of racial identity formation. By claiming this allegedly vacated space, it does not displace anybody else, even as it questions how indigeneity is constructed, and in this very action contests the vacancy of the identity ‘Khoi’. It challenges the lie of successful Khoi and San extermination by posing the question, ‘How can there be at once no Khoi people alive and there be thousands alive who identify as such?’ It works also as an alternative to ‘coloured’ because it chooses an indigenous African trajectory of naming over a colonially imposed one. It chooses to be Khoi instead of ‘mixed’. It therefore does not negate that others may inhabit colouredness differently and reclaim it, but this is not its political imperative.
Resistance to articulations of Khoi and San identities in contemporary South Africa is problematic. It tends to lump all these very different articulations together. In this manner those who question the ability of Khoi people to identify as such avoid addressing the specificities of each and betray contemporary (internalised) racist notions of what we expect a Khoi or San person to ‘look’ like. Much of the anxiety over the choice of ‘Khoi’ over ‘coloured’ stems from a hypocritical relationship that many South Africans have with Khoi identities. Thus, in spite of the assertion of all cultures’ dynamism, predominant concepts of the Khoi are as timeless people trapped in space. To be Khoi is to appear as ‘Bushmen’ in some tourist brochures, or as naked ‘Hottentots’ running around in the desert. The problem posed by progressive articulations of Khoi and San presence and identities is that they unsettle the belief that the somatic holds the key to meaning-making. This lie has been central to South African society in relation to race for over three centuries.
CONCLUSION: THE KHOI–COLOURED CONTINUUM IMAGINATIVELY RENDERED
The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century. (Hall 1999: 42)
I speak appropriating all the knowledge that interests me, that is accessible to me, and that can help me and my territory to deal with new emergent realities, since I am also a new and emergent reality. (de Torro 2002: 117)
The above demonstrate the complexity in contesting meanings which attach to identities that apparently cannot be inhabited progressively. There are charges that in a post-apartheid South Africa, given the rejection and problematisation of the label ‘coloured’ during the liberation struggle, it can only be racist to reclaim it (now). Similarly, it is argued that laying claim to Khoi identity is a denial of history of ‘mixing’ and an aspiration towards ‘purity’ and authenticity. Therefore, in crude terms the first is denounced for apparently ‘not being Black enough’, while the latter is seen to aspire to a Blackness that is ‘too authentic’. These readings are equally problematic for they read these subjectivities within the confines of the very discursive binaries that are rejected by those who claim ‘coloured’ or ‘Khoi’ identities, in the manner analysed above. Indeed, an attentive examination of the two articulations discussed above reveals that ‘[r]ather than expanding the category of “real” blackness, they suggest that if all identities are discursively produced and under negotiation, then all identities are inauthentic’ (Smith 1998: 67).
The challenges of fashioning new identities in a democratic South Africa include being able to move away from the few ‘safe’ spaces of racial identification that Black South Africans could inhabit under apartheid. Given the recent demise of the systems of violent state-sponsored racist terror which ended with apartheid, it is not difficult to see why exploring racial identity anew is a daunting task for South Africans. Black Consciousness gave us a Black skin to be proud of and one through which to contest the shame associated with everything Black.
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