culture, and underestimated
their achievements. Nearly all Afrikaners,
moreover, continued to live and work in a rural environment,
whereas
most immigrants were townspeople.
Neither the Afrikaners nor the immigrants were homogeneous commu-
nities. Among the Afrikaners there were well-to-do people-long-estab-
lished wine farming families in the southwestern Cape Colony, wool farm-
ers in the Cape interior, and grain and cattle farmers in the republics-but
there were also increasingly numerous Afrikaners who owned no land,
were unequipped
to compete with white immigrants in the towns, and
were becoming known as Poor Whites. Among the nineteenth-century
immigrants,
those who settled in Southern Africa before 1870 did not
readily identify with the subsequent
rush of people to Kimberley and
Johannesburg. English-speaking lawyers, merchants, tradespeople, skilled
workers, and semiliterate proletarians jostled and competed among them-
selves and with immigrants from the Continent in the older towns-Cape
Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, and Pietermaritzburg-as
well as in the
mining cities. A few superrich mining magnates commuted between South-
ern Africa and England, where they made a splash in high society.
Although people of British origin were a majority among the Whites in