This prompted fears that, in the long run, white supremacy and the very survival of Western civilization in southern Africa were at stake. One of South Africa’s most popular authors in the first half of the twentieth century who wrote extensively on the theme of race from a racist perspective, Sarah Gertrude Millin, quoted Prime Minister Jan Smuts as cautioning that “white South Africans (must) have a care lest one day … ‘little brown children play among the ruins of the Union Government Buildings.’”53 The promulgation of the Immorality and Mixed Marriages Acts confirms just how seriously these threats were taken.
A concomitant problem was the inability of organic intellectuals within the community to delineate a positive set of symbols, a distinctive culture, or an acceptable myth of origin around which those who regarded themselves as Coloured could cohere with a sense of pride. Their slave past and Khoisan heritage were generally treated as embarrassments requiring a tactful silence rather than as affirmations of group identity. Although their assimilation to Western culture was emphasized because of their determination to distance themselves from Africans, organic intellectuals within the group were sensitive to the general perception that the Coloured people did not have a distinctive culture. This was illustrated by the emotional response of a prominent Coloured politician from the Western Cape on visiting the museum at the Genadendal mission station. Asked afterward why he had been visibly moved by the experience, the politician replied that he had always been under the impression that Coloured people did not have a culture but that the history of Genadendal had proved otherwise to him.54
What is more, those cultural features commonly accepted as distinctively Coloured have generally been denigrated and accorded low status in South African society. The Afrikaans vernacular distinctive to the Coloured community and variously referred to as Capey, Gamtaal (language of Ham), or kombuis (kitchen) Afrikaans has, for example, customarily been stigmatized as a mark of social inferiority. Until relatively recently, before the argument for Afrikaans being a creole language gained popularity, there was widespread acceptance within the Coloured community of white and especially Afrikaner denigration of kombuis Afrikaans as a vulgar patois. By way of example, a middleclass Coloured informant in the mid-1990s told me that although kombuis Afrikaans was his home language, he felt ashamed of using it when speaking to whites or “respectable people,” as it would mark him as “low class.”55 An Afrikaner school inspector in the mid-1970s exemplified white attitudes toward the dialect when, on hearing me speak the vernacular to some of my high school students, he admonished me, in a gentle but paternalistic tone, for using “daardie gebasterde taal” (that bastardized language) and perpetuating uncultured practices among my students.56 The Coon Carnival, a celebration of the new year particular to the Coloured community—though embraced by most working-class Coloured people as their own and more recently touted as an example of colorful Cape culture to promote tourism—was similarly stigmatized among whites and middle-class Coloureds as boorish, disreputable, and even depraved.57
The lack of positive identification with Colouredness meant that much of the social mobilization and political activity conducted in the name of the Coloured people was in reaction to white racism rather than a proactive marshaling of ethnic resources. Throughout the era of white domination, anger, anxiety, and fear engendered by the social injustices they suffered rather than a positive identification with Colouredness proved to be the more potent means for mobilizing people on the basis of their identity as Coloured. Coping with white racism rather than affirming Colouredness motivated a great deal of these separatist agendas. Virtually all Coloured communal organizations, whether cultural, professional, or political, either were formed because Coloured people were excluded from the corresponding white bodies or were established in response to one or another segregationist development. Coloured responses to segregationism, which, with the exception of the radical movement, generally sought to protect Coloureds’ position of relative privilege, thus tended to reinforce existing racial boundaries despite the nonracial rhetoric that usually accompanied them. The pervasiveness of racial identifications was such that even in the most obvious exception to this pattern, the Non-European Unity Movement, the outcome of fifteen years of endeavor was a split largely along racial lines in 1958.58
The essentially opportunistic nature of Coloured identity politics, especially in response to segregationism, points to the marginality of the Coloured people. This, the fourth of the key attributes of Coloured identity, was the most important core element because it dominated the day-to-day conditions under which the identity operated. The Coloured community’s response to its predicament of marginality was central to the manner in which the identity manifested itself socially and politically. The marginality of the Coloured people goes a long way toward explaining how they perceived themselves as a social group; it also helps explain the contradictions and ambiguities within the identity and the changes it experienced through the twentieth century. Further, that marginality was the source of a great deal of frustration and anger, as well as a degree of fatalism within the Coloured community.59
The Coloured people comprised a marginal group in that they never formed more than about 9 percent of the South African population throughout the twentieth century.60 Although it constituted a significant minority, the Coloured community did not enjoy anything near a commensurate level of influence or power under white supremacy. A heritage of slavery, dispossession, and racial oppression ensured that Coloured people lacked any significant economic or political power as a group and that by far the greater majority consisted of a downtrodden proletariat. Under white minority rule, the Coloured community had no meaningful leverage to bring about change in the society or to reform or influence the way in which it was governed. Indeed, Coloured communal and political leaders had great difficulty drawing attention to their standpoint and having their protestations taken seriously by the ruling authorities. Coloured political organizations were doomed to be bit players on the political stage, and Coloured protest politics was little more than a sideshow in the national arena. Even in the western Cape, where two-thirds of Coloured people were concentrated and formed a majority of the population,61 their political influence progressively declined through the greater part of the century. This impotence was highlighted early on by the APO’s protest campaign against the Act of Union. Despite being remarkably successful in mobilizing Coloured opinion behind the campaign, the APO was unable to change a single clause in the draft South Africa Act.62 And in subsequent decades, Coloured protest politics was unable to boast a single clear-cut victory in the battle against white supremacism. The clearest demonstration of the community’s powerlessness came with the removal of Coloured people from the common voters’ roll in 1956, notwithstanding mass protests and substantial support from liberal whites.
The marginality of the Coloured community meant that it had little choice in the matter of accepting an inferior social status to whites or the second-class citizenship imposed on it by the state. To a large extent, this marginality accounted for the pragmatism and opportunism of much of Coloured protest politics, as well as the incrementalism that characterized its strategies. Grappling with this predicament of marginality also goes some way toward explaining key developments in the history of the Coloured community, such as the emergence of a radical movement in the mid-1930s, the rejection of Coloured identity from the late 1970s onward, and the resurgence of Colouredism at the end of the twentieth century. Whatever else may have gone into their making, frustration engendered by impotence played a part in the adoption of new political strategies.
Trapped by their condition of marginality, Coloureds found their options for social and political action severely constrained. With their assimilationist overtures spurned by whites and with joint organization with the African majority either impractical or unattractive, they were left isolated and powerless. To the majority of the political and communal leaders, the only realistic option open to them was to bow to white power and work toward an incremental improvement in conditions for their constituency. Consequently, they adopted an outlook that was highly opportunistic, taking advantage of every chance to reinforce Coloureds’ status of relative privilege.63
The various radical movements were too narrowly based and ephemeral to have broken this isolation decisively.
