618
ANGUS WILSON
United States-they are the new prosperity European Com–
munity cities. In England as y.et .we do not have .such cities.
The White South Mricans are forever apologizing for
this
"Americanization." Their motives for so doing are many. In the
first place the business community is both frightened and
dis–
appointed at the United States' official condemnation of Apar–
theid. And for all their cry that the "real" Americans-i.e. the
Southerners--appreciate their position, they know that politically
and economically the "unreal" Americans are far more important
to them. Then the English South Mricans have the same sort of
tedious, genteel sort of snobbery about the United States as their
counterparts in London suburbs; while Afrikaner Calvinism has
made an identification between Mammon and the "American
way of living."
As
I had just come to the Union from a first
and perhaps therefore wildly enthusiastic visit to the States,
all
this
infuriated me. I was able with great satisfaction to tell them
that the resemblances were purely superficial and even these
superficialities only a ludicrous parody of the originals.
On
occasion, however, Mrikaners, in rebuke of the English visitor,
will remind him that America like South Mrica is a frontier
nation, and that frontier nations know no checks to their aims.
This hubris is usually accompained by the even more absurd
remark that "of course, you won't find us so naive as the
Americans." In truth the only serious parallel that an American
visitor would find in the Union would be the likeness between
the paternalism of the Afrikaner attitude towards the non-white
population and the similar attitude of the conservatives of
his
own Southern states. And here, it must be said in favor of the
Afrikaners, that there are after all only three million whites (one
million of these of English descent) out of a population of over
fourteen million.
This Afrikaner paternalism is the most immediately strik–
ing contrast with the Anglo-Saxon attitudes of the English South
Mricans. Being of my generation, I inevitably give strangers a
first glance that is a mixed Freudian and Marxist appraisal,
