The Map Is Not the Territory

My English Traits - Chapter 9

“It is the last achievement of the intelligence to get all of one’s life into one coherent scheme, and Kipps was only in a measure more aware of himself as a whole than is a tree.”

Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul, H.G. Wells, 1905

Disillusionment comes in many shades, shapes and flavours. For young people with high aspirations and higher hopes there is nothing more disappointing than discovering that the ideas they have about the world aren’t quite the same as the ideas the world has about them. Disillusionment, unfortunately, doesn’t always lead to self-knowledge. When the territory turns out to be nothing like the map we were given to navigate it, our instinct is to blame the territory, not the map.

Or, as the Belgian surrealist René Magritte put it, "…perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves."

In those youthful days in the white English-speaking regions of Natal, but especially in the Midlands, there were other farmers and townsfolk who believed themselves to be as English as my mother believed us to be. So I assumed from the bumper stickers on their Land Rovers that had the words “Last Outpost of the British Empire” emblazoned across the Union Jack.

Apparently there are die-hards who continue to display them even now, “bittereinders” as they’re called more descriptively in Afrikaans, determined to cling on to their cultural exceptionalism to the bitter end. But when once that slogan appeared to me to speak in bold defiance of the political hegemony of the Afrikaner and the iniquities of the apartheid state, it comes across today in tones of jingoistic conceit or, at best, of sentimental whimsy.

A handful of them, in fairness, were or are actually English, expatriates from Blighty fleeing the horrors of Wilsonian socialism or the dismal weather. They could be distinguished from the other locals with English pretensions by their authentic uniform of hound’s-tooth Barbour shooting jackets and tweed deerstalker hats from the House of Bruar.

I had mixed feelings about living in the last outpost of the British Empire. I spoke English, I thought in English, and all the books I loved were English books by English authors about English life and English mores. But feeling English somehow didn’t translate into feeling British.

My mother never called herself British. Sir Francis Drake was clearly English, not British. I wasn’t at all sure that I would ever want to be counted as British unless another war broke out and I was obliged to choose a side, in which case I would do what my father had done and sign up with the British on the unexamined assumption that they were the good guys.

Egypt, Italy and the Eastern Cape explained my father’s very British moustache.

I had acquired the idea from the following anecdote that the Eastern Cape, where my father grew up, veered in the direction of being British, while Natal, where my mother grew up, veered very definitely in the direction of being English.

The story went, in my mother’s telling of it, that when my father came back from the war he took his fiancée to meet his parents, driving her all the way from Durban to his family farm of Ossa in the wild region of ridges and valleys a hundred miles inland from Port Elizabeth. It was a long and gruelling journey through the barren tracts of the Transkei where sheep and goats wandered at leisure across hazardous dirt roads that led eventually to tortuous and precipitous passes through the mountain ranges that separated Ossa from civilization as my mother knew it.

When they arrived at last and the obligatory niceties were done, my mother enquired politely if she could have a nice warm bath before dinner. Her future mother-in-law gave her a look of imperious contempt and said, “Water for the bath is heated only on Thursdays.”

My father never tired of hearing it told. He would listen and beam with a bashful sort of pride, as though he saw in it the measure of how far she had raised him in the world.

But there was no doubting the severity of my mother’s disapproval, and it was from this that I took it that people who bathed only on Thursdays were well beyond the English pale, and by definition then, because it struck me that to bathe in cold water, or not at all, on other days of the week would have been a peculiarly British thing to do, that she had nothing but mute contempt for the habits of the British at large.

My mother had grown up in Durban, surely the most English of all the Empire’s colonial cities. My father had grown up in Dordrecht in the Stormberg Mountains, surely the least English of all of the districts occupied by the British settlers transported in 1820 to strengthen the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony against the neighbouring Xhosa peoples.

From these hand-me-down anecdotes, and from various hints, dark looks and unexpected turns of conversation over the evening ritual of pre-prandial cane and cokes or at the dinner table, I deduced that my father’s upbringing had given him dangerously British tendencies, but he’d given them up readily and unconditionally at the chance of marrying my mother — all except the moustache.

To the extent that I gave it any thought at all, the English seemed to me to be a softer, more domestic, more feminine version of the very masculine British. It was the British Empire, after all, not the English Empire, and its dominions would have been won over not by my mother’s English manners but by the brawn and bravado of men like my father. And he had a genuine 19th century 4-bore, black powder elephant gun to prove it.

It followed that I imagined England as a wider, greener, gentler version of New Dell, and Britain as a larger, rockier, wilder version of the world beyond its boundaries. Whether one contained the other, or whether all English people were British or all British people were English, I had few ways of knowing and less reasons to care.

Fourteen-year-old boys have enough identity issues to worry about without having to concern themselves with the perplexities of their cultural heritage. Mine, in the South African autumn of 1968, had nothing to do with being white or English or British or South African, and everything to do with rugby, a distressing plague of spots in the mirror, and Wendy Charlton-Perkins, not always in that order.

