Englishness
To John Matshika. When I read your piece about how disconcerting you found it to be at Aardklop, I remembered the time I was in Burkina Faso with an English colleague. It was his first visit to Africa, and (for the first few days at least) he was at least as disconcerted and intimidated as you were at Aardklop.
He could not distinguish the various individuals we were working with - they all seemed to scare him, even though they were not making any attempt whatsoever to be intimidating.
Which is funny, because you have very much in common - the way you express yourself, your sense of humour, everything that is discernable about you from your writing, seems English. I guess the English just have a problem with non-Englishness.
