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.
我父母來自南非，以前，我們常?；啬戏侨タ赐抢锏挠H人。大約30年前的那個圣誕節，我們乘大巴從約翰內斯堡出發去一個野生動物園。大巴上其他所有乘客都是阿非利卡人(Afrikaner)：這些人都是大塊頭的白種人，穿著短褲，看上去很健康。他們中有一些人同姓，都有典型的荷蘭人長相，在周遭非洲的環境中十分顯眼，看上去應該屬于同一個種族。這些人的先輩大多是講荷蘭語的新教徒，幾百年前漂洋過海來到南非。我們曾經生活在荷蘭，所以要跟這些阿非利卡人說荷蘭語，他們則跟我們說阿非利卡語（Afrikaans，在南非使用的荷蘭語）。