THE WHITES IN SOUTH AFRICA
617
the latter. My _father had always brought me up to look down
socially upon my mother's "colonial" family: they worked hard,
had no or few interests outside small commerce, and became
rich; he did no work, played very hard, and lost all the money
he had. I have tried my best to counteract this inherited prejudice,
but my mother's family do not
assist
by their defiant assertion of
their commercial values which by its very vehemence reveals how
much they respect the snobbish English social values by which
my father labeled them. There was
in
my
visit
inevitably an
element of longstanding family warfare played out
in
a new
era. But this personal element was,
in
fact, no distortion, for
there
is,
I am sure, some element of
this
snobbish
de haut en bas,
of a new poor towards a new
rich
in all English dealings with
those once called "Colonials"-Canadians, Australians, New
Zealanders, English South Mricans. It is the misfortune of the
English South Mricans that their precarious racial situation
does not allow them to treat this English snobbery with the con–
tempt which most affluent Australians, Canadians or New Zea–
landers now show. American readers, I suspect, even American
liberals, may regard with amusement my distaste for the declared
money values of the English South Africans. It is also possible
that they might find the Mrikaners less charmingly exotic, for
the "old" Dutch families of the Cape, at any rate, have much
that recalls the "old" families of the South, including a general
propensity to declaring themselves as "old" as possible.
So much by way of warning. What then are the patterns
of white life in South Africa? There is much talk there, as there
is
in Western Europe, of growing "Americanization." I have
al~
ways doubted whether this means much more than the use of
certain widely advertised
Amer~can
consumer goods by urban
communities with a newly acquired, generally spread prosperity
sufficient to purchase them. It is true that Frankfurt, Milan and
Lyons, to name outstanding examples, have a supranational
quality now that they had not before the war; but this likeness
surely is much more to each other than to any cities of the
