Diary: J. M. Coetzee, (1) Mother Tongue

A writer who made his name writing in English tries to leave it behind

Robert Fludd, from Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (1617)

In conversation with Mariana Dimópulos

In my case, descended from Germanized Poles on my mother’s side and Dutch-speaking settlers in South Africa on my father’s, I grew up in Cape Town in an environment where English—the master tongue—seemed to be the way of the future, and an English-language education the best way of ensuring that a child would prosper. Both of my parents had their schooling in English, and learned to read and write English better than they read or wrote Afrikaans.

The language of schooling remained an intensely political issue. By the time I arrived on the scene in the 1940s, the reactionary Afrikaner nationalist movement was on the point of taking over political power. The current that had borne so many Afrikaans speakers into anglophony began to be reversed; and a cohort of children like myself was left stranded, at home neither among the Afrikaner-nationalist majority nor among the suddenly powerless Anglo minority.

The phenomenon of which I was an instance—the child who masters the English language but is not a member of the Anglo culture—was not uncommon across British colonies in Africa and Asia. As British control weakened and withdrew after 1945, significant minorities were left behind: middle-class “natives” who, attracted by the material advancement promised by British-dominated commerce and government, had done their best to anglicize themselves. Even in their isolated position in the newly independent nations, such minorities continued to feel they belonged to a worldwide Anglo culture, whose center was perhaps now the United States rather than Britain.