Colored Identity.adhikari

8/13/2019 Colored Identity.adhikari

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C o n t e n d i n g A p p r o a c h e s t o C o l o u r e d I d e n t i t y

a n d t h e H i s t o r y o f t h e C o l o u r e d P e o p l e o fS o u t h A f r i c a

Mohamed AdhikariU ni v e rs i t y of C a pe Tow n

Abstract

Ever since its emergence in the late nineteenth century Coloured identity, its natureand the implications it holds for southern African society, have been the subject ofideological and political contestation. Because contending and changing perceptionsof Colouredness imply different interpretations of their past there have been a widerange of approaches to the history of the Coloured people in both popular thinkingand the academy.Also, controversy around the nature of Coloured identity hastended to intensify in recent decades, especially after the popularization of Colouredrejectionism in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976. Disagreements have thusoften become quite heated because political and ideological agendas, as well as

matters of high principle, have increasingly been seen to be at stake.After sketchingthe main contours of Coloured history this article outlines the full range ofcompeting interpretations of this history and of the nature of Coloured identitythat have emerged and explores the main contestations that have arisen.

The historical background

In South Africa the term Coloured has a specialized meaning and does not

refer to black people in general as it does in many other contexts, mostnotably in Britain and the United States. It instead refers to a phenotypicallyvaried social group of highly diverse social and geographical origins. Novelist,academic and literary critic, Kole Omotoso, aptly describes their skin colour,the most important of these phenotypical features, as ranging from charcoalblack to breadcrust brown, sallow yellow and finally off-white cream thatwants to pass for white.1The Coloured people are descended largely fromCape slaves, the indigenous Khoisan population and other people of Africanand Asian origin who had been assimilated to Cape colonial society by the

late nineteenth century. Being also partly descended from European settlers,Coloureds are popularly regarded as being of mixed race and have held anintermediate status in the South African racial hierarchy, distinct from thehistorically dominant white minority and the numerically preponderantAfrican population.

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There are approximately three and a half million Coloured people inSouth Africa today.2 Constituting no more than nine per cent of thepopulation throughout the twentieth century and lacking significant politicalor economic power, Coloured people have always formed a marginal group

in South African society.There has, moreover been a marked regionalconcentration of Coloured people with approximately ninety per cent within

the western third of the country, over two thirds resident in the WesternCape and over forty per cent in the greater Cape Town area.3 The Colouredcategory has also generally been taken to include a number of distinctsub-groups such as Malays, Griquas, Namas and Basters.

Although Coloured identity crystallized in the late nineteenth centurythe process of social amalgamation within the colonial black population atthe Cape that gave rise to Coloured group consciousness dates back to the

period of Dutch colonial rule. It was, however, in the decades after theemancipation of the Khoisan in 1828 and slaves in 1838 that variouscomponents of the heterogeneous black labouring class in the Cape Colonystarted integrating more rapidly and developing an incipient sharedidentity.This identity was based on a common socio-economic status anda shared culture derived from their incorporation into the lower ranks ofCape colonial society.4The emergence of a fully fledged Coloured identityas we know it today was precipitated in the late nineteenth century by thesweeping social changes that came in the wake of the mineral revolution.

Not only did significant numbers of Africans start coming to the westernCape from the 1870s onwards but assimilated colonial blacks and a widevariety of African people who had recently been incorporated into thecapitalist economy were thrust together in the highly competitiveenvironment of the newly established mining towns.These developmentsdrove acculturated colonial blacks to assert a separate identity in order toclaim a position of relative privilege to Africans on the basis of their closerassimilation to Western culture and being partly descended from Europeancolonists.5

Due to their marginality and the determination with which the stateimplemented white supremacist policies, the story of Coloured politicalorganization has largely been one of compromise, retreat and failure.Themost consistent feature of Coloured political history until the latter phasesof apartheid has been the continual erosion of the civil rights first bestowedupon black people in the Cape Colony by the British Administration in themid-nineteenth century.

