Mohamed Adhikari

Hope, Fear, Shame, Frustration: Continuity and Change in the Expression of Coloured Identity in White Supremacist South Africa, 1910–1994

This article seeks to explain the basic impulses behind coloured exclusivity in white supremacist South Africa and to elaborate on continuity and change in the processes of coloured self-definition by identifying the core attributes of coloured identity and outlining the ways in which they operated to reinforce and reproduce that identity. The central argument is that coloured identity is better understood not as having evolved through a series of transformations, as conventional historical thinking would have it and as the existing literature assumes, but as having remained remarkably stable throughout the era of white rule. It is argued that this stability derived from a core of enduring characteristics that informed the manner in which colouredness functioned as an identity during this period. This is not to contend that coloured identity was static or that it lacked fluidity, but that there were both important constraints on the ways in which it was able to find expression and sufficiently strong continuities in its day-to-day functioning for coloured identity to have remained recognisably uniform despite radical changes in the social and political landscape during this time. The principal constituents of this stable core are the assimilationism of the coloured people, which spurred hopes of future acceptance into the dominant society; their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, which generated fears that they might lose their position of relative privilege and be relegated to the status of Africans; the negative connotations, especially the shame attached to racial hybridity, with which colouredness was imbued; and finally, the marginality of the coloured community, which severely limited their options for social and political action, giving rise to a great deal of frustration.

‘God Made the White Man, God Made the Black Man…’: Popular Racial Stereotyping of Coloured People in Apartheid South Africa

Extracted from text ... 1. See, for example, W.M. MacMillan, The Cape Colour Question: A Historical Survey (Cape Town, 1968; originally London, 1927)); H.P. Cruse, Die Opheffing van die Kleurlingbevolking: Deel I Aanvangsjare, 1652-1795 (Stellenbosch, 1947); J.S. Marais, The Cape Coloured People, 1652-1937 (Johannesburg, 1968; originally London, 1939); A.J. Venter, Coloured: A Profile of Two Million South Africans (Cape Town, 1974). Even those works sympathetic to Coloured people help sustain racial stereotyping by working within a racialised paradigm. 2. M. Hommel, Capricorn Blues: The Struggle for Human Rights in South Africa (Toronto, 1981); R. van der Ross, The Rise and Decline of Apartheid: A ..

‘Not Black Enough’: Changing Expressions of Coloured Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa

I have argued elsewhere at great length that Coloured identity was remarkably stable and experienced relatively little fundamental change in the way it functioned as a social identity throughout that period of white supremacist rule from the formation of the South African state through to the ending of apartheid) Expressions of Coloured identity have, in contrast, undergone rapid transformation in the post-apartheid environment. The past decade has been a time of flux and unprecedented change in the way Colouredness has operated, and indeed, has needed to operate as a social identity. Not only has the new democratic dispensation brought with it a degree of freedom of association and possibilities for ethnic mobilisation inconceivable under white domination, but it has also undermined, even invalidated, some of the most basic assumptions and practices that had underpinned Coloured identity from the time it had crystallised in the late nineteenth century. And with the racial hierarchy that had regulated social relations in white-ruled South Africa having broken down in important respects, intergroup relations have become more complex and expressions of social identity more fluid. While this has, on the one hand, compounded the confusion and controversy that have dogged the identity in recent decades, it has also opened up opportunities for new ways of conceptualising Colouredness and brought forth more varied and creative responses to questions about the nature of Coloured identity and its role in South African society. It is thus not surprising that the new

A total extinction confidently hoped for: the destruction of Cape San society under Dutch colonial rule, 1700–1795

San (Bushman) society in the Cape Colony was almost completely annihilated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of land confiscation, massacre, forced labour and cultural suppression that accompanied colonial rule. Whereas similar obliterations of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world have resulted in major public controversies and heated debate amongst academics about the genocidal nature of these episodes, in South Africa the issue has effectively been ignored aside from passing, often polemical, references to it as genocide. Even recent studies that have approached the mass killing of the Cape San with sensitivity and insight do not address it as a case of genocide. This article sets out to redress this imbalance in part by analysing the dynamic of frontier conflict between San and settler under Dutch colonial rule as genocide. It demonstrates both the exterminatory intent underlying settler violence as well as the complicity of a weak colonial state in these depredations, including its sanctioning of the root-and-branch eradication of the San.

‘THE PRODUCT OF CIVILIZATION IN ITS MOST REPELLENT MANIFESTATION’: AMBIGUITIES IN THE RACIAL PERCEPTIONS OF THE APO (AFRICAN POLITICAL ORGANIZATION), 1909–23

Historical writing on the coloured community of South Africa has tended to accept coloured identity as given and to portray it as fixed. The failure to take cognizance of the fluidity of coloured self-definition and the ambiguities inherent to the process has resulted in South African historiography presenting an over-simplified image of the phenomenon. The problem stems partly from an almost exclusive focus on coloured protest politics which has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance of coloureds to white supremacism and largely ignoring their accommodation with the South African racial system. Furthermore, little consideration has been given to the role that coloured people themselves have played in the making of their own identity or to the manner in which this process of self-definition shaped political consciousness. This is particularly true of analyses of the period following the inauguration of the Union of South Africa in 1910, a time when the legitimacy of coloured identity was not in any way questioned within the coloured community and when coloured protest politics was dominated by one body, the African Political Organization (APO).

