JAMES HENDERSON (1867 - 1930)

There can be no question that South African missionaries are at present passing through a difficult stage in their work, when more than ever before it is necessary for them to concentrate their study and effort on the material life and the economic position of Native people. The stupendous changes wrought by the European occupation of the country have thrown Native economics off their balance. While in some areas the Natice population is prosperous, and in others it at any rate looks thriving and contented, the best informed opinion is agreed that the Native populationof the Union [South Africa] as a whole is living in circumstances which are gravely unsatisfactory from the standpoint of their well-being and well-doing, and which for long have been going step by step from bad to worse. It is common knowledge that very many Native communities are sunk in debt, and the people are disheartened and embittered through the sufferings and disabilities arising out of an impoverishment from which they see no hope of escape. That this is their condition is unknown to, or ignored by the average European whose voice and vote control so much of the country's resources. He does not perceive that South Africa may be saddling itself with a “poor black” problem beside which the “poor white” problem beside which the “poor white” problem may be child's play. The government for some years back in sporadic cases of acute Native distress has been affording temporary relief by doles and loans of foodstuffs and seed grain. The districts councils now coming into being all over the Native territories are doing important constructive work; and the Native Affairs Commission is deeply concerned about the economic recuperation of the Native people generally. But important and hopeful though the ameliorative measures now in operation are, they cannot yet be said yo have had any appreciable effect on the general situation. Before the arrival of the white man droughts no doubt occurred periodically as they do now, and involved, in all probability, a heavier loss of life. The standard of living would vary with the density of the population. But in general there was an abundant sufficiency for the indigenous inhabitants in the inexhaustible resources of the country. When European immigration enveloped the land actually occupied by the aborigines, isolating the Native areas like islands, the situation underwent a most far-reaching change. In one fell stroke the Natives lost their great vacant spaces, the virgin soil, the unexploited pastures, the as yet little used bush and forest, all the reserves on which rested their primitive economy. That in the absence of a far-seeing Native policy this seizure seems to have been, at the time it occurred, inevitable, and was hardly understood as any real infringement of Native rights or claims, should not obscure the fact that for the original inhabitants it was a catastrophe, that, as lapse of time shows, was to imperil even their survival. This event dispossessed the Natives of nearly all their reserve capital, so to speak, and left them nothing to carry on with but their cash on current account. Moreover white racial feeling made it all but impossible for the Natives to obtain later on by purchase or otherwise any share of the vast spaces over which the Europeans had established their rights.