The process of attrition started with the franchise restrictions imposed bythe Parliamentary Registration Act of 1887 and the Franchise and BallotAct of 1892.6 A spate of segregationist measures in the first decade of thetwentieth century further compromised the civil rights of Colouredpeople.The most significant were the exclusion of Coloured people fromthe franchise in the former Boer republics of the Transvaal and the OrangeFree State after the Anglo-Boer War, the promulgation of the School Board

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Act of 1905 that segregated the Capes education system by providingcompulsory public schooling for white children only and the denial of theright of Coloured people to be elected to parliament with theimplementation of Union in 1910.7

In the 1920s and 1930s the economic advancement of the Colouredcommunity was undermined by the Pact Goverments civilized labour policy8

and a number of laws designed to favour whites over blacks in thecompetition for employment. For example, the 1921 Juvenile Affairs Actset up mechanisms for the placement of white school leavers into suitableemployment.Also, the Apprenticeship Act of 1922 put apprenticeshipsbeyond the reach of most Coloured youths by stipulating educational entrylevels that very few Coloured schools met but that fell within the minimumeducational standard set for white schools.The 1925 Wage Act subvertedthe ability of Coloured labour to undercut white wage demands by settinghigh minimum wage levels in key industries. Furthermore, in 1930 theinfluence of the Coloured vote was greatly diluted by the enfranchisementof white women only.9

It was during the Apartheid era, however, that Coloured people sufferedthe most severe violations of their civil rights.Their forced classificationunder the Population Registration Act of 1950 made the implementationof rigid segregation possible.The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 respectively outlawed

marriage and sex across the colour line. Under the Group Areas Act of 1950over half a million Coloured people were forcibly relocated to residentialand business areas usually on the periphery of cities and towns.The GroupAreas Act was probably the most hated of the apartheid measures amongstColoureds because property owners were meagerly compensated,long-standing communities were broken up and alternative accommodationwas inadequate.The 1953 Separate Amenities Act, which introduced pettyapartheid by segregating virtually all public facilities, also created deepresentment.After a protracted legal and constitutional battle the NationalParty in 1956, moreover, succeeded in removing Coloured people fromthe common voters roll.10

As their primary objective was to assimilate into the dominant society,politicized Coloured people initially avoided forming separate politicalorganizations. By the early twentieth century, however, intensifyingsegregation forced them to mobilize politically in defence of theirrights.Although the earliest Coloured political organizations dated back tothe 1880s, the first substantive Coloured political body, the African PoliticalOrganization (APO), was established in Cape Town in 1902.11Under theleadership of the charismatic Dr.Abdullah Abdurahman who served aspresident from 1905 till his death in 1940, the APO dominated Colouredprotest politics for nearly four decades. It became the main vehicle forexpressing this communitys assimilationist aspirations as well as its fears atthe rising tide of segregationism until its demise in the mid-1940s.A number B l a c k w e l l P u b l i s h i n g 2 0 0 5 H i s t o r y C o mp a s s 3 ( 2 0 0 5 ) A F 1 7 7, 116

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of ephemeral political organizations such as the United Afrikaner League ofthe late 1910s and the Afrikaanse Nasionale Bond (ANB) of the latter halfof the 1920s bodies that were promoted by Cape National Party politicianshoping to win Coloured electoral support failed to subvert the dominance

of the APO.

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Intensifying segregation and the failure of the APOs moderate approachcontributed to the emergence of a radical movement inspired by Marxistideology within the better-educated, urbanized sector of the Colouredcommunity during the 1930s.The National Liberation League (NLL)founded in 1935 and the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM)established in 1943 were the most important of these organizations. Proneto fissure and unable to bridge the racial divisions within the society, theradical movement failed in its quest to unite blacks in the struggle against

segregation.13

The South African Coloured Peoples Organization(SACPO),14which was founded in 1953 and affiliated to the ANC-ledCongress Alliance, also organized protests and demonstrations, especiallyagainst the removal of Coloured people from the voters roll.15Organizedopposition to apartheid from within the Coloured community was, however,effectively quelled by state repression following the Sharpeville massacre of1960 and only re-emerged in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976.Afew scantily supported political organizations such as the Labour Party ofSouth Africa and the Federal Coloured Peoples Party that were prepared

to work within apartheid structures were, however, sanctioned during theheyday of apartheid.

From the latter half of the 1970s onwards, starting with the popularizationof Black Consciousness ideology, which sought to promote black solidarityand self-reliance, the nature of Coloured identity became an extremelycontentious issue as increasing numbers of educated and politicized peoplewho had been classified Coloured under the Population Registration Actrejected the identity. Fed also by Marxist ideas of false consciousness,Colouredness increasingly came to be viewed as an artificial categorization

imposed on the society by the ruling minority as part of its divide and rulestrategies.The burgeoning of the mass, non-racial democratic movementthrough the 1980s under the leadership of the ANC-aligned UnitedDemocratic Front (UDF) as well as controversy over the participation ofsome Coloured leaders in the Tricameral Parliament of the P.W. Bothagovernment from 1984 onwards, fostered Coloured rejectionism.With theWestern Cape an epicentre of resistance to apartheid, Coloured identitybecame a highly charged issue and within the anti-apartheid movement anyrecognition of Coloured identity was repudiated as a concession to apartheidthinking.16

