Читать книгу I Beg to Differ - Peter Storey - Страница 6

The South African English

People like me are usually called English-speaking South Africans, but my generation was more accurately the last of the South African English. We were born in Africa and our ancestors of the last 200 years lie buried in African soil, but we never totally belonged here. The haunting beauty of our birthland – bold brass skies and scudding cumulus, dusty, gold-grey veld and dry brown sandstone, thorn trees and the smell of dust after rain – all these may have crept into our hearts, but they were not indigenous to our souls. Our inward beings were formed less by the geography of our birth than by the heritage, values, and rituals of a small island in the mists of the Northern hemisphere. We were proud South Africans, but to be South African was to be in most important ways, British. When I measure the strongest influences on my young life I have to acknowledge that those things I can identify as essentially African are outweighed by this other identity. Compatriots of my generation, though surprised by the question, have most often grudgingly agreed. They also agree that our children are different from us, making us the last of the South African English.

Post-colonial sensitivities require that this be a matter for interrogation rather than pride. The apartheid decades that occupied centre stage between 1948 and 1994 tended to overshadow the ravages of Dutch and British colonialism that preceded them and we South African English liked to cast the blame entirely on the Afrikaners. We downplayed our own forbears’ role in the systematic conquest, humiliation and subjugation of the land. Since 1994 we have been held more rigorously to account – and rightly so. But these things are never simple and nor can I make them so. I have to confront those parts of my story stained with colonial wrongs and I know there will be more to uncover and repent of. Yet, as in all cultures, there are deep contradictions. My guilt has to be accompanied by gratitude, because without this heritage I would be culturally rootless and deeply impoverished. Ironically, the sharpest moral tools I use to critique the wrongs of my own people were forged in me by the same heritage. That is the paradox of my culture: the story of my people and their influence all around the world is one in which high moral codes that produce fine Christian character co-existed with exploitative colonial practices, and too often the one was used to justify the other. I, like my first South African ancestors, am both marred and ennobled by the influence of that faraway island.

On 15 May 1820, three long months after leaving Gravesend in the naval transport Aurora, my great-great-great-grandfather John Oates and his family were ferried through the surf onto the beach of Algoa Bay where the city of Port Elizabeth now stands. The 3 700 settlers who arrived that year consisted mostly of people adversely affected by Britain’s economic woes following the Napoleonic wars. They were grateful to take their government’s offer of 100-acre farming plots in faraway South Africa. They sailed in groups gathered by different leaders, one of whom was Hezekiah Sephton, a London carpenter and devout Methodist. Sephton’s party consisted of more than one hundred co-religionists willing to make the journey. They knew they were to be pioneers, but were less aware of the political role envisaged for them by the Colonial Office, which was to form a stabilising ‘buffer’ on the dangerous, contested frontier between the Cape Colony and the Xhosa people. The Xhosa had already been significantly dispossessed and would make a number of failed attempts to forcibly win back their land from the white interlopers.

John Oates and his spouse Elizabeth were settled in the Assegai Bush River area with other members of the Sephton party in a valley which they named Salem. Today, nearly 200 years later, the little Methodist chapel with its cluster of surrounding dwellings shows little change, but its quiet loveliness belies the struggles it has witnessed.

The story of the Settlers’ first years of farming is one of unrelenting hardship and near starvation. Most of them had been small traders or artisans – Oates himself was a shoemaker – and wresting a desperate living from the unforgiving zuurveld was an enormous and unfamiliar challenge. Some of the Dutch farmers in the region helped them and slowly they learned to be frontier folk – to plough, hunt, fight, ride and trek with the same skill as their new compatriots – but this did not alter their essential Englishness. The Dutch over time became Afrikaners, cutting ties with their origins and chafing under what they saw as foreign colonial governance, but my ancestors had no difficulty seeing themselves as being both rooted in the soil of South Africa and subjects of the British Empire. How could it be otherwise? The language they spoke, the books they read, the poets and sages who touched their souls, the customs they followed, the way they worshipped, all remained essentially British. When they clashed with colonial authority – over the issue of press freedom, for instance, or political representation – it was to the higher principles of their British heritage that they appealed. The land they had settled might be wild, cruel and unpredictable, but it was now a proud province of the Empire.

