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Contending Approaches to Coloured Identity and the History of the Coloured People of South Africa
Mohamed Adhikari
University of Cape Town

Abstract

Ever since its emergence in the late nineteenth century Coloured identity, its nature and the implications it holds for southern African society, have been the subject of ideological and political contestation. Because contending and changing perceptions of Colouredness imply different interpretations of their past there have been a wide range of approaches to the history of the Coloured people in both popular thinking and the academy. Also, controversy around the nature of Coloured identity has tended to intensify in recent decades, especially after the popularization of Coloured rejectionism in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976. Disagreements have thus often become quite heated because political and ideological agendas, as well as matters of high principle, have increasingly been seen to be at stake. After sketching the main contours of Coloured history this article outlines the full range of competing interpretations of this history and of the nature of Coloured identity that have emerged and explores the main contestations that have arisen.

The historical background In South Africa the term Coloured has a specialized meaning and does not refer to black people in general as it does in many other contexts, most notably in Britain and the United States. It instead refers to a phenotypically varied social group of highly diverse social and geographical origins. Novelist, academic and literary critic, Kole Omotoso, aptly describes their skin colour, the most important of these phenotypical features, as ranging from charcoal black to breadcrust brown, sallow yellow and finally off-white cream that wants to pass for white.1 The Coloured people are descended largely from Cape slaves, the indigenous Khoisan population and other people of African and Asian origin who had been assimilated to Cape colonial society by the late nineteenth century. Being also partly descended from European settlers, Coloureds are popularly regarded as being of mixed race and have held an intermediate status in the South African racial hierarchy, distinct from the historically dominant white minority and the numerically preponderant African population.
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There are approximately three and a half million Coloured people in South Africa today.2 Constituting no more than nine per cent of the population throughout the twentieth century and lacking significant political or economic power, Coloured people have always formed a marginal group in South African society. There has, moreover been a marked regional concentration of Coloured people with approximately ninety per cent within the western third of the country, over two thirds resident in the Western Cape and over forty per cent in the greater Cape Town area.3 The Coloured category has also generally been taken to include a number of distinct sub-groups such as Malays, Griquas, Namas and Basters. Although Coloured identity crystallized in the late nineteenth century the process of social amalgamation within the colonial black population at the Cape that gave rise to Coloured group consciousness dates back to the period of Dutch colonial rule. It was, however, in the decades after the emancipation of the Khoisan in 1828 and slaves in 1838 that various components of the heterogeneous black labouring class in the Cape Colony started integrating more rapidly and developing an incipient shared identity. This identity was based on a common socio-economic status and a shared culture derived from their incorporation into the lower ranks of Cape colonial society.4 The emergence of a fully fledged Coloured identity as we know it today was precipitated in the late nineteenth century by the sweeping social changes that came in the wake of the mineral revolution. Not only did significant numbers of Africans start coming to the western Cape from the 1870s onwards but assimilated colonial blacks and a wide variety of African people who had recently been incorporated into the capitalist economy were thrust together in the highly competitive environment of the newly established mining towns. These developments drove acculturated colonial blacks to assert a separate identity in order to claim a position of relative privilege to Africans on the basis of their closer assimilation to Western culture and being partly descended from European colonists.5 Due to their marginality and the determination with which the state implemented white supremacist policies, the story of Coloured political organization has largely been one of compromise, retreat and failure. The most consistent feature of Coloured political history until the latter phases of apartheid has been the continual erosion of the civil rights first bestowed upon black people in the Cape Colony by the British Administration in the mid-nineteenth century. The process of attrition started with the franchise restrictions imposed by the Parliamentary Registration Act of 1887 and the Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892.6 A spate of segregationist measures in the first decade of the twentieth century further compromised the civil rights of Coloured people. The most significant were the exclusion of Coloured people from the franchise in the former Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State after the Anglo-Boer War, the promulgation of the School Board
