accepted into the dominant society and share in the benefits of citizenship on the basis of individual merit.24 Though the majority of the Coloured elite aspired to acceptance into English-speaking, middleclass culture, there was also a significant movement within the Coloured community for accommodation within the fold of Afrikanerdom.25 Despite occasional warnings that the continued oppression of Coloured people could have dire consequences for the society as a whole, the Coloured political leadership had no interest in overthrowing the system or changing South African society fundamentally, except for eliminating institutionalized racial discrimination. As is so often the case in any discussion of Coloured politics after the mid-1930s, the exception represented by a small minority of radicals needs to be noted here.
This assimilationism, which in more recent times has often been misunderstood and denounced by radicals as mere rationalizations of self-serving sycophants and collaborationists, was rooted in a worldview informed by nineteenth-century Cape liberal values. For much of the twentieth century, moderate Coloured political opinion still clung to a weltanschauung reminiscent of mid-nineteenth century progressionism. The first key assumption of this utopian outlook was that humanity was on a path of inevitable progress toward the ultimate attainment of an elysian future of social harmony and prosperity. The second assumption was that all people, no matter what their current condition, were capable of self-improvement and the acquisition of “civilization,” which equated to Western bourgeois culture in the minds of the Coloured elite. These assumptions were reinforced by deeply held religious beliefs that not only posited the equality of all humans in the eyes of God but also fed the progressionist vision with ideas about the ultimate redemption of humankind and the notion that its destiny was directed by the guiding hand of a just God.26
These assimilationist hopes were remarkably resilient and underlay the longer-term vision of the Coloured communal leadership regarding the future of the Coloured people and the destiny of humanity in general. The Coloured elite continued to nurture hopes of being accepted into the dominant society even as new obstacles were placed in their way and as the prospect of realizing these aspirations deteriorated with the continued tightening of segregationist measures through most of the twentieth century. Though the elite were disconcerted by each new discriminatory regulation and alarmed by the more draconian developments, setbacks were usually rationalized as temporary reversals, and acceptance into white middle-class society was often seen as something that Coloured people still needed to earn—something that would only be attained after a struggle worthy of the prize.27 Indeed, this notion often served as justification for clinging to their assimilationist hopes in the face of intensifying segregation. Not even the utter rejection of any form of assimilation with the implementation of apartheid policies entirely extinguished these dreams. The desire for acceptance into the dominant society was evident in its most acute form among those individuals willing to disown their identity as Coloured; turn their backs on friends, family, and former lives; and take the considerable risk of exposure by attempting to pass for white.28 To a significant degree, the durability of these yearnings for acceptance explain the eager response of so many Coloured people to the National Party’s overtures in the 1994 general election campaign.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that these dreams of assimilation were badly misplaced and out of step with the social and political realities of white supremacist South Africa. Such optimism might have had a degree of compatibility with nineteenth-century Cape liberalism or have resonated with Western liberal or Left opinion in the twentieth century. And in the first decade of the century, though the prospects were increasingly remote, it was not entirely unrealistic to hope that individual Coloured people would be accepted into white middle-class society on the basis of personal merit and that the community as a whole might, in time, assimilate into the mainstream of Cape society. These desires were, however, completely out of place in the unified South African state, whose policies were increasingly informed by social Darwinist and segregationist assumptions.
Yet the Coloured elite and the political leadership could not avoid coming to terms in some way with the reality of intensifying segregationism that confronted them. Because they were denied their first choice of assimilation into the dominant society, politicized Coloureds had little alternative but to mobilize along racial lines to defend their rights and promote their interests as a group. This brings to the fore a second fundamental attribute of Coloured identity in South Africa, namely, its intermediate status in the South African racial hierarchy.
Coloured people experienced the South African racial hierarchy as a three-tiered system in which Coloureds held an intermediate position between the dominant white minority and the large African majority. As sociologist Zimitri Erasmus put it, “For me, growing up coloured meant knowing that I was not only not white, but less than white: not only not black but better than black (as we referred to African people).”29 Similarly, in 1943, radical activist Ben Kies criticized the self-segregationist ethos of the Teachers’ League: “For thirty years they accepted the idea that their children were not fit to be taught with white children and were too good to be taught with African children.”30
The symbolism of referring to Coloured people as “brown” neatly captures this intermediate status. The equation of Coloured people with the color brown is even more entrenched in the Afrikaans language, in which words such as bruinman (brown man) and bruinmens (brown person) are translated as “(Cape) Coloured man” and “(Cape) Coloured person.”31 Indeed, writing in 1960, leading Afrikaner literary figure N. P. van Wyk Louw declared the conventional Afrikaans term for Coloured, Kleurling, to be a nauseating word, stating that he preferred bruinmens.32 That Coloured people have, on the whole, accepted this description of themselves is indicated by the fact that Coloured intellectual Christian Ziervogel entitled his late-1930s book on the Coloured people Brown South Africa and Coloured poet and educator S. V. Petersen, in a 1956 address to the Stellenbosch Afrikaanse Studentebond, protested he was not a “kleurling” but a “bruinman”; similarly, in the mid-1990s, Coloured politician Peter Marais described himself as a “bruin Afrikaner” (brown Afrikaner). In additon, this particular usage is common in Cape Vernacular Afrikaans.33
Because their assimilationist aspirations were thwarted and their intermediate position gave Coloured people significant privileges relative to Africans, the basic dynamic behind the assertion of Coloured identity and the main thrust of mobilizing politically as Coloured people was to defend this position of relative privilege. Their minority status and political powerlessness as well as intensifying segregationism engendered fears that Coloureds might end up being relegated to the status of Africans and lose their position of relative privilege. These concerns reinforced Coloured exclusivity and encouraged a separatist strategy with respect to Africans within the Coloured political leadership.34 Only a tiny minority of Coloured people chose the alternatives of communism or black unity or some combination of the two.
Their assimilationism, together with the insecurities engendered by their intermediate status, meant that in daily life the most consistent—and insistent—element in the expression of Coloured identity was an association with whiteness and a concomitant distancing from Africanness, whether in the value placed on fair skin and straight hair, in the prizing of white ancestors in the family lineage, or in taking pride in the degree to which they were able to conform to the standards of Western bourgeois culture. This “white-mindedness,” as one commentator referred to it,35 could give rise to a sense of shame with regard to any personal associations with blackness or an aggressive bigotry toward Africans. The former is illustrated by the ludicrous yet poignant example of Betty Theys, who was considerably darker than her light-skinned father. Throughout her life, she felt inadequate, and considered herself a disappointment to him. She finally felt vindicated when she gave birth to her fair-complexioned daughter and immediately sent her father the message, “Your black hen has laid a white egg.”36 The latter is demonstrated by a 1993 interview, in which a working-class Coloured woman, identified as Mrs. D. E., gave voice to the racist chauvinism that often resulted from this affiliation with whiteness: “And a kaffir, even if he wears a golden ring,
