Hendrick van Reede Quotes

White Africaners were slaughtering Blacks to appropriate their land in violation of English law. See {583901} for a related quotation.

The power structure of England and the English administrators of South Africa were strong advocates of racial equality at the beginning of the 19th century. They insisted on equal administration of law. However the Boer white population could think of nothing more absurd. In a sense the Boers were much like the Southern Whites at the same time. The South African government however could not enforce its equality policies in the rural area – the majority of South Africa at the time. When democracy and self rule came to South Africa, the racially moderating force of the English was minimized and the majority of South Africans wanted a racially segregated society. Apartheid resulted.

The Boers were generally furious because the British emancipated the Blacks that the Boers were holding as slaves. This hurt their economic interests. But according to this woman in the middle of it all, the worst of it was the insult of giving the Blacks political and functional equality. This was really very similar to most American Southern racist feeling during Reconstruction. Racism is very pernicious, in that the remedies always bring about insult and anger because the belief structure of slavery and discrimination must be based in a theory of inferiority.

As a British Loyalist officer, he and his men were dispatched to Savannah, Georgia. There he saw the Southern version of slavery for the first time and was shocked at the cruelty. At the end of the Revolutionary war, he and many other loyalists fled to Canada and began his political career, then representing Britain in the Caribbean. See also {591379}.

Most Northerners knew little about Southern Slavery and its abject cruelty. The institution was so horrendous that most Northerners tended to think of them as aberrant, unusual occurrences. Speakers fanned out throughout the North disclosing the reality.

At the time, Capetown was under the control of the Dutch East India Company which had recruited Gordon from Scotland. There was a wave of liberality following the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the very vocal English, anti-slavery, reformers. The Dutch were concerned mainly with making money, and that they thought that meant stability and the status quo. Gordon was their strong spokesman on this. Like American Southern slave owners, Gordon read the Bible as God endorsing slavery and the inferiority of Blacks. Thus, reformers did not "believe in God any more".

What is interesting is that when he cites the dreadful facts about American slavery, he never points out that the American slave traders rarely raided the villages and captured the slaves themselves. Most often this was done my Khamenei’s Muslim brethren slave traders who dominated the slave trade in Africa. Nor does he point out what after realizing the evil that Americans perpetrated with slavery, we ended it in the 1860s. Saudi Arabia, the central nation of Islam, did not make slavery illegal until 100 years later, and even today, there are many Saudi’s who get caught practicing slavery with household servants and forms of indentured servitude. And while Christians and the Bible tolerated slavery, the Koran and the Prophet never once condemn the practice of slavery. Democracy at any point in time is not always morally right, but it is a process by which under pressure from the people it improves over time because the people can change it and do.

The upper socioeconomic classes are generally less rascist then the lower classes in the United States as well as England and South Africa. The counter argument given by the lower classes are that the upper classes have the money to insulate themselves from the negative aspects of desegregation and the lower class whites have to bear the brunt of desegregation. However, in South Africa, the English of all socioeconomic classes were far less enthusiastic about apartheid then were the Boers. The latter were farmers who wanted the land; the former were traders who could succeed even of the Blacks had their land and were given political rights.

This quotation while difficult for us to fathom today, illustrates a very conservative 18th century view of punishment and law enforcement. The South African high court was very distressed that torture was to be ended. To them, and many others throughout the so called “civilized” European cultures of the time, capital punishment was not a very good deterrent—even for slaves. The execution was usually accompanied by horrible torture and cruelty before death. Slavery was such a horrible life, and the White colonists knew it, that death could be welcome (many slaves had committed suicide). So the suffering at the execution was to serve as a further deterrent. In reality it did not, any more than capital punishment did in the 20th century, but by the logic of the culture and the times, torture was needed as well as capital punishment.

The White Boers viewed themselves as superior to the Blacks and the Blacks and Whites competed for land. In an early form of ethnic cleansing, the Boers attacked the undefended women and children of the Black tribes. The authorities opposed these atrocities but did not have any way of enforcing their orders.