The Soutie Africans:The Infinite Strangeness of British Heritage in Mzansi

“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar.”

• Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Do I belong in South Africa? 

Under the laws, yes. Of course. I was born in Parklands Hospital in Durban when Mandela was President. I’ve spent nearly all my life here. I own no other pet but a Green Mamba. As the Constitution has it, I’m welcome to stay for as long as I like, and I’m sure I will. So that’s not the right question to ask. 

Words: Cameron Luke Peters

The better way of proffering my concern would be to ask, 

‘Do I need to own my family roots in the British Isles if I want to be South African? And can the tally of those roots amount to a just way of belonging in this country in the first place?’ 

It’s a very privileged question. Almost greedy. Is it not enough that I freely get to live in South Africa as a middle-class white man decades after Apartheid? Do I need to seek reassurance in the fact that most of my grandparents were born (or grew up) here too? Perhaps not. My interest sparks from the shock I felt when I got to live in the UK for the course of my Masters degree in 2018-9 and, within a matter of weeks, could hardly wait to leave. It wasn’t just the weather. It wasn’t just the food. It wasn’t just the undercoating of depressed cynicism beneath every single conversation. It was that the person I knew I’d become if I stayed much longer would, in Wordsworth’s phrase, seem more like a man flying from something that he dreads, than one who sought the thing he loved. 

This experience was so intense that I returned to my new-old life in Cape Town like a born-again South African. When friends emigrated to the UK or built new lives in London, my brain and heart broke equally. I still don’t get it at all. Even when complete strangers justified their continued residence in this country in the parlance of convenience, perks or mere over-familiarity, I struggled to hold back my annoyance. Yes, we’re dysfunctional. Yes, we’re unsafe. Yes, we’re always our own worst enemies. But is there a warmer place in the world to call home? And can you begin to recognise what a beautiful birthright it is to be born under the folds of our Constitution? The words that rang in my head for years were JFK’s injunction to “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” 

I felt like I’d had the chance to glimpse through to the truth that a good and meaningful and happy life could only be lived in service to your people. This didn’t necessarily require activism or building up a saviour complex. It just meant recognising that nothing you can create exists in a solitary vacuum. Everything you do to survive in the world is for others too, whether you like it or not. The trick of life is to take accountability for this involuntary impact, then learn to wield it. So the question stands: Which others would you most like to serve? To whose cause would you like to make your contribution? 

This was how I finally got the sense of the phrase ‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ - that South Africa can be unproblematically adored like few other places on the Earth. But, at the same time, how did we create this many problems for ourselves? What degree of societal care is needed now to compensate for centuries of trauma? However, the phrase itself, I think, is part and parcel of one of the biggest issues. The sigh of “Agh, shame” implied by its declaration slides too easily into the exasperated whine of an English investor fed up with a land that’s proved itself more trouble than it’s worth. Alan Paton, the gentle novelist who coined it, did not mean it that way. He translated his reflections into political action. His mitigating testimony at the Rivonia Trial is thought by many to have saved Nelson Mandela from the gallows. Even his granddaughter, Carol, bears his torch today as one of the most respected journalists in the country. But words, as ever, live a life of their own.

As I mulled my position over, I became more and more amused at how absurd my identity appears in the long arc of our story, considering how racism and tribalism have structured the narrative just as much as wine and gold. I earn and spend my days as a tour-guide in the City Bowl and, occasionally, when a guest asks me what year the British ended up leaving South Africa, I answer that they never left. I’m still here. Sometimes I think of British-South Africans today as something like the strange minority assortment of mixed families and hybrid tribes left behind in Southern Britannia by the Roman Empire in the 5th-Century AD (back when the shoe was on the other foot). In some sense too, I think you can compare us to “[t]he stranded nucleus of older [Dutch] settlers from Western Europe” whom John Bond (in They Were South Africans (1957)) describes the first British colonists encountering on taking possession of the Cape back in the 1790’s, and whom, he says, “felt a powerful and disturbing reinforcement” at their arrival.

