THE TRIBE THAT LOST ITS POWER
John Simpson reports on the way
white English-speaking South Africans are facing up to the prospect of black rule
Johannesburg `WELL, IT WAS good while it lasted,' said the yellow-bearded giant in a resigned way, and reached for his glass of Castle beer. He was the South African cameraman in our team, and had the build and general appearance of someone in a Robin Hood remake. 'May not be over yet,' said the sound recordist, a man of similarly shaggy appearance. In his spare time he was a musician in a rock band, a group called the Cherry-Faced Lurchers. In the old apartheid days the Cherry-Faced Lurchers had received the greatest accolade of all: security policemen would grow their hair long and turn up to spy on their concerts. There was a brief silence as the two white, English-speaking South Africans reflected on the passing of political power. We were sitting on the balcony of a pleas- ant hotel of colonial aspect, overlooking the Indian Ocean: no sign here that English-speaking white power was in decline. The Zulu waiter approached def- erentially with a pot of Earl Grey tea, and held out both hands in the approved fash- ion when I gave him a tip. If he felt himself to be one of the masters now, he didn't show it. In white South Africa it still feels like the 1950s: the golden weather, the cleanliness, the polite servants. This must be the last place on earth where you see Ford Anglias in everyday use, the shrunk- en grey-haired drivers crouched low behind the steering-wheel. If you turn on the radio, you can hear The Goon Show or Round The Home; and on breakfast televi- sion the weatherman wears a double- breasted blazer and club tie, tucks his handkerchief in his sleeve, and barks at you in the accents of a wartime Royal Naval commander to watch out for high winds orf the coast of Natal.
Some time later, the sound recordist began to tell us how his views about South Africa had changed. It had happened in 1977, when he was still at his ultra-English public school in Natal. One of the masters had told the class the news that Steve Biko had died at the hands of the security police: beaten terribly, chained, driven around for hours without receiving medi- cal care. It was a glimpse of a world which wasn't golden at all, but dark and repres- sive and fearful, a hidden world behind the meek politeness of the servants in their narrow quarters at the back of every white household. The awakening has come at different times for different people, and many white English-speaking South Africans still know nothing of the real lives of millions of black people here. Now it doesn't really matter: the change has hap- pened in spite of them. The apartheid years were the years of the decline of English-speaking white South Africa. They were strangers in their own country, yet because conditions were good and labour costs were low under apartheid the majority simply got on with the business of making money and enjoy- ing themselves. In the 60s and 70s, when times were bad in Britain, immigration to South Africa was high. Most of these were people who had no quarrel with apartheid; on the contrary, they tended to support it more thoroughly than almost anyone. But they, like so many of the other English- speakers here, held on to their British passports in case of trouble. Afrikaners, who have no other passports, give the English-speakers the derisive nickname of soutpiel, 'salt prick', meaning that with one foot in South Africa and the other in Britain their vitals dangle in the ocean.
As a form of cultural self-defence, English-speaking South Africa is far more thoroughly British than its equivalents in Australia, New Zealand or Canada. Because there is no sense of English South African nationalism, there is nowhere for them to turn but Britain. And not just in the names of towns and streets, all these Kensingtons and Margates and Prince of Wales Avenues: this is the one large com- munity of English-speakers which has no residual chippiness towards us. The news- papers are full of news about Britain and our fads are automatically followed here, from Red Nose Day to car-boot sales and open-air markets called Petticoat Lane.
Now this, too, seems about to change. From being politically powerless in an Afrikaner state, they are about to become politically powerless in an African one. Already, several thousand people with British passports have left South Africa. Many of them seem to be the fair-weather immigrants who came in the 60s and 70s. The newspapers are carrying advertise- ments with big Union Jacks on them, telling people who want to go to Britain that they will take care of all their moving requirements. It's called 'taking the gap' here, and everyone with a foreign passport is checking its validity, just in case things get bad here.
The waiter came up and took away the tea things and the empty beer glasses. 'It's fine for all of you,' said the fourth man in our group, the picture editor. 'You've all got your British passports. People like me can't go anywhere else.' He shrugged. `Maybe, of course, we don't want to.' I looked out at the Indian Ocean, but I was listening to the slang and the vowel sounds. Not everyone here talks like East Grin- stead, circa 1945. The television crew I was with belonged to a more demotic South Africa, whose English has a rich admixture of Afrikaans, Zulu and Tswana words. This is a patois where a bloke is an ou, pro- nounced 'o' ('Who's that ou, eh?'), nice is lekker, slow is kashle, from the Zulu. You are greeted with 'How's it?', and people say `Shame' if you tell them something sad. Sometimes an older note slips in: a public phone is a `ticket'-box', from the small sil- ver pre-apartheid threepenny piece, and a cinema is a `bioscope'. It is all delivered with the great South African vowel shift, which turns a car park into a `cor pork' and puts a faint glottal stop between two vow- els: 'my arm' is `mah awm'. This is a South Africa which is as authentic as any other; which originated here, and is as native as Zulu or Xhosa.
But the people who speak it don't feel native, and they haven't forgotten the slo- gan of the radical Pan African Congress, which is standing at this election but is unlikely to do well: 'One settler, one bul- let'. That is not, however, the attitude of Nelson Mandela, who within a month will be South Africa's new president, nor of the ANC which will form the majority of its government. When Mr Mandela reached his agreement with Chief Buthelezi earlier this week, he took the opportunity to make what was, in effect, his first presidential speech. It was to those white South Africans with foreign passports. 'We hope to allay the fears of some of our talented people who have left,' he said. 'We hope that they will return, and that those on the verge of leaving will realise they have noth- ing to fear.' And he concluded, 'We are one country, one people: Africans, Indians, coloureds, and whites.' It was a splendid and moving thing to say; but now that they are about to lose power for the last time, the white tribes of South Africa will want to make sure Mr Mandela is telling the truth before they decide, finally, to stay.
John Simpson is foreign affairs editor of the BBC.
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