of the Coloured people at nine months after the landing of van Riebeeck’s party,74 the popular mind looks back to primal acts of interracial sex rather than processes of social interaction and identity formation in nineteenth-century southern African society for the making of Coloured identity. Thus, no matter how “respectable” a Coloured person may have become or what his or her level of personal achievement is, the taint of that original sin has persisted in racial thinking that remains entrenched in the broader South African society.
Indeed, the risqué element of the van Riebeeck joke is derived from the image of the Coloured people having been conceived through illicit sexual intercourse immediately on the landing of the first Dutch colonists. Implicit in most people’s understanding of the joke is what “Coloured” novelist Zoë Wicomb referred to as “the nasty, unspoken question of concupiscence that haunts coloured identity.”75 This racially attributed trait is not nearly as unmentionable as Wicomb’s comment might suggest—except perhaps in genteel company, especially within “respectable” sectors of the Coloured community itself—as the widely recognized stereotype of the goffel confirms. Goffel is a highly pejorative term that generally refers to working-class Coloured women and characterizes them as socially inferior, usually physically unattractive, but sexually available.76 Zimitri Erasmus attested that for her, “being Coloured is about living an identity that is clouded in sexualized shame.”77 There can be little doubt that for most people, the van Riebeeck joke is enhanced by tacit assumptions about Coloured females’ lasciviousness or the ease with which they may be sexually exploited.
Throughout Western society and probably more so in South Africa, racial hybridity has carried a heavy stigma, with ideas of miscegenation and “mixed blood” conjuring up a host of repugnant connotations for most people. Negative attitudes toward “hybridization” as opposed to “purity of breed” are well entrenched in modern popular culture, whether applied to livestock, household pets, or humans.78 Writing at the end of the 1930s, historian J. S. Marais confirmed that “this philosophy of blood and race … leads to a passionate aversion to miscegenation … which is the primary article of faith of the South African nation.”79 In South Africa, these attitudes found concrete expression in the notorious Mixed Marriages and Immorality Acts.80 This kind of prejudice was still very much in evidence in the latter phases of white rule. Take, for example, the way Maria van Niekerk, a conservative white South African woman, expressed her horror at the repeal of the Mixed Marriages Act in 1985. Van Niekerk claimed that she “did not stand for bastardizing our land” and that she wanted South Africa “to be pure white, pure Indian, pure blacks [sic] and the Coloureds must be proud of what they are now.”81 This repugnance is a product of the commonly held belief that miscegenation of necessity pollutes the resulting offspring and renders them inferior. Although archconservative Andries Treurnicht’s claim that “Coloureds are our 12-year-old children and must remain under our guardianship” is at the extreme end of the spectrum of racist opinion,82 there was a general acceptance among whites that Coloured people were intellectually and morally inferior, to varying degrees, as a result of their miscegenated origins.83
As the van Riebeeck joke illustrates, Africans broadly shared these negative perceptions of racial hybridity and therefore of Coloured people. The Xhosa-derived Afrikaans colloquialism malau, a pejorative reference to Coloured people signifying a supposed lack of cultural or racial integrity and suggesting that they are thus rootless and uncouth, is a clear indication of this.84 Sol Plaatje, in a telling if exaggerated example, gave expression to these negative perceptions of racial hybridity among Africans in his novel Mhudi, which had been written between 1917 and 1920 but was published only in 1930 and is generally accepted as the first South African novel in English by an African writer. In a speech to rally the defeated and dispirited Ndebele people, Mzilikazi is made to denounce the alliance between Bechuana and Boer ranged against him. He predicts that after betraying and subjugating the Bechuana, the Boers “shall take Bechuana women to wife and, with them, breed a race half man and half goblin, and … these Bechuana will waste away in helpless fury till the gnome offspring of such miscegenation rise up against their cruel sires.”85 The poignant story of Thuli Nhlapo, who endured a life of ridicule and rejection by both her family and the wider community that taunted her as “boesman” (bushman) and “this yellow thing” because she was the “love child” of an African mother and a white father, provides an intimate insight into the torment that can result from the odium that is often attached to racial hybridity in African society.86 “Coloured” academic Roy du Pre summed up a common attitude among Africans toward Coloured people: “Africans despise Coloured people in general. They [look] upon them as ‘mixed-breeds’ with no nationhood, no identity, no land, no culture. The African, on the other hand, is a proud, full-blooded, ‘pure-breed’ with a history, culture and identity going back centuries.”87
In keeping with the social Darwinist and eugenicist assumptions that have thoroughly permeated South African racial thinking at the popular level, it has generally been assumed that miscegenation breeds weakness. This was predicated on the notion that the progeny of racially mixed sexual unions tend to exhibit the combined or even exaggerated weaknesses of their progenitors and for the positive qualities to be diluted or lost altogether. Indeed, many of the racial traits attributed to Coloured people have often been explained in terms of the deleterious effects of racial mixture. Allegedly inherent characteristics of Coloured people—such as being physically stunted, lacking in endurance, and naturally prone to dishonesty, licentiousness, and drink—have often been explained or justified in terms of the effects of racial mixture or of gebastenheid (bastardization), resulting in physical and moral weakness.88 In my experience, it was not uncommon to find both serious and tongue-in-cheek explanations suggesting that Coloured people are morally weak, confused, and vacillating by nature because their white “blood” pulls them in one direction and their black “blood” pulls them in another.89
Popular assumptions about the racial hybridity of the Coloured community are based on the premise that miscegenation gives rise to offspring that are related but nevertheless racially distinct from their parents.90 In this way, from the very start of Dutch colonization, sexual relations between European male settlers, on the one hand, and Khoi and slave women, on the other, were thought to have given birth to a distinct racial entity, the Coloured people. This much is apparent from the way the joke employs Jan van Riebeeck as the symbolic father of the Coloured people and the alternative version of the joke dates the origin of the Coloured people at nine months after the landing of van Riebeeck.91 The common characterization of Coloured people as “mixed-race”—which presupposes the prior existence of “pure races” and their “mixture” to be unnatural and undesirable or even pathological—demonstrates an unreflective popular acceptance of Coloured people as both different and inferior.92
In popular thinking and in a great deal of academic writing as well,93 there is very little if any recognition of the necessary historical reality that Coloured identity arose as a result of social change and human agency rather than simply being an automatic product of miscegenation. Indeed, the assertion of a separate Coloured identity in the late nineteenth century proved to be a highly successful strategy precisely because it utilized those very ideas and assumptions of racial difference and hybridity on which the doctrine of white supremacy rested. The key assumption in this respect was that humanity consisted of a hierarchy of races in which status was determined by the degree to which a particular group conformed to the somatic and cultural norms of Western Europe.94 Being able to assert partial descent from European settlers was thus essential to Coloureds being able to justify, and receiving, favored treatment relative to Africans.
The claim to kinship with whites was, as noted before, a double-edged sword for members of the Coloured community. Although it allowed them to argue for a status of relative privilege, it also meant accepting racial hybridity as an integral part of their being. For the white establishment, there was, of course, no question that such kin-ship could be the basis for a claim to equality. For some, however, kin-ship underpinned attitudes
