raw. They say we brown people are mixed masala, but we brown people are closer to white people, than they are to white people. Because our culture and the white people’s culture are the same.”37 Colloquially, this deference to whiteness is often referred to as the Coloured or slave mentality.
In spite of the racially egalitarian rhetoric that characterized so much of the discourse of Coloured protest politics, it has to be recognized that Coloured political organizations were, on the whole, racially exclusive and strove to entrench the relative privilege Coloured people enjoyed. If the ultimate aim of much of Coloured political organization was acceptance into the dominant society, then most of its day-to-day politicking was a narrow concern with the advancement of Coloured interests. Thus, though there was an assertion of nonracial values and protest against discrimination, there was also an accommodation with the racist order and an attempt to manipulate it in favor of Coloured people.38
That members of the Coloured community, especially within the petite bourgeoisie, were ambivalent about their identity should not come as a great surprise. Even as their assimilationism tended to dampen separatist tendencies from whites, their desire to protect their status of relative privilege pushed Coloured people into asserting a separate identity with respect to Africans. And although being the victims of racial discrimination promoted the principle of non-racism, political realities forced them to organize on a racial basis. The attempt to exploit segregationism to their own advantage confirms John Cell’s observation that though “force lay behind segregation … most of the time segregation was self-enforcing.”39 The structurally ambiguous position of the Coloured community within the South African racial hierarchy thus played an important part in reinforcing and reproducing the identity.
The intermediate status of the Coloured grouping contributed in two ways to a third key characteristic of Coloured identity, namely, that it was largely the bearer of a range of negative and derogatory connotations. First, because of their lack of political and economic clout and because they formed a relatively small stratum within the racial hierarchy, the Coloured people tended to be perceived in terms of the larger groups. This was most notable in official definitions of the term Coloured, in which the category was usually described as consisting of those people who were neither white nor African.40 Consequently, the Coloured community was usually not identified in a positive manner, as social groups typically are, in terms of a set of distinctive characteristics but was instead conceived in a negative fashion with reference to other groups, in terms of what it was not—as Erasmus put it, “in terms of ‘lack’ or taint, or in terms of ‘remainder’ or excess which does not fit a classificatory scheme.”41
This was one of the more subtle ways in which negative associations came to be attached to the concept of Colouredness. It reinforced ideas that the Coloured people were not of the same standing as other groups, that their claims to autonomous group status—usually articulated in terms of “nation,” “people,” or “race”—were deficient or lacked a degree of authenticity. The ultimate expression of this belief came from none other than former first lady of South Africa, Marike de Klerk, who, in a 1983 interview, declared that Coloureds “are a negative group. The definition of a coloured in the population register is someone that is not black, and is not white and is also not an Indian, in other words a no-person. They are the leftovers. They are the people that were left after the nations were sorted out. They are the rest.”42 Such ideas were often internalized by Coloured people, for, as one working-class Coloured informant in the early 1990s put it to me, “We Coloured people are not a proper nation, we don’t have our own culture or land that we can say is our own. The Coloured people is like a mixed bredie [stew] made up of all different kinds of people.”43 Comparing the Coloured people to a mixed bredie is a common colloquialism used to emphasize their racial and cultural hybridity.44 The perception that the Coloured community lacked cultural distinctiveness and full status as an ethnic group reinforced not only their marginality but also the idea that Coloured people, being the product of miscegenation, were misfits and somehow inherently deficient. Charles Sebe, at the time director of state security in the Ciskei, the eastern Cape bantustan, exemplified these attitudes in his rejection of miscegenation during a speech reported by Joseph Lelyveld, a New York Times journalist: “‘What will you get from [black/white] in-ter-mar-riage? You get a Coloured.’ The word was pronounced with contempt. ‘You don’t get a white person, you don’t get a black person, but a frustated child which does not belong anywhere.’”45
A second way in which the intermediate status of the Coloured people contributed to these negative perceptions is that it served as a residual category into which smaller groups that did not fit into either the white or the African categories were placed. This, again, was very much apparent in official practice, where, for example in census figures or in the compilation of statistics in official publications, those groups who were not manifestly white or African were lumped with the Coloured category. Thus, groups such as Malays, Griquas, Rehoboth Basters, Namas, and even Indians were sometimes treated as distinct groups and at other times included under the rubric of Coloured.46 The Population Registration Act went to the ridiculous length of creating a category labeled “Other Coloured” for those people who did not fit into any of the other six subcategories into which it divided those classified as Coloured.47
Because of negative associations attached to it, Colouredness was not enthusiastically embraced as an affirmation of self and group identity except in relatively rare or transient instances. The derogations were far too many and deeply entrenched—among both outsiders, especially whites, and, more important, many Coloured people themselves—for the identity to function in a positive, affirmative fashion. Coloured identity instead tended to be accepted with resignation and often with a sense of shame by its bearers, as a bad draw in the lottery of life.48
Erasmus listed some of the negative associations attached to Coloured identity as “immorality, sexual promiscuity, illegitimacy, impurity and untrustworthiness.”49 One could add other attributes to the list, as well, such as supposed propensities for criminality, gangsterism, drug and alcohol abuse, and vulgar behaviour. The most pervasive of the negative characteristics attached to Colouredness, however, and one that is usually seen as the source of other weaknesses was the idea that it was a product of miscegenation. For a popular mind-set suffused with social Darwinist assumptions, the implications of this notion were that Coloured people were therefore deficient in positive qualities associated with racial purity and handicapped by negative ones derived from racial mixture. Having internalized the racist values of the dominant society and having accepted racial mixture as the defining characteristic of their identity, Coloured people by and large viewed their community as indelibly stigmatized by their supposed condition of racial hybridity. This has been an extremely onerous burden, especially for the Coloured petite bourgeoisie, in a society obsessed with racial purity and the dangers of “mongrelization.” Reflecting on her own upbringing in a “respectable” Coloured family, Zimitri Erasmus commented, “I can see how respectablity and shame are key defining terms of middle class coloured experience.”50
In this regard, the Coloured community was trapped in a catch-22 situation that was partly of its own making. In order to distance themselves from Africans and protect their status of relative privilege, Coloureds emphasized their partial descent from European colonists. But it was precisely this claim that encumbered them with the stigma of racial hybridity. The import of white supremacist discourse about the origins of the Coloured people was that they were the unwanted and unfortunate consequence of the colonization of southern Africa.51 The Coloured people were thus a source of embarrassment to the white supremacist establishment as reminders of past lapses in morality. As the Reverend Allan Boesak inimitably put it, “We were there looking them in the eye and saying to them, ‘Well here we are. So what about your pure race theory and what about your chosen-people-of-God theory?’ We were the living proof that [they were] not really able to lock up every human emotion.”52 To white racists, Coloured people also presented the danger of an ongoing infiltration of white society by light-skinned Coloureds