The belief that this was the natural order of things persisted until my generation. It was strengthened, if anything, by the call to arms in three British wars. At the turn of the twentieth century both my grandfathers fought against the Boers in what was a kind of civil war – the South African War, identifying with the British Crown against the Transvaal and Free State republicans. World War l claimed the life of a great-uncle in the slaughter of the Somme and the Second World War saw another relative killed training to be a fighter pilot. I was born nine months before this conflict began, and it had an enormous – perhaps disproportionate – impact on me. My early childhood was lived in the shadow of seemingly permanent crisis. ‘The War’ dominated everything. Most of my male relatives were first known to me only in photographs, wearing khaki uniform. I was told that they were ‘up North’, the mysterious, catch-all destination for South African troops, all of them volunteers, who spent six years fighting Fascism in Abyssinia, then the Western Desert and Italian campaigns. It may have been far away and I may have been very small, but as the most brutal conflict of all history unfolded, I inhaled its contagion. A gargantuan struggle – somehow critical for my life – was afoot. It seemed to be about a good or evil future and my earliest impressions were of fears that it would go badly. I recall my parents crouching over the scratchy radio, straining to hear Winston Churchill’s words of defiance on the BBC. I can even remember at three and a half years being in the car as my father drove from farm to farm in the Ermelo and Carolina districts of the Transvaal bringing news to scattered families that a husband or son had been captured or killed at a place called Tobruk. The heaviness of it all must have struck hard into my child’s mind for the image to be with me still. Later the tide turned and names like El Alamein, Stalingrad, Malta, Palermo and Salerno, Monte Cassino, Normandy and the rest lodged in my memory.

The war ended for a wide-eyed seven-year-old on the lawns of the Union Buildings in Pretoria where a great thanksgiving service was held. My father, then minister at the central Methodist church in the city, helped lead the service. ‘Oom Jannie’ Smuts was there in his Field Marshall’s uniform, the British Commonwealth had triumphed, good had conquered evil, and thanking God seemed the most appropriate response in the world.

In the immediate post-war years I learned for the first time what normality was for the South African English: food rationing ended and Dad could put away the wood and muslin sieve he had fashioned to refine flour – albeit illegally – in the war years. My mother put away her Red Cross uniform. Genuine butter was once more available but I was by then a peanut butter addict. For the first time Christmas gifts were newly bought and not hand-me-downs from older, ‘pre-war’ cousins. Steamship schedules between Southampton and Cape Town resumed, and the reading material my sister Valmai and I devoured – the Boys’ Own and Hobbies Magazine, and her Girls’ Crystal – arrived each week by Union Castle liner, as did the Women’s Weekly that guided thousands of mothers’ knitting habits. We were Wolf Cubs and Scouts, or Brownies and Girl Guides. All our story-books came from England, and my imagine-world was inhabited by the knights of Arthur’s Camelot and past tales of derring-do by Britishers in distant outposts like the Khyber Pass, Khartoum, and on the seas off St Vincent and Trafalgar. Biggles and Bulldog Drummond sorted out the more contemporary villains who wished us ill. I pored over every page of Arthur Mee’s ten-volume Children’s Encyclopaedia, absorbing worlds of knowledge through the filter of an unapologetic imperialism, with its uniquely British amalgam of chivalry and Christian piety that sanctified the sword so long as it was wielded by good men. My heroes took it for granted that duty, service and sacrifice were paramount, and that failure was not the worst that could happen, so long as it was in a noble cause and integrity preserved. Thus, the selflessness of Scott’s failure in the Antarctic was a more inspiring model than Amundsen’s mere success and left an indelible mark on me. The saga of the motley Dunkirk rescue fleet covered a military rout with glory. Our heroes eschewed bombast and despised self-advertisement, yet their qualities of modesty and understatement concealed a steely, unquestioned confidence that the Empire we belonged to was a divinely ordered force for good in the world.

Something else about us, not easily understood by others, was that one’s politics made little difference to these loyalties and values. My dad favoured the socialism of the British Labour Party, influenced as it was by the Methodist movement. He admired leaders like Ramsay MacDonald, the first ever Labour Prime Minister, brilliant Christian radical Sir Stafford Cripps and fiery Aneurin Bevan, founder of the National Health Service. Churchill was honoured for his inspirational war leadership, but would always be a Tory rogue. Yet none of this leftish sympathy diluted respect and affection for the Royal Family, nor was there any question about being proud citizens of both South Africa and the British Empire. The South African English were sure that they rejoiced in the best of both worlds.

This sense of privilege reached its apogee during the Royal Visit of 1947. We stood for hours in our Wolf Cub uniforms to watch the glistening White Train whoosh by, rewarded by the tiniest glimpse of their Majesties. We listened entranced as a shy Princess Elizabeth, newly turned 21, broadcast from Cape Town that: “… my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong … God help me to make good my vow.” When she said, “I am six thousand miles from the country where I was born, but I am certainly not six thousand miles from home,” she summed it up for the South African English.

