Can I ever be English?

There was a phrase in Southern Africa – “pass for white” – applied to “Coloured” (Eurafrican or Eurasian) people who were light-skinned enough to pretend to be Europeans in apartheid society.  Which gave them a lot of advantages.  (It also meant they found they did not have to show a “pass”, or permit, but that’s a side issue.)  And it was a precarious existence in the longer term, particularly if you cohabited with a white and produced what we charmingly called a “throwback”, a child no longer quite light-skinned enough to pass.  Silly, really, because all the main proponents of apartheid had a little bit of black blood in their veins, just as Englishmen can boast varying amounts of Celt or Neanderthal. 

It was even tougher if you were middle class (here the term is used as a slur) – as with a lot of superficial anxieties.  Though the class structure was less pronounced than it was in European countries, being overridden by race, there was still of course a class hierarchy. 

Anyway, this is merely a long introduction to my claim that in Britain today I can pass for English.  I have to be a bit careful about my accent in the South (many Northerners cannot distinguish between a Rhodesian accent a strangulated toff’s).  Accent aficionados, of whom there are many, for the English are obsessed with accent, sometimes pinpoint me to Zimbabwe; others think I may be a New Zealander, for New Zealanders swallow their “e”s, too.  Plenty of folk cannot place me at all and if they are charitable souls may even default me to high-born.  In fact, strangers have occasionally assumed I have an entrance hall forty feet long.  Very flattering.

But eventually they sense there is something wrong.  I am deficient in an essential characteristic of the English, and that is a coating of impermeable complacency.  No migrant exhibits complacency.  And if I do find myself getting on with an English person it is probably because they have a dodgy CV – lived five years in Nigeria, an aunt married a Sri Lankan, caught cholera in Venezuela, something like that.

It is hard to avoid topics that will reveal my defect.  Sport?  I cannot stick to football, because I know nothing about it and only found out yesterday that it is what I used to call “soccer”, an excitable game played in Salisbury (Harare) by Africans.  In motor racing circles I can get by for slightly longer.  I know no cyclists.  As for politics and religion and sex: if I want a fight I can talk about them, but we’ll surely end up at cross-purposes.