discourses by deploying the tools of that discourse. It does not question the premises through which ‘race’ is evaluated, given meaning and put to use. For the KWB, then, the task is not to undo white supremacist logic, or even to question it. What is focused on is the mere changing of the position of coloured/brown subjects by denying race mixing, and thereby disavowing the discursive history of ‘miscegenation’. It denies ‘mixing’, ‘left-over’, ‘neither-nor’ discourses through an insertion of brown/coloured subjectivity at a new point along the continuum of racial valuation. The apartheid state sought to limit the ambiguities present in legislating who counted as coloured in 1959 by proclaiming that the category would be subdivided into ‘Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian, Chinese, “other Asiatic”, and “Other Coloured” ’ (Reddy 2001: 73). Not only did the ambiguities which remained highlight the absurdities of this classifications system, they also betrayed the anxieties associated with the category ‘coloured’. The KWB effort is an attempt to engage this anxiety by concretising the position of coloured through naming it via a stabilised brownness.
The increased academic scrutiny of colouredness has also been influenced by the multiple frames used to analyse various coloured locations in public discourse. In their analysis of aspects of this public discourse, and with specific reference to voting patterns in the Western Cape in 1994, Zimitri Erasmus and Edgar Pieterse (1999: 167) declare:
we have heard that coloured people voted the way they did because they are white-identified, sharing language and religious affiliation with white voters; because they are racist towards africans and hence voted against the African National Congress (ANC); because they suffer from ‘slave mentality’ … and that this voting behaviour can be explained in terms of NP [National Party] propaganda and the ‘psychological damage’ this has caused in coloured communities who are yet to free themselves ‘from the stranglehold of psychological enslavement’.
The views explored above point to an apparent contradiction in how Black political action is made sense of in contemporary South Africa. For those arguing along the same lines as Erasmus and Pieterse, similar questions are not asked about groups of black South Africans who were never classified coloured, and who cast their votes for political parties which have a history of collaboration with the apartheid state, such as the Inkatha Freedom Party or parties led by former bantustan leaders. Some of the respondents in Ruiters (2006) share such sentiment. They point out that there is no parallel process by which those who vote for the parties headed by previous homeland ‘leaders’ are denied entry into Blackness, or accused of harbouring a similar ‘slave mentality’. Or, at least, where these discussions exist they are less prominent and more dismissive. In relation to the framing of coloured subjectivities, however, as Erasmus and Pieterse note, these are in the majority. Erasmus and Pieterse’s paper is a challenge to these explanations as reductionist and as linked to other limited ways of thinking through coloured identity formation. The latter encompass divergent ways of essentialising colouredness, among them conservative coloured nationalism, discussed by Wicomb in relation to the KWB, and imagining that coloured subjects are overdetermined by racist apartheid naming.
The above criticisms of what is constructed as ‘the coloured vote’ are valid because the very discursive constitution of voting tendencies in this manner is problematic. In other words, the very language used to describe Western Cape voting patterns in the first democratic elections through primarily resorting to constructing something called ‘the coloured vote’ is an oversimplification that itself deserves debunking through attention to the specificities of electoral choices (Hoeane 2004; Ruiters 2006). At the same time, the conflation of ‘coloured’ with ‘Western Cape coloured’ occludes other coloured subjectivities that are constructed differently, both from within and in public discourse. This conflation is explicitly rehearsed by those who discursively construct ‘the coloured vote’, but it is also implicitly endorsed in Erasmus and Pieterse’s (1999) critique. This is done when what happens in the Western Cape is seen to be representative of nationwide coloured subjectivities through the generalisation of Western Cape coloured historical specificities. Subsequent scholarship on aspects of ‘coloured’ identities warns against this overgeneralisation of Western Cape realities and debates (Adhikari 2009; Ruiters 2006).
Erasmus and Pieterse’s paper also raised concerns about the implications of these problems for the larger national democratic project. They call for the important recognition that ‘not all assertions of coloured identity are racist’ because ‘no identity is inherently progressive or reactionary’ (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 178, 179). It is important to acknowledge the variety of ways in which coloured subjects shape collective identities and make meaning of their lives. This enables the understanding that coloured formulations are ‘relational identities shaped by complex networks of concrete social relations’ (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 183).
The acknowledgement of creolisation is central to this process, as is the creolisation of the Dutch language into Afrikaans by slaves and of cultural practice by these communities and their descendants. Processes of creolisation happen in proximity to and within different relations of power under conditions of slavery. This conceptualisation of creolity within recent South African studies is one of two streams. Both have moved beyond addressing only linguistic creolisation in relation to the Afrikaans language. The first, espoused by Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael (2000), conceptualises creolity as any mixing of various strands to result in a hybrid formation which constantly draws attention to itself as dynamic and disruptive. The second branch is that in which Erasmus (2001a) theorises creolity under the very specific conditions of slavery and its ensuing inequalities. It draws on the extensive works of Françoise Verges and Eduoard Glissant on creolisation in the Indian Ocean Islands and Caribbean, respectively, as well as more broadly on the schools of thought on creolisation emerging from Caribbean studies. For the latter branch, not all hybrid formations are creolised. Here creolity is interpreted as encompassing a range of possibilities: creative and unstable. It is to be found in cultural practice with a slave history and is dynamic. For Erasmus’s formulation of creolity, and application to the coloured historical series of experiences in South Africa, the inequity of power is paramount. Unlike the hybridity-like creolisation model adopted by Nuttall and Michael, Erasmus roots creolisation, like scholars of the Caribbean, in the specific experience of histories of enslavement. Consequently, for example, while Afrikaner and coloured experiences and identities are hybridised, only coloured identities are creolised identities. This creolisation is part of the memory project for it values the history of enslavement as a constitutive, even if not total, influence on current collective positionings within coloured communities.
Adhikari (2009) argues that Erasmus ‘does little beyond proposing the idea’ of creolisation to coloured identities in her introduction to her book, while Helene Strauss (2009) asks very pertinent questions in her essay on creolisation as a useful framework for thinking about contemporary coloured identities post-apartheid:
Does creolisation help clarify processes of coloured identity formation, or does it reinforce apartheid-era essentialisms and undermine the very transgressive potential that has made it so attractive for revising cultural exclusivity? To what extent do received cultural and racial categories continue to inflect the ways in which processes of creolisation take place? (Strauss 2009: 23)
Strauss’s questions can be answered obliquely through engaging with Adhikari’s latest work on coloured identities in southern Africa, of which Strauss’s chapter forms part. Adhikari (2009) underlines the importance of varied registers of coloured identities in South African politics and scholarship. Although he delineates four streams, two are immediately relevant for my purposes here: the ‘essentialist school’ and the ‘instrumentalist school’. The introduction to this text is instructive, given the manner in which he reads assertions and/or definitions of coloured identities against one another, rather than solely against their perceived opposites.
Adhikari’s ‘essentialist school’ relies on conventional colonialist registers of miscegenation and either denies the agency of coloured people in history (conservative essentialist), celebrates miscegenation as evidence that racial