The difference today, of course, is that we’ve never developed a South African-Englishness to match the pride (and mania) of the Afrikaner. And today’s demographics do not promise any nation-building spectacles in the future; which is all for the good. Sometimes even I forget about us. A few months ago I was wandering through Kirstenbosch Gardens when I spotted a long, seated line of thirty- & forty-something white couples and families snaking down the hillside to the conservatory entrance. I did a double-take, struggling to place their origins or name the occasion. Belatedly, I remembered that the Goo Goo Dolls were in town for a Summer Sunday Concert, and that this picnicking crew was a cross-section of all the 90’s Kids who’d recently bloomed into homeowners in the Southern Suburbs. There were thousands of them! Who knew? 

The reason I felt (and feel) such a sense of surprise at all this is that there are very few colonial communities in any country’s history who’ve made such a walloping impact on every imaginable aspect of national life, whilst remaining somehow inconspicuous as an actually extant body of people. Englishness is the ‘vanishing mediator’ of South Africa. It functions even today as the white paper on which all the markers of the identities of other South Africans are inscribed. The official language which cuts through all eleven others in politics, business, journalism and literature is English. The basis of our government and our laws is British Constitutionalism. Our education system has evolved from the hierarchies of British universities, private schools and state services. Our favourite sports and games were first imported and played by British colonists. Although Afrikaners, Germans, Jews, Americans, and ‘Hollanders’ played major parts in starting our mining and retail industries, Cecil Rhodes was as British as they come, growing up next door to the current site of London Stansted Airport. It was the British colonial forces who conquered and dispossessed nearly every Black tribe in Southern Africa over the course of the 1800’s. And it was the British who, between 1899 and 1902, decimated the Afrikaner people and burned down nearly every farm in the Free State and the Highveld just to resew the region into one united state just a few years later.

And yet, the people themselves have always seemed ephemeral. As C.O. Gardner, one of the exceedingly British Apartheid-era English professors at UKZN once put it: “English-speaking South Africans have tended to be [...] uncommitted, unsure and uncreative as far as the communal life of South Africa is concerned.” This is exactly what Afrikaners imply (then and now) by the monikers Soutie and Rooinek: to be English-South African is to have the hyphen that connects the two identities dangle in the middle permanently like a penis dipping into the sea whilst the legs above it straddle continents (just like ‘The Colossus of Rhodes’ once straddled Africa). Similarly, it means to have stayed in Africa for generation after generation without ever stooping to adapt or evolve - never ‘browning’ or mixing, either physically, genetically or spiritually.  

Why did this happen? 

Well, because the British legacy has never once allowed its exiles to feel marooned here, as the Dutch East-India Company once did. The British state first snatched the Cape Colony in 1795 because the Prince of Orange asked them to (and they couldn’t stand the notion of the route to India falling into the hands of the Jacobins). In 1802, they were obliged to give it back. Then in 1806 they sailed right back again to seize it from ‘the Batavian Republic’. In 1814 they committed to stay, and inherited all the frontier wars with the amaXhosa, mostly because retaining their new Navy base in Simonstown would secure their domination of the entire southern hemisphere ad infinitum. For the next century and change,“British governors and generals came and went in official invulnerability on the stage of South African history, profoundly affecting for good and sometimes for evil the destinies of the country in which they never settled.” We only recall their names now through a scattered constellation of old border-dorpies: Darling, Somerset East, Caledon, Greyton, Cradock, Napier, Harrismith, Ladysmith, Durban.

 The motley settlers who followed in their stead were most often either dupes, pawns or desperate opportunists. The famed 1820 arrivals - the nearly 4,000 men, women and children from all corners of the British Isles, and all classes and professions, who hopped off 60 ships in Algoa Bay between April and June 1820 - were unaware they were being given huge tracts of other people’s land because the colonial office sought to plant a human buffer-zone between the Boers, Khoi and Xhosa tribes in the ever-warring Eastern Cape. They were selected from more than 90,000 applicants who were promised warmth, property and opportunity half a world away from the grimy horror of the early-Industrial Revolution. As Guy Butler surmised whilst devising their Monument, “[t]hese early British immigrants were no more a hand-picked elite approved by the Minister of the Interior than were the seventeenth-century ancestors of the Afrikaners. They were average people from a country in one of its great ages.” Unsurprisingly, they failed at their initial scheme.

