‘hostile black’ government, the !HCM is clearly in conversation with other political traditions in South Africa. The !HCM chooses not to articulate a ‘purity’, and indeed demonstrates a lack of interest in this project. The mere foregrounding of slave and Khoi ancestry as a starting point demonstrates the !HCM’s lack of interest in engaging with racist discourses of miscegenation by asserting purity. Rather, what is seen as central to the identity ‘Brown’ for the !HCM links to historically, socially and culturally constructed events and experience. The focus is on ‘language, history, culture and freedom’ as birthright in as much as this was disrupted through dispossession, genocide, slavery and apartheid.
Additionally, section 3.1 of the !HCM’s Constitution states that one of the objectives is to ‘restore in Brown people a pride in the culture of their forebears’. The intertextual political references here are multifold. First it is an engagement with the discourses which inscribe the relationships of those previously classified ‘coloured’ with shame when a relationship with their past is uncovered. In the place of the shame Wicomb observed, the !HCM intends to put ‘pride’. It appears, then, that the !HCM recognises that the current relationship that people descended from the enslaved and Khoi people have with their past is characterised by shame. To choose to participate in a project which disarticulates this shame is to embark on a task of restoring pride and disavowing shame. This emphasis on pride resonates with the discussion of Wicomb’s and Dabydeen’s shame earlier. The !HCM’s stress on pride links with other liberatory Black discourses in South Africa, such as the Black Consciousness Movement, and globally. The installation and reinscription of pride challenges the historic processes of humiliation. However, where other anti-racist Black movements foreground pride through inclusion, the !HCM’s paradoxical exclusion gestures to other ambiguities about adjacent South African subjectivities.
The !HCM targets Khoi ancestry as its focus, not through an explicit negation of other foreparents who were also enshackled, but by prioritising the Khoi forebears in ways that implicitly deny the unnamed excluded others. It is an impulse which roots itself in African reality through accessing a stabilised indigeneity. In this respect, discursively, the processes of self-definition, backward- and forward-looking as they are like Pennington’s helix, access the past through Pan-African liberation discourse. At the basic linguistic level this is echoed in the emphasis on the combination of descent and choice of loyalty to Africa. This echoes parts of Pan-Africanist ideology globally, but it also distances itself from these same ideologies.
The !HCM project is imaginative as much as it is recuperative. The Constitution sets out specific ways in which to use cultural and artistic production as grounds through which to participate in achieving the position of pride. This is because, according to the Preamble to the !HCM Constitution, ‘culture is an integral part of our struggle to reclaim what is rightfully ours’.
These conversations with other liberation traditions which addressed themselves to the liberation of Black and African people globally permeate the remainder of the Constitution. That the connections are most markedly to Black Consciousness and Pan-African politics cannot be incidental given the prominence accorded to the cultural activities of the !HCM. Given the context set out in the founding document, it seems facile to assume that the mere use of the same word, brown/Brown, allies it to the KWB or other similar movements in straightforward ways. Attention to the use of language, which it to say the self-representation of the !HCM, suggests otherwise. It confirms Stuart Hall’s (1997: 5) stance that:
[r]epresentation, here, is closely tied up with both identity and knowledge. Indeed, it is difficult to know what ‘being English’, or indeed French, German, South African or Japanese, means outside of all the ways in which our ideas and images of national cultures have been represented. Without these ‘signifying’ systems, we could not take on such identities (or indeed reject them) and consequently could not build up or sustain that common ‘life-world’ which we call culture.
To extend Hall above then, ‘being b/Brown’, like ‘being c/Coloured’ can only mean in relation to how it is framed, and functions politically in the terrain of culture. Identifying as Khoi, African, Black and Brown simultaneously has several effects which serve to regulate the workings and meanings which ensue from self-representation in this manner. These meanings also participate in the necessary politics of interrogating colonialist and apartheid definitions of the descendants of slaves, whilst interrogating trajectories of self-representation. They are simultaneously grounded in and informed by Black Consciousness thinking and open up its silences and ambiguities for (re)interpretation. It is a narrow reading which reads the !HCM as wishing away history. The project is premised on the fact that members of this group, who claim all of the identities outlined above, are descended from slaves. Theirs is therefore not an ahistorical position since the chronological trajectory of this identity is foregrounded.
Rather, it is the meanings which ensue from this history which are contested. In other words, to the questions, ‘What does it mean to be a descendent of slaves for your racial politics today?’ and, ‘Who does it make you?’ the proponents of this view respond with a redefinition of how to inhabit Blackness in a post-apartheid South Africa: by identifying as b/Black, African, Brown and Khoi all at the same time. Thus, this legacy is interpreted in ways which are in accordance with the anti-racist projects of this location. They challenge not only racist labels but also conservative ideas about who can count as black (and within that, Khoi) and Black in contemporary South Africa. This space draws attention to the limitations of thinking about an anti-racism which influences the relationship people previously classified as ‘coloured’ have with not only a racist trajectory but also with liberation politics in South Africa.
Here the expressions of ‘deformation, masking and inversion’ in their application have the subversive potential to:
demonstrate that forces of social authority and subversion or subalternity may emerge in displaced, even decentred strategies of signification. This does not prevent these positions from being effective in a political sense, although it does suggest that positions of authority may themselves be part of a process of ambivalent identification. Indeed the exercise of power may be both politically effective and psychically affective because the discursive liminality through which it is signified may provide greater scope for strategic manoeuvre and negotiation. (Bhabha 1994: 145)
First, identifying as Khoi in the context of the !HCM rejects the belonging to a third race marked ‘coloured’ in colonial and apartheid legislation. This is conscious anti-racist work that goes further than drawing attention to this appellation, as was necessary through the use of ‘so-called coloured’. To engage with that history of naming is to participate in a particular kind of anti-racist practice which privileges colonial inscription. It entails a ‘talking back to’ as part of the larger initiative of contesting identity. The politics of dis-identification with ‘colouredness’ rejects a stance of talking back to and moves instead to a project of self-definition. It establishes a distance from such white supremacist forms of framing this identity and at the same time it disses and deconstructs them. This move to rename the self echoes earlier Black Consciousness rejections of ‘non-white’ for Black. For Black Consciousness activists in South Africa, ‘non-white’ represented a negation which had attendant materiality. Consequently, there were immeasurable gains to be made from moving from a positive definition. To identify as Khoi and Brown for the !HCS echoes this and stems, then, from the same political urgency. The postcolonial memory imperative cannot be about just addressing the problematics of historical location; it also needs to be mindful of what lies ahead.
In his inaugural lecture for the interdisciplinary Postcolonial Studies Graduiertenkolleg of the University of Munich on 25 January 2002, Homi K. Bhabha spoke eloquently of what he explores in his forthcoming book as ‘political aspiration’, which participates in ethical and textual interpretation as well as positionality vis-à-vis enactment and entitlement. For Bhabha, ‘aspiration is not utopian, but imbued with the present imperfect and emerges from the desire to survive, not the ambition for mastery’. He goes further to discuss the meanings of
