Government have to an extent prohibited these burnings,
but as the practice is carried on by the Boers, who are
a law unto themselves, the enactment is more honoured
in the breach than in the observance.
The Boer farmer usually passes his time in riding
about or sitting in his house smoking and drinking
coffee. His vrow sees to the house-work, his sons
drive the ox-wagon. The living is wretchedly poor
and vilely cooked, but the Boer has few wants and is
happy if left alone. Kafirs do the farm-work, which
is principally attending to the cattle,^ who neither require
food nor water, as the veld provides the first, and
they are always kept where some small stream can be
found. These people retire to bed at about 7 p .m., but
rise early. Illiterate and uneducated to a greater
extent than our own rustic population,, they possess
a keen and intelligent grasp of the government and
politics of the Transvaal, and in this respect are
intellectually superior to our own men of the,shires.
They have won their position by hard fighting and hard
living. Forty years ago they had to wage war with
lions and leopards on their farms, where now scarcely
a buck is to' be seen, and not only did they struggle
against wild beasts, hut sustained sanguinary Kufir
fights. They showed no mercy to one or the other,
hut fixed their boundaries and protected their farms.
They are the nearest present approach to the old
Hebrew patriarchs; like them they value wealth in
flocks and herds, and, away from the world m almost
lonely wilderness, worship God, and often possess the
same strong and unruled passions as were exhibited by
some of the biblical personages, i Wild tales of wild
doings are sometimes told as having occurred m faraway
farms; but I incline to the view that these are
often exaggerated and that the average Boer is, according
to his lights, a citizen pioneer, and a rough, Godfearing,
honest, homely, uneducated philistine.
My Boer friend once showed me the two books
which appeared to form his library; they were both
large Bibles—one in Dutch, which he read; the other W
English, which he did not understand, but which had
been taken as security fo r a debt. Both were illustrated
in that primitive and almost outrageous^ fashion
which seems to hcive often inspired biblical artists, and
no doubt these pictures considerably influence the
minds of these primitive Boers. Science, literature,
and criticism being unknown quantities, one can speculate
on the theological crudities of these good people.
Alone on the veld, with the silent plains often jnore
or less surrounded by the “ everlasting hills,” the
Jehovah of the Jews seems to supplant in their minds
the God of the Christian, and these biblical pictures of
the pastoral patriarchs must have an attraction and
sense meaning to them which are unknown to us.
They are alone by themselves and the God of the
Illustrated Family Bible. I often ask myself if it is
better to be a joyful savage Kafir, or a sombre civilized
Boer. The Calvinistic sabbath is supreme on Sunday
in Pretoria: the Europeans drive and frequent their
hotels and clubs on that day, or, at least, the migratory
portion of our race do so; the Boer rejoices in that
respectable gloom dear to Scotchmen (at home) and
themselves.
To understand the Boer you must understand his
theology, which rules his life and guides his actions,
and you may as well fight him at once as seek to argue
with his prejudices. In the early days of the Boer
Trek, they, absolutely thought that they would eventually
reach Jerusalem *. Their favourite scriptural
reading is the Old Testament, and especially the Book
of Joshua, where the command to go forward, enjoy
the promised land, and smite the heathen was freely
adopted by themselves as referring to the Transvaal and
the treatment of the Kafirs. It is owing to this feeling
that you find towns in the Transvaal called by names
such as Bethlehem and Nazareth, and when in their
Transvaal advance they approached a river which over-
* For this and some subsequent information, I baye tbe absolute authority
of a Protestant clergyman of long experience in the country, whose name
I naturally refrain from publishing.