Unlike the VOC’s company, the majority of the British arrivals never took to ploughing, sewing or herding. They swiftly dropped their arcadian illusions and huddled into towns like Bathurst, Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth and East London, which hugged the coastline in turn. As their presence here was always the consequence of, and insurance for, maritime trade across the Empire, the British always remained the one sea-centric people of the subcontinent. Though the Dutch had preceded them in ruling the waves, their progeny at the Cape never established another port but Kaapstad. They became an African people by echoing the restless migrations of many of the indigenous tribes they conquered and then marrying themselves to the soil they seized. The British, for their part, remained Umlungu: ‘the sandy white foam thrown up by the waves’. As Bond comments, “[t]he frontier Boer, however oppressed by danger and hardship, could say with truth, ‘I am monarch of all I survey.’” Hence the Groot Trek, when tens-of-thousands of Boers crossed the Orange and the Vaal Rivers in the 1830’s to recover this sense of independence and dominate as much land as they could. And hence Durban and the colony of Natal, which the British created in the 1840’s mostly to landlock the Boers and secure the ‘Englishman’s Inn’ at the entrance to the Indian Ocean. The sugar empires came later.  

This early ambivalence about the land caused two knock-on effects for the Soutie identity. The first was that it forever set the British against the Afrikaners as the more ‘mature civilisers’ (in their own minds), taming the place and its peoples, white and black, by dragging them kicking and screaming into the modern world from the solitary depths of the 18th-Century. By the Apartheid era, this enlightened detachment had evolved into an abiding sense of cultural cringe at our cockney-Dutch cousins. Despite crushing them in war, we remained the feeble minority amongst the white-overlord community, numerically and politically, and we consoled and distanced ourselves by mocking their provincial culture and romantic self-mythologising, before judging them without irony for their house-brand of paranoid racism.    

The second was that it gradually, and then catastrophically suddenly, transformed South Africa into a globalised society - an America-lite. The brittleness of South African-Englishness was diluted ever further by the communities which followed in the wake of their industrial rackets. The waves of Indian, Irish, Greek, German, Jewish, Portuguese, Chinese and diversely African residents who were either forced or seduced into building their lives here, in the decades after Diamonds and Gold, became mildly Anglicised over time, in both language and culture, because it was the only convenient medium between them all, and their own lives were the obvious products and subjects of Empire. The weird synthetic nationalism of the Scots, Welsh, Irish and English met and made its mirror in the artificial fantasy of ‘the Union of South Africa’: a literal description which read as more of a working-title than a proper name. 

Finally, you could put the invisibility of the Soutie down to the fact that the British lost all control of the country ‘two South Africas ago’, to quote a brilliant phrase. Once upon a time, in early 1947, as recorded in Graham Viney’s tour-de-force book The Last Hurrah, the Royal family spent two months on a grand tour around the entire sub-continent, finding themselves hailed with joy and reverence in nearly every town they visited, eventually being seen in the flesh by more than 60% of the entire population - Black, White, Indian, Coloured and Khoi. But the expedition still failed its mission. Colonials and liberals alike across the Commonwealth had hoped that the divine presence of the head of state and his retinue would repair the divides of World War II and save white South Africa from itself. But the very next year D.F. Malan’s Nats steamed into power. Thirteen years after that, Hendrik Verwoerd (symbolically) defenestrated the Queen from the government, despite all her kind words for Kirstenbosch. And in the six decades since, the successive nation-building projects of the NP and the ANC have subconsciously collaborated on just one big shared accomplishment: the erasure of the role of their original best fiend, the British Empire.

Nevertheless, here I remain in Cape Town, the original soutie city for soutie people.  My mum’s paternal family, the Hultzers, are German-Dutch, going back to settlers from the 1850’s, but I’d say I still count as a full soutie for showing no real skaam for never learning any other language even semi-fluently than the one you’re currently reading. There are perhaps 1,5 million of us still spread across the country, with more set to return from abroad now that the Global North’s recent insanity is spilling over by the month. We are, I think, unique in the history of modern empire. 

