continue to embrace this identity, yet coloured claims to it are seen to be the most vocally contested.
I have linked reservations about the coherence with which Erasmus invests ‘black’ as a signifier, especially in relation to what she labels the ‘moral authenticity or political credibility’ (Erasmus 2001a: 17) bestowed upon the ‘africanist lobby’ (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 170). Her ‘africanist lobby’ includes those who police b/Blackness in terms of authenticity. So her use of ‘africanist’ here does not relate to the location of these authenticity police within an Africanist politics. For Erasmus, the most discernible manner in which Blackness is policed refers to the exclusion of coloured subjects from a Black and indigenous African identity by some black subjects. Here, she correctly critiques the conservative nature of this tendency, and points to the highly troubled and painful existence of such impulses, especially within what parades as the progressive ambit of national politics.
My point of departure stems from Erasmus’s inference that reducing Blackness and African identity to the ambit of black people then invests the category ‘black’ with automatic security. The split and contestation is not between secure ways of being black/African versus insecure ones within colouredness. The same anti-coloured sentiment which Erasmus accuses of destabilising the Blackness/Africanness of non-coloured Black/African groups is credited with treating other ethnicities within black communities similarly. The reactionary political attacks from what Erasmus names the ‘africanist lobby’, when not targeted at suggested coloured racism, are aimed at ‘uprooting’ ‘the Nguni conspiracy’ or the ‘Xhosa nostra’, or demonising the ‘Shangaan uncontrollability’.3 These impulses can be gleaned in public culture, for example, in newspapers as apparently diversified in their politics as the Mail & Guardian and The City Press.
To discuss the silencing of coloured ways of being Black/African as though they are the object of a collective conspiracy by all other black/ African groups is to ignore the successes of apartheid policies of divide and rule, as well as all evidence that they retain currency. It is to credit blacks with a unity of purpose which they obviously do not have in spite of all attempts by the Black Consciousness Movement. Thus, when Erasmus declares, ‘If ever there is an unstable, restless, highly differentiated, hybrid place to be, it is the one I occupy’ (Erasmus 2000: 199), her words ring true beyond coloured Black subjectivity. It is therefore not only a matter of barring access for coloured subjects into a safe Black collective. This emerges quite clearly when coloured subjects are seen as one of a range of Black subjectivities.
Indeed, contestations of Blackness through the bestowal of progressive subjectivities to specific Black ethnicities, and the Othering of other Black ethnicities through the projection of ‘slave mentality’ and/or ‘collaborationist’ lines, are typical of broader political contestations in post-apartheid South Africa. If we interpret coloured subjectivity as ‘race’ rather than as ‘ethnicity’, then it is possible to read coloured subjects as positioned in the unique position against which other Black people position themselves, as Erasmus and Pieterse (1999) argue. However, such a lens rests on the invisibilisation of similar political moves directed at different Black ethnic members at different political times.
Post-apartheid public discussions and controversies reveal that although there are groups of Blacks who can always be subsumed under that label, coherence does not mark the spot where these people reside. The certainty ends with being able to claim that name. What lies beyond that is silence about what else constitutes b/Black identity, and resistance to acknowledging the connections between this silence and the internal division within the ranks Erasmus (2000) and Erasmus and Pieterse (1999) use as examples. They justly critique the tendency to question coloured people’s position within Blackness/Africanness at all and thus deny them unconditional entry into even this very small certainty.
My reservations about Erasmus’s (and Erasmus and Pieterse’s) reading of internal Black insecurities do not diminish the courageous and insightful ways in which she continues to theorise colouredness and its various entanglements in contemporary South Africa. Nor do they detract from the urgency of the project she charts, which forces a more nuanced engagement with national identities that are always differentially racialised, gendered and marked by class, among others. Her work continues to echo Amina Mama’s reminder that:
we are formed out of contradictions and yes we do have to live with them and with ambivalence and they need not necessarily be resolved, although at some level you know extreme contradictions are uncomfortable. A sense of well-being is not about being not contradictory; it is about being able to live comfortably with one’s contradictions and to be tolerant of ambivalence. (in Magubane 1997: 22)
In order to attain a state where it is possible to live comfortably with these tensions and ‘be tolerant of ambivalence’, wounds need to be reopened and attended to. The processes by which the sores are focused on require penetrating honesty and initiative. For Erasmus, they begin with an insistence on claiming coloured, African and Black identities simultaneously and participating in what those categories describe. In this manner she challenges other Blacks/Africans, and specifically blacks, to go to that dangerous place where it is no longer possible to, through self-censure, disown what else they are. There are parallel processes of difficulty in identifying along ethnic lines for all Black subjectivities. Apartheid legislation and violence have made it difficult to assert a progressive position within Blackness in ways that are not construed as ‘tribalist/ethnicist’, just like they made identifying as coloured complicated for those who reject that terminology. In opening up studies of coloured identities to progressive signification, she challenges other Blacks to reconceptualise the specific identities we dare not name except under heavily policed circumstances. This full project can be undertaken when we take Adhikari’s warning of avoiding analyses predicated on coloured exceptionalism. Taking the dynamic agency within coloured identities seriously requires an accompanying attentiveness to the complementary complexity and contestations which characterise other Black subject positions.
Relationships to a history of classification as coloured vary. The path outlined by Erasmus above presents one alternative. A second alternative can be glimpsed through an analysis of the synthesis of Black and African identities by the !Hurikamma Cultural Movement (!HCM), whose membership identifies as Khoi and Brown. This self-identification is informed as much by the rejection of the label ‘coloured’ as it is by its proximity to other varieties of Blackness and African identities. It is also an engagement with a history of dispossession and enslavement. Section 1 of the Constitution of the !HCM (1993) defines its membership as only open to those:
who are descended from the Khoi-Khoin (or Mens-Mens) and the slaves brought here from St Helena and Indian Ocean Islands, and who share a common history, culture and identity and pledge their alliance only to their Khoi ancestors, and who, because of their identity and history, have been deprived of their birthright, namely their right to their land, language, history, culture and freedom.
Central to the identification is the valuing of Khoi ancestry, itself a move that is in conversation with history in varied ways. This is particularly true given representations of Khoi/San peoples as backward and undesirable, or disappeared, which retain currency even today. In this respect, although the racial identification of the !HCM appears linked to that of the KWB, there is a marked difference. The valuing of Khoi and slave ancestry already participates in discursive terrain outside of, and partly subversive of, the colonial valuing of a hierarchy of races. By foregrounding the choice to identify with that part of their ancestry which has been most debased, the !HCM’s engagement with history and memory is politically antithetical to that of the KWB. That both should appear so similar is only stressed by the commonality of B/brownness. At the same time, the exclusion of other African histories is telling and echoes some of the purity contained within the KWB’s self-definitions.
The conceptualisation of b/Brownness gestures towards adverse political effects. Where the KWB, with its foregrounding of a ‘pure brown’ coloured race, echoes and allies with the right-wing AWB’s