Now, as I summon what little intelligence I have left to make a coherent scheme of my life, it’s clear that, like Kipps, I was no more aware of myself “as a whole than is a tree”. And my world was the world-as-I-took-it-to-be.

Miss Cheeseman’s arrival at Estcourt High School coincides in my recollection of that time with a dim sense of something stirring in the world beyond the limits of my experience and understanding. It was as faint and fluctuating as the shortwave signal that broadcast the Hit Parade from Lourenço Marques on Sunday nights. It came in the scraps and fragments of thoughts and sounds and images that escaped the attention of the government censors; in the books and records that escaped the attentions of South African customs, smuggled in by older siblings and cousins, or open-minded aunts and uncles, returning from trips “overseas”.

It came in their stories, distributed downwards in ever more prurient whispers, suggesting an unprecedented loosening of manners and morals sweeping the world from Sweden to San Francisco; and in their intimations of a strange new politics of peace and love flooding the streets of Paris, Amsterdam and West Berlin.

The government couldn’t censor what they didn’t understand. They knew a nipple when they saw one. They recognised that peace and love were the twin pincers of the Marxist advance on western civilization. They banned Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da from the radio after identifying it as a clear invitation to drug-fuelled sexual experimentation. But anything more complex than the lyrics of The Monkees whooshed over their heads like blue cranes flying north.

So we found it in the liner notes of imported LPs; in the playground exchange of a grubby copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the cover art of Electric Ladyland; in wildly imaginative interpretations of the lyrics of the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel as they modulated from pleasant pop to something altogether more suggestive, subversive or sinister; in Mother’s Little Helper, in The Times They Are a-Changin’, in Mrs Robinson, in My Generation and I Can’t Explain, in Break On Through (To the Other Side).

I didn’t understand it any better than the censors did, but it spoke to me the way rain speaks to a desert.

So when I gathered from Miss Cheeseman that A.N. Boyce’s version of South African history was neither comprehensive nor definitive, and that the events of the past were as much a matter of opinion as of fact, and that Vietnam might not, after all, be a righteous war, and that the Rolling Stones weren’t necessarily unwitting puppets of Soviet aggrandisement; and when I heard it whispered that God was officially presumed dead on the 8th of April 1966 after having gone AWOL for four centuries, it felt as if the earth had come loose from its foundations, and it was rocking gently to the tune of Hey Jude.

Which poignant image of universal brotherhood would last as long as All You Need Is Love, that is, about three and a half minutes.

I am conscious that the real Miss Cheeseman, were she to stumble across these pages, might wish to deny that she was directly responsible for any of my adolescent revelations. For any suggestion of a slight on her integrity, professionalism, or personal dignity, I apologise unreservedly in advance. But whether she likes it or not, she stands alone in my memory as the adult who gave legitimacy to a suspicion that had first begun to trouble me in 1961, and which by 1968 had developed into a disturbance of pathologically paranoid proportions, viz., that I was the only person in the world stupid enough to believe anything anyone said.

It was a revelation as astonishing as it was embarrassing. It was the epistemic equivalent of discovering at the age of seventeen after a drunken party in the cow shed up the hill that I was the only virgin in Mooi River. As though a switch had been flicked in a darkened room, I went from questioning nothing to questioning everything.

The dictionary was no longer a reliable guide to meaning. A word that meant one thing yesterday meant another thing today. In a certain order, a few words could sound like a tender love poem; in a different order, the same few words could describe a colonoscopy. Suddenly, amazingly, alarmingly, and quite unexpectedly, words didn’t say what they meant.

I found myself listening for the meaning behind words; for the secret messages that hovered over them or beneath them; for the things they weren’t saying, for the thoughts they were displacing; for the meaning they didn’t want me to take from their meaning. The lines became less interesting than the blanks between them.

I had become as sceptical in an instant as Russians had learned to become after sixty years of Pravda. In the early 2000s, focus groups in Moscow were still wondering what we really meant when we said, “Have a break, have a Kit-Kat.”

The course of my life from 1968 to the present was determined then and there. I decided that if I was ever going to understand propaganda I would have to learn to make it myself.

My interest in persuading people to put their faith in fantasies led me eventually to a career in advertising, or actual propaganda as it’s called in Portugal and Brazil.

But I learned it at the feet of a master.

South Africans of my generation will remember him as the vile, unctuous, mean-spirited, small-minded, vituperative, and bigoted voice we heard every weekday night from the early seventies to the late eighties on the SABC’s “A” Programme before the evening news. Yes, the brilliant Cliff Saunders, master of the art of doublespeak, and apartheid’s most articulate apologist.

We weren’t on first name terms. I knew him only as a natty-dresser, handsome and charming, who flitted about the SABC newsroom in the early seventies like a stylish shadow, stopping now and then to whisper in the ears of the News Editors, one English, one Afrikaans, who sat at the far end of the long desks where lowly sub-editors like me bashed out government-approved paeans to the splendour of Namaqualand daisies.

