While we have, to date, undertaken few readings of the intimacies, across race and class, that have long characterised a deeply segregated society – that is, the often unexpected points of intersection and practical knowledge of the other wrought from a common, though often mutually coercive and confrontational experience – we might equally remark, using the South African case as a powerful moment in a wider global history of race, that intimacy does not necessarily exclude violation. Intimacy is not always a happy process. On the contrary, it may often be another name for tyranny. This all being said, my own intellectual preoccupation is less with the term ‘creolisation’ than with a way of thinking, a method of reading, the possibility of a different cartography.
Regional variations
In the light of the available historical and ethnographic material it might be argued that such a method of reading relies on the history of the Cape. Although this may be so, such an approach can be usefully applied to other regions of the country. Consider, for example, the density of the circulation of workers through urban sites of production in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Southern, Central and Eastern Africa over centuries. Consider, too, the transnational cultures of the mines, of which we still know so little. Do we believe that there was no cross-cultural interaction; that South Africans took nothing from other African migrant workers in inventing an urban vernacular culture they now claim as their own? Or that the Indian presence in Natal had no influence on ways of being black, or white? As for the political culture of the Bantustans, it surely cannot be unearthed without mapping the imitations by local potentates of their white masters’ culture of power. Conversely, the practices of apartheid tyrants cannot be grasped without paying attention to the various ways in which they subtly mimicked, in selective ways, their victims, while at the same time denying their common humanity.
More substantial, though, is the evidence already gathered, by historians in particular, about the flexibility of racial boundaries on the Witwatersrand in the years directly preceding apartheid. Jon Hyslop (1995), in his work on white working-class women and the invention of apartheid, shows how the newfound independence of the Afrikaner female working class on the Rand threatened patriarchal relations in white society, and how Nationalist government hysteria about ‘mixed marriages’ played an important role in re-establishing gender hierarchies. In urban slums Afrikaans-speaking poor whites were frequently not demonstrating the instinctive aversion, socially or sexually, to racial mixing proclaimed by government racial ideology. Hyslop shows that these whites would by no means automatically identify as ‘Afrikaners’ so allegiance to Afrikaner nationalism had constantly to be created (see also Van Onselen 1982).
One of the most distinctive features of Johannesburg’s built environment in the inter-war years was the existence of a large belt of slums that spread from the western suburbs across the city centre to the suburbs in the east. Eddie Koch’s work (1983) shows how resistance to the clearance of the slums gave rise to a series of conflicts and tensions which delayed the implementation of segregation and allowed the culture of the slum yards to grow and thrive.
The extent of the permeability of racial boundaries at this time again reveals the amount of work it took to put and keep apartheid in place. The degree to which rural paternalism contained egalitarian elements has been debated in relation to Van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine (1996). Interesting, too, in this context is the existence of hybrid border communities: John Dunn’s people, and Coenraad de Buys and his descendants, the Griquas, in particular, symbolise what Mostert (1993, p 237) calls ‘a lost route of Afrikaner history’. Of De Buys Mostert writes: ‘on the one hand he represented the interracial intimacy and familiarity, on the other the ruthless self-interest, peremptory will and desire and brutality, of relations between those forerunning Boers and the indigenous inhabitants’ (p 238).
George Frederickson, in his book White Supremacy (1981), suggests that the Cape really was different. He shows that the main external source of attitudes to race mixture in the early Cape Colony was the precedents deriving from the Dutch experience in Indonesia, where the trend was to encourage intermarriage in an effort to superimpose on the native social order a new caste of Dutch Christians. The Dutch, not particularly committed to racial purity, preferred to legalise Dutch-speaking Christianised ‘mixed-race’ people, though the British would later try to impose a clearer basis of stratification on what they saw as this racial chaos. Frederickson argues in his comparative study that it is, in fact, the United States, not South Africa, in which historically-white supremacists enjoyed the luxury of a racial exclusiveness that is unparalleled in the annals of racial inequality (p 135).
The work of Vivian Bickford-Smith et al (1999) on Cape Town’s history has tended to de-romanticise the city’s story but still contains much material suggesting that Cape Town was much less racially bounded than other areas of South Africa. But the point I am pursuing here has less to do with the porousness or otherwise of racial boundaries than with the idea that the more such boundaries are erected and legislated the more the observer has to look for the petty transgressions without which everyday life for both the ‘master’ and the ‘slave’ would be impossible. Racial segregation, that is, can only work if, somewhere else, the entanglements, denied precisely to safeguard the official fiction, are also taking place.
The larger question is, therefore, how to find a method of reading the social which is about mutual entanglements, some of them conscious but most of them unconscious, which occur between people who most of the time try to define themselves as different. The more they try to do this the more the critic must be suspicious of their talk of uniqueness and difference. Such claims, we might well suggest, repress, at least at times, precisely what draws together, what links, the oppressor and the oppressed, black, white and coloured. In respect of all the above, then, it would not make sense to confine our understanding of creolité to the Cape past.4
Race and class
Once we take on board a way of reading which is based on mutual entanglements we are obliged to think of race, class and power differently. In particular, we have to confront what it is that older paradigms are not able to show us. Beginning with race we might first note that the South African academy and beyond has produced many examples of carefully argued work on race and power in this country. Moreover, there is a self-awareness, from within these very traditions, of the limits of dominant approaches (see Hamilton 1997 and Hyslop 2002a&b).
In asking how to locate the ‘now’, the contemporary, in South Africa, we have to ask the question when and how race matters. Here we might reflect on the fact that race appears to be hardening in the public political realm precisely as legalised racism has been abolished. One early example of this was the public correspondence between South African President Thabo Mbeki and the leader of the Opposition, Tony Leon, in 2000. Mbeki accused Leon of publishing ‘hysterical estimates’ of HIV/Aids sufferers in South Africa and of ‘making wild and insulting claims’, along with the international community, about the African origins of HIV. Leon averred that it was ‘a fundamental mistake and profoundly misguided to associate matters of race with the Aids crisis’ and accused Mbeki of using ‘tactics of moral blackmail or demonisation’.5 Since 1994, moreover, what used to be called ‘non-racialism’ is seldom heard in political discourse. This silence is closely related to the fact that while under apartheid racial discrimination was crucial to the twin issues of work and wealth, in the post-apartheid period the politics of black empowerment plays an important role in shifting institutional power politics.
This hardening is taking place at the same time as more choices are becoming available in terms of racial identification, especially in the sphere of culture. The pragmatics of a ‘cross-over culture’ are now expressed through other vehicles, in particular through powerful new media cultures and the market (see Nuttall 2004). There is, as yet, only the beginning of new work and theorisation of these ‘post-racist’ configurations which reinvigorate the political utopias of these terms. Extraordinary ethnographies are emerging from scholars such as Nadine Dolby (2001), Tanya Farber (2002) and Mpolokeng
