THE WHITES IN SOUTH AFRICA
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the urban born Afrikaner is a very new phenomenon-are
brought up to play with "coloureds" or "natives" until puberty.
A lively, pleasantly vulgar farming class who recall the figures
in
seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings, they love to tell
broadly humorous stories and these stories frequently revolve
around their friendly relations with the coloureds, which they
contrast with the English South African's awkward master–
servant attitude. Behind this the Afrikaner rightly detects fear.
Yet all these stories in their brutal, patronizing humor only il–
lustrate what a Cape Coloured schoolteacher meant when he
said to me that "The English patronize, but the Afrikaner can
make you feel like a dog." It was in talk with uneducated
Afrikaners, too, that sexual lust for colored and African women
slyly yet brutally came to the surface. Much of the reported
miscegenation which under South African law can be punished
with corporal punishment as well as by imprisonment takes place
on Afrikaner farms, although this could be attributed to rural
isolation rather than to the Afrikaner view of the natives.
Nevertheless in such a world something of the old pioneers' view
of African concubines being sanctioned by Abraham's Hagar
still survives.
In general it is true to say that the English fear their servants
but would not "mind meeting" educated Africans socially if this
could help to avoid the social upheaval they fear. The Afrikaner
feels at ease with his "boys" and can afford them a freedom
of manner that the English "baas" would be unable to control,
yet for him the very existence of educated Africans around him
is exactly the social upheaval that is intolerable to him. This
emotional distaste for the very idea of an African who cannot be
patronized, an African who can "answer back," fortifies strongly
the Afrikaner distrust of any evolutionary change by which
educated Africans could be gradually admitted to an unseg–
regated society. It inclines him emotionally to Apartheid, which
he thinks in any case to be the realistic, strong policy. The
English South African, on the other hand, 'has inherited the
