of the van Riebeeck tercentenary festival, one of Jordaan’s aims was to correct ahistorical perceptions that the treatment of South African blacks through history could be explained in terms of an abstract, uniform white racism. He wanted to demonstrate that each social system had its own set of policies “toward the black and mixed people,” grounded in their specific “living historical reality which grew out of a definitive stage in the productive process.”43 For all its sketchiness, Jordaan’s text will have to serve as the model for the radical perception of Coloured history in the absence of any more explicit example.
Born in Cape Town in 1924 and a teacher by profession, Kenneth Jordaan was a prominent member of FIOSA in the latter half of the 1940s. Together with a small band of associates who declined to comply with the Fourth International’s recommendation that FIOSA amalgamate with the rival Cape Town Trotskyist grouping, the Worker’s Party of South Africa, Jordaan formed the Forum Club, an independent left-wing discussion group that met during the early 1950s. In the 1950s, Jordaan won broad respect in left-wing circles for a number of theoretical papers he wrote on the nature of South African society, its history, and the implications this held for revolutionary strategy.44
The first social system of South African history identified by Jordaan existed during the era of Company rule at the Cape, from 1652 to 1795. He claimed that because the Cape served mainly as a refreshment station and military outpost, the economy was not expansionist and there was no attempt to bring indigenous peoples under direct Dutch control. Because of the colony’s simple social organization and its imperative of consolidating control over the southwestern tip of the continent, Jordaan asserted that “there was no colour policy” and that Cape colonial society “absorbed all mixed elements—the result of miscegenation between whites, blacks and imported slaves.” Jordaan was emphatic about the miscegenated origins of the Coloured people, and he emphasized that they were an integral part of Dutch colonial society: “The father of the Cape Coloured people is therefore van Riebeeck. It is he who, by encouraging mixed unions, called them to life and it is he who, realizing their close affinity to the Dutch, made them an indissoluble and indistinguishable part of the European population.” Although he indicated that substantial numbers of miscegenes passed into the settler community, he did not explain how and why the rest of this supposedly “indistinguishable part of the European population” nevertheless remained separate.45
According to Jordaan, the second stage of South Africa’s development, which lasted from 1795 to 1872, was dominated by the ideology of British liberalism. Under this social system, the integration of Coloured people was taken further, in that “all the Coloureds and detribalized Hottentots were assimilated into European society on the basis of complete legal and political equality for all.”46 At the same time that black people were being integrated into Cape society, a third social system that implemented a rigid constitutional colour bar coexisted in the Boer republics. Jordaan characterized this system, which he saw as having lasted from 1836 until 1870, as consisting of isolated and isolationist peasant communities.
Then, from 1870, argued Jordaan, “the entire face of South Africa was radically transformed by the discovery of gold and diamonds which heralded the Industrial Revolution.” With the introduction of wage labor and industrial methods of production, the relationship between white and black, employer and employee changed as all preexisting social systems were rapidly eroded and the integration of Coloured people into the dominant society was reversed with the introduction of segregationist policies to facilitate the exploitation of black labor. Jordaan did not pursue this line of inquiry any further, making it clear that his concern in this essay was with preindustrial South African society.47
What is most striking when comparing progressionist and radical visions of Coloured history are the similarities they share despite the ideological gulf and a vitriolic mutual antagonism that separated them. First, both accepted the Coloured people as originating from miscegenation during the earliest days of Dutch rule, which is an indication of just how hegemonic white supremacist conceptions of Coloured identity were in South African society. Second, both saw the Coloured people as experiencing a long period of acculturation and incorporation into the dominant society followed by a sudden reversal, leading to twentieth-century segregationism. Though the reasons for, and timing of, the about-face differed, the pattern remained consistent. This period of incorporation was presumably necessary to support the perception that Coloured people were the product of miscegenation and to explain their assimilation to Western culture. Finally, the radical view was also progressionist and even more dogmatically so than its moderate counterpart, in that it followed Marxist doctrine that society would progress through a series of stages culminating in a socialist utopia—only the timing and method of its attainment were in question. Instead of the inner impulse for self-improvement posited by Ziervogel, it was the objective conditions of capitalist development that were seen by radical intellectuals to drive progress.48
“Contingent on the Liberation of the African People”: A Novel Approach in the Early 1980s
The views of Jordaan and other radical theorists had a very limited impact on popular consciousness because their ideas were confined to a tiny set of intellectuals within the Coloured elite. But these ideas remained alive within this intelligentsia, even through the quiescent heyday of apartheid, and they were to feed into the climate of resistance that arose from the mid-1970s onward. The views of radical theorists, especially Jordaan’s, would be extremely influential in the writing of Maurice Hommel, who took up their ideas and arguments—even verbatim chunks of their writing, some of it unacknowledged49—in Capricorn Blues.
Maurice Hommel was born in 1930 in Uitenhage, South Africa, where he worked as a teacher and journalist. Unable to find suitable employment because of his radical sympathies, he emigrated in 1964. Taking up residence first in Zambia and then in the United States and Canada, Hommel made a living as a journalist and writer, obtaining a doctoral degree in political science from York University, Toronto, in 1978.50
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