identities in terms of ‘race mixing’ or thinking of them as being invested with a special hybridity, they should be read in their own context and this is one which needs to seriously engage history. This will enable a processing and thinking of them as ‘cultural formations born of appropriation, dispossession and translation in the colonial encounter’ (Erasmus 2001a: 16). The presence of historical significance suggests, in Erasmus’s first position, that the current assertions and activity within coloured collective subjectivities cannot be decoded with merely an eye to the present. These formations make sense, then, only when read as memory activity in conversation with, responding to and processing events of the past as a crucial part of imagining and inventing the present.
Her second pillar advances an argument for viewing colouredness through processes of creolisation where oppression was operational. This recognition will be unproductive if it then denies the agency of communities under attack to reshape and make new meanings for their lives and trajectories. Thus, although slavery, colonialism and apartheid cannot be left out of the equation, using them to assert that these systems of violence were wholly constitutive of these communities is dangerous. It is to be complicit in the denial of Black will; it is to be blind to the obvious demonstration of agency by coloured subjects.
As colouredness becomes reshaped and rethought, the discomfiting constituents of this identity need to be courageously opened up. Thus, this position requires from coloured subjects an acknowledgement of the contradictions that characterised the identity ‘coloured’ in colonial and apartheid discourse. Given that colouredness was framed as existing between white and black/African, and that subjects thus classified did not always resist this positioning, the role of complicity should be acknowledged; so too should the privilege that accorded to being coloured, especially in the Western Cape where the presence of preferential employment legislation placed certain categories of jobs outside the reach of other Blacks. Erasmus (2001a: 16) notes:
[c]oming to terms with these facts is one of the most important and difficult challenges for coloured people. Coloured, black and African ways of being do not have to be mutually exclusive. There are ways of being coloured that allow participation in a liberatory and anti-racist project. The task is to develop these.
Finally, she calls for a self-reflexive engagement with the variety of ways of inhabiting African and Black identities by unfixing the meanings attached to them. This is only achievable with the destabilisation of those positions within Blackness/Africanness which are seen to have assumed ‘moral authenticity and political credibility’ (Erasmus 2001a: 17). Asserting that a progressive coloured politics necessarily requires discomfort, she resists the position of identifying only as Black, seeing this as a safety net which ‘denies the “better than black” element of coloured formation’ (Erasmus 2001a: 25).
Erasmus’s propositions have immense implications for thinking through specifically coloured but also more broadly Black cultural and identity formations in the post-apartheid moment. Because her first tenet stresses the need to historicise identity formation, its invitation is for an unpacking of how processes of hybridisation play themselves out in related identities. A reconceptualisation of colouredness cannot be an isolated project nor can it be locked in acontextual and simplistic declarations of its mixedness. It is positioned within the terrain of memory, and since memory is helix-shaped, à la Pennington, it shifts shape whilst constantly re-examining itself and its own process. Memory activity is relational, as are indeed all identity activities. Its reading requires a move beyond the mere fashionable declaration that all identity is hybrid to an interrogation of the consequences of this assertion for those identities which are labelled ‘pure’. This project has direct bearing on the conceptualisation of the creolity of coloured identities and therefore demands that we imagine coloured subjects as human beings invested with agency who were not simply hybridised but participate(d) in creolisation. Viewed like this, they cannot be the objects of history but retain visibility as subjects.
Erasmus stresses the need to acknowledge the middle-of-the-hierarchy position occupied by coloured subjects under apartheid and colonialism. She returns to this as core to a progressive conceptualisation of this identity. In these classificatory systems, coloured people were oppressed and denied full subjecthood because they were Black whilst at the same time made complicit in processes which maintained the oppression of other Black people.
The imperatives identified above point to the specificity of coloured identities. They invite the continued fashioning of a politics and theory which is informed by history and the everyday. Whilst they chart a more vigilant engagement with the ways in which we participate in identity, they also point to their own theoretical limitations. Erasmus’s final pillar relies heavily on and conflates the stability of the categories black and African in South Africa. Erasmus, of course, knows that African identity is contested in South Africa in ways that make little sense to people who identify as African beyond its borders. In a country where ‘Afrikaner’ and ‘Afrikaans’ have been appropriated and reserved exclusively for white people of Dutch descent, it is not entirely accurate to refer to a stable category that is marked ‘African’. This is especially so given that the two examples cited above demonstrate that there are pathways into identification with Africa which are always foreclosed to indigenous South Africans of any kind. There are certain expressions of ‘African’, for example ‘Afrikaner’, which are foreclosed to indigenous Africans, be they black or coloured. This remains the case even amidst assertions that there is such a category as ‘bruin Afrikaners’, whose very naming demonstrates the racism of what ‘Afrikaner’ means.
Furthermore, post-apartheid public spherical contestations over the meanings of ‘African’ have been precisely about the instability of the label. The widely publicised polemic between the late John Matshikiza, journalist Max du Preez and fellow journalists, Lizeka Mda, and academic Thobeka Mda from 17 June to the end of July 1999 in the pages of The Star and Weekly Mail & Guardian is one incarnation of an exchange characteristic of post-apartheid South Africa. Sparked in this instance by Max du Preez’ article ‘I am an African … an Afrikaner’ (The Star 17 June 1999), the debate asked questions about whether this assertion of ‘white African’ identity in South Africa was not without problems. Thobeka Mda’s first challenge to du Preez was tellingly titled ‘Can whites truly be called Africans?’ (The Star 24 June 1999). While du Preez’ claim to the identity foregrounded affiliation and geographical entitlement, the Mdas argued – differently – that white claims to African identity had a continuing history of displacement and non-recognition of Black South Africans. Even responses to Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech delivered on 8 May 1996 foregrounded how contested such identification remains.
Another visible manner in which African identity is not stable for Black South Africans inscribed with discourses that stress ‘race purity’, in other words, for black South Africans, is the adaptation of the signifier ‘African’ to mean ‘born in Africa’ more broadly than just ‘Afrikaner’. Although b/Black subjects, in South Africa and beyond, heavily critique and resist this redefinition as appropriative and implicated in the history of colonisation and enslavement of African peoples, it nonetheless retains much currency in South Africa. Indeed, its precise contestation points to the weight of its circulation since those who resist it would expend their energies elsewhere were this not perceived as an urgent task. What societies revisit in heated public conversations is a measure of their importance.
The cheapening of the adjective ‘African’ to name commodities which range from recycled cans (Afri-cans) to the more elusive Diesel campaign about ‘Afreaks’ is part of the instability of what ‘African’ means.2 These and numerous other positions on display in contemporary South Africa demonstrate that the identity African is contested and cannot generally be said to be invested with ‘authenticity’ in the manner that Erasmus argues. This is not to deny the presence of tendencies to essentialise and fix who can be African by excluding coloured subjects, but to postulate that coloured is the only Black position that this conservative impulse excludes is to invest the rather chaotic and reactionary project she critiques with excessive coherence.
