labor practices on his farm in the 1980s, believed that his “Coloured labourers were like children … didn’t know what was good for them, only wanted their daily dop (tot) of wine.”95 But when asked whether Afrikaners were different from Coloureds, he replied, “We made them,” evading the question but acknowledging paternity as well as a degree of responsibility toward Coloured people.96 For others, the claim to kinship was embarrassing and even threatening, as demonstrated by the story of Mrs. C. S., a Coloured woman who was born on a farm in Swellendam in 1922 and lived in a Windermere squatter camp on the outskirts of Cape Town in the 1950s. Employed on a white-owned farm as a young girl, she rejected the claim of the farmer and his wife that Coloureds were different from and inferior to whites. Resorting to the van Riebeeck mythology, she countered, “The blood is then the same, there is not a white blood or a black blood or a brown blood … from Jan van Riebeeck’s time he mated with the brown people and the whites with the brown people.” Both as a form of denial and as a reinforcement of master-servant relationships, the farmer dragged her into his garage and gave her a thrashing for her insolence.97
It is through the misconception about their racial hybridity that the stigma of illegitimacy has also been imputed to Coloured people. In terms of popular thinking, Coloured people originated largely from black-white sexual unions outside of wedlock. There is an enduring myth that they resulted from prostitution and casual sex between slave and Khoisan women and passing soldiers, sailors, and white riffraff.98 Cedric Dover’s memorable description of the “half-caste” in Western literature—“His father is a blackguard, his mother is a whore”—suggests that it is not a peculiarly South African perception that miscegenation tends to be a failing of the lowest elements of society.99 These associations have contributed to the perception that Coloured people lack a proper heritage or pedigree, for, as Hombi Ntshoko, an African woman from Langa, maintained, “Coloureds don’t know where they come from. We know where we come from. Whites know where they come from.”100 Winnie Mandela’s comment in 1991 that the Coloured people came about as a result of white men raping black women demonstrates that the idea that the Coloured community originated from extramarital unions across the color line is not only current among white racists but also broadly accepted in South African society.101 Despite coming from an ideological position diametrically opposed to that of white racism and meant as a rebuke to white maledom, Mandela’s remark reveals a similar misunderstanding regarding the nature and origin of Coloured identity.
Perceived to have originated largely from illicit sexual relations, the Coloured community as a whole has also been indelibly stained by the mark of illegitimacy. The idea that at their very genesis, the Coloured people had been conceived in “sin” contributes to the notion among racists that Coloureds are somehow defective and form a special breed of lesser beings—God’s stepchildren, as Sarah Gertrude Millin vividly put it.102 This is also apparent from the way the punch line of the van Riebeeck joke sets Coloured people apart from the rest of humanity. This outlook is, furthermore, reflected in jokes that depict Coloured people as the unintended consequence of the devil’s hapless attempts at imitating God’s creation of humanity. In these jokes, the devil’s creations turn out to be brown and not white, and when placed on earth, they walk off singing, dancing, and drinking wine.103 A variant on this joke has God baking figures of clay that come to life when placed on earth. Every now and then, God is heard to exclaim in frustration, “Damn, I burnt another one!” before tossing the figure into Africa. Depending on the degree of scorching, the damaged figures would turn out to be either Coloured or African and exhibit behavior appropriate to their respective racial stereotypes.
To evoke laughter, the punch line of the van Riebeeck joke draws mainly on a shared perception between teller and audience that both racial hybridity and illegitimacy are humiliating and shameful. It is clear that for people to react spontaneously to this joke, the images, values, and assumptions about Colouredness that are evoked have to be part and parcel of their waking consciousness and instantaneously accessible to their minds, given the appropriate cues. The joke, however, goes beyond the imputed traits of hybridization and illegitimacy and draws on other aspects of Coloured stereotyping for embellishment.
Although not raised directly by the joke, the implicit question of who van Riebeeck and his merry band’s sexual partners were evokes the popular association of Coloured people with the Khoisan and hence with a “savage” past. Whereas the Coloured protagonist in the van Riebeeck joke might put much store by his or her partial European descent and assimilation to Western culture, both teller and audience are nevertheless likely to be mindful of the Khoisan heritage associated with Colouredness.
In the popular mind, the association is an extremely derogatory one. This much is evident from the terms Boesman (Bushman or San) and Hotnot (Hottentot or Khoikhoi) being among the most opprobrious of racial slurs that can be hurled at Coloured people. The contractions Hottie, Bushy, or Boesie are also sometimes used.104 The extreme derogation of these words lies in the images of physical ugliness, repulsive social practices, and mental and social inferiority they conjure up. In 1919, a correspondent to the S. A. Clarion, a newspaper aimed at a Coloured readership, remarked that “one would have a quarrel on one’s hands if one addressed a coloured in a Cape Town street as Hot-not even if that person had three-quarters Hotnot blood in his veins.”105 Gerald Stone’s description of the meaning of Boesman in the lexicon of working-class Coloured people more than half a century later is “a seriously insulting reference to coloured person, denoting putatively San features: sparse peppercorn hair, flat nose, wizened face, dry yellow skin, steatopygic posture, small stature: connoting insignificance, ugliness, poverty, vagrancy, treachery.”106 From my experience of the way in which the term has been used by out-groups to describe Coloured people, moral and intellectual inferiority should be added to this list. Generations of South Africans, both black and white, have had negative stereotypes of “Bushmen” and “Hottentots” instilled into them, especially during school history lessons.107 Indicative of the deep opprobrium and emotive associations attached to these terms, a riot was sparked in the sleepy west coast town of Laaiplek in 1987 when a local white resident called one of the Coloured townsmen a “Hotnot.”108
In popular discourse, the Khoisan origins of Coloured people are often used to explain racial traits ascribed to them. Negative characteristics attributed to the Khoisan have thus been projected onto the Coloured grouping as a whole, invoking images of inveterate laziness, irresponsibility, dirtiness, and a penchant for thievery, all of which are often assumed to have been inherited by Coloured people from their Khoisan ancestors. This much is apparent from another popular joke that sometimes also served as an utterance of frustration, especially among employers, at the alleged waywardness of Coloured employees—“You can take the Coloured out of the bush but you cannot take the bush out of the Coloured”—or alternatively and more to the point—“You can take the Coloured out of the bush, man, but you cannot take the Bushman out of the Coloured.”109
It is worth noting that although Coloured people have been strongly associated with their Khoisan progenitors, the identification with a slave heritage has been tenuous. There are two basic reasons for this. First, the Cape Colony, unlike most New World slave societies, did not develop a vigorous slave culture, largely because of the atomized pattern of slaveholding, the extreme ethnic diversity of the slave population, and the high death rate among importees.110 Since slaves were thus, by and large, not able to transmit a coherent body of learned behavior and communal experience from one generation to the next, an identifiably slave culture remained weak and attenuated at the Cape.111 Therefore, the conscious identification with a slave past did not survive much beyond the lives of the freed slaves themselves. Second, because slaves were defined in terms of their legal status, their descendants were able to escape the stigma of slave ancestry fairly easily after emancipation. In popular consciousness, vague connotations of a servile past have been attached to Coloured identity, for example, through the annual reminder of the Coon Carnival and the use of the pejorative label Gam (Ham) to describe working-class Coloured people.112
Coloured