In spite of this, the salience of Coloured identity endured. During thefour-year transition to democratic rule under president F.W. de Klerkpolitical parties across the ideological spectrum made ever more stridentappeals to Coloured identity for support. Not only did it once again become




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politically acceptable to espouse a Coloured identity but post-apartheidSouth Africa has also witnessed a rapid retreat of Coloured rejectionism anda concomitant Coloured assertiveness.This has been due partly to a desireto project a positive self-image in the face of the pervasive negative racial

stereotyping of Coloured people and partly as a result of attempts at ethnicmobilization to take advantage of the newly democratic politicalenvironment.The resurgence of Colouredism has, moreover, to a significantextent been due to fear of African majority rule and a perception that, as inthe old order, Coloureds were once again being marginalized.Though farfrom allayed, these fears have in recent years been alleviated by the fadinginfluence of swart gevaar (black peril) tactics by opposition parties and theacclimatization of people to the new political dispensation.The lament thatfirst we were not white enough and now we are not black enough has

become a common refrain amongst Coloured people who feel alienatedfrom the post-apartheid order.

Paradigms in perspective

The marginality of the Coloured community is reflected in South Africanhistoriography in that relatively little has been written on the history of thissocial group and much of what has been written is journalistic, polemical,speculative, poorly researched or heavily biased. In many general histories

Coloured people have effectively been written out of the narrative andmarginalized to a few throw-away comments scattered through the text.Thistendency was noted as early as 1913 by Harold Cressy, a Colourededucationist and school principal, when he called on the Coloured teachingprofession to dispel the myth that Coloured people played little or no partin the history of their country.17Les Switzer put it eloquently when he in1995 wrote that, South Africas Coloured community has remained amarginalized community marginalized by history and even historians.18

There was, however, a notable increase in both scholarly and popular

writing on the history of the Coloured community from the mid-1980sonwards.19 The emergence of a vocal Coloured rejectionist movement inthe latter phases of the apartheid era raised the political profile of thecommunity and upped the stakes in an increasingly bitter wrangle over theracial and ethnic distinctiveness of the Coloured people.This stimulatedinterest in the Coloured past, particularly their political struggles of thetwentieth century. Shock and intrigue at the alignment of the majority ofColoured people with their former oppressors, the National Party, againstthe African-dominated parties of liberation in the post-apartheid era sustainedthis interest into the twenty-first century. Recent attempts at kindling asense of ethnic pride and interest in their past within the Colouredcommunity, such as the December 1 Movement and Khoisan revivalism,have also fed controversy around the identity by encouraging Colouredexclusivist tendencies.These more recent developments have generated B l a c k w e l l P u b l i s h i n g 2 0 0 5 H i s t o r y C o mp a s s 3 ( 2 0 0 5 ) A F 1 7 7, 116



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to the noble struggle of hardy, pioneering colonists to tame the wildlandscape and maintain a civilized existence in barbaroussurroundings.Where explicit consideration is given to the history of theColoured people the focus is very much on colonial institutions and

colonizers who, despite onerous circumstances, do their Christian duty ofraising Coloured people in the scale of civilization.24Equally faceless arethose whites, usually regarded as debased, who indulge in miscegenationwith black people to produce the Coloured population.This perspectivehas been thoroughly discredited in the new South Africa and is no longerpublicly propagated except within a fringe receptive to racist and whitesupremacist ideologies.

Secondly, there are the liberal essentialists who dissent from the dominantracist view and have sought to ameliorate racial antagonisms and break down

racial barriers.To the liberals the very existence of the Coloured people isconfirmation of the central contention of the liberal interpretation of SouthAfrican history, namely, that progress and economic modernization waspredicated upon the integration, co-operation and inter-dependence of itspeoples and that racial separation was not only abnormal and a survival ofan outmoded frontier mentality but also detrimental to the countryseconomic development.The miscegenation that is supposed to have givenrise to the Coloured community is held up as living proof that South Africansociety had not always been strictly segregated and that the dominant theme

of its history was that of the inter-dependence and acculturation of its variouspeoples.Though sympathetic to the assimilationist aspirations of Colouredpeople the liberal essentialist approach is nevertheless racialized in that itconceptualizes Colouredness in terms of race and defines it as a product ofmiscegenation.And while the Coloured people were not regarded asinherently inferior they tended to be seen as relatively uncivilized and inneed of white tutelage.The liberal interpretation was common within theEnglish-speaking sector of the academy, the minority of whites opposed tothe segregatory ethos of the ruling establishment and some Coloured

intellectuals of moderate political persuasion. Before the mid-1980s by farthe best quality and most thoroughly researched writing on the history ofthe Coloured community came from within the liberal school of SouthAfrican historiography.25