The pattern of colonial domination since the 1500’s has usually followed one of only two paths. Either the settler community captures a territory through vanquishing its indigenous people by means of disease, war and privatisation before gradually repopulating it with new arrivals and ensuing generations who constitute the new face of the land, leaving the original people to rebuild themselves as a traumatised fragment of their former identity. This is the origin story of the USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and the Western Cape (as we know it today). The other path is when a territory is insidiously brought under the command of the bureaucratic elite of a colonial power and a small settler community arrives to serve the enterprise and pocket the land for themselves, a la India, Vietnam, Mozambique, Kenya, DRC, Yemen, Indonesia and so forth. This settler community might take root for many, many decades, and grow to very substantial numbers, but when push comes to shove, as in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, the mass of them are eventually obliged, or kindly asked, to leave.

Neither of these scenarios has played out according to any set template in South Africa. The Afrikaner community took elite control of the country during Apartheid to restore and ensure its dominance whilst Black South Africans remained the majority of the civilian population. There was no colonial motherland for Afrikaners to go back to, and by the 1980’s their numbers were great enough that, even if one did exist, their forced expulsion or destruction would bankrupt the country. Thus Mandela proved his pragmatic genius by, amongst other things, learning and reading Afrikaans in his prison cell, reciting one of Ingrid Jonker’s best poems at the opening of the first democratic parliament and wearing the old Springbok jersey whilst handing over the Rugby World Cup trophy to Francois Pienaar. My feeling is that he sincerely acknowledged and accepted Afrikaners as a people of South Africa, or at least he learned to perform this understanding so brilliantly that he assuaged their fears and found a miraculous method to tame a dragon that had nearly burned him alive. 

But what of the English-South Africans? Were they off the hook for everything? Seemingly so. Even in the midst of Rhodes Must Fall and the colonial recriminations that have salted and peppered the discourse over the last twelve years, what has almost always been attacked is ‘whiteness’ and ‘capital’ - two nebulous, overhanging forces which, though strong in their implications, have seldom been attached to the narratives of any particular community who could potentially be nailed down as the political culprits. Sometimes guests on my walking tours are startled at the sight of statues of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII still standing - by the Houses of Parliament and athwart the Grand Parade - given the anti-colonial fervour they’ve read about us. The best guess I can give them is that some statues exude meaning and relevance forever while others just drop down to us like the crumbs of a leftover fantasy. 

In his Introduction to Better Than They Knew (1972), a rare compendium of the lives of British South Africans, the editor R.M. De Villiers notes, in the middle of a very fawning passage,  “[i]t is unfortunately true that the mass of English speakers have often been found wanting in their political wisdom or courage.” Strong stuff for the middle of the high-Apartheid era. But this unwillingness to be collectively brave, loud or relevant in our commitment to our country reflects the basic fact that patriotism, for the common man at least, is not ‘the last resort of scoundrels’ but the painful acknowledgement that there exists no other home or community for them to escape to. We were complacent about fighting Apartheid en masse because we were here while the going was good. Indeed, as the system started crumbling in the mid-80’s English-South Africans increasingly voted for the Nats as they signalled their turn to reform before revolution, and the NP themselves learned to lean harder on their English support as they got outflanked to their right by Treurnicht’s Conservatives. 

In the Post-Apartheid era, nothing has forced us out. Loadshedding, corruption, crime and urban decay have each, in their time, felt like horses on a Merry-Go-Round of the Apocalypse. But the purchasing power, quality-of-life, living-space, constitutional rights and entrepreneurial opportunities South Africa has afforded middle-class whites for more than a century have remained steady. Nonetheless, many of us have trickled away, seeking out better money and more familiar neighbourhoods in the rest of the Commonwealth, or Dubai, or Israel, or whichever destination has been deemed flavour of the year, seeking a world ‘as it used to be’ and, more often than not, meandering back to find it in Cape Town.   

We only have ourselves to blame for any present sense of dislocation. I still don’t know quite where my love of this country stems from. It is, like any true love, fundamentally irrational and infinitely difficult to articulate. But as I want to remain in South Africa and serve a part in its future, what I can do to belong here is call on a list of ancestors who’ve echoed my love back to me. English-South Africans have failed, and continue to fail, at forming a communal identity, and we still need to recognise ourselves in the weave of the country’s story. In all the debates around name-changes, statue-removals and ‘the erasure of history’, I’ve felt that a crucial point has been missed. All the names that have fallen away reflect a colonial legacy that was not committed by anonymous aliens, but by people whose descendants are still among us, or recently scattered out in the world. We need to escape our estrangement.

