develop into a distinct community and withdraw to the slums and locations [where] the church continued to take care of them.”19
In part, this abject complicity in the denigration of their own community was clearly the result of the authors’ need to comply with the syllabus in order for their text to be accepted as a course reader. Although there was only the slightest trace of the progressionist vision in their interpretation, there can be little doubt that Hendricks and Viljoen, being typical members of the moderate faction within Coloured politics, subscribed to this view but were prepared to suppress it for the sake of having the volume approved as a textbook. Their meek conformity with the expectations of the Education Department was also an indication of Coloured marginality, as negotiation with its officials or any form of protest or assertive action on their part would have been futile.20 The only alternative was not to publish at all.
That Hendricks and Viljoen, in line with the progressionist vision, would presumably have believed that the Coloured people were indeed “backward” and had relatively recently emerged from a barbarous past probably helped make their distasteful task a little easier. And at the very least in the case of Hendricks, a personal identification with whiteness and a dissociation from Colouredness played a role. Ralph Bunche, an African American professor of political science at Howard University who spent three months traveling through South Africa toward the end of 1937, reported that the “very fair” Hendricks, “though known to staff [at Zonnebloem] as coloured, has nothing to do with coloured people.”21 Although it is not known whether Hendricks and Viljoen’s volume was approved as a textbook or how widely it was used, it is clear that their version of Coloured history was representative of what Coloured teacher trainees were fed and in turn passed on to their pupils.22
The “Benefit of Their White Blood”: A Late 1930s Progressionist Interpretation
Given the schematic nature of Hendricks and Viljoen’s outline history and the constraint of having to conform to the syllabus, Christian Ziervogel’s Brown South Africa, a slim volume that appeared a mere two years later, deserves recognition as the first history of the Coloured people to have been written by a Coloured person. An autodidact who had worked his way up from humble origins, Ziervogel devoted his energies to the spiritual, cultural, and socioeconomic uplifting of the Coloured community, particularly in District Six, a depressed inner-city area of Cape Town, where he lived. Ziervogel, a noted bibliophile and librarian, had a reputation as one of the leading Coloured intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s and was nicknamed “the Professor of District Six.”23 In this book, he wrote self-consciously as a Coloured intellectual deliberating on the history and current condition of his community.
Ziervogel was an enigmatic and contradictory figure. On the one hand, he was active in left-wing circles, supporting the National Liberation League and contributing to its journal, The Liberator.24 He confided to Ralph Bunche that he not only had “‘left’ inclinations” but also “hates white people and can’t help it.”25 Yet Brown South Africa as well as his other publications were politically conservative, racist in outlook, and, although critical of white supremacism, nevertheless deferential toward white authority. His work, moreover, contained not the slightest trace of class analysis or radical rhetoric of the sort that would ordinarily have been expected from someone with left-wing sympathies. In tone and content, the book was typical of moderate, assimilationist discourse within the Coloured elite. And in keeping with the moderate political agenda, a key objective of the book was to plead with whites for fair treatment of the Coloured people and to aid their social advancement.
Ziervogel’s use of the term brown in the title signaled his acceptance of popular racialized perceptions of Colouredness. Indeed, he regarded the term coloured to be inaccurate and preferred brown hybrid. His interpretation differed little from white supremacist versions of Coloured history in broad principle except that he wove a strongly progressionist strand into his narrative, arguing that in the case of Coloured people, racial differences should not lead to their exclusion from the dominant society. The contorted logic and profoundly racist assumptions that at times informed Ziervogel’s tract can be gauged from his explanation of why various sections of the Coloured community could be expected to develop at different rates:
The hybrids of South Africa, the coloured people, are in many cases partly descended from English people, and must of necessity have inherited some of the virtues of that race. Hence, though they are comparatively backward at the present time, it is reasonable to suppose that it will not take them nine centuries to reach their ancestors’ high standard of development. Those descended from Asiatics will naturally develop in accordance with the stage of development previously reached by their ancestral race. That is, the people of Indian descent will develop more rapidly than those of Javanese descent, since the former come from a stock where there has been greater enlightenment. On the other hand, the hybrids of Bantu origin cannot be expected to develop as rapidly as others, since the degree of development reached by the Bantu is not equal to that of the Europeans or the Asiatics.
All this was offered despite the author’s declared standpoint that “humanity is greater than race,” that “‘pure races’ are hypothetical … and have no present existence,” and that he rejected the “Nordic Myth” of Aryan superiority.26
Ziervogel’s interpretation of the history of the Coloured people not only typified the progessionist vision but was also the most comprehensive and fully developed example of this paradigm. Its appearance was conveniently timed, coming as it did just as Marxist-inspired views of this history were about to challenge the conventional wisdom. The unifying thread of his none-too-coherent and often rather vague narrative was the persistent struggle of the Coloured people to rise from a benighted past to ever higher levels of civilization, their distinctive characteristic as a people being that they were “constantly responsive” to the “progressive” influence of Western civilization.27
Brown South Africa followed the conventional pattern of having the Coloured people originate as a result of miscegenation during the Dutch colonial period, describing van Riebeeck’s landing as “the beginning of White South Africa, and also of Brown South Africa.” He regarded the emancipation of slaves as pivotal to the emergence of a specifically Coloured identity, although he gave no explanation of how Coloured identity came about; he offered no more than “before and after 1834, the half-castes, Hottentots and slaves were merged together as the Cape Coloured people.” The real significance of emancipation for Ziervogel was that it “released coloured energies for self-improvement and ambition up to then repressed by social injustices.” Their newfound freedom gave the people the incentive to profit from their own efforts and aroused a quest “for education, the acquiring of property and the cultivation of the mind.” And although “mental and spiritual progress” was slow at first, the Coloured people, with the help of sympathetic whites, always managed to find ways to overcome obstacles—not least of which were the legal impediments raised by the colonial government—to their “upward course in the common life of South Africa.”28
Ziervogel depicted Coloured people as well on their way to being integrated into the dominant society on an equal footing with colonists by the mid-nineteenth century, when the “strong rush of the Bantu peoples sweeping downwards from the north, and the European advance upward from the south, meant that the two virile forces came face to face.” The ensuing struggle for supremacy and the growing incorporation of Africans into the South African economy after the discovery of minerals instilled a “fear complex in whites.” The consequent hardening of racial prejudices not only put an end to Coloureds’ integration into the dominant society but also reversed the trend to the extent that in the twentieth century, they fell victim to white South Africa’s segregationist policies.29
The author accepted that the Coloured people were “comparatively backward at the present time” but rejected the view of racists such as Sarah Gertrude Millin who regarded this condition as