The third distinct strand within the essentialist approach is what mightbe termed the progressionist interpretation of Coloured history and which,for the greater part of the twentieth century, represented the conventionalview within the Coloured community of its own history. It acceptedelements of the racist view that Coloured people formed a separate raceand were socially and culturally backward compared to whites but did notaccept this condition as innate.This perspective was in effect a variation onthe liberal essentialist theme in that it combined an environmentalistconception of racial difference with liberal values of personal freedom,inter-racial co-operation and status based on individual merit to argue that




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the history of the Coloured people demonstrated that they were welladvanced in the process of becoming as fully civilized as whites and thusdeserved inclusion in the dominant society.This view was predicated onan assumption that humanity, and with it the Coloured people, were on an

inevitable trajectory of progress and an Elysian future of prosperity and socialharmony. Espoused publicly by organic intellectuals and community leaders,this interpretation was usually coupled with a plea for fair treatment or thepreservation of their status of relative privilege within the South Africanracial hierarchy.26

Until the 1980s essentialism was in effect the only paradigm in Colouredhistorical writing.The only exception was the standpoint of a handful ofradical intellectuals within the Trotskyist tradition of the South African leftwhose critique of South African society and whose interpretation of South

African history implied an alternative interpretation of Colouredhistory.While these radicals never wrote explicitly about the history of theColoured people their analyses of South African society and history impliedthat racial identities, and hence also Coloured identity, were a capitalist ployto divide, rule and exploit the South African masses.The impact of theseradical analyses dating from the early 1940s onwards remained confined toa small elite within the Coloured community until their ideas and insightswere taken up by a series of studies produced in the 1980s.

A new paradigm in historical writing relating to the history of the

Coloured people emerged in the post-Soweto era in reaction to theessentialist mode of analysis and a desire amongst scholars both withinthe liberal and revisionist schools of South African history to distancethemselves from any form of racialized thinking or any idea that Colouredgroup consciousness was based on biological or primordial ties.This school,which will be referred to as the instrumentalists, regarded Coloured identityto be an artificial concept imposed by the white supremacist state and theruling establishment upon weak and vulnerable people as an instrument ofsocial control. Positions in this respect range from seeing Coloured identity

simply as a device for excluding people of mixed race from the dominantsociety to viewing it as a product of deliberate divide-and-rule tactics bythe ruling white minority to prevent blacks from forming a united frontagainst racism and exploitation.27 The distinction of being the firstinstrumentalist history lies with Maurice Hommels Capricorn Blueswhichtook up the ideas and arguments of preceding radical theorists, switchingthe focus of historical writing on the Coloured community from narrativesof miscegenation in pre-industrial South Africa to Coloured protest politicsin the twentieth century.28

The instrumentalist approach was grounded in the growing rejection ofColoured identity that gained initial impetus from Black Consciousnessthinking.The idea of Coloured identity as a product of white supremacistsocial engineering was also rooted in Marxist notions of false consciousnessused by ruling groups to manipulate populations under their control.This




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view was actively propagated at a popular level by political activists in theanti-apartheid movement.Written from a point of view explicitly opposedto the apartheid system, instrumentalist histories have tended to focus onColoured politics, especially resistance to white domination. Instrumentalism

represented the politically correct view of the turbulent two decades thatfollowed the Soweto uprising and stemmed from a refusal to give credenceto apartheid thinking, or in the case of the expedient, the fear of beingaccused of doing so.Although this approach was far removed from the socialreality of racial divisions within black South Africa, it did score significantpolitical successes in that it helped foster non-racism and played a role inundermining the apartheid system.The instrumentalist interpretation lostmuch of its potency when the unbanned ANC in the early 1990s side-linedthe anti-racist lobby within the UDF and recognized the reality of Coloured

ethnic identity in an attempt to win Coloured political support. Its appealhas all but evaporated in a post-apartheid era in which inter-black racialtensions cannot be explained away as the dastardly machinations of the whitesupremacist establishment.A few die-hard instrumentalists neverthelessremain within the small anti-racist lobby and the Khoisan revivalistmovement is essentially instrumentalist in that its followers rejectColouredness as the colonizers caricature of the colonized.

