ABSTRACT
I have a cousin who worked in London as a hairdresser for a number of years. When I attended the Translation Studies Research Summer School at University College of London in 2007, we had lunch together. Inevitably, the discussion veered towards his and my experience of London/England. Being Afrikaans-speaking, and having had the horrors of the Anglo-Boer War impressed on me from an early age, one of my experiences while walking the streets of the city center of London was the following. Noticing the age of buildings and the advanced level of civilization that England must have had while South Africa was still "in the bush", I was wondering why the English, who seemingly had it all, felt the treed to come to Africa to oppress and pillage other peoples who had much less. When I voiced this naive observation, my cousin told me the following story. One day, at their hair dressing salon in an up-market part of London, a fellow South African colleague of his tended to an English lady's hair. All the while, she was complaining about all the foreigners in London: Polish, Pakistanis, Chinese, Russians, Hungarians, Nigerians, Somalis, etc. The woman claimed that these foreigners were taking all the jobs, running all the shops and disadvantaging the English. At a point in the conversation, the colleague responded: Lady, for centuries your country pillaged and ravaged the world, taking gold and diamonds and labor as much as you needed. Now, it's payback time!!
