of peace, prosperity, and social harmony.13
In essence, the progressionist perspective wove together an affirmative view of Coloured history with key elements from the traditionalist and liberal strands. This interpretation thus accepted the racist view that Coloured people formed a separate “race” and were socially and culturally “backward” by Western standards but stressed their common history and cultural affinities with whites while strongly emphasizing that theirs was a history that demonstrated a hunger for personal development and the achievement of social advancement against enormous odds. The progressionist interpretation was not so much an alternative to the white supremacist version as an acceptance of it in broad outline but with major qualifications. It reinterpreted crucial aspects of the dominant society’s version to give it a positive spin and an optimistic outlook for the future. For the Coloured people themselves, the critical difference between their progressionist visions of their history and those of the traditional genre of white South Africa was that, even though they admitted they were “backward,” they did not accept their inferiority as permanent or inherent. Combining an environmentalist concept of racial difference with liberal values of personal freedom, equality in the eyes of the law, interracial cooperation, and status based on individual merit, progressionists argued that the history of the Coloured people demonstrated that they were well advanced in the process of becoming as fully “civilized” as whites and thus deserved to be accepted into the dominant society. Espoused publicly by organic intellectuals and political leaders within the Coloured community, this interpretation was usually coupled with a plea for fair treatment or the preservation of their status of relative privilege within the South African racial hierarchy.
Although there was no attempt from members of the Coloured community to produce any formal or systematic account of their history until the latter half of the 1930s, educated and politicized Coloured people nevertheless exhibited a clear sense of the trajectory of their history as a community. This much is evident from Harold Cressy’s 1913 exhortation to his colleagues to raise the profile of the community’s history. During the earlier part of the twentieth century, this historical consciousness, though it had not yet been formalized as written history, was implicit in discourse about Coloured people as a community, including their political ideals and social aspirations. This consciousness, usually expressed in terms of a common oppression dating back to slavery and the dispossession of the Khoisan, informed the endeavors of Coloured communal organizations and can be deduced piecemeal from a range of evidence in which Coloured people reflected on their community and its place in South African society. This sense of shared history was expressed not so much as an interest in the past for its own sake but as a means to justify social and political demands and support strategies for communal advancement. Abdullah Abdurahman’s presidential addresses to the 1909, 1923, and 1939 APO conferences are good examples of the progressionist interpretation of Coloured history harnessed to support particular social or political agendas.14
This popular perception of Coloured history looked back to the period of Dutch colonial rule as a dark night of slavery, savagery, and serfdom during which the Coloured people came into being as a result of miscegenation. In 1923, Abdurahman described the Dutch policy of conciliatie (conciliation) as having “always meant, for the Coloured races, the acceptance of servitude.” It was the introduction of liberal policies under British rule and the endeavors of missionaries on their behalf that was seen to mark the start of the Coloured people’s ascent from servile and brutish origins into the light of civilization. The 1828 repeal of the vagrancy laws that had enserfed the Khoisan and the emancipation of slaves in 1834 were regarded together as the main watershed in the history of the Coloured people because these acts gave them personal freedom and the opportunity to cultivate a communal life. The establishment of the principle of equality in the eyes of the law and the introduction of a nonracial franchise in 1853 were viewed as the other key developments because they bestowed citizenship rights on Coloured people and provided a means for their integration into the mainstream of Cape colonial society. In the words of Abdurahman during his 1939 presidential address to the APO, “The Ordinance [50 of 1828] was the real foundation of the broad political framework of 1852 [sic] within which White and Coloured were joined together by a bond of loyalty as free and equal citizens.” The Coloureds’ assimilation to Western culture and their acquisition of education were presented as proof of their ongoing integration into the civic life of the Cape Colony until unification in 1910, which allowed the triumph of northern racism over southern liberalism, reversed this process. Abdurahman summed up the course of this history in his 1923 presidential address: “Since van Riebeeck’s day there was a period of bitter struggle, then followed a period of comparative tranquility and hopefulness in the Cape … from 1854 to 1910 during which years the Non-European races enjoyed political privileges.” After that, however, “the policy of van Riebeeck has been steadily, vigorously, and relentlessly followed.”15
The earliest known attempt from within the Coloured community itself to provide an account of the history of the Coloured people is found in a history textbook entitled The Student Teacher’s History Course: For the Use in Coloured Training Colleges, which was published in Paarl by Huguenot Press in 1936 by two relatively junior members of the Coloured teaching profession, Dorothy Hendricks and Christian Viljoen. Hendricks was the daughter of Teachers’ League of South Africa (TLSA) stalwart Fred Hendricks and lectured at the Zonnebloem Training College. The twenty-six-year-old Viljoen, who taught at the Athlone Institute, a Coloured teachers’ training college in Paarl, was to become a leading member of the Teachers’ League, serving on its executive committee in the late 1930s and elected president in 1941.16 Hendricks, who had bachelor of arts and bachelor of education degrees, and Viljoen, with master of arts and bachelor of education degrees, not only were very highly qualified by the standards of their community at the time but also held some of the most prestigious teaching posts to which Coloured people could aspire.
The textbook followed the history syllabus for training Coloured primary school teachers and provided a broad outline of modern European, British imperial, and South African history from 1652 to the 1930s. Interspersed in the section on the history of South Africa are short subsections on Coloured history, which, if stitched together, would provide a coherent sketch of the history of the Coloured people.17 Hendricks and Viljoen’s rendition of South African history conformed to white settler views, as one would expect of a textbook diligently following the syllabus set out by the Cape Education Department. Accordingly, the writing on the history of the Coloured community was suffused with the phraseology and assumptions of white supremacist discourse.
The authors largely accepted settler stereotyping of the indigenous peoples, in that they present the “Bushmen” as primitive, dangerous, and essentially unassimilable whereas the “Hottentots” were described as an incorrigibly lazy and thieving people. Slaves were depicted as having adapted well to civilized life under the paternalistic care of colonists and the relatively benign conditions prevalent at the Cape. Hendricks and Viljoen followed the customary line that miscegenation and a limited degree of interracial marriage early on in the life of the Cape Colony gave rise to a “half-breed” population that formed the nucleus of “a new race that was emerging.” They claimed that “this hybrid race, together with pure-blooded slaves and detribalized Hottentots, became known as the Cape Coloured people and gradually developed more and more homogeneity as they became subjected to positive and constructive forces of European society.” According to Hendricks and Viljoen, the emergent Coloured race benefited not only from the civilizing efforts of the colonists but also from “the unconscious influence of example and suggestion which acted with peculiar power upon an imitative and susceptible race.”18
The authors asserted that with the emancipation of the Khoi in 1828 and then of slaves in 1834, the Coloured people “entered a new era of development … to work out their own salvation, to rise as a class or revert to barbarism.” By 1834, the Coloured people were seen to have come into existence as an identifiable race, for “when emancipation took place they had already developed the physical and psychological characteristics which they today exhibit.” Not able to adapt well to the competitive environment engendered by the mineral revolution, the Coloured