A third paradigm, referred to here as social constructionism29and in whichI place myself, emerged from the latter half of the 1980s onwards in response

to the inadequacies of both the essentialist and instrumentalist approaches.30The basic assumption of this genre is that Coloured identity cannot be takenfor granted as an inevitable part of South African society, ordained eitherby God or nature but that it is a product of human agency dependent on arange of historical, social, cultural, political and other contingencies.Thecreation of Coloured identity is also taken to be an ongoing, dynamic processin which groups and individuals make and re-make their perceived realitiesand thus also their personal and social identities.The fundamental concernsof social constructionists are thus to explain how and why Coloured identity

came into existence and to unravel the intricate ways in which has foundexpression.While Bickford-Smith and Muzondidya portray the making ofColoured identity as a dialectic process of imposition by the rulingestablishment from above and Coloured initiative from below, Adhikaristresses the primacy of Coloured agency in the making of their own identity.

The main criticisms of both the essentialist and instrumentalist approachesfrom the perspective of social constructionists are that they tend to acceptColoured identity as given and portray it as fixed.They, in addition, generallyfail to take cognizance of the fluidity of Coloured self-definition andambiguities inherent in the process. In essentialist histories this is a productof a profoundly Eurocentric perspective and a reliance on the simplisticformulations of popular racialized conceptions of Coloured identity.Theproblem in instrumentalist writing partly stems from a narrow focus onColoured protest politics and the social injustices suffered by the




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community.This has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance ofColoured people to white supremacism and playing down theiraccommodation with the South African racial system.The overall result hasbeen an over-simplified image of the phenomenon in this literature.

A cardinal sin of both these schools is that they deny Coloured people asignificant role in the making of their own identity. Essentialist interpretationsdo this by assuming Colouredness to be an inbred quality that arisesautomatically from miscegenation. Instrumentalists share the essentialistpremise that Coloured identity is something negative and undesirable butblame it on the racism of the ruling white minority.Though they may havehad the laudable intention of countering the racism of essentialist accounts,instrumentalist histories are nevertheless condescending by denying Colouredpeople a role in the basic cognitive function of creating and reproducing

their own social identities. Even the best of these histories, Gavin LewisBetween the Wire and the Wall, despite its firm focus on Coloured agency inthe political arena, nevertheless asserts that the solution to this dilemma (ofdefining Coloured identity) is to accept Coloured identity as a white-imposedcategorization.31Both schools of writing treat Coloured identity as somethingexceptional, failing to recognize it for what it is a historically specific socialconstruction, like any other social identity. In this respect, both schools havebetrayed undue concern with contemporary ideological and politicalconsiderations.32

Muzondidyas suggestion that the social constructionist approach is aproduct of rational choice theory is misguided in that writers in this genrehave not consciously used any such theory to analyze or explain Colouredidentity and there is no evidence to suggest that they believe that socialchange or identity can be explained simply as a matter of rational choice.33

If anything, social constructionist analyses are marked by an emphasis onnon-rational elements such as the ambiguities and contradictions withinColoured identity.

The main concerns of social constructionists have therefore been to

demonstrate the complexity of Coloured identity and, most importantly, tostress the agency of Coloured people in the making of their own identity.In my own work emphasis has been placed on the ways in which ambiguitiesin their identity and the marginality of Coloured people influenced theirsocial experience and political consciousness. It also seeks to demonstratethat far from being the inert, anonymous entities of the essentialist schoolor the righteous resisters of instrumentalist histories, Coloured peopleexhibited a much more complex reaction to white supremacism thatencompassed resistance as well as collaboration, protest as well asaccommodation. Social identity is by its very nature the product of its bearersand can no more be imposed upon people by the state or ruling groups thanit can spring automatically from miscegenation or peoples racial constitution.Social identity is cultural in nature in that it is a part of learnt behaviour andis moulded by social experience and social interaction.34 At most identities

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can be manipulated by outsiders but then only to the extent that it resonatesstrongly with peoples particular social identities. In this regardinstrumentalists confuse status with identity in that a status can be imposedupon people while an identity is by its very nature primarily a creation of

the bearers themselves. In the case of the Coloured community under whitesupremacist rule, it was both through customary means and the various waysin which the state was able to assert its power that a particular status wasimposed upon Coloured people.

Recently the rudiments of a fourth approach, of viewing Coloured identityas a product of creolization, have emerged.This approach, which draws onpost modernist theory, shares much of the critical perspectives of socialconstructionists. It is, as one would expect, nuanced and sensitive to thecomplexity of identity politics and by its very nature, critical of the simplistic

paradigms of essentialist and instrumentalist writing. Zimitri Erasmussintroduction to her edited volume, Coloured by History, Shaped by Place, isas yet the only significant example of creolization theory applied to Colouredidentity.

