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J.P. FitzPatrick, in 'The Transvaal from Within' a book to which all subsequent writers upon the subject must acknowledge their obligations narrates how in 1896 he was approached by Mr. D.P. Graaff, formerly a member of the Cape Legislative Council and a very prominent Afrikander Bondsman, with the proposition that Great Britain should be pushed out of South Africa.
Those who have rightly earned the contempt and hatred of every true Afrikander are those Boers who, not content with deserting, have gone yet further, and attempted to assist the enemy that they were fighting against only the day before. Even their new masters must surely despise such willing slaves!
It lost him, too, the respect of all the men who could have helped him to govern South Africa wisely and well. It deprived him of the experience and popularity of Mr. Schreiner, Mr. Merriman, Mr. Sauer and other members of the Afrikander Bond who had once been upon terms of intimacy and affection with him.
The ideas of the West were the leaven which quickened the Japanese; and the ideas of the West, transmitted by the Japanese mind into ideas Japanese, may well make the leaven powerful enough to quicken the Chinese. We have had Africa for the Afrikander, and at no distant day we shall hear "Asia for the Asiatic!" The possibility of race adventure has not passed away. We are in the midst of our own.
It was a painful moment when the presiding judge, after a whispered consultation with the assessors, turned to the prisoner and confirmed the sentence, adding, in his clear, incisive voice, that the name of Vilonel would remain an eternal stigma upon the fame of the Afrikander race. One could not help feeling a thrill of compassion at the tragic end of such a promising career.
All the same, it is a fact that members of the House of Assembly belonging to the Afrikander party visited Groote Schuur in the course of that last winter which Rhodes spent there, and were warmly welcomed. Rhodes showed himself unusually gracious. He hoped these forerunners would rally his former friends to his side once more. But Rhodes was expecting too much, considering ail the circumstances.
"P.S. A few days after we dropped across a troop of elephants without entering the fatal bush, and managed to bag seven, photographs of which I took, and shall be pleased to send for your inspection, if desired." There can be very little doubt that the phantom the Afrikander saw was the actual spirit of a dead horse.
His great object was to bring about a reconciliation between the two great political parties in the Colony the South African League, with Rhodes as President, and the Afrikander Bond, headed by Messrs. In the gigantic task of welding together two materials which possessed little affinity and no love for each other, Sir Alfred was unable to be guided by his experience in the Motherland.
From the merely practical point of view the question therefore is now reduced to the discovery of a modus vivendi for the Indian community now in South Africa, and it would be very near a solution if legislation to secure the economic and eugenic standards on which the Afrikander lays so much stress were so framed as to apply to the whole population, even should it in practice bear more heavily on the Indian than on the European, if the former less frequently rose to the required standards.
He had power to alter details according as circumstances might dictate, but that was all. One peculiar feature of the Afrikander character is the complete absence of anything approaching hero-worship. Perhaps this is due to the habit of ascribing success to the favour of Providence.
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