Though his surname is Afrikaans, though his father is more Afrikaans than English, though he himself speaks Afrikaans without any English accent, he could not pass for a moment as an Afrikaner. The range of Afrikaans he commands is thin and bodiless; there is a whole dense world of slang and allusion commanded by real Afrikaans boys—of which obscenity is only a part—to which he has no access. There is a manner that Afrikaners have in common too—a surliness, an intransigence, and, not far behind it, a threat of physical force (he thinks of them as rhinoceroses, huge, lumbering, strong-sinewed, thudding against each other as they pass)—that he does not share and in fact shrinks from. They wield their language like a club against their enemies.
J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood (1997), 124
A digital form of the sadly lost fashion for copying out memorable passages from texts. I kept losing my actual book.
Showing posts with label South Africa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label South Africa. Show all posts
Saturday, 4 July 2026
Saturday, 12 May 2018
Once upon a time, Amla would have been the player required to leave his homeland
Once upon a time, Amla would have been the player required to leave his homeland to realise his potential and live out his dreams. It would have been the destiny of Pietersen, with his expensive Pietermaritzburg education and his apparently inviolable sense of self-certainty, to wear the national cap
B. Carpenter, 'South African Time', L. Booth (ed.), Wisden Cricketers' (2013), 116
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