sector within the Coloured community broke categorically with the separatist agenda and embraced nonracialism as part of a populist strategy, that individuals from within its ranks such as Allan Boesak, Trevor Manuel, and Patricia de Lille started having a significant impact on national politics and the broader society. Even then, however, the majority of Coloured people in the 1990s felt vulnerable and alienated from the African majority, prefering to ally themselves with their former oppressors. Their insecurity is captured in the colloquial expression “We are the jam,” which likens Coloured people to the thin layer of jam squeezed between two slices of bread. The metaphor gives expression to both their marginality as well as their intermediate status. This expression, usually uttered in a resigned tone of voice and used to express alienation and political apathy or to justify support of the National Party, became especially popular during the uncertain times facing the Coloured community in the mid-1990s.64
The dynamic behind the assertion of a separate Coloured identity and the continuities in its expression identified here have been reinforced by the popular stereotyping of Coloured people. This stereotyping has played an important part in the social construction of Coloured identity within the Coloured community and especially within the dominant society. Because of their marginality, Coloured people have been more vulnerable than most to this form of prejudice. The stereotyping of Coloured people in the popular mind will be explored through the analysis of a well-known joke from the apartheid era that has been making the rounds in South Africa for several decades.
God, Jan van Riebeeck, and the Coloured People: The Anatomy of a South African Joke
The joke in question hinges on the audience’s awareness of the status of Jan van Riebeeck, the commander of the first Dutch settlement established at the Cape in 1652, as the “founding father” of white South Africa. One of the most basic “facts” drummed into children in school history lessons in apartheid South Africa was that van Riebeeck’s landing marked the start of South African history proper and of civilized life in the subcontinent.65 Elaborate state-sponsored celebrations of the tercentenary of his arrival at the Cape to establish a victualing station for the Dutch East India Company ensured van Riebeeck a prominent place in apartheid propaganda from the early days of National Party rule.66 The presence of van Riebeeck became even more ubiquitous when his image appeared on the obverse side of the currency after South Africa became a republic in 1961. Van Riebeeck was thus not only an icon of white supremacism in South Africa but also an important element in the mythmaking and ideological manipulation used to justify apartheid ideology.
The joke begins by describing a scenario that provokes a Coloured person into hurling racial insults at an African and repudiating him as an inferior being. A typical setting for the joke would be an apartheidera situation in which an African person tries to gain entrance to some facility, such as a movie theater or a public conveyance reserved for Coloured people. In a fashion all too familiar in the apartheid experience, the Coloured protagonist expels the African from the facility and ends a racist diatribe by exclaiming, “No Kaffirs are allowed here!”67 The African then counters this tirade with the punch line: “God made the white man, God made the black man, God made the Indian, the Chinese and the Jew—but Jan van Riebeeck, he made the Coloured man.”68
This joke, which has taken on a variety of forms, became a wellestablished means of teasing or deriding Coloured people, and the premises on which it is based are understood over a broad spectrum of South African society. Although typical of the apartheid era, the assumptions, images, and values that underlie the joke would nevertheless have resonated with South Africans from all walks of life from at least the late nineteenth century onward. In my experience, it was a very common joke often openly told to and by Coloured people during the apartheid period. Though never acceptable in politically progressive circles, the coming of the “new” South Africa, with its heightened sensitivity to anything that might be deemed racially offensive, has caused the joke to lose much of its appeal; where still in evidence, the joke is mainly restricted to private discourse among people who share a high degree of personal trust.
The van Riebeeck joke harnesses several key features of the racial stereotyping of Coloured people in apartheid South Africa and, indeed, reveals much about the popular concept of Colouredness. The punch line makes sense only if both teller and audience share particular assumptions about Coloured people or, at the very least, acknowledge the existence of a popular image of Coloured people that embodies these characteristics. The joke’s broad appeal is apparent from a local entrepeneur who arranged tours of Cape Town’s black townships for foreign visitors in the late 1980s, kicking off these tours with a version of this story “about old Jan van Riebeeck and his comrades frolicking with the local maidens … giving birth to the ‘colourful folk.’”69 Clearly, these assumptions about Coloured people were shared widely enough that even foreigners were able to get the joke.
The exchange of insults between the Coloured and African protagonists in the van Riebeeck joke is set within the context of the racial hierarchy of white supremacist South Africa. The conventional perception of this racial stratification has the ruling white minority on top, the African majority at the bottom, and the Coloured people in between. It is evident from the treatment of the African protagonist that the Coloured person in the joke shares this perception of the social order. In terms of the value system in which the joke operates, Coloured people are accorded a superior status to Africans within the racial hierarchy because they can claim to be partly descended from whites and more closely assimilated to Western bourgeois culture. As the riposte from the African demonstrates, however, the conventional perception of the social order was open to dispute. Although the punch line does not necessarily challenge the dominant status of whites, the African rejects the relatively privileged status of Coloureds by asserting that racial purity trumps genetic proximity to whiteness or assimilation to Western culture.
The punch line of the van Riebeeck joke invokes the most salient characteristic associated with Colouredness in the popular mind, namely, racial hybridity. Through hybridity, the closely allied attributes of racial inferiority and illegitimacy are also assigned to Coloured people as a group. The joke turns on a shared perception between teller and audience of the pejorativeness of racial hybridity and illegitimate conception. Without these associations, the joke would hardly be considered funny.
The attribute of racial hybridity is virtually inherent to the concept of Colouredness in the popular mind and is the most prominent of the array of negative qualities associated with it. Coloured people are generally considered to be of “mixed race” or, less flatteringly, to be a “half-caste” or even a “bastard” people, with racial mixture viewed as their defining characteristic. The idea of racial hybridity has been so intrinsic to the concept of Colouredness that even an ultra-left-wing Coloured intellectual such as Kenny Jordaan, a leading member of the Trotskyist Fourth International Organization of South Africa, writing in 1952, accepted that Jan van Riebeeck was the “father of the Cape Coloured people.”70 The Torch, the mouthpiece of the Non-European Unity Movement—the most prominent of the Marxist liberation organizations to gain support within the Coloured community—also accepted that the Coloured people “arose as a result of the glandular carelessness of van Riebeeck and his men.”71 For evidence that the perception of Colouredness as the automatic product of miscegenation has survived into the “new” South Africa among people regarded as politically progressive, one could point to Tokyo Sexwale, the former Gauteng premier who is married to a white woman and has described his children as Coloured;72 similarly, the novelist Achmat Dangor declared that “in my own case, I’m so bastardized I can only call myself Coloured.”73
If racial hybridity is the defining attribute associated with Colouredness in the popular mind, then the idea that Colouredness is an inherent racial condition that results automatically from miscegenation between black and white people is the fundamental misconception associated with the identity. In popular thinking, Colouredness is not treated as a social identity but tends to be reified into a cluster of innate qualities that spontaneously and inexorably are assumed to manifest
