Notes on the Anglo-South African

The Anglo-South African is a curious creature: a small, often overlooked minority, left in a contradictory state by the many winds of change that have swept across the subcontinent. At barely three per cent of the population, he should hardly matter. Yet his imprint on South Africa has been immense.

Many legacies mark his story. First, the plucky pioneers of the 1820 Settlers, scratching out farms on the Cape frontier. Second, the empire-builders like Cecil Rhodes, whose vaulting imagination saw a British dominion stretching from Cape to Cairo. And third, today’s urban professionals and suburban retirees, who keep up neat lawns in Constantia, Parktown or Grahamstown, and continue to send their children to schools like Bishops and Michaelhouse. It is a colonial inheritance, one many profess to despise, yet one no one seems able to live without. The parliamentary system remains one based on Westminster; liberation politicians rail against “colonialism” by wanting everything to be written in English; and even
the sons of Struggle heroes end up sipping G&Ts at Anglo gentleman’s clubs.

Relations with neighbours have long been fraught. With the Zulus, memory fixes on Rorke’s Drift: 140 redcoats fending off thousands of warriors. The tale is usually cast as simple oppression, yet it sits in the shadow of the Mfecane – the scattering that saw the Zulu Kingdom drive hundreds of thousands of their neighbours out of the east of the country. With the Afrikaners, the bond is worse. The concentration camps of the Boer War left a permanent scar, even if the Afrikaner order that succeeded British rule from 1948 proved harsher still. The Englishman emerged successful, and over time has grown embarrassed by those victories. But not embarrassed enough to relinquish the air of superiority those victories gave him. He feels guilty, yet never quite guilty enough to believe he is wrong.

And what of him today? In one sense, much endures. The stone churches of Rondebosch are full at Christmas; the cricket pitches of the Eastern Cape still echo with leather on willow; and every Sunday lunch still produces a roast and a bottle of Stellenbosch red.

But in another sense, the tribe is thinning out. The familiar pressures – economic stagnation, affirmative action, the steady hum of crime – all point the same way. Many book their ticket to Perth or Surrey. Others, especially the older generation, stay put, yet indulge in late-night Anglophilia with BBC cookery shows or the Proms. Unlike the Afrikaners, who
forged an identity rooted in the soil, the Anglo-South Africans have always been slightly at sea: identifying more with their national than their cultural identity, more South African than English, and yet never quite either.

It is not certain that the Anglo-South Africans as a people will survive another century at Africa’s southern tip. But their buildings, their schools, their churches, their cricket fields – these will remain. If they vanish, it will be as the Cheshire Cat did: leaving behind the grin, the voice, and the faint smell of Sunday lunch.