My parents come from South Africa, and we often used to go back on family visits. One Christmas about 30 years ago we left Johannesburg on a bus trip to a safari park. All the other people in the bus were Afrikaners: big healthy white families in shorts. With their handful of surnames, and heavy Dutch faces utterly distinct from their African surroundings, they were a tribe. Their forefathers had been the mostly Dutch-speaking Protestants who had come to South Africa over the centuries. We lived in the Netherlands, so we spoke Dutch to the Afrikaners, and they spoke Afrikaans back.
我父母来自南非，以前，我们常常回南非去看望那里的亲人。大约30年前的那个圣诞节，我们乘大巴从约翰内斯堡出发去一个野生动物园。大巴上其他所有乘客都是阿非利卡人(Afrikaner)：这些人都是大块头的白种人，穿着短裤，看上去很健康。他们中有一些人同姓，都有典型的荷兰人长相，在周遭非洲的环境中十分显眼，看上去应该属于同一个种族。这些人的先辈大多是讲荷兰语的新教徒，几百年前漂洋过海来到南非。我们曾经生活在荷兰，所以要跟这些阿非利卡人说荷兰语，他们则跟我们说阿非利卡语（Afrikaans，在南非使用的荷兰语）。