Migration, Space and Transnational Identities

The British in South Africa

D. Conway, P. Leonard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349344796
  9780230346574
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137319135
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Twenty years after the post-apartheid Government took office, this timely text interrogates the extent to which the attitudes, identities and everyday lives of British people have changed in accordance with the 'new' South Africa. New ethnographic research is drawn upon to explore important questions of mobility, locality and identity.

1

The British in South Africa: Continuity or Change?

‘But what exactly do you mean by “The British in South Africa”?’ Pauline was asked on a hot summer’s afternoon in the garden of Claudia’s London house in 2010. Now in her 80s, Claudia was born in South Africa and had grown up in the province then known as Natal (now Kwazulu-Natal). Of British ancestry, she identifies as ‘white South African’, and remembers being advised by the passport office of the new National Party government of 1948 that she should relinquish her British passport if she wished to remain a South African citizen. Although she subsequently came to live in the United Kingdom for most of her adult life, she has continued to make regular visits to the house in which she had lived as a child, in the leafy suburbs of Pietermaritzburg, and still feels that she is, first and foremost, South African. She maintains good contact with her neighbours, an eclectic mixture of white South Africans, Afrikaners¹, British, and mixed heritage Europeans. Many have histories of South African residence spanning several generations, while others have arrived relatively recently, due to the various assisted passage schemes of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, which encouraged and eased white immigration. ‘I’m not sure the term has any meaning anymore,’ Claudia continued. ‘We are all just “white”’.

While Claudia may question the salience of nationality, the fact that she chooses to categorise herself as white underscores the ongoing and powerful position of race in the construction of individual identities in South Africa (Distiller and Steyn, 2004). The historical, political and social reasons underlying this distinguish South Africa as a distinctive context within transnational migration flows. Its history of colonial settlement, white minority government, the racially-based socio-economic and political system known as apartheid (literally meaning ‘apartness’/‘separateness’) and ‘whites-only’ immigration policies mean that being white and English-speaking have long had political and social significance within white society in South Africa. For those whites with British connections, South Africa’s chequered colonial past provides a controversial legacy. White British migrants were important for apartheid, and white British settlers were thus often accused of supporting the regime, while much of the rest of the world was indicating its antipathy by subjecting South Africa to a variety of sanctions and boycotts.

With the ending of apartheid and the succession to power of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1994, a new ‘Rainbow Nation’ was conceptualised. While this discourse can be accused of masking complexity through oversimplification (Nuttall and Michael, 2000), nonetheless the changing multicultural context means that ‘whites’, including British migrants, have to rethink and reconstruct their identities, relations, performances and attitudes. As Claudia indicates, being ‘white’ is still very much part of the grammar of South Africa and remains a key marker of identity, even though it ‘just isn’t what it used to be’ (Steyn, 2001).

Yet the representation and imagination of South Africa should not be reduced to the inherited structures of its separatist, apartheid past (Distiller and Steyn, 2004). Albeit in uneven and contested ways, it is a country of plurivocal and multi-layered interpretations, transformations and possibilities (Tomlinson et al., 2003). For the British, while South Africa may present a more complex context than some other popular migratory destinations such as, say, France or Spain, it continues to be an attractive location and the number of migrants is significant: there are an estimated 219,000 British expatriates in South Africa (higher than the number resident in Germany and only slightly less than in New Zealand; Finch et al., 2010). In addition, South Africa has a booming tourist industry, which sees more British visitors to the country than any other group outside of Africa (Laing, 2013). At peak season, there are almost 60,000 British tourists in the country and almost half a million visit each year. Furthermore, with its ‘retirement visa’ scheme, South Africa is a top 10 destination for British retirees (Finch et al., 2010).

Yet despite these long-established and noteworthy links, South Africa has been surprisingly underresearched in the academic literature on British privileged and lifestyle migration. The reasons for this include the fact that ‘in social science research and teaching, the Global South remains a marginal, residual and generalised category’ (Williams et al., 2009, p. 1). South Africa occupies a somewhat ambivalent position within the North/South dichotomy; its white communities in particular share elements of the North, yet it also has many features in common with the South. It is still in the process of emerging as a developed economy, as exemplified by its inclusion in 2010 as a developing industrialised economy in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) classification, although as yet, its growth rates are lower than Brazil, India or China.

