Destination London

Travelling must be ingrained in my fabric. Ever since boyhood, the notion of travelling somewhere new has always enthralled me.

Of all destinations for travel, London must rate with the best in my experience. There's a special familiarity that carries with it certain nostalgia about London. Parts of Cape Town and Port Elizabeth in South Africa reveal the recent colonial origins of these cities and thereby the strong British cultural heritage of South Africa.

As a boy, my country was firmly engulfed in the remake to rid itself of Britishness and become an Afrikaner dominated society. But large pockets of white society and essential pillars of national institutions still displayed a distinctly British heritage.

The school system was essentially a slightly outdated British system what with boarding schools, venomous teachers and all. Thousands of children went to boarding school, some many miles away from home. School discipline was strict and correctness was of paramount importance in all subjects taught. English and Afrikaans children were also mostly kept apart, respectively attending English and Afrikaans medium schools as it were.

Looking back, one of my biggest regrets about the system is the separation between English and Afrikaans culture that was instilled in schools by the government. My first encounter with English children was in high school. It was only at university that I started to make English friends.

Provinces such as Eastern Province and Natal showed their distinct ties with Britain with a predominance of English spoken in towns and on many farms. Natal was even mokingly called "The last outpost". Several families of Natal and elsewhere in SA to this day have relatives in Britain.

My family's heritage was divided between staunch Calvinist Dutch and Presbyterian Scottish. The predominance was towards Dutch and so I was raised Afrikaans. Even so, aspects of British culture still made it into my upbringing and were imprinted with strict, Calvinist fear of God. Good manners and table etiquette stand out for me as the most valuable parts of my upbringing. Unforgettable are the Christmas dinners, a formal afternoon affair serving a succulent leg of lamb to which followed a rather potent Christmas pudding with brandy sauce for desert. An alternative main course presented grilled chicken with vegetables. Dinner was concluded by tea or coffee with homemade milk tart and other confectionary.

Our family loved to travel, although most travels were locked into the seemingly inescapable rituals of Christmas and Easter visits to either one or the other set of grand parents. Of course, most travels were characterised by incessant family feuds and quarrels. But even so, some my most memorable travels were to the cities of Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. We had never lived inside the old neighbourhoods of either of these cities. But my mother, who voluntarily attended an English medium high school, grew up for part of her pre-teen life in a very English part of Cape Town. And my older sister, after getting married, lived in an old part of Port Elizabeth for some years.

On occasion, I visited Durban, in Natal, and excepting the most unpleasantly humid summer weather, the old city had beautiful examples of Victorian architecture. Inland, Pietermaritzburg had even grander examples of Victorian influences. Today, lavish city gardens exist in all of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, Pietermaritzburg and even Pretoria and Johannesburg, created under British rule in years gone by.

Travelling to London puts much of the white history of South Africa into perspective. The origins are immediately clear. There is a sense of extended foundation, of knowing where some of the most important roots are based. It is a pilgrimage of sorts - my Jerusalem, if you will. Second to that stands Edinburgh, in honour of my Scottish great grandfather, George Wilson.

In October will happen another travel, destination London. It promises 9 days of sharing in modern Englishness, of recharging the cultural batteries with ingredients that are ever dwindling back home in the new SA. As my immediate roots are slowly getting extinguished by turning politcal and social circumstance at home, I am ever reaching further back towards my roots in Europe. As always, the experience will be both faintly familiar and surreal, a polite reminder that Britain is not my home.