however, could not so easily avoid being associated with the Khoisan because the defining characteristics, in this instance, were racially attributed and genetically transmitted physical traits. Many Coloured people have had little choice but to live with physical traits that have served as markers of the Khoisan physical type, as indicated by the colloquialisms boesman korrels (Bushman corns or tufts) and Hotnot holle, vernacular Afrikaans for steatopygia. The nicknames Boesman or Hotnot for people who display what are taken to be typical Khoisan physical features have also been fairly common within the Coloured working class.113 Although these nicknames could signify endearment or be ironic and self-deprecating,114 they are generally derogatory and are an indication that white racist values have, to a considerable degree, been internalized by those Coloured people who use them.
The van Riebeeck joke also draws on the marginality of the Coloured community for heightened effect. Whites are represented by a proactive and familiar figure symbolic of white supremacy, but in the supposed making of the Coloured people, their black ancestors remain essentially faceless and passive. There has been an abiding perception that Coloured people played little or no constructive part in the making of South African society and thus do not deserve the recognition of historical personalities beyond what is necessary for whites to make sense of their own history. This is very much part of the depersonalization that is almost universally present in the way that dominant groups perceive those whom they dominate.
Coloured marginality is evoked in a second and more subtle way by the joke. In human interaction, one of the psychosocial functions of humor is to demonstrate and affirm power. Jokes therefore often seek to humiliate and demean or depend on vituperation to raise a laugh, as the international examples of “Paddy” jokes or blonde jokes and local examples of “Gammatjie and Abdoltjie” or “Raj” jokes demonstrate.115 Thus, those who considered themselves superior to Coloureds were likely to have found the joke all the funnier because it reinforced their conceit that they were able to laugh at Coloured people with impunity. However, Coloured people who laughed at it—and in my experience, many more Coloured people laughed at the joke than took offense—confirmed their marginality by acquiescing in their own denigration.
Yet the targets of demeaning humor are not entirely powerless because humor can, of course, also be harnessed for retaliation. This would explain the immense popularity of “van der Merwe” jokes among Coloured people during the apartheid era. The “stupid and uncultured Afrikaner” stereotype represented by van der Merwe provided the perfect foil for Coloured people to assert their worth as human beings and to hit back at those whom they regarded as the most rabidly racist and their main oppressors.
The popularity of the van Riebeeck joke has waned in recent years. The amelioration of interblack political divisions in the post-1976 environment, the growth of a mass, nonracial democratic movement during the 1980s, and the dawning of the “new South Africa” have progressively made the values and sentiments embodied in the joke less acceptable in public discourse. The growing rejection of Coloured identity by politicized Coloureds from the mid-1970s onward meant that crude racist thinking of the sort embodied in this joke became unacceptable to a widening constituency of people. By the late 1980s, even the likes of the Reverend Allan Hendrickse, the leader of the collaborationist Labour Party, at times rejected Coloured identity. In a heated moment in parliament, for example, he lashed out at the National Party: “God made me a man, the National Party made me a Coloured man.”116
Although the image of van Riebeeck is far less pervasive than it was in the “old South Africa,” it has nevertheless remained a powerful symbol of white supremacism in the new millennium.117 Bizarre confirmation of this occurred at a formal dinner on 31 October 2000, organized by a local black economic empowerment company to celebrate Cape Town’s cultural diversity and to promote racial tolerance. At the dinner, held in the banquet hall of the Castle in Cape Town, one of the guests, Priscilla De Wet-Fox, who claims to be the headperson of the Chainnoquia Khoi-Khoi tribe of the Oudtshoorn region, heckled speakers and subjected the gathering to a tirade about the colonial oppression of the Khoi. On being escorted out of the function, she attacked a bronze bust of van Riebeeck in the foyer, damaging it and causing its eyes to pop out when she pushed it off its pedestal. De Wet-Fox later justified her actions by saying that “van Riebeeck lied to my ancestors” and that he was a symbol of European colonialism that had made her feel “ashamed of being me, of looking like me.”118
Humor is intrinsic to human interaction and forms an integral part of popular culture. For these reasons, jokes disclose much about the societies and communities in which they become current. Because people reveal their values, aspirations, fears, hatreds, and most other aspects of their social experience through humor, jokes—especially the more enduring and popular ones—are authentic reflections of the perceptions, attitudes, and mores of the societies in which they circulate and are often more reliable indicators of popular thinking than the conventional sources used by historians and social analysts.119 This authenticity is guaranteed to the extent that jokes not only have to resonate with the values, sensibilities, and experiences of their target audiences to survive but also have to make sense instantaneously to elicit the appropriate response.
The van Riebeeck joke, by any yardstick, provides an accurate and dependable gauge of popular attitudes toward Coloured people during the apartheid era. At the core of its success and longevity as a joke lie the popular assumptions that Colouredness is an automatic product of miscegenation and that racial hybridity, together with its associations of illegitimacy and racial inferiority, are shameful and therefore open to ridicule. The joke also indirectly draws on a wide range of derogatory imagery about the Khoisan, the marginality of the Coloured people, and the racially attributed trait of their profligacy for embellishment. That most Coloured poeple were able to laugh at this ribbing and accept Jan van Riebeeck as the “father” of the Coloured people is a measure of just how hegemonic the racist ideas and assumptions behind the joke were in apartheid South Africa. The evidence indicates that this mindset has been slow to change in the postapartheid period, despite the dictates of political correctness that now govern South African public life.
This overview of Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured people in white-ruled South Africa has provided insight into the way Coloureds viewed themselves, their community, and its place in the broader society. It has elucidated the dynamic behind the expression of a separate Coloured identity, highlighting continuities in processes of Coloured self-definition. This analysis has identified their assimilationism, their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, the negative associations attached to the identity, and their marginality as core elements of Coloured identity and demonstrated how they meshed to reproduce and stabilize that identity through the twentieth century. In addition, the role of popular stereotyping in the social construction of Coloured identity has been explored, explaining how associations of hybridity, illegitimacy, Khoisan primitiveness, and marginality converged in reinforcing and reproducing the racial typecasting of Coloured people. These themes are elaborated on in the following chapter, which investigates the ways in which Coloured people viewed their history and how interpretations of this history changed over time.
2
History from the Margins
Changing Perceptions of Its Past within the Coloured Community
The marginality of the Coloured community is reflected in South African historiography in that relatively little has been written on the history of this social group and much of what has been written is polemical, speculative, poorly researched, or heavily biased. In many general histories, Coloured people have effectively been written out of the narrative and marginalized to a few throwaway comments scattered through the text.1 In addition, only a handful of works on the subject have been written by Coloured people themselves. As early as 1913, Harold Cressy, a Coloured educator and school principal, decried this state of affairs when he urged the Coloured teaching profession to help build self-confidence and pride in the community by dispelling
