drawn on the specialist knowledge of colleagues, and I have a memory of pestering Chris Saunders, Bill Nasson, Neville Alexander, and Satyendra Peerthum with esoteric questions. To these and others who have been willing to help, I am grateful. Special thanks are due to Robin Kayser and Shaheen Ariefdien for sharing with me their source material and research findings. I would also like to thank Colleen Petersen for her efficient and congenial help with a range of tasks. I am particularly indebted to her for being prepared to sacrifice time over a weekend to help me recover from a computer-related mishap. Many people, too numerous to mention here, have provided support and encouragement over the years. They have my undying gratitude. The efficient and courteous service of staff members at the African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town and the Cape Town branch of the National Library of South Africa is also greatly appreciated. I would, in addition, like to acknowledge research funding over several years from the University of Cape Town’s University Research Committee. Funding from the National Research Foundation also helped ease the financial burden. Finally, the love and warmth of my sons, Rafiq and Zaheer, and a host of dear friends—including Shadow, Peggy, Ratso, Prince, Lady, Edgar, Oscar, and Junior (and hopefully Skipper will do his bit in the future)—have made the very rewarding task of producing this manuscript all the more enjoyable.
Introduction
The nature of Coloured identity, its history, and the implications it holds for South African society have evoked considerable interest in recent times. Debates around these issues have generated much controversy, yet there has been no systematic study of Coloured identity. At best, the current literature offers superficial attempts at analyzing its character or the social and political dynamic that informed Coloured exclusivism.
More recent studies on the history of the Coloured community focus narrowly on the racial oppression Coloured people suffered under white supremacy and on Coloured protest politics.1 They largely ignore crucial questions relating to the nature of Coloured identity and the way in which it operated as a social identity. By either taking Coloured identity for granted—as something inherent that needs no explanation because it is the automatic product of miscegenation—or by portraying it as a false identity imposed on weak and vulnerable people by the ruling white minority, the existing literature minimizes the role that Coloured people played in the making of their own identity and presents an oversimplified image of the phenomenon. The most recent scholarly volume on the subject, a collection of essays edited by Zimitri Erasmus, a sociologist at the University of Cape Town, breaks with this pattern in that parts of it attempt an analysis of aspects of Coloured identity; further, it does not suffer the usual coyness about broaching sensitive issues such as racial hostility toward Africans within the Coloured community or the sense of shame that suffuses the identity. This work, however, consists of tightly focused contributions that collectively fail to provide a sustained narrative or consistent interpretation of the history or character of Coloured identity.2
This book aims to redress these imbalances and to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the manner in which Colouredness functioned as a social identity from the time the South African state was formed in 1910 to the present. It analyzes the fundamental social and political impulses behind the assertion of a separate Coloured identity and explains processes of continuity and change in its expression throughout that period. This is achieved through close analysis of a range of key texts written by Coloured people in which they give expression to their identity as Coloured and reflect on the nature of their community, its past, and its place in the broader society. In addition to broad thematic analyses of Coloured identity, a series of chronologically arranged case studies are used to demonstrate the book’s thesis.
The central argument of this study is that Coloured identity is better understood not as having undergone a process of continuous transformation during the era of white rule, as conventional historical thinking would have it, but as having remained essentially stable throughout that period. This is not to contend that Coloured identity was static or that it lacked fluidity but that the continuities during the period were more fundamental to the way in which it operated as a social identity and a more consistent part of its functioning than the changes it experienced. I argue that this stability was derived from a central core of enduring characteristics rooted in the historical experience and social situation of the Coloured community that regulated the way in which Colouredness functioned as a social identity under white domination. The principal constituents of this stable core are the Coloured people’s assimilationism, which spurred hopes of future acceptance into the dominant society; their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, which generated fears that they might lose their position of relative privilege and be relegated to the status of Africans; the negative connotations with which Coloured identity was imbued, especially the shame attached to their supposed racial hybridity; and finally, the marginality of the Coloured people, which caused them a great deal of frustration. Their marginality is the most important of these attributes, as it placed severe limitations on possibilities for social and political action. That marginality also put members of the Coloured community at the mercy of a ruling establishment that was generally unsympathetic to their needs and aspirations and that usually acted in prejudicial and sometimes even malicious ways toward them. The marked creativity in the way the identity is finding expression in the postapartheid environment accentuates its relative stability in the preceding period.
My initial intent was to provide a history of Coloured identity through the twentieth century and to show how it changed and developed during that period. The original assumption was that after its late nineteenth-century genesis, Coloured identity continually evolved through the twentieth century, with new departures such as the rise of the radical movement in the 1930s, the emergence of Black Consciousness thinking in the 1970s, and Coloured rejectionism in the 1980s representing periods of accelerated transformation. Faced with the empirical evidence and the actual task of explaning the evolution of Coloured identity, I was instead struck by how stable that identity had been throughout the era of white domination and how superficial the influences of earlier radical politics, Black Consciousness, and the rejectionist movement were. With the evidence failing to confirm my initial hypotheses, based on orthodox approaches within the discipline and assumptions in existing writing on the subject, a reconceptualization of Coloured identity and its history was clearly necessary. The result is a counterintuitive argument that through the era of white supremacy, Coloured identity is better understood as having been stable rather than as continually changing.3
Although it is recognized that broad parameters for the production and reproduction of Coloured identity were set by an authoritarian, white ruling establishment in control of an increasingly prescriptive state and that Coloured perceptions of the world were framed within a hegemonic racist ideology, this study is emphatic about Coloured identity being primarily and in the first instance a product of its bearers. The analysis focuses mainly on the manner in which processes of Coloured self-definition were influenced by the marginality of the Coloured people, their intermediate status in the South African racial hierarchy, class differences, ideological and political conflict, cultural affinities, and popular stereotyping. It is argued that their marginality was central to the relative stability of Coloured identity because of the limitations it placed on their possibilities for independent action. Their status of relative privilege was also critical in maintaining this equilibrium because it rewarded Coloured exclusivism and conformity with white racist expectations while discouraging alternative strategies, particularly association with a broader black identity. Their resultant assimilationism and fear of being cast down to the status of Africans were further incentives for maintaining the status quo. By concentrating on the role that Coloured people themselves played in the making of their identity and by exploring the ways in which ambiguities and contradictions within their group identity shaped their consciousness, this volume seeks to elucidate complexities in Coloured social experience hitherto neglected by historians and social scientists.
My main criticism of nearly all of the extant literature centers on its effective denial or underplaying of the role Coloured people have had in making their own identity, and in the pages ahead, I attempt to redress that shortcoming.