My mother’s forbears were also of 1820 Settler stock. The names Thorne, Kidger and Stretton on her mother’s side figured large in the Eastern Cape. Jack Wood, my maternal grandfather – a fastidious and grumpy old gentleman who used to carefully note the time of sunset so that he could switch on the lights of his Vauxhall exactly thirty minutes after – rose to be Postmaster of East London. He had fought in what we called the ‘Boer War’ as a mounted trooper with the famed Driscoll’s Scouts. Because he and Granny Mabel lived by the sea we made our annual holiday trek there from Pretoria in the 1938 Chevrolet, much of it on muddy dirt roads. Whenever we visited, I was awed by the cavalry sabre perched in the umbrella stand along with his brolly and walking sticks, wondering how many Boers he had stuck with it, but never daring to ask. I recall no conversations with him; I don’t think he spoke to small boys.

My paternal grandfather John Storey was a cabinet-maker from the English Lake District who had sailed to South Africa in the 1880s to enter the Methodist ministry. That didn’t work out as planned and he settled in Kimberley and went back to his craft. Widowed once, he then married grandmother Ivy Oates, granddaughter of the settler John Oates. He died long before I was born, but I like to think that some dexterity with my hands might be evidence of his DNA. My father had only one photograph of him, showing a very handsome man with gentle eyes and I think I felt a wistful closeness. It was easier to relate to the person in the picture than to my living grandfather. In later life, there was a moment when I felt John Storey did come close to me: I was preparing to clean a graceful display cabinet he had made. More than a century of polish had blackened the Burmese teak and I wanted to uncover its original golden glow. With one of his wooden-handled screwdrivers, passed down through my father, in hand, I started to remove the cast-iron hinges. The screws came free smoothly – that is the nature of teak – and right then it struck me that the last person to turn those screws, possibly with this very screwdriver, had been Grandfather John. It was a moment of connection and he and I finally met. Artisan he may have been, but he was a cultured man, known for his mastery of the English language and its poets. His volumes of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning and Pope line my bookshelves still, together with biographies of his political heroes, William Gladstone and Abraham Lincoln. He was also a respected lay preacher and Sunday School superintendent. During the siege of Kimberley he joined the Town Guard manning the perimeter trenches, while I’m told that Granny Ivy was known to sit a horse with regal grace undeterred by the odd Boer cannon shell. Nearly 6 000 Boer shells fell on the town, killing 155 people, with hunger and disease claiming 1 500 more, mostly among the black and coloured population.

I was born only 28 years after the Act of Union, designed to heal the bitter aftermath of that war. In 1910 Boer and Briton had buried the hatchet to build a nation together, with the former colonies and Boer republics now forming the Union of South Africa. The fact that up to the 1930s every prime minister of this new self-governing British dominion was a former Boer general, and the readiness of two of them – Louis Botha and Jan Smuts – to rally to Britain’s aid in the wars of 1914 and 1939 seemed to underline this spirit of reconciliation, but the reality was more complicated. Afrikaner bitterness and English condescension were not an easy mix, and lurking behind both was the fact of white racial hegemony: “We ought not to forget,” said British Prime Minister Asquith in 1910, “that besides Briton and Boer, South Africa contains a vast population of His Majesty’s coloured subjects, and we may feel the strongest confidence that the same wide liberality of treatment which has made Union possible will be as promptly shown to these coloured races.”1 That was not to be: the ‘coloured subjects’ were, of course, both forgotten and betrayed. Their struggle would continue for 84 more years. Meanwhile, unity between the two white tribes tended to rely more on the expediencies required for racial domination than any real warmth.

Thus, the cultural narrative that shaped me majored in British values and virtues, but was largely silent about the ugly, dark fault-lines running through the history of my people. That had to wait for new understandings to dawn. It was much later when the opportunity came to travel to the United Kingdom and I made my first visit to Westminster Abbey, the high temple and repository of all that was British. Confronting me there were the stark contradictions of my heritage. I was deeply moved by the modest tablets and plaques honouring the poets, writers and Christian saints whose work had honoured God and transformed society for the better, shaping one of the more humane and tolerant of nations anywhere, as well as enriching my mind and touching my soul. But the larger more triumphalist statuary seemed to be reserved for the admirals and generals of Empire. Standing among them I suddenly found myself weeping, overwhelmed by an unfamiliar shame. Here, cast in bronze or carved in stone, were gathered the warriors of my tribe, the instruments of centuries of colonial conquest and bloodletting in every corner of the world, including my own. Here was the ugly subtext to what I knew was noble and good in my culture. There was no way of calculating the measure of suffering and dispossession they had meted out and I had to face the reality that for every Shakespeare, Milton, Browning or Wordsworth, every Shaftesbury, Nightingale or Wilberforce, every Scott or Shackleton, every Tyndale, Whitefield or Wesley, there were plenty of representatives of this other face of my heritage.

