half-caste type has evolved into something very like the Southern Europeans.” Despite huge impediments, the Coloured people had made great strides in the last generation and were rapidly catching up with whites. He viewed educated Coloureds as a dynamic, modernizing group fully imbued with the “spirit of civilization” and the most progressive elements of Western culture. He thus resented white perceptions that “the coloured man is only fit to be a messenger or a hawker” and the tendency not to judge Coloured people as individuals but to assume that they were “of an inferior race, whose most striking characteristics are those of lower intelligence, lower knowledge and lower general constitution.” Ziervogel was also frustrated by the indifference of the state and whites in general to the plight of the Coloured working classes living in squalor and the detrimental effect that the civilized labor policy and other discriminatory measures had on their progress as a people.30
Writing in a context of intensifying racial chauvinism internationally and tightening segregationism at home, Ziervogel feared that Coloureds could suffer a fate similar to that of Africans, to the extent of perhaps even finding themselves subject to territorial segregation. He was thus at pains to stress the long history and cultural affinities that Coloured people shared with whites. Although he did not broach the issue directly in Brown South Africa, in his pamphlet The Coloured People and the Race Problem, published two years earlier, he explicitly raised a related question: “On which side of the dividing line is he (the coloured man) to be placed?” Asserting that the two groups were so closely related that it was often difficult to distinguish between Coloured and white individuals, he argued that Coloureds “have practically nothing in common with the Bantu. While the Native is one who is at home in the countryside, has a language of his own, a culture of his own, and lives in many cases under tribal law, the coloured people came into being and live the whole of their lives in the midst of European civilization and culture.”31 On this basis, he invoked the call attributed to Lord Selborne, high commissioner for South Africa from 1905 to 1910—“Give the coloured people the benefit of their white blood”—and appealed for “absorption” and not segregation as the solution to the “Coloured problem.”32
“A Purposeful Social Instrument”: Radical Counter-positions of the 1940s and 1950s
It was fully forty-three years after the publication of Brown South Africa that the next significant book on the history of the Coloured community by a “Coloured” author—Maurice Hommel’s Capricorn Blues—appeared. Meanwhile, during the 1940s and 1950s, the radical movement in Coloured politics developed an interpretation of Coloured history that provided an alternative to the progressionist version.
The elaboration of a contending version of Coloured history was spearheaded by intellectuals within the Trotskyist tradition of radical politics, of which the Non-European Unity Movement and the Fourth International Organization of South Africa (FIOSA) were the main factions during the 1940s.33 The rival radical tradition, allied to the Communist Party and later the Congress Movement, made little contribution to the fleshing out of this new interpretation. With its emphasis on political activism, the Communist Party faction appears to have been too caught up in the cut and thrust of day-to-day politicking to pay too much attention to polemics about the significance of history and debate over the implications of South Africa’s past for current and future revolutionary strategy. Coloured political activists in the Trotskyist tradition were prone to a more cerebral and highly theorized approach and the precept expressed by FIOSA member Kenneth Jordaan: “In history [lies] the key to understanding the present which in turn is the indispensable guide to the future.”34
Like its progressionist counterpart, the radical view of the trajectory of Coloured history was implicit in the ideology and aspirations of the left-wing movement as well as in its political strategy. In addition, this historical consciousness was sometimes invoked for political purposes, such as arguing that black unity was a prerequisite for overthrowing white rule in South Africa, or to score points off opponents in ideological infighting. The best example of such an exchange involving the history of the Coloured people is Kenny Jordaan’s riposte to Willem van Schoor’s history of segregation in South Africa.35 Besides wanting to refine the relatively crude analysis of van Schoor, Jordaan was also clearly engaged in a contest of one-upmanship between FIOSA and the NEUM, of which van Schoor, president of the TLSA for much of the 1950s, was a leading member.
This radical discourse, however, differed from the progressionist interpretation in that little attention was paid, directly or exclusively, to the history of the Coloured people per se, and it did not find expression in a focused history in the way the progressionist view was represented in Brown South Africa. Drawing on Marxist theory, radical historical analyses were usually situated within a framework of the development of international capitalism and the imperatives behind imperialism. In contrast to the more parochial concerns of the progressionist perspective, social issues tended to be viewed in the context of international relations and global history by radicals.36 And given the radicals’ explicit goal of fomenting social revolution, their reflections on South African society and its history by and large trancended narrower issues relating to localized identities, such as the specific role or significance of the Coloured people on any particular question. Their emphasis on black and working-class unity also discouraged separate consideration of the Coloured community. In the writings of radical Coloured intellectuals, issues relating specifically to the Coloured community were therefore either ignored, subsumed under a broader black rubric, or referred to obliquely or parenthetically. The collective radical perception of the history of the Coloured people thus needs to be unraveled and extracted by inference from broader analyses of the history of South Africa or of the “oppressed.”
Although Coloured radical politics had always been rent by fierce ideological infighting and irreconcilable doctrinal splits, there was sufficient common ground for one to discern a generic radical notion of the history of the Coloured people. The spirit with which Coloured activists in the radical movement, especially the Trotskyist faction, approached history in general and the history of South Africa in particular is neatly summed up in the opening sentence of van Schoor’s address on segregation to the Teachers’ League of South Africa in October 1950 and repeated for emphasis as its closing sentence: “A people desiring to emancipate itself must understand the process of its enslavement.” He went on to explain that “we who have thus far been the victims of South African history, will play the major role in the shaping of a new history. In order to make that history we must understand that history.”37 Radicals would also have shared Edgar Maurice’s view that “the phenomenon of colour prejudice and the colour bar is largely one of capitalist exploitation of peoples … a purposeful social instrument, politically manufactured to serve certain ends.”38 Insofar as it referred to the Coloured people, radical historical writing was framed in these broad terms.
Historical analyses by radical Coloured intellectuals, though recognizing the existence of the Coloured people as a separate social entity, avoided treating them as an analytical category distinct from the African majority. Van Schoor’s monograph on the origin and development of segregation in South Africa, for example, focused almost entirely on the African experience and hardly made any mention of Coloureds or Indians. It is noteworthy that in this review of South African history stretching back to the arrival of van Riebeeck, the first substantive comment by van Schoor on the Coloured people related to the establishment of the Coloured Advisory Council in 1943. He indirectly justified this approach by claiming that Africans formed a large majority of the oppressed and that exploitative measures had largely been directed at them.39
Jordaan criticized this tendency of “placing the Cape Coloured people in the same category as the Bantu” as ahistorical and a distortion of the past.40 It should thus come as no surprise that it is in his writing that one finds the most explicit treatment of the history of the Coloured people in radical writing. But even he did not address the history of the Coloured people directly as an independent topic of inquiry. In his disquisition, “Jan van Riebeeck: His Place in South African History,”41
