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