Erasmus proposes a new way of conceptualizing Coloured identity.Thebasic premise of her analysis is that Coloured identity is not a product ofracial mixture as popular wisdom and much academic writing would haveit, but of cultural creativity shaped by South Africas history of colonialismand white domination. Erasmus contends that Coloured identity is not

characterized by borrowingper sebut by cultural borrowing and creationunder the very specific conditions of creolization. Creolization is definedas cultural creativity under conditions of marginalization and theconstruction of an identity out of elements of ruling class as well as subalterncultures. She would thus by implication also emphatically reject the notionsthat Coloured identity is either a product of miscegenation or little morethan a white-imposed categorization. Erasmus insists that Coloured identitywas made and remade by Coloured people themselves to give meaning totheir everyday lives.35

Moving from what, up to that point, had been an intellectual argumentabout the nature of Coloured identity to what is essentially an ideologicaland personal project to change perceptions about the identity, Erasmus insiststhat the relatively privileged position of Coloured people, their disrespectfor, and disassociation from, all things African, as well as their degree ofcomplicity in maintaining white supremacism, be recognized.Theseacknowledgements she argues are necessary for re-imagining Colouredidentity and breaking with its apartheid baggage in terms of which it wasnever an identity in its own right, always having been negatively definedin terms oflack or taint or in terms ofremainder or excess which doesnot fit a classificatory scheme.A concomitant condition she stipulates forre-imagining Coloured identity is that there be a move away from thetendency to assign moral authenticity or political credibility to blacknessor Africanness , attitudes that amount to African chauvinism. In the


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anti-apartheid struggle, Erasmus argues, this chauvinism resulted in Colouredcomrades either renouncing their Coloured identity or being regarded asblacks of a special type.This has meant the continued marginalization ofthe Coloured community in post-apartheid South Africa.36

Interpreting Coloured identity in terms of creolization is an innovativeand potentially fruitful line of enquiry. It is a pity that Erasmus does not gomuch beyond proposing the idea and does not follow through with a morecomprehensive analysis or even an outline of what a fully-fledged study ofthe subject might encompass. None of the contributors to this volume takeup her line of argument in any substantive way though some may, in oneway or another, be seen to be illustrating aspects of her argument.

Coloured social experience in white-dominated South Africa is mirroredin the historiography of Coloured identity in a number of ways. Features

of this historiography that stand out are its relatively poor quality, its paucityand the degree to which political and ideological considerations haveinfluenced positions staked out by contributors.There is also a clear tendencyfor opinions to be polarized with Coloured identity either being taken forgranted or imbued with intense political significance and often rejected withvehemence.The poor quality and scantness of this historiography are to aconsiderable extent products of racial oppression and the marginalization ofthe Coloured community. Controversy over Coloured identity in historicalwriting stems from more than one source, not least of which is the

ambiguous status of Coloured people in the South African racial hierarchy.Given the subjective nature of historical enquiry as well as long-standingand highly politicized disputes over the nature of Coloured identity, it isnot at all surprising that there is fierce disagreement over Coloured identitywithin this historiography or that individual authors exhibit a degree ofconfusion over the issue. Historical writing on the Coloured communityalso reflects the hegemony of racial thinking with regard to Colouredidentity.The idea that Colouredness was the product of miscegenation wasso deeply entrenched in South African society that nearly all people,

including academics and radical polemicists, accepted this assumption untilthe latter phases of the apartheid era. Even a hard-nosed Trotskyist intellectualsuch as Kenny Jordaan could accept Jan van Riebeeck as the father of theCape Coloured people.37

Notes

1 Cape Times, 14 January 2002.2 The People of South Africa Population Census, 1996: Primary Tables The Country as a Whole

(Report No. 03-01-19), p. 6; Statistics South Africa, 2000 (Pretoria, Government PublicationsDept., 2001), 1.1.3 Compare statistics in Census of the Union of South Africa, 1911(U.G.321912), Annexure 1,pp.711 with South African Census, 1996, p. 6.4 M.Adhikari, The sons of Ham: Slavery and the making of Coloured identity, South AfricanHistorical Journal, 27, 1992, pp. 1078; N.Worden, Adjusting to emancipation: Freed slaves andfarmers in mid-nineteenth century southwestern Cape in The Angry Divide: Social and Economic




