620
ANGUS WILSON
ing businessman, otherwise reasonably intelligent and sensitive,
suddenly turned upon me in the midst of a conversation upon
quite a different theme, and shouted, "They don't
kiss,
you
know. They never
kiss.
Unless they're copying what they've seen
in the· cinema." An African journalist commented to me on
all
this that the emphasis laid by the English oommunity on mere
"necking" had always been a puzzle to him. But to the English
South African the "natives" are "they," and especially that sin–
ister, dangerous, contemptible thing-"they" the servants. I was
constantly reminded among my South African relations of a
grand Protestant Irish noblewoman I knew who would not
speak of "them" (the Roman Catholics) until the servants were
out of the room. She too lived amid a hostile, socially sub–
ordinate alien majority. For English South Africans racial fears
are immensely reinforced by social terrors. No English South
African would "mind" meeting "educated natives," doctors or
clergymen,
if
they did not fear that the successful African will
one day bring in his wake a servant class risen ( both in arms and
in status). Middle-class English South African women (and
most English South Africans are middle class) live in relation
to their native servants as English women did about 1860, or
perhaps with a few of the fears of a growingly educated servant
class that belong more to 1890. One of the few witty revues
in
Johannesburg (the Government's proposed Censorship Bill
will
no doubt soon bring it to an end) contained a sketch of an
Englishwoman facing the new desegregation in Southern Rho–
desia. Entertaining an African professor to cocktails, she can only
find one topic of conversation-the "impossibility," the untouch·
ableness, and the slackness and general dangerousness of African
servants.
Quite different is the feudal, paternal attitude of the M–
rikaner. With considerable justice, Afrikaners will point to their
easier intimacy with their native employees or servants, but it
is a coarse, patronizing intimacy that could only be tolerable
to
the most uneducated African. Afrikaners of rural origin-and
