African Affairs

The first thing you notice when you reach Cape Town by sea is not the famous Table Mountain towering behind it but a man-made tower in front labeled Samlam, the name of a big insurance corporation whose modern offices rear their heads in every major South African city. Samlam was founded, is financed and managed by South Africans whose mother-tongue is Afrikaans. It symbolizes the most significant development in the Republic in recent times: the final emergence of the Afrikaner people from the era of frontiersmen and covered wagons into the modern world of board rooms, stock markets and telephones.

Formerly they left all this sort of thing, which smacks of Mammon, to Jews and English-speaking Uitlanders. Now they have not only entered the field themselves but discovered, partly perhaps to their own surprise, that they can more than hold their own. Afrikaners have been governing and administering their country for twenty years; now they are advancing on the economic citadel and their country’s economy goes from strength to strength. They should be feeling full of confidence and outwardly they are. Yet Afrikanerdom is torn by doubts as perhaps never before.

EH

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Elspeth Huxley

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The first thing you notice when you reach Cape Town by sea is not the famous Table Mountain towering behind it but a man-made tower in front labeled Samlam, the name of a big insurance corporation whose modern offices rear their heads in every major South African city. Samlam was founded, is financed and managed by South Africans whose mother-tongue is Afrikaans. It symbolizes the most significant development in the Republic in recent times: the final emergence of the Afrikaner people from the era of frontiersmen and covered wagons into the modern world of board rooms, stock markets and telephones.

Formerly they left all this sort of thing, which smacks of Mammon, to Jews and English-speaking Uitlanders. Now they have not only entered the field themselves but discovered, partly perhaps to their own surprise, that they can more than hold their own. Afrikaners have been governing and administering their country for twenty years; now they are advancing on the economic citadel and their country’s economy goes from strength to strength. They should be feeling full of confidence and outwardly they are. Yet Afrikanerdom is torn by doubts as perhaps never before.