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History of the Western Cape, ed.W. James and M. Simons (Cape Town, David Philip, 1989),pp.334.5 See M.Adhikari,Let Us Live for Our Children:The Teachers League of South Africa, 19131940(Cape Town, University of Cape Town Press, 1993), pp. 1118 and Sons of Ham, pp. 95112for a more detailed discussion of the origins of Coloured identity. For case studies of the processin Cape Town and Kimberley respectively, see V. Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice

in Victorian Cape Town, 18751902(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 186209;P. Lawrence, Class, colour consciousness and the search for identity at the Kimberley diamonddiggings, 18671893, MA thesis (University of Cape Town, 1994).6 S.Trapido, The friends of the Natives: Merchants, peasants and the political and ideologicalstructure of liberalism in the Cape in Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa, ed. S. Marksand A.Atmore (London, Longman, 1980), p. 266.7 R. van der Ross, The Rise and Decline of Apartheid:A Study of Political Movements Among theColoured People of South Africa, 18801985(Cape Town, Tafelberg, 1986), pp. 4355; G. Lewis,Between the Wire and the Wall:A History of South African Coloured Politics (Cape Town, DavidPhilip, 1987) pp. 309, 4663.8 This policy sought to ameliorate the poor white problem by absorbing newly urbanized whites

into industrial occupations and replacing black workers with whites at wages that ensured acivilized standard of living. See T. Davenport and C. Saunders, South Africa:A Modern History(London, Macmillan, 2000), pp. 6367.9 L.Thompson, The Cape Coloured Franchise ( Johannesburg, South African Institute of RaceRelations, 1949), pp. 2021, 55; G. Lewis, The reaction of the Cape Coloureds to segregation,PhD dissertation (Queens University, 1984), pp. 3301.10 van der Ross, Rise and Decline of Apartheid, ch. 16; Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, pp. 26170;R. du Pre,Separate but Unequal:The Coloured People of South Africa A Political History ( Johannesburg,Jonathan Ball, 1994), chs 48;V. Bickford-Smith, E. van Heyningen and N.Worden, Cape Townin the Twentieth Century:An Illustrated Social History(Cape Town, David Philip, 1999), pp. 14396.11 Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, pp. 1025; van der Ross, Rise and Decline of Apartheid, pp. 130.

12 M.Adhikari, Abdullah Abdurahman, 1872 1940 in They Shaped Our Century:The MostInfluential South Africans of the Twentieth Century (Cape Town, Human and Rousseau,1999),p.438;Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, pp. 12433, 2506.13 M. Hommel, Capricorn Blues:The Struggle for Human Rights in South Africa(Toronto, Culturama,1981), pp. 65ff.; Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, pp. 1798, 20744; van der Ross, Rise and Declineof Apartheid, pp. 209ff.; A. Drew, Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South AfricanLeft(Aldershot,Ashgate, 2000), pp. 26670.14 SACPO was renamed the Coloured Peoples Congress in December 1959.15 Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, pp. 26371; Hommel, Capricorn Blues, pp. 13542, 1579.16 For discussion of attitudes toward Coloured identity in the anti-apartheid movement seeM.Adhikari, You have the right to know: South, 19871994, pp. 34954 and I.Van Kessel,Grassroots: From washing lines to Utopia, pp. 30810, both in South Africas ResistancePress:Alternative Voices in the Last Generation Under Apartheid, ed. L. Switzer and M.Adhikari(Athens, Ohio University Press, 2000).17 Cape Argus, 22 March 1913; Cape Times, 22 March 1913.18 L. Switzer, Review of Adhikari, Let us Live for our Children, The Journal of African History, 36(2), 1995, p. 338.19 The appearance of the three books by van der Ross, Lewis and Goldin within twelve monthsof each other during 19867 represents something of a landmark in this historiography.20 See W. James, D. Caliguire and K. Cullinan (eds.), Now that We are Free; Coloured Communitiesin a Democratic South Africa (Boulder, Lynne Riener, 1996) and Z. Erasmus (ed.), Coloured byHistory, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town(Cape Town, Kwela

Books, 2001) for recent edited volumes on Coloured identity. Mohamed Adhikaris Not WhiteEnough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community(Athens, OhioUniversity Press, 2005) has a short section on Coloured identity in the new South Africa.21 Some people, especially intellectuals, who are generally regarded as Coloured still reject thedesignation.Two PhD dissertations, one on Khoisan revivalism by Mike Besten at the Universityof the Western Cape and another on Coloured identity in post-apartheid South Africa by MichelleRuiters at Rutgers University are in the making. E. Salo, Respectable mothers, tough men and




