There are eleven official languages in South Africa. The most spoken is Zulu followed by Afrikaans, English, and xhosa. English is the language of business, but all of the whites that I have met, including my guides, seem to speak Africaans as their first language. Even when they are making arrangements right in front of us, our guides speak Afrikaans to each other. All of the blacks speak one or two native languages, English, and Afrikaans. It is very impressive that most people are at least trilingual.
Total aside ... someone who speaks three languages is trilingual. Someone who speaks two languages is bilingual. Do you know what they call someone who speaks one language? American.
What the British proconsul Sir Garnet Wolseley thought of the Boers in 1879:
A Boer's idea of life is, that he should pay no taxes of any sort or kind, that he should be amenable to no sort of law he disliked, that there should be no police to keep order, that he should be allowed to kill or punish the Natives as he thought fit, that no progress towards civilization should be attempted, that all foreigners should be kept out of the country & that he should be surrounded by a waste of land many miles of extent each way which he called his farm, in fact that he should have no neighbours as the smoke of another man's fire was an abomination to him. These Transvaal Boers are the only white race I know of that has steadily been going back towards barbarism. They seem to be influenced by some savage instinct which causes them to fly from civilization ... Altogether I regard them as the lowest in the scale of white men & to be also the very most interesting people I have ever known or studied.
Oh, and when the Boer dissidents held a mass meeting that Wolseley had banned, they marched with their Confederate flag. Whoops, I mean the Vierkleur, the Transvaal flag.
It turns out, not surprisingly, that language is always politics. The Afrikaans language is a bastardization of Dutch and zulu that was invented so the Afrikaans could thumb their noses at the British who ruled them.
It also turns out that, while there are no good Europeans in the history of South Africa, the Dutch Boers were way worse than the British who tried to be fair - sorta - and made treaties with the local tribes that they had no power to enforce when the Boers ignored the treaties and invaded native land. It is really hard to make the British colonialists look good, but the Boers managed to do it.
It also turns out that Cecil Rhodes was definitely a product of his time as well as an unscrupulous businessman. He said:
I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence. Added to which the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars. (GRC: clearly we are not counting the wars while that "absorption" was going on.)
He pledged himself to work for: "The furtherance of the British Empire, for the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race into one Empire." He was particularly exercised by the "loss" of the United States, blaming it on "two or three ignorant pig-headed statesmen" in the eighteenth century. "Do you ever feel mad, do you ever feel murderous? I think I do with these men." Nevertheless, there was Africa. "Africa is still lying ready for us and it is our duty to take it ... more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses."
This afternoon I flew to Johannesburg to join my next safari. We are leaving early in the morning for Victoria Falls, but we are staying today in an incredibly luxurious hotel. Gated of course, so I am sitting at poolside once again and have seen nothing of Johannesburg. I am staying in a villa with a few rooms, not the main building, and our villa has our own butler. I don't know that I have ever had a butler before. Maybe the British got some things right.
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