This may in part explain the lack of research interest by ‘privileged’ migration studies in the North, which have tended, to focus on other Westernised/developed contexts. Further, South Africa’s history as a one-time political outcast may be an additional reason it has been somewhat avoided by academics in the North. One of our motivations for writing this book, therefore, is to rise to Williams et al.’s (2009) challenge of readjusting the research lens. By making an addition to the rich scholarship on South Africa already existing within that country, not least on the question of changing white identities, we hope to contribute to the communication of some of the diversity and complexity of South Africa.

A second motivation arises from the fact that while until the mid-twentieth century the great majority of English-speaking white people in South Africa were of British origin or descent, and as a group dominated nineteenth-century South Africa politically, they have rather fallen out of the focus of recent research (Lambert, 2009). In 1929, William Macmillan published ‘Bantu, Boer and Briton: The Making of the South African Native Problem’ which firmly placed ‘The Briton’ as one of the three key ethnic groups in South Africa and a critical player in the evolution of ‘the native problem’. As the historical standard for many years, Macmillan’s work centralised British people within the construction of South Africa’s history. However, by the 1950s, John Bond described the British as ‘an unknown people’ (1956, p. 1), and in the 1970s, Butler suggested that any earlier British sentiment had been ‘burned out’ (1976, p. 13). Further, Garson (1976) claimed that British identification had been abandoned such that they were now merely part of a broader group of ‘WESSAs’, White English-Speaking South Africans, that was still developing an identity (cited in Salusbury and Foster, 2004, p. 95).

As such, in the contemporary context, can the British be considered an identifiable ‘group’ at all? Indeed, both of us have received substantial critique from other academics about the topic of this book: ‘There is no such group as “The British in South Africa”’, it has been claimed. In the light of this, and Claudia’s uncertainty, the question of whether the British in South Africa even have a recognisable identity seems worth pursuing. Further, this potentially ephemeral quality of a British identity problematises the claim made in a recent British think-tank report that the global phenomenon of outward British migration has a progressive and significant ideological and socio-economic impact on the societies where contemporary Britons migrate (Finch et al., 2010).

A third motivation springs from our own personal experiences of being white and ‘British in South Africa’. Despite Claudia’s ambivalence, from our own engagements and relationships with South Africa, we both feel the term ‘British’ does have traction. Pauline’s story is intersected by both colonialism and gender to reveal the complexities and ambiguities of privilege and nation. When she was a child, her father, John, made regular trips to Tanzania, invited through the country’s historical links with the United Kingdom for his ‘expert’ assistance with the training of its teachers. A geographer by discipline, he always returned from his trips with wonderful photographs of the people and landscape and, from a child’s perspective, exciting travel stories and intriguing, intricate artefacts.

Pauline longed to visit South Africa, and as an adult, she has been able to establish an ongoing relationship with the country, first through her partner, Guy, a third generation Zimbabwean, whose schoolteacher grandfather had emigrated in the 1930s to teach the children of the white British prospectors, farmers, engineers, navvies and administrators building the new Rhodesia. Originally settling in Southern Rhodesia, the family later moved to Northern Rhodesia. Some years after the country’s move to independence and the creation of Zambia in 1963, Guy’s father, Bill, now also a head teacher, received a letter from the newly formed Government saying his services were no longer required. The choice was to move to South Africa or return home to the United Kingdom. Disliking the apartheid state, the family chose the latter course, although Bill’s qualifications and work experience were derogated by the British educational system, and he had to return to the bottom of the career ladder at the probationary teacher level. However, ongoing connections with those British relatives who did decide to move to South Africa, as well as the fact that much of Guy’s career has been in that country, have meant that Pauline, Guy and their children have all spent considerable time there over the years, developing a deep familiarity and a great sense of attachment with its people and landscapes. In time, Pauline’s own relationship with South Africa has been further developed through her own research and teaching.

Daniel lived in South Africa in the early to mid-2000s while studying for his PhD and lecturing at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape Province. His interest in the country was also inspired by his family’s experiences of living there, which, like many other British migrant families, are deeply implicated in the interrelated historical and socio-political relationship between South Africa and the United Kingdom. Daniel’s father, also called John, had been one of the many thousands of British emigrants to use the assisted passage scheme in the late 1960s; as an engineer, he and his colleagues were ‘headhunted’ by a South African company when the firm they worked for went into liquidation.

