ited States Senate, during the summer of 1919, that
there was in progress a debate concerning the ratification of the
Treaty of Peace with Germany and the consequent ratification of the
covenant of the League of Nations. Speaking to this question the words
of Senator William Edgar Borah of Idaho were, in substance, these:
"The President of the United States has said that if we fail to ratify
the covenant of the League of Nations we will 'break the heart of the
world.' ... But, sir, failure to ratify this covenant will not break
the heart of China, which constitutes a third of the world; it will
not break the heart of India; _it will not break the hearts of the
natives of the South African Republics_."

How could the Senator from Idaho state so confidently that the failure
of the League of Nations, under which Great Britain retained her role
as protector of British South Africa, would not be a source of grief
to the natives of the republics thus protected? What is the status,
political, economic and social, of these people? For what do they
stand on the African continent? How have they withstood the
characteristic onslaught of British colonization and imperialism? What
does "the autonomous development of small nations" mean to them? Any
reasonable attempt to answer questions of this nature necessitates a
review, however brief it may be, of the history of South African
colonization by the English and of its relation to the native.

British South Africa, which occupies the entire southern horn of the
African continent, from the southern coast to the Zambesi River, and
from the Indian Ocean on the east to the Atlantic on the west, has a
population of about 6,500,000 people, fully five-sixths of whom are
of Negro extraction, the other one-sixth being of European--British
and Boer. It is a "southern black belt" in every sense of the term,
and its Negro or Negroid inhabitants belong to the subdivision of the
race to which ethnologists have given the name "Bantu," a native
African word meaning "the people." Their origin is unknown, and no
authentic history of their racial and tribal movements is available.
All that is known of their past is what has been gleaned by
surmise and deduction from the condition in which they were
found by missionaries and traders making their way into South
Africa. A nomadic, patriarchally governed people--polygamists,
ancestor-worshipers, tillers of the soil, sheep-raisers, raiders upon
neighborin