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Updated: June 9, 2025
Could a minority of one-fifth, that is to say, twelve Uitlander members against forty-eight Boer members, be said to constitute a menace to the status or to the conservative interests of State?
Then came the much-quoted expression: 'We come in fact to offer you the olive branch; it is for you to say if you will take it; if you are sincere in your professions, you will. A great deal of discussion took place, many members of the Committee maintaining that, although they placed full confidence in the gentlemen who had been sent by Government, they were nevertheless convinced that there was treachery at the bottom of it, and they stated in plain language what has become more or less an article of faith with the Uitlander: 'Whenever the Government are earnestly intent upon deceiving us they select emissaries in whose character and good faith we have complete trust, and by deceiving them ensure that we shall be misled. Both gentlemen repeatedly assured the meeting that the Government were most anxious to remove the causes of discontent, and stated moreover that Johannesburg would get practically all that was asked for in the Manifesto.
It has happened that the Uitlander got a very poor horse in exchange for his thoroughbred because a Boer had tied the token of recognition to his own horse and made off with the better one.
It was at this stage in May, 1894, that a monster petition with some 25,000 signatures was presented to the Volksraad, setting forth the entire position, and praying for a commission to be appointed to examine the merits of the Uitlander complaints, and to frame a programme of reforms, the interests of the mining community needing such in a most urgent degree, not only for the sake of its own prosperity, but for the welfare of the entire State.
In other words, the Uitlander child gets 1s. 10d., the Boer child £8 6s. 1d. The Uitlander pays £7 per head for the education of every Boer child, and he has to provide in addition for the education of his own children." The following extract is from a more general point of view, but one which it is unphilosophical to overlook.
Was the revenue of the State not chiefly derived from the Uitlander element from Uitlander investments, which all throve from the nation's own buried gold wealth? No scruples existed to provide from those sources the armaments and all else needed for the common cause of conquest. A secret service fund of some £40,000 per year only was placed upon the budget list.
Every morning except Sundays and holidays, after family worship, that is to say, from 5.30 in summer and 6 in winter to 8 o'clock he gives audience to Boer and Uitlander, rich or poor alike, and also on each afternoon, from 4 to 6 and even later. His residence in the west end of Church Street, Pretoria, is quite an ordinary modest building of the bungalow type.
It was well with the Uitlander optimist who remained in our country while the Republics could give him the comforts he demanded as his right, but who, as soon as things went wrong, and he saw nothing but misery in the future, left for his own country there to sit in judgment on our peasant-nation.
He has stood stock still in South Africa for two centuries and a half, and would like to stand still till the end of time, for he has no sympathy with Uitlander notions of progress. He is hungry to be rich, for he is human; but his preference has been for riches in cattle, not in fine clothes and fine houses and gold and diamonds.
A feeling of responsibility for those dependent on him, such as a king might feel, added to a sense of divine guidance that gave him the dignity of inspiration, had made him majestical in his simple presence; and even among those who laughed at divine inspiration and scorned Mormonism as the *Uitlander scorned the faith of the Boer, his sagacity and his diplomacy and his power to read and handle men made him as fearfully admired as any Oom Paul in the Transvaal.
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