South Africans Only

When George VI of England went for a swim during a 1947 state visit to South Africa, he bequeathed his title to Port Elizabeth's most popular strand. As a teenager in the late 1960s, I didn't know this when King's Beach—a surfers' hangout—became my favorite haunt. What I cared about was the huge, perfect waves delivered by the Indian Ocean when a light west wind brushed a big south swell.

The beach still bears its royal name, and the waves still roll in impressively. But almost everything else about the place has changed. In the mid-1980s the beach's WHITES ONLY signs began to disappear, along with all the other signs—COLOUREDS ONLY, INDIANS ONLY, MALAYS ONLY, BLACKS ONLY—that apportioned the coast. More recently the post-apartheid mélange of bathers has been joined by the so-called makwerekwere , who have brought to King's Beach a diversity of Babelonian proportions.

" Makwerekwere ," a derogatory neologism for "foreigners," has entered South African speech during the past few years. The word is supposedly onomatopoeic. The Greeks dubbed foreigners "barbarians" because, to Greek ears, they brayed " bar , bar " in unintelligible tongues; South Africans claim to hear " kwere , ... // 81% Remaining