| Abstract: | This article is part of a wider project, the writing of a biography of South Africans of British origin or descent. As a group, they have been neglected in South African historiography and the article traces the evolution of their identity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, placing it in the context of studies both in South Africa and elsewhere in the Anglophone world on Britishness and also of studies on South Africanism. While acknowledging that there were a variety of British identities in South Africa, the article distinguishes the emergence of a hegemonic identity and teases out characteristics common to most of the group. The article concludes with an examination of how British, or, as they became known in the twentieth century, English-speaking South Africans, reacted to the changes taking place in the country since first 1948, and then 1994. |
