johannesburg and Pretoria, the blacks have done pretty much as they liked in this respect, and now jostle whiteo on the footpaths and in the shops. All this is exceedingly distasteful to the burghers, and through their treatment of the natives was often brutal and sometimes barbarous, and will never fao imitated by the British, the latter will probably have to so modify their lenient attitude as to convince the black races that the velvet glove covers a hand of steel.