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good daughters: Producing persons in Manenberg township, South Africa, PhD dissertation(Emory University, 2004) has recently been completed.There are at least half a dozen otherdissertations on the subject being researched.22 See H. P. Cruse, Die Opheffing van die Kleurlingbevolking: Deel I; Aanvangsjare, 1652 1795(Stellenbosch, Christen Studentevereniging, 1947);W. M. MacMillan,The Cape Colour Question:AHistorical Survey(Cape Town, Balkema, 1968), first published in London by Faber and Gwyer,

1927 as examples.23 The earliest example is D. Hendricks and C.Viljoen, Student Teachers History Course: For theUse in Coloured Training Colleges(Paarl, Huguenot Drukkery, 1936).24 Cruse, Opheffing van die Kleurlingbevolking; D. P. Botha, Die Opkoms van Ons Derde Stand(CapeTown, Human and Rousseau, 1960) are good examples.25 The best-known examples are MacMillan, Cape Colour Question and J. S. Marais, The CapeColoured People, 16521937( Johannesburg,Witwatersrand University Press, 1968), first publishedin London, by Longmans, Green and Co., 1939. R. van der Ross, Rise and Decline of Apartheidis an example of a moderate Coloured writer espousing the liberal interpretation.26 C. Zievogel, Brown South Africa (Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1938) and some speeches ofDr.Abdullah Abdurahman, the most prominent Coloured political leader of the first half of thetwentieth century provide good examples of this approach. See R. van der Ross, Say It OutLoud:The APO Presidential Addresses and Other Major Political Speeches, 19061940, of Dr.AbdullahAbdurahman (Bellville, University of the Western Cape Institute for Historical Research, 1990)for a collection of Abdurahmans speeches.27 du Pre, Separate but Unequal andI. Goldin, Making Race:The Politics and Economics of ColouredIdentity in South Africa(Cape Town, Maskew Miller Longman, 1987) respectively represent thetwo standpoints.28 The other major instrumentalist interventions of the 1980s were Lewiss Between the Wire andWalland Goldins Making Race.29 The first known usage of this term in relation to Coloured historiography occurs in H.Trotter,What is a Coloured?: Definitions of Coloured South African identity in the academy,

unpublished paper (Yale University, 2000), pp. 1112, 21.Trotter does not explain precisely whathe means by social constructionism and distinguishes between positive (myself and Bickford-Smith)and negative (what I call instrumentalists) social constructionists.30 See Adhikari, Teachers League, Adhikari, Not White Enough, and Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Prideas the main examples of this genre. J. Muzondidya, Sitting on the fence or walking a tightrope?A political history of the Coloured community of Zimbabwe, 1945 1980, PhD dissertation(University of Cape Town, 2001) draws on Adhikari and Bickford-Smith in applying this paradigmto Zimbabwe and makes the occasional comparison with South Africa.31 Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, p. 4.32 See M.Adhikari,The product of civilization in its most repellent manifestation:Ambiguitiesin the racial perceptions of theAPO (African Political Organization), 19091923,Journal of African

History, 38 (2), 1997, pp. 283300 and M.Adhikari, A drink-sodden race of bestialdegenerates:Attitudes toward race and class in the Educational Journal, 19131940 in Studies inthe History of Cape Town, 7, ed. E. van Heyningen, (Cape Town, University of Cape Town Press,1994), pp. 10932 for more detailed critiques of essentialist and instrumentalist histories and forcase studies within the social constructionist approach.33 Muzondidya,Sitting on the fence, p. 13.34 This much can be established from introductory social psychology texts. See, for example,D.Abrams, Social identity, psychology of in International Encyclopedia of the Social and BehaviouralSciences, ed. N. Smelser and B. Baltes (Oxford, Elsevier, 2001), vol. 21, pp. 143069.35 Erasmus, Coloured by History, p. 16.36 Ibid., pp. 17, 19.37

K. Jordaan,Jan van Riebeeck: His place in South African history, Discussion, 1 (5), 1952, p.34.For detailed elaboration on the issues raised in this paragraph, especially amongst Coloured writersthemselves see M.Adhikari, Hope, fear, shame, frustration: Continuity and change in theexpression of Coloured identity in white supremacist South Africa, 19101994, PhD dissertation(University of Cape Town, 2002), pp. 63120.




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Christen Studentevereniging, 1947).Davenport,T., and Saunders, C., South Africa:A Modern History(London, Macmillan, 2000).Drew, A., Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left(Aldershot,Ashgate,

2000).Erasmus, Z., Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape

Town(Cape Town, Kwela Books, 2001).Goldin, I., Making Race:The Politics and Economics of Coloured Identity in South Africa(Cape Town,

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