Not White Enough, Not Black Enough. Mohamed Adhikari
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Not White Enough, Not Black Enough
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Not White Enough, Not Black Enough
RACIAL IDENTITY IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN COLOURED COMMUNITY
Mohamed Adhikari
Ohio University Research in International Studies Africa Series No. 83 Ohio University Press Athens
Double Storey Books
Cape Town
© 2005 by the
Center for International Studies
Ohio University
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form and by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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The books in the Ohio University Research in International Studies Series are printed on acid-free paper
Published 2006 in Southern Africa by Double Storey Books,
a division of Juta & Co. Ltd, Mercury Crescent, Wetton, Cape Town, South Africa
ISBN 1 77013 002 0 (Double Storey)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
For Rafiq and Zaheer
Contents
1. Continuity and Context: An Overview of Coloured Identity in White Supremacist South Africa
2. History from the Margins: Changing Perceptions of Its Past within the Coloured Community
3. The Predicament of Marginality: Case Studies from the Earlier Period of White Rule
5. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Coloured Rejectionism during the Latter Phases of the Apartheid Era
6. New Responses to Old Dilemmas: Coloured Identity in a Transforming South Africa
Acknowledgments
The long-germinating seed for this book and, more generally, my interest in the nature of Coloured identity was planted sometime in March or April 1979 when, as a second-year history student at the University of Cape Town, I went on one of my periodic visits to Marie Maud’s office. Marie was a lecturer in the History Department, a colorful if somewhat eccentric figure. She was an inspired teacher who took a personal interest in her students and befriended many of them. Her office served as a congregating point for students where one could engage in discussion over a wide range of topics, particularly issues relating to contemporary politics in South Africa, over a cup of tea and a cigarette. By this time Marie had become a firm friend and a mentor despite my Non-European Unity Movement background teaching me to despise weak-kneed liberals. Marie might have been a self-proclaimed liberal but was not weak-kneed and did more than her share to undermine the apartheid system. On that late-afternoon excursion I encountered a forty-something first-year history student I had known for some weeks, in her office. He was a school principal from the tiny, conservative, northern Cape town of Keimoes who had taken a year’s leave to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree at UCT. With his very fair skin and red hair he was obvioiusly white. After chatting for a while the principal from Keimoes left, whereupon Marie, in characteristically melodramatic fashion, said, “Mohamed, I feel so sorry for that poor man!” Immediately there flashed through my mind images of him being diagnosed with a dreaded disease, being informed that his wife had suddenly died or that one of his children had been run over by a bus. Upon inquiring what the matter was, Marie replied, “That poor man is Coloured. Can you imagine what it must be like for him living in Keimoes?” Marie had inadvertently provided future direction to my research, for in subsequent years, pondering the vagaries of life for a pale-skinned, red-haired, Coloured person in conservative Keimoes played an important part in my choice of research topics as a postgraduate student.
I would like to thank Richard Mendelsohn for his unflagging support, his wise counsel, and his incisive reading, as supervisor, of the doctoral thesis on which this book is based. On numerous