I thought England was my fatherland because English was my mother tongue.

Then I lived there.

My English Traits is the consequence. Written in London between 2017 and the present, it tells the unfinished story of the attempt by my white English-speaking South African self to discover what his actual South African self would be left with if all its white Englishness were taken out of it.

While it touches on the events of the fraught years that followed the Brexit referendum, it is less political than personal. It is less of a commentary on the peculiarities of the English than a collection of the confessions my peculiarly English self was obliged to make to the wide-eyed Sarf Efrikin I’d forgotten I was. As such, it is less of an autobiography than an auto-da-fé, a self-evisceration of the colonial prides and prejudices that made me think I was English to begin with.

Some of these chapters were published as stand-alone blogs at the time of writing. They have since been revised and supplemented to make the book My English Traits will become when I have nothing left to confess. So while many of the earlier chapters can still be read as individual essays, I would encourage readers who are curious to know how and why I worked myself into such a frenzied froth of outrage in the penultimate chapters to start at the beginning and read to the end. Or to what might be the end.

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Fair play, remember.

Gordon Torr