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