essentialist), or accepts that coloureds were a separate race that was temporarily inferior to whites (progressionist essentialist). These nuances matter for a fuller understanding of shifts and reification in how coloured identities – or, for Adhikari, identity, differentiated but in the singular – articulate themselves in contemporary South Africa.
The second stream of concern here is the ‘instrumentalist school’, which contains much of the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid left. Within this school, Adhikari includes movements as varied as the Non European/New Unity Movement, the Black Consciousness Movement and other parts of the non-racist and non-racialist movements, all of which see coloured identity as ‘negative and undesirable but blame it on the racism and exploitative practices of the ruling white minority’ (Adhikari 2009: 15). Finally, both essentialist and instrumentalist schools ‘treat coloured identity as something exceptional, failing to recognise it for what it is – a historically specific social construction, like any other social identity’ (Adhikari 2009: 15).
My reading of articulations of coloured identity and rejections of the label by those previously classified as such is premised on the understanding that echoes of colonial memory are complex phenomena which are not trapped in the binaries of either complicity or resistance. My exclusion of articulations such as the KWB from detailed analysis is due to the considerable attention this movement has already received from scholars of coloured identities (Erasmus 2001b; Erasmus & Pieterse 1999; Lewis 2001; Ruiters 2006; Wicomb 1996, 1998).
It is naïve to continue insisting that there is only one progressive, complex manner to be mindful of history and to make sense of a slave past, and that to do this entails theorising colouredness through first acceding to the cultures of complicity and privilege even as these were rejected (Erasmus 2001b). There are multiple progressive engagements with a past of enslavement (Marco 2009). Denying this erases the variety of ways of inhabiting colouredness and reduces the agency and choice of historical subjects classified coloured to fashion and reinvent collective identity. However, the activity evident in contemporary negotiations of coloured identities demonstrates the importance of creativity in political memory processes. To the extent that memory is an imaginative process, and not simply a recuperative one, the dynamic articulations of colouredness, along with the rejection of the identity ‘coloured’, bear witness to the collective reinvention of identities which is at the heart of memory. The specific foregrounding of slavery in this repositioning and re-evaluative process links the memory project directly to slavery in ways that are sometimes explicit, and at other junctures more subtle. This resonates with Carolyn Cooper’s model of reading engagements with identity for creolised societies along a continuum. There are several ways in which assertions of progressive coloured identity or disavowal via the reclaiming of Khoi subjectivities reveal themselves to be along a continuum in the manner suggested by Cooper. One lens which illuminates this comparison is the theorisation of Black will and anti-will under conditions of enslavement by Patricia Williams.
Williams (1991) argues that slavery is predicated on the absence of Black will so that the perfect Black person becomes one without a will. An enslaved person is rendered object only because s/he becomes owned, therefore property, a thing. One of the basic assumptions about humanity, especially in the Judeo-Christian narrative, is the presence of spirit/intention, in other words, willpower. When the slaves are equated to other inanimate objects, or to non-human animals, this is a move which denies humanity. If what distinguishes human beings from other beings in the living world is this spirit/agency/will, the enslaved people cease to have will. This is in keeping with the construction of the enslaved as only corporeal in colonial discourse. For Williams, this leads to the conclusion that under conditions of slavery the perfect white person is the opposite of the perfect Black one: one with will. A reading of the variety of ways in which coloured subjects participate in an imaginative project in relation to their identity is the ultimate assertion of the presence of will and humanity in the concrete historical subjects who were enslaved, as well as those descended from them. This variety of articulations, in James Clifford’s (2001) sense, testifies to the heterogeneity of the historically enslaved as well as to their survival. In other words, it testifies to the strength of this will.
It becomes important not to read these articulations as exclusively related to or overdetermined by their relationship to whiteness and discourses which sought to inscribe this in terms of ‘racial purity’. A sensitive postcolonial engagement with these processes is attentive to their proximity to anti-apartheid discourses on Blackness as well. It is mindful of Zine Magubane’s (1997: 17) caution that:
[i]f we are looking at multiplicity and hybridity from a South African perspective, as important as it is to historicise, acknowledge, and celebrate our multiple identities, it is equally important to acknowledge the political gains that ‘totalising discourses’ like black nationalism have been able to effect. We need to understand the way in which speaking from an essentialised position can be a site of political power as well.
The recasting and meaning-making processes of Blackness in liberation movement discourses have been analysed at great length. The scholarship which has participated in this project has unearthed the ways in which discourses of Black nationalism, especially as proposed by the Black Consciousness Movement, relied on a unified Black experience rather than on physiognomy. While it is important to draw attention to the manner in which the unifying gestures of many Black nationalist and anti-colonial movements policed Blackness, and to recognise the thorny character of this monitoring, it is crucial to recognise that the effect of this unity was a direct contribution to the successes of activism.
At a time when Black people were routinely subjected to racial terror, suppressing a realistic engagement with heterogeneity within led to two contradictory effects. First, it silenced certain experiences of Blackness and was not attentive to the difference that gender, sexuality, class, ‘ethnicity’,1 geographical location, and so forth, made. In this manner, it was implicated in oppressive tendencies and systems. The second effect realised the establishment, in so far as was possible under apartheid, of a ‘safe’ space to identify those who were in positions of collaboration with the state. Given that this was an issue of survival, the fiction that politics could be read from immediately observable behaviour meant that political affiliation was signified in a series of identifiable actions. These notions of what ‘authentic’ Blackness is did not successfully eliminate diversity within, but theoretically made it more possible to negotiate the delicate terrain of who could be trusted in relation to apartheid resistance and who not. They were a fiction which bore directly on imprisonment, torture and state-sponsored murder. To recognise the second as beneficial is not to justify the existence of the first impulse, nor is it to participate in the argument that discussions of gender, class, sexuality, location and so forth could be rightly postponed until the moment of liberation from colonial/slave/apartheid oppression. This argument remains nonsensical even when we recognise that the onset of democracy has enabled a different quality of exploration.
Heeding Adhikari on avoiding coloured exceptionality, what happens when we recognise that:
Coloured identities are neither inherently progressive nor inherently reactionary. Instead articulations of coloured identity are resources available for use by both progressive and reactionary social movements. These movements are more likely to articulate to reactionary movements under some circumstances. (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 184)
Erasmus has, in a variety of fora, foregrounded the possibilities which exist for claiming coloured identity and inscribing this as a progressive space. She has repeatedly suggested that to assert a coloured identity can have a variety of implications with divergent ideological impetuses. In ‘Re-imagining Coloured Identities in Post-apartheid South Africa’, which serves as introduction to her book on coloured identities in Cape Town, she argues in favour of reading coloured subjectivities as a dynamic presence with attendant tensions and contradictions. Locating colouredness ‘as part of the shifting texture of a broader black experience’ is important (Erasmus 2001a: 14). Her argument is anchored through four parts, to which I will briefly turn before I analyse their greater significance.