From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-Modernist Re-Imagining: Toward a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa

Abstract This article traces changing interpretations of the nature of Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured community in South Africa in both popular thinking as well as the academy. It explores some of the main contestations that have arisen between rival schools of thought, particularly their stance on the popular perception that Colouredness is an inherent racial condition derived from miscegenation. This essay identifies four distinct paradigms in historical writing on the Coloured people. Firstly, there is the essentialist school which regards Colouredness as a product of miscegenation and represents the conventional understanding of the identity. Secondly, instrumentalists view Coloured identity as an artificial creation of the white ruling class who used it as a ploy to divide and rule the black majority. This explanation, which first emerged in academic writing in the early 1980s, held sway in anti-apartheid circles. Opposing these interpretations are what may be termed the social constructionists who from the early 1990s stressed the complexities of identity formation and the agency of Coloured people in the making of their own identities. Most recently the rudiments of a fourth approach, of applying postmodern theory, especially the concept of creolisation, to Coloured identity have appeared.

Fiercely Non-Racial? Discourses and Politics of Race in the Non-European Unity Movement, 1943–70

The Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), founded in Bloemfontein in December 1943 as an organisation for national liberation by activists within the ‘Trotskyist’ tradition of the South African left, has built up a formidable reputation for its uncompromising stand on non-racism. Its puritanical insistence on the principle of non-racism has become one of the hallmarks of its discourse and political philosophy. The current literature accepts this non-racism as given and typically describes the NEUM as always having been ‘fiercely non-racial’ or having had an ‘abiding commitment to non-racialism’. By contrast, this article argues that non-racism had not always been a central tenet of the organisation but that it became much more self-conscious and politically correct about its discourse around issues of race only from the early 1960s onwards. Generalised assertions that the NEUM was non-racist reflect neither the intricacies of its ideology and political strategy nor changes in its priorities. They ignore the very considerable concessions the organisation made to various forms of racial thinking and racial identities within its constituency and disregard its own lapses into racial thinking in unguarded moments. By scrutinising the ideological and political, as well as the day-to-day, discourses within the NEUM and tracing its elevation of non-racism to a matter of high principle, this article demonstrates that attitudes toward race within the organisation, especially towards Coloured identity, were far more complex and pragmatic than hitherto suggested by commentators.

From Manenberg to Soweto: race and coloured identity in the black consciousness poetry of James Matthews

The Black Consciousness poetry of James Matthews, internationally recognised Coloured writer from the Cape Flats, reflects the growing popularisation amongst politicised Coloured people during the 1970s of the idea that racial distinctions in general, and Coloured identity in particular, had historically been used by the white supremacist establishment to divide and rule the black majority. This insight, by no means novel, provided the main thrust to the popular rejection of Coloured identity in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Coloured rejectionism had, however, originated within a small section of the Coloured intelligentsia, in particular amongst those active within the Non- European Unity Movement (NEUM) in the early 1960s (Adhikari 2002: 186-87, 213-14, 243-48) and grew into a significant movement by the time it peaked at the end of the 1980s. Though confined to a politicised minority within the Coloured community itself, and observed mainly in public discourse or for pragmatic reasons, the disavowal of Coloured identity had by the early 1980s nevertheless become a politically correct orthodoxy within the anti-apartheid movement, especially in the Western Cape. In response to the overt racism of apartheid, the democratic movement embraced non-racism as a cornerstone of its philosophy and any recognition of Coloured identity was condemned as a concession to apartheid thinking. This tendency was, however, reversed during the four-year transition to democratic rule as radical changes to the political landscape in the first half of the 1990s once again made the espousal of Coloured identity acceptable in left-wing and “progressive” circles (Adhikari 2000: 349; 2002: 23-24, 281-87).

Book Review: Coloured Identity and Creolization in Cape Town

The nature of Coloured identity, its history and the implications it holds for South African society have evoked considerable interest in recent times. Debate around these issues has generated much controversy yet there has been no systematic study of Coloured identity. The current literature offers only the most superficial of attempts at analyzing how Colouredness functioned as a social identity or the social and political dynamic that has informed Coloured exclusivi sm.

Ambiguity, Assimilationism and Anglophilism in South Africa's Coloured Community: The Case of Piet Uithalder's Satirical Writings, 1909–1922

Straatpraatjes was a satirical column that appeared in the APO newspaper, the official organ ofthe African Political Organization (APO), between May 1909 and February 1922. Founded in Cape Town in 1902, the APO was the first substantive Coloured ’ political association and subsequently dominated Coloured politics for nearly four decades. During the wave of protests that preceded the unification of South Africa in 19 10, the African Political Organization decided to publish its own newspaper to represent the interests of the Coloured community and to champion its ‘just cause for political equality with whites? The APO, which first appeared on 24 May 1909 and was published fortnightly on alternate Saturdays, thus became the first newspaper to be directed at a Coloured readership. Over and above reports on social, sporting and cultural events within the Coloured community, the APO concentrated mainly on news concerned with politics, education and socio-economic issues affecting Coloured people. Because the APO’s constituency was bilingual, its newspaper was divided into an English section that occupied about two-thirds of the space and one written in Dutch and Afrikaans confined to the back pages. Since the standardization of Afrikaans had hardly begun by 1909 and was only completed by the early 1920s