In the absence of television, the internet, and foreign newspapers with a contrary point of view, Cliff was able to persuade even the most polite, tolerant, mild-mannered, even-handed, good-natured, fair-minded English-speaking white South Africans that for civilisation to survive and endure it had to be rooted in the strict separation of nations, tribes, and races. Just as nature ordained that different species grew to maturity in the habitats most congenial to their needs and their individual rates of development, so too, according to Cliff, should the affairs of nations be arranged to the advantage of all races, separately but equally, each according to its stage of development, and each according to its unique cultural aspirations. The bee and the butterfly coexisted peacefully to the mutual benefit of each, but the bee did not lie down with the butterfly, nor the butterfly with the bee.

Long before Farage, Trump and Le Pen, Cliff was making the identity politics of apartheid sound reasonable, logical, and perfectly fair. It’s a shame that the collected texts of his five-minute diatribes aren’t a matter of public record. Champions of “Nation First” and populists everywhere could do worse than take an instructive leaf or two out of them.

Like those of most of the characters who once bestrode the narrow world of apartheid like colossuses, the verifiable details of Cliff’s biography have disappeared in the digital ether. He pops up in the Guardian in February 2000, in an article that appears to be hiding more than it’s allowed to reveal. The essence of it is that Cliff had submitted a demand for £10,000 in unpaid expenses to the post-apartheid minister of intelligence, a gob-smacked Joe Nhlanhla, for work done “in London and South Africa” on behalf of the apartheid ministry of intelligence. If that isn’t bizarre enough, he pops up again— after sixteen years of radio silence — in an article in The Citizen where we find him weighing in on the side of the teachers at Pretoria Girls High who apparently called some pupils “monkeys” and “k****rs” for wearing their hair in afros. But by this time Cliff’s razor-like rhetorical skills appear to have gotten a little rusty from disuse because his sharpest contribution to the debate is to suggest that the girls with afros might want to comb their hair with rakes.

It’s almost impossible to write these stories without punctuating them with processions of astonished exclamation marks underlined in bold italics or putting “only in South Africa” in the place of them.

But being dismissive about the absurdity of people like Cliff was only viable until Trump was elected. It was then I realised that the sands of political debate had long since shifted from under the feet of politicians who stood on principle. Elections were being won and lost around the world precisely on the basis of which party could come up with the most stingingly stereotypical insults about the colour, culture, or couture most characteristic of the opposing party—and the lower, the viler, the baser and the more trivial the better. Cliff’s quip about the rakes is quintessential Steve Bannon. But I suspect the greater debt is owed by the latter to the former. Apartheid was never about principle or policy. It was a culture war won by the side with the basest and vilest insults.

Just one sample of Cliff at his Orwellian best turns up extant, but it’s beautifully representative of his contribution to the history of patriotic cant. Defending himself from the 2000 accusations made in the Guardian and elsewhere, Cliff is reported by the Afrikaans newspaper Rapport as saying: “My work, whoever it was done for, was meant to promote the welfare, stability and safety of the country.”

The first thing that struck me about this is that Cliff was too smart not to have known Albert Camus’ maxim: “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.”

The second was the chilling echo of it I heard in Boris Johnson’s speech at the Conservative Party Spring Conference in Blackpool just a few days ago:  “…I know that it’s the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. When the British people voted for Brexit, in such large, large numbers, I don’t believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. It’s because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself.”

I can’t help thinking Cliff Saunders would have made it sound more credible, that P.W. Botha would displayed better judgement, and that Ian Smith’s speech justifying Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence would have been more persuasive.

The third was the sudden realisation that this England was no longer my mother’s England, and this Britain was no longer my father’s Great Britain. Because I saw at once how staggeringly stupid I had been to impose my childhood maps of England and Britain onto the actual territories of England and Britain, all the while missing the blindingly obvious irony of it.

The map of the United Kingdom had become, in all of its ugly reality, the territory of my childhood South Africa.

Brexit was and is England’s apartheid. Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland were always only its Bantustans.

The English called it Brexit to blame it on the British. There is no such thing. The word British isn’t a designation of culture or geography. It’s a call to arms.

A Briton is an Englishman on a high horse, or an Englishwoman in high dudgeon. The British are the English wearing hobnail boots and brandishing bayonets at the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots until they join them.

When the English are content to be English they’re the most thoroughly decent, polite, tolerant, charming, mild-mannered, even-handed, good-natured, fair-minded people in the world. When the English start calling themselves British, it’s time to grab your most precious possessions and head for the hills.

“The Last Outpost of the British Empire” was never a protest against the hegemony of Afrikaner nationalism. It was a sigh of nostalgia for a time when the servitude of people unlike themselves was enforced, not by the inhuman laws of apartheid, but by polite, decent, mild-mannered, well-meaning, fair-minded, good-natured men with old-fashioned British values and elephant guns.

Thank you, Fiona.