Daniel’s mother, Sandra, went to South Africa with a group of female friends, intending to live there for a year or so. She had chosen South Africa because of the stories her father had told about the country while he was stationed there for a period during the Second World War, as well as the fact that it was easier to obtain a visa than for continental Europe. Daniel’s parents met and married and lived in South Africa for five years, returning to Britain in 1975 due to a combination of homesickness and concern with the country’s politics and future.

In the early 2000s, many of Daniel’s peers at Rhodes University had British parents or grandparents, had already spent a gap year in the United Kingdom, or were British born. ‘Britishness’ was a salient identity, distinct, albeit interrelated, from the broader English-speaking white identity that both Rhodes and Grahamstown had a long association with. Yet it was also problematic and contentious; parents of students at Rhodes were often open about wanting their children to leave the country upon graduation, and British residents could appear deeply dislocated in the rapidly changing politics of the country. The university’s ‘Britishness’ was also embodied through its many British staff, its heritage and its claims to a particular British form of education, but this was becoming increasingly controversial and appeared racist in the broader context.² The lived reality of this was also complex: the British traditions of the university and the presumed universality of academic practices were not matched by the experience. In everday life boundaries were fluid, and behaviours that would be considered unprofessional in a British context were sometimes latently tolerated. Although a fascinating country in which to study politics and society, the complexities of this academic and social context led to Daniel’s decision to return to the United Kingdom.

The continued attachment of those in South Africa of British ancestry to some of the cultural trappings of home, in spite of the dramatic political and social changes marking their country of residence, was an interesting topic of conversation when Daniel and Pauline first met at a Worldwide Universities Network ‘White Spaces’ Conference in 2009. To what extent, we wondered, were the lives of the white British migrants changing and adapting in relation to the democratic, post-apartheid regime 15 years later? What impact has this had on them socially and economically? How is this articulated on the ground, in terms of their daily practices and the spaces and places in which these are conducted? And how is this affecting their senses of (national) identity and the nature of their engagement with, and contribution to, both South Africa and Britain? Are they, for example, ceasing to self-identify as British and, like Claudia, positioning themselves within the catchall category of ‘South African white’? And indeed, if the meanings of whiteness have shifted in the new, supposedly ‘post-racial’ South Africa, what does ‘whiteness’ now mean for the British in contemporary South Africa (Steyn, 2001)? It was through these questions of migration, space and transnational identities that our research project was conceived.

However, Claudia’s ambivalence about the existence of a ‘British’ identity meant that it was with some initial trepidation that we posted a feature on our proposed research on ‘The British in South Africa’ in the Telegraph Weekly World Edition newspaper and the Daily Telegraph online in the summer of 2010 (Conway, 26 July 2010). This article was also featured on the Telegraph’s expat website and was reposted in a number of other expatriate and other online forums. The FIFA World Cup, hosted by South Africa, was in full swing, although England had just lost their place in the tournament. In our article, we explained that we were about to embark on a funded project³ to explore the lives of British-born expatriates in South Africa and how they relate both to the dynamic country around them and their former home. We were particularly interested in the expat’s sense of change, and how they were experiencing the post-apartheid state. We wrote that we were looking to talk to British residents living in either Cape Town or Johannesburg, and anyone interested in participating in the research was invited to make contact with us.

By midday, our email inboxes were bursting! Messages were pouring in from people identifying as British, some simply insisting that we interview them, others demanding to know why we weren’t also coming to the Eastern Cape, Kwazulu-Natal and so forth. The respondents were an eclectic mixture of people who had lived in the country for many years since the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, as well as those who had moved there more recently, post-apartheid. Some were working and emailing us from their work addresses, others were retired or non-working partners. For all this diversity, it was clear that we had touched a nerve: a good many people wanted to talk about their experiences as British-born residents in South Africa.