I will claim proud allegiance to one part of this legacy. On an individual basis, many British-South Africans have lived at the vanguard of asserting the sovereign human rights and democratic birthright of all South Africans. I’m not alone in this appreciation. Despite all their struggles, both Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela often acknowledged that their lives and achievements had been formed in the mold of free Englishmen. Their Christian names show it, for one. Tutu, of course, was the Archbishop of the Anglican Church, and an equal celebrity in the UK as in SA throughout his career. And Mandela wore the trappings of an Anglophile, referring to the Queen often by her first name. When he addressed the British Parliament on the 5th of May 1993, he quoted John Donne back to them then laid down the law: 

Your right to determine your own destiny was used to deny us [the power] to determine our own.

Thus history brought our peoples together in its own peculiar ways. That history demands of us that we should strive to achieve what you, through the rediscovery of the practice of democracy, achieved for yourselves.

 To me, this is the tone of an heir returning to the reading of a will to claim a rightful inheritance. As Bond claims, “[t]hose to whom [this] torch has been handed down will, at the peril of their souls, forget the contribution made to South Africa by the liberal spirit which is the glory of the English tradition.” 

It is also the shame of that tradition that it has not been upheld justly. But I want to follow the footprints of some of those who dearly tried to extend it:

Dr. John Philip (1775-1851), the Scottish missionary who devoted his life to lobbying for the rights of the Khoikhoi and enslaved peoples in Southern Africa against the colonial government (and who had Philippolis named after him).

His son-in-law, John Fairbairn (1794-1864), who fought and won the first great battle for press freedom in Cape Town in 1829, and played an instrumental role in founding state-sponsored education and the national insurance industry (as the father of Old Mutual).  

Lucy Lloyd (1834-1914) who, with her brother-in-law Wilhelm Bleek, contributed decades of work to recording and archiving the language and stories of the San people, building one of the most sympathetic libraries of indigenous life in all modern history.

David Gill (1843-1914) who, by decking out the Royal Observatory in Cape Town, made South Africa’s name as one of the great sites of modern astronomy, plotting the first photographic star atlas of the southern hemisphere and engineering a glorious era of international co-operation between telescopes.

James Stevenson-Hamilton (1867-1957) who almost single-handedly stitched together the Kruger National Park over 44 years, becoming the global pioneer of wildlife conservation, game-ranging and anti-poaching strategy whilst earning the affectionate nickname Skukuza (‘the man who has turned everything upside down’) from his Tsonga neighbours.

James Stevenson-Hamilton

Henry Harold Welch Pearson (1870-1916) who fought like hell to establish and build Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens, became the first great advocate for indigenous flora in the 20th-Century and worked himself to death by the age of 46 before being buried in the middle of his creation, beneath a Celtic Cross.

Margaret Ballinger (1894-1980) who, despite working within the bounds of a sexist and segregated democracy, served as the face of white liberalism for three decades, was hailed as the first great voice for a multi-racial South Africa on the floor of the Apartheid Parliament, roasted Verwoerd to his face on many occasions and preferred to fold her party rather than comply with new limits on membership for different racial groups. 

Roy Campbell (1901-1957) who casually re-invented English Poetry through a South African-modernist template and produced the first multi-lingual, anti-racist literary publication in the country’s history before he turned 25.  

Rick Turner (1941-1978) who was Steve Biko’s greatest academic comrade, wrote The Eye of the Needle (perhaps the most enduring book of political philosophy inspired by anti-apartheid), became the intellectual voice of ‘the Durban Moment’ in the early 70’s when trade-union activism reawakened the Struggle, and who was shot through a window in his own home by the state security services, dying in his 13-year-old daughter’s arms.

Justice Edwin Cameron (1953-) who brought a career of Gay Rights-activism and HIV-awareness and welfare disputes to the highest court in the land and built on the potential of our progressive Constitution in the most dicey years of the post-Apartheid era.

I want to go on.

For now, for me, South Africa is not a place or a club or a trap or a destiny. As the poet Wopko Jensma would call it, South Africa is a situation I found, and continue to find, myself in.