played little part in the history of their country.2 Les Switzer, historian and professor of communication at the University of Houston, summed up the situation eloquently in 1995 when he wrote that “South Africa’s coloured community has remained a marginalized community—marginalized by history and even historians.”3
This chapter charts changing approaches to Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured people within that community itself by analyzing popular perceptions of this past as well as the writing of Coloured intellectuals on the subject. Both popular beliefs and intellectual discourse about the nature of Colouredness and its history played an important part in defining the identity and creating a sense of community among its bearers. In addition to epitomizing the thinking within sectors of the community, the texts chosen for analysis also reflect the social and political currents of the time. Importantly, they lay bare ideological contestation around the meaning of Colouredness and strategies for social and political action.
Contending Historiographical Paradigms
Historical writing on the Coloured community, both that of a popular nature and that emanating from the academy in the era of white supremacy, can be divided into three broad classes. The first, which may be termed the essentialist school, is by far the most common approach and coincides with the popular view of Coloured identity as a product of miscegenation going back to the earliest days of European settlement at the Cape. According to this approach, racial hybridity is considered the essence of Colouredness. For essentialists, there is usually no need to explain the nature or existence of Coloured identity because it is part of an assumed reality that sees South African society as consisting of distinct races, of which the Coloured people is one. The existence of Coloured identity poses no analytical problem because it is regarded as having developed naturally and self-evidently as a result of miscegenation.4 This approach is inherently racialized because it assigns racial origins and racial characteristics to the concept of Colouredness, though it has to be recognized that not all writing within this category is necessarily racist. Indeed, a good deal of it, including some of the best writing in this genre, was intended to help break down racial barriers and expose the injustices suffered by Coloured people under the South African racial system.5 Because the essentialist approach embodies the conventional wisdom about Coloured identity, virtually all of the popular writing and most of the older and more conservative academic works are cast in this mold.6
A second approach to the history of the Coloured people emerged in the 1980s in reaction to the prejudicial assumptions of the traditional mode of analysis and a desire among scholars within the “liberal” and “radical” paradigms of South African history to distance themselves from any form of racist thinking. This school, whose adherents will be referred to as the instrumentalists, regarded Coloured identity as an artificial concept imposed by the white supremacist state and ruling groups on a weak and vulnerable sector of the population.7 Positions in this respect range from seeing Coloured identity simply as a device for excluding people of mixed race from the dominant society to viewing it as a product of deliberate divide-and-rule strategies by the ruling white minority to prevent black South Africans from forming a united front against racism and exploitation.8 The instrumentalist approach was grounded in the growing rejection of Coloured identity that gained impetus from the latter half of the 1970s onward and was buttressed by the nonracism of the mass democratic movement of the 1980s. This approach represented the politically correct view of the post-Soweto era and stemmed from a refusal to give credence to apartheid thinking or, in the case of the expedient, from a fear of being accused of doing so.9
A third paradigm, to which this study subscribes and which may be dubbed social constructionism, emerged from the latter half of the 1980s in response to the inadequacies of both the essentialist and instrumentalist approaches. It criticizes both those approaches for their tendency to accept Coloured identity as given and to portray it as fixed. Their reification of the identity, it is argued, fails to recognize fluidities in processes of Coloured self-identification or ambiguities in the expression of the identity. In essentialist histories, this is a product of a profoundly Eurocentric perspective and a reliance on the simplistic formulations of popular racialized conceptions of Coloured identity. The problem in instrumentalist writing partly stems from a narrow focus on Coloured protest politics and the social injustices suffered by the community, which has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance of Coloured people to white supremacism and playing down their accommodation with the South African racial system. The overall result has been an oversimplification of the phenomenon in this literature.10
The cardinal sin of both these schools, however, is their condescension in denying Coloured people a significant role in the making of their own identity. Essentialist interpretations do this by assuming Colouredness to be an inbred quality that arises automatically from miscegenation. Instrumentalists share the essentialist premise that Coloured identity is something negative and undesirable, but they try to blame it on the racism of the ruling white minority. Though they may have had the laudable intention of countering the racism of essentialist accounts, instrumentalist histories have nevertheless contributed to the marginalization of the Coloured people by denying them their role in the basic cognitive function of creating and reproducing their own social identities. Even the best of these histories, Gavin Lewis’s Between the Wire and the Wall, despite its firm focus on the Coloured people themselves and its stress on their agency in the political arena, is nevertheless condescending by suggesting that “the solution to this dilemma [of defining Coloured identity] is to accept Coloured identity as a white-imposed categorization.”11 Both approaches treat Coloured identity as something exceptional, failing to recognize it for what it is—a historically specific social construction, like any other social identity. In this respect, both schools reflect the undue influence of contemporary ideological and political considerations.
The main concerns of the social constructionist approach have therefore been to demonstrate the complexity of Coloured identity and, most important, to stress the agency of Coloured people in the making of their own identity. Emphasis has also been placed on the ways in which ambiguities in Coloureds’ identity and their marginality influenced their social experience and political consciousness. This approach also seeks to demonstrate that far from being the anonymous, inert entities of the essentialist school or the righteous resisters of instrumentalist histories, Coloured people exhibited a much more complex reaction to white supremacism that encompassed resistance as well as collaboration, protest as well as accommodation. By its very nature, social identity is largely and in the first instance the product of its bearers and can no more be imposed on people by the state or ruling groups than it can spring automatically from miscegenation or their racial constitution. Social identity is cultural in nature in that it is part of learned behavior and is molded by social experience and social interaction. At most, social identities can be manipulated by outsiders—but even then, only to the extent that it resonates strongly with the bearers’ image of themselves and their social group as a whole.
Up from Servitude and Savagery: Earlier Perspectives on Coloured History
Within the broader category of essentialist writing, it is possible to distinguish three further divisions. First, there are those I refer to as traditionalists, who analyze Coloured identity and history in terms of the racist values and assumptions prevalent in white supremacist thinking. Second, there are the liberal essentialists, who dissent from the dominant racist view and seek to demonstrate that cooperation and interdependence rather than racial antagonism marked historical interaction between South Africa’s various peoples.12 The third distinct strand within the essentialist school might be termed the progressionist interpretation of Coloured history, and for the greater part of the twentieth century, this interpretation represented the conventional view of members of the Coloured community regarding their own history. Until challenged by ideas emanating from a Marxist-inspired radical movement during the 1940s and 1950s, the progressionist version reigned supreme within the better-educated and politicized sector of this group. This approach was progressionist in that it was based on the assumption that