Researchers interested in the British in Australia have also experienced enthusiastic responses to requests for interview. Wills believed this was because ‘many of them were ready to tell their stories as British migrants – as part of the multicultural story of Australia – but with no particular sense of their claim to now be telling the national story in Australia’ (2010, p. 233). This desire to tell one’s own story in relation to South Africa’s national narrative was certainly present in our sample. It was not just that the British had been ‘invisible migrants’, as they had in post-war Australia (Hammerton and Thomson, 2005, p. 9), but that many felt ignored by popular and academic understandings of international migration, and misrepresented as having complicity in apartheid and perceptions of ongoing colonial privilege. For some, there was a further sense that South Africa itself was neglected and stereotyped incorrectly in the international imagination. In addition, for some of the older residents, there was also anger against the United Kingdom, which they felt discriminated against them through the freezing of their pension rights (a policy not applied to British residents in other territories, such as Spain).

There were also certain and troubling expectations of us as researchers: that we automatically understood and agreed with their perspectives, that we would help publicise and end the pensions issue and even that we could help return a town bell taken by British forces during the Boer War! Over the years since the article first appeared, we have continued to receive emails from people keen to be involved. For a multiplicity of reasons, this is a group of transnational migrants who want their voices heard.

Migration, space and transnational identities

This book’s interest in migration and transnational identities in the dynamic context of South Africa situates itself across a range of contemporary theoretical and empirical literatures. Our position in relation to these is discussed fully in Chapter 3, but here we will give a brief outline in order to contextualise the research on which this book is based. First, it draws on the broader contemporary literature on ‘privileged migrants’, whether due to professional, career and/or lifestyle motivations. ‘Privileged’ is a clearly relative term, and it refers to more than the movements of an exclusive, highly mobile and wealthy ‘transnational elite’ (Sklair, 2001). Rather, it is a broader concept, incorporating a range of spatial mobilities undertaken by people with diverse backgrounds. While these are primarily displacements undertaken voluntarily by relatively affluent, middle-class and largely professional people who have the necessary resources – money, time and credentials – to decide to live in a country other than that of their birth (Amit, 2011), the class and occupational backgrounds of privileged migrants are by no means fixed. In certain contexts, such as Australia and South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, (white) working-class people were also welcomed with attractive work opportunities and promises of social and economic mobility (Hammerton and Thomson, 2005; Elder, 2007). In this way, South Africa has, at certain stages in its recent history, gladly admitted white British migrants to fulfil both manual and non-manual occupations. Through this migration policy, a diverse group were brought together to enjoy a new, advantaged lifestyle (Peberdy, 2008).

While it is often difficult to disentangle the exact reasons that push such people to migrate, there is a growing body of work that aims to interrogate the expectations, aspirations and experiences of a group that has the agency and power to choose to leave their established homes and lives for a new spatial context (Leonard, 2010; Fechter and Walsh, 2012). The aim here is to provide comparative detail to the broad church of international migration studies, encompassing as it does the displacements of refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented ‘illegals’, retired sun-worshippers, gap year and foreign exchange students, and unskilled, semi-skilled and highly skilled labour.

International migration of all these types is intrinsic to global capitalism, yet the fractured politics of national borders and the multifarious demands of multinational corporations, labour markets and transnational finance mean that the social, economic and cultural capital of this global traffic is multiply striated (Braziel, 2008). In order to understand the granularity of these differences, we need to know about the lives and experiences of all migrants – from those more privileged at the top of the spectrum to those at the lower end. As Avtar Brah argues, ‘the question is not simply about who travels, but when, how and under what circumstances?’ (1996, p. 182). Much of the existing research suggests that, for the former group, geographical shifts are usually imagined to be part of a transformative quest to improve their quality of life – within their work and careers (They are often referred to as ‘professional migrants’), through environmental factors such as better weather, food, culture and accommodation (‘lifestyle migrants’), or a complex mixture of all...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The British in South Africa: Continuity or Change?
• 2  The Historical, Political and Social Dynamics of British Migration to South Africa
• 3  Transnational and Translocal Identities: Settling in South Africa
• 4  Space and Place in South Africa
• 5  Landscapes of Belonging: Negotiating Britishness in South Africa
• 6  The Landscapes of Un/belonging in South Africa
• 7  Narratives of Continuity and Change: British Social and Political Attitudes in South Africa
• 8  The British in South Africa: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index