This, of course, was a perspective my Afrikaner compatriots would gladly have shared with me had we ever talked to each other, but most of the South African English had little relationship with Afrikaners and even less awareness of the complexities of their politics. Beyond our Afrikaner heroes – those who the English saw as having fought a good fight, and then wisely embraced the imperial project of their conquerors – was a deep, unhealed anger. British scorched-earth policy during the South African War had left wounds which many determined to keep open until vengeance could be exacted. The burning of Boer farms and the desperate suffering of their women and children in concentration camps were seen as war crimes. Their loss of independence and having to bow once more to the Union Jack rankled deeply. The domination of the economy by English speakers and their ill-disguised attitude of superiority were further cause for resentment. To these Afrikaner nationalists, my kind of South African was not wanted; to them we were still uitlanders with our loyalty given to a faraway British monarch, and no rooted patriotism for the soil of Africa. If things got bad, they said, we could pick up our marbles and go to any number of English-speaking destinations around the world. Much of this was true, and as it happened, when things did get bad, many English speakers did just that. The surprise was that a time came when many Afrikaners did too, but that was long into the future.

Those of us who had waved flags as the royal Daimlers swept past in 1947 didn’t know that the visit marked not only the apogee but the beginning of the end of South Africa’s Englishness. Prime Minister Jan Smuts, though a colossus on the world stage, had lost popularity at home. Thousands of World War Two veterans were struggling to find jobs in the post-war economy and were blaming him. With an election in the offing, Smuts had calculated that a visit by the Royal family would boost his chances, but the opposition National Party, who had scarcely disguised their Nazi sympathies in the War, had a trump card of their own. Central to Afrikaner mythology was the ‘Great Trek’, the saga of their nineteenth-century migration away from British domination into the interior. Its centenary in 1938 had been re-enacted by thousands of bearded ‘trekkers’, and as their covered wagons trundled through towns and villages all over the nation, they fanned the flames of Afrikaner identity and republicanism, converging on Pretoria to lay the cornerstone of a massive monument. Then, during the War they used the absence of both English and Afrikaner Smuts loyalists ‘up North’ to build their political strength. The trekker exercise was repeated in preparation for the Voortrekker Monument’s dedication. By the time 250 000 of them gathered on the hillside below the monument in 1949, Dr DF Malan’s National Party, in an alliance with the smaller Afrikaner Party, had defeated Smuts, carrying the country with a slim majority, and had been in power for a year. Afrikaner men again grew ‘trekker’ beards – not a fashionable accessory at the time – to identify with the event.

The new reality would take some time to sink in. Our elders had been shocked by the election result but I’m not sure they saw it as anything but temporary, and beyond my nasty experience on the train tracks after the election, I had much to learn about how fundamentally things had changed. During the monument celebrations I remember joining older friends on our bikes, baiting the bearded men in their corduroys and velskoens, mocking their bokbaards2 with rude, bleating noises, then tearing off before they could catch us.

We should have taken their monument much more seriously. To non-Afrikaners, exploring the Voortrekker monument is a chilling experience but it offers the best clue to the nationalistic racial fervour gripping post-war Afrikanerdom. The architecture is ‘Nazi kitsch’, designed to overwhelm with massive scale and impregnability. Inside the vast gloom, marble friezes recount battles between brave Boers and primitive savages, climaxing with the Afrikaners’ own version of manifest destiny: like the Israelites of old, the trekkers are seen on the eve of the Battle of Blood River, making their solemn vow to a God who would seal their conquest over the Zulu in exchange for a promise of perpetual piety. Here, too, as in Westminster, ideology is baptised by theology, but unlike Westminster, no gentler, more altruistic forms of heroism offer any relief. If Westminster presents the British Empire as one on which the sun would never set, the Voortrekker monument, through a strategically placed aperture in its roof, ensures that on every anniversary of Blood River all the sun’s brightness would be focused in a narrow shaft falling on a sarcophagus representing the Afrikaner people alone.

The fragile 38-year experiment of white unity in partnership with the British Commonwealth of nations had tended to favour the South African English and now it was about to unravel. In his 1948 victory speech, Nationalist Prime Minister DF Malan proudly reversed the words of the young Elizabeth: “In the past we felt like strangers in our own country,” he said, “but today South Africa belongs to us once more. For the first time since Union, South Africa is our own.” The 1910 arrangement had also favoured South Africa’s two white tribes to the exclusion of millions of blacks, but the ‘us’ Malan now referred to meant Afrikaners only. On that May afternoon in 1948 the jeering youths who rained spittle on me as the train pulled out of Koedoespoort station had reason to celebrate. Their day of vengeance had come. The South African English had been brushed aside and for the first time South Africa would be ruled by their people alone.