PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS SECTION E. 97 



So wliL'ii one advances tlie arguuieiit that the coloured people 

 of thi« land must take as many years as we have done to travel 

 the painful uiDward way of progress, that person is shutting his 

 eyes to the teachings of history, and is unobservant of the vast 

 changes that a sudden alteration in the mode of life of a people 

 will bring about in a few years. As we have said it is the dynam- 

 ical forces rather than the statical that control and direct the 

 changes in the habits, race movements, and ultimate goal of a 

 people. Where the statical forces are strong, as in the case of 

 tlic Chinesa, then the changes are slow. 



What have we in the case of the Bantu people? Here we 

 have an adaptable, imitative, warm-hearted, alert-minded race, 

 whose conservatism is social rather than political, faced, and 

 even surrpunded, by an advanced modern civilization. Shall this 

 race take two thousand 3'ears to accustom itself to, to imdei-stand 

 and to share in, this modern civiliation ? Because it took cen 

 turies to move forward from Volta to the modern motor car, will 

 the denizen of Woodstock take centuries to learn how to drive 

 a motor car? 



True, we must make allowances for the peculiarities and 

 pertinacities of race. Underneath the civilization which the 

 Bantu may acquire there will always be something belonging to 

 his pecuhar people. The human soul is very impressionable, and 

 if the English Public School will leave upon its children the in- 

 delible imprint of its influence, how much more the by-gone 

 generations of Native habits and ways. But that, in the future, 

 may only give a charm and a character to a new aspect of 

 civilization just as the Celtic minor undertones give a pathos and 

 a romance to every act and every song of that ancient and 

 winsome people. 



What are the circumstances that conspire for rapid change 

 in the case of the Native people? Take the oi'dinary dweller in 

 a native village. To-day almost every native home uses tea or 

 coffee, bread or cake, jam or preserves. Then every individual 

 of that home, except the little children, must clothe themselve; 

 in some sort of garments, preferably clothing approximating to 

 those worn by Europeans. These clothes are worn because it is 

 right and decent to do so. There are other changes in the old 

 mode of life, but let us consider these simple ones, changes 

 common to every Native village in South Africa. Think what 

 a chain of economic circumstances, circumstances wholly alien 

 to primitive Native life, even these give rise to. 



To buy tea or coffee, bread or cake, jam or preserves, sugar 

 or salt, money is required. To obtain money, work or worth 

 must be given in some form. This means that some one has to 

 go and work somewhere. And at once the machine, the modern 

 economic machine, begins to work inexorably. We can hear the 

 whir of its great wheels ! To get work one must travel — .a new 

 experience from which the childlike soul of the vmtutored Native 

 returns no more as it went forth. 



Now travel means Johannesburg. Durban, Cape Town, Port 

 Elizabeth. And Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and Port 



