Essex girl or jolly hockeysticks?

We’re having a culture day at the agency on Friday. Everyone is supposed to dress up and bring a plate of eats symbolising their cultural heritage. This is easy if you’re Indian, or Xhosa, or Italian. Or even Afrikaans.

But what about us English-speaking South Africans of somewhat mongrel origin, who no longer qualify for an ancestral UK visa and whose ties with the Empire are frayed at best? What do we do?

Take clothing, for instance. What on earth do I rock up in? What is “English”? Jodhpurs and a riding hat? Tweed? Tennis gear? Or, if we’re not going to indulge in the usual stereotyped jolly hockeysticks version of English culture, perhaps I should dress up as an Essex girl in white stilettos and a short skirt.

A prop might also help — a copy of Noddy or The Faraway Tree, perhaps, or a Little Britain DVD. The latest issue of Hello! magazine, specially flown out so that it might land on the shelves of Woolworths in time to feed the insatiable desire of Bryanston matrons for news of slaggish celebrities and twattish toffs.

As for food, do I bring in cucumber sandwiches? Yorkshire pudding? I’ve never eaten Yorkshire pudding in my life. Fish and chips? These days, the quintessential English dish is chicken tikka masala.

And are those things “my” culture in any real sense of the word? That’s the trouble with so-called English culture; in many ways it is generic. Everybody can lay claim to it, and nobody can. As a resident of the former colonies, what-what, I have far less claim to English culture than the average immigrant with a funny surname. I haven’t spent more than a few weeks in my ancestral land. I’ve never worked there, never been dismissed as a Saffer or a Puffer, never hung out at the Springbok Bar or longed for a King Steer burger. In many ways, my Anglophilia is ersatz, an attempt to compensate for my lack of affinity with the flaccid suburban conformity in which I grew up.

Now, if I were in another country I’d have plenty of options because I could claim all of South Africanness as my own. One’s own identity is so much easier to articulate when it is defined in marked contrast to others. I’d show up with biltong, morogo, koeksusters and a Springbok T-shirt cunningly accessorised with Ndebele tourist tat. A bottle of mampoer, perhaps, or a 2 litre Coke with Klippies gooied in. Maybe an empty pain tin filled with mageu. I’d walk around and accuse everyone else of being racist, when I wasn’t blikseming them.

That would be so much easier than having to come up with something 3/4 English, 1/4 Afrikaans, with a bit of French, Cornish and Scottish thrown in for good measure. Perhaps, in the end, I should stop worrying about dressing up or bringing food, and instead focus on the essence of Englishness: being polite, emotionally unavailable and filled with repressed anger, which I would then express through biting wit.

Goodness gracious — as it turns out, I am more than prepared for culture day already.