Read Online True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Ignatieff
Tags: History, Non-Fiction
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and then Canada, where he travelled from Vancouver home to Kingston via his beloved railway. But one stop in particular, South Africa, turned out to be signally important, both to the fate of the empire and to his conception of it.
He had introductions to the governor of the province and all the local dignitaries, and while he was there he visited the vineyards of Stellenbosch, the diamond mines of Kimberley, mulatto churches and Christian missions, and witnessed the sounding fury of the ocean beating on the southernmost rocks of Africa. Everywhere he went he compared what he saw to Canada, the veldt so burnt and bare, like the Prairies in high summer. It was both the same—a British colonial society—and different—a kingdom built upon a brutal racial hierarchy. In the De Beers diamond mine, he peered into a walled enclosure at the mine entrance where the black workers were corralled, forbidden to return to their homes in the bush untilthey had finished their contracts. There were more than two thousand “niggers”—he used the term in quotation marks—resting, sleeping, talking, laughing, some in groups preparing their supper, others at a short religious service, still others lighting fires and playing cards. They were indentured slaves, in effect, who on expiry of their contracts would return to tribal homelands and their wives and children. This was the other side of empire, the infernal labour, the primitive accumulation, that made all the high-minded dreams possible.
Grant recoiled at the outright racial hatred of the Boers for the black majority. He wrote home to Jessie to tell her that one of the Boers had taken him aside and recounted in shocked tones that in the nearby Portuguese colony of Mozambique, Portuguese actually married coloured people. We have never sunk so low, the Boer told him.
On the train back from the mines, he shared a carriage with a Mr. Botha, member of the colonial Upper House and president of the Afrikaner Bond, a Boer organization seeking to establish Dutch supremacy in South Africa. Botha, Grant thought, was exactly like a Presbyterian elder in some rural county in the Maritimes, a man, he perceptively added, “to be led not driven.” Grant thought their racial prejudices unchristian, but he could not help admiring men like Botha, industrious, ascetic and severe Christians like himself, so fiercely committed to freedom, as they conceived it, that when the British liberated the slavesand ended the slave trade in the 1840s, they trekked north to found their own homeland in the Transvaal.
The Boer Wars between 1898 and 1902 were the most serious crisis to befall the British Empire since the loss of the American colonies in 1783. By 1898 Grant was in his sixties, plagued by kidney trouble, exhausted by university administration and visibly aging, drawn and white-whiskered in the photographs. His wife, Jessie, was also failing, having never fully recovered from the loss of their beloved son Geordie.
The crisis in South Africa taxed Grant further, because it pulled apart two elements—the imperial and the national—that he had managed to reconcile for most of his life. Canada, he believed, had succeded in bringing together these opposing ideals. In the completion of its national dream, it had strengthened both its independence from and its ties to the imperial mother. In the Boer rebellion, the national and the imperial had split apart. A child of empire was demanding complete independence.
Grant’s sympathies with the Boers ran deep, because he was more than sensitive to the imperial injustice and rapacity that had provoked them into revolt. Cecil Rhodes, the British adventurer whose raid on the Transvaal had provoked the second Boer uprising, was, in Grant’s eyes, nothing more than a pirate in top hat and patent leather boots. “I hope to see the rascal hanged,” he confided angrily. As for the Boers, he saw in them theimage of the hardy settlers who were peopling the empty
He had introductions to the governor of the province and all the local dignitaries, and while he was there he visited the vineyards of Stellenbosch, the diamond mines of Kimberley, mulatto churches and Christian missions, and witnessed the sounding fury of the ocean beating on the southernmost rocks of Africa. Everywhere he went he compared what he saw to Canada, the veldt so burnt and bare, like the Prairies in high summer. It was both the same—a British colonial society—and different—a kingdom built upon a brutal racial hierarchy. In the De Beers diamond mine, he peered into a walled enclosure at the mine entrance where the black workers were corralled, forbidden to return to their homes in the bush untilthey had finished their contracts. There were more than two thousand “niggers”—he used the term in quotation marks—resting, sleeping, talking, laughing, some in groups preparing their supper, others at a short religious service, still others lighting fires and playing cards. They were indentured slaves, in effect, who on expiry of their contracts would return to tribal homelands and their wives and children. This was the other side of empire, the infernal labour, the primitive accumulation, that made all the high-minded dreams possible.
Grant recoiled at the outright racial hatred of the Boers for the black majority. He wrote home to Jessie to tell her that one of the Boers had taken him aside and recounted in shocked tones that in the nearby Portuguese colony of Mozambique, Portuguese actually married coloured people. We have never sunk so low, the Boer told him.
On the train back from the mines, he shared a carriage with a Mr. Botha, member of the colonial Upper House and president of the Afrikaner Bond, a Boer organization seeking to establish Dutch supremacy in South Africa. Botha, Grant thought, was exactly like a Presbyterian elder in some rural county in the Maritimes, a man, he perceptively added, “to be led not driven.” Grant thought their racial prejudices unchristian, but he could not help admiring men like Botha, industrious, ascetic and severe Christians like himself, so fiercely committed to freedom, as they conceived it, that when the British liberated the slavesand ended the slave trade in the 1840s, they trekked north to found their own homeland in the Transvaal.
The Boer Wars between 1898 and 1902 were the most serious crisis to befall the British Empire since the loss of the American colonies in 1783. By 1898 Grant was in his sixties, plagued by kidney trouble, exhausted by university administration and visibly aging, drawn and white-whiskered in the photographs. His wife, Jessie, was also failing, having never fully recovered from the loss of their beloved son Geordie.
The crisis in South Africa taxed Grant further, because it pulled apart two elements—the imperial and the national—that he had managed to reconcile for most of his life. Canada, he believed, had succeded in bringing together these opposing ideals. In the completion of its national dream, it had strengthened both its independence from and its ties to the imperial mother. In the Boer rebellion, the national and the imperial had split apart. A child of empire was demanding complete independence.
Grant’s sympathies with the Boers ran deep, because he was more than sensitive to the imperial injustice and rapacity that had provoked them into revolt. Cecil Rhodes, the British adventurer whose raid on the Transvaal had provoked the second Boer uprising, was, in Grant’s eyes, nothing more than a pirate in top hat and patent leather boots. “I hope to see the rascal hanged,” he confided angrily. As for the Boers, he saw in them theimage of the hardy settlers who were peopling the empty
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