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Act of 1905 that segregated the Capes education system by providing compulsory public schooling for white children only and the denial of the right of Coloured people to be elected to parliament with the implementation of Union in 1910.7 In the 1920s and 1930s the economic advancement of the Coloured community was undermined by the Pact Goverments civilized labour policy8 and a number of laws designed to favour whites over blacks in the competition for employment. For example, the 1921 Juvenile Affairs Act set up mechanisms for the placement of white school leavers into suitable employment. Also, the Apprenticeship Act of 1922 put apprenticeships beyond the reach of most Coloured youths by stipulating educational entry levels that very few Coloured schools met but that fell within the minimum educational standard set for white schools. The 1925 Wage Act subverted the ability of Coloured labour to undercut white wage demands by setting high minimum wage levels in key industries. Furthermore, in 1930 the influence of the Coloured vote was greatly diluted by the enfranchisement of white women only.9 It was during the Apartheid era, however, that Coloured people suffered the most severe violations of their civil rights. Their forced classification under the Population Registration Act of 1950 made the implementation of rigid segregation possible. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 respectively outlawed marriage and sex across the colour line. Under the Group Areas Act of 1950 over half a million Coloured people were forcibly relocated to residential and business areas usually on the periphery of cities and towns. The Group Areas Act was probably the most hated of the apartheid measures amongst Coloureds because property owners were meagerly compensated, long-standing communities were broken up and alternative accommodation was inadequate. The 1953 Separate Amenities Act, which introduced petty apartheid by segregating virtually all public facilities, also created deep resentment. After a protracted legal and constitutional battle the National Party in 1956, moreover, succeeded in removing Coloured people from the common voters roll.10 As their primary objective was to assimilate into the dominant society, politicized Coloured people initially avoided forming separate political organizations. By the early twentieth century, however, intensifying segregation forced them to mobilize politically in defence of their rights. Although the earliest Coloured political organizations dated back to the 1880s, the first substantive Coloured political body, the African Political Organization (APO), was established in Cape Town in 1902.11 Under the leadership of the charismatic Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman who served as president from 1905 till his death in 1940, the APO dominated Coloured protest politics for nearly four decades. It became the main vehicle for expressing this communitys assimilationist aspirations as well as its fears at the rising tide of segregationism until its demise in the mid-1940s. A number
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of ephemeral political organizations such as the United Afrikaner League of the late 1910s and the Afrikaanse Nasionale Bond (ANB) of the latter half of the 1920s bodies that were promoted by Cape National Party politicians hoping to win Coloured electoral support failed to subvert the dominance of the APO.12 Intensifying segregation and the failure of the APOs moderate approach contributed to the emergence of a radical movement inspired by Marxist ideology within the better-educated, urbanized sector of the Coloured community during the 1930s. The National Liberation League (NLL) founded in 1935 and the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) established in 1943 were the most important of these organizations. Prone to fissure and unable to bridge the racial divisions within the society, the radical movement failed in its quest to unite blacks in the struggle against segregation.13 The South African Coloured Peoples Organization (SACPO),14 which was founded in 1953 and affiliated to the ANC-led Congress Alliance, also organized protests and demonstrations, especially against the removal of Coloured people from the voters roll.15 Organized opposition to apartheid from within the Coloured community was, however, effectively quelled by state repression following the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and only re-emerged in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976. A few scantily supported political organizations such as the Labour Party of South Africa and the Federal Coloured Peoples Party that were prepared to work within apartheid structures were, however, sanctioned during the heyday of apartheid. From the latter half of the 1970s onwards, starting with the popularization of Black Consciousness ideology, which sought to promote black solidarity and self-reliance, the nature of Coloured identity became an extremely contentious issue as increasing numbers of educated and politicized people who had been classified Coloured under the Population Registration Act rejected the identity. Fed also by Marxist ideas of false consciousness, Colouredness increasingly came to be viewed as an artificial categorization imposed on the society by the ruling minority as part of its divide and rule strategies. The burgeoning of the mass, non-racial democratic movement through the 1980s under the leadership of the ANC-aligned United Democratic Front (UDF) as well as controversy over the participation of some Coloured leaders in the Tricameral Parliament of the P. W. Botha government from 1984 onwards, fostered Coloured rejectionism. With the Western Cape an epicentre of resistance to apartheid, Coloured identity became a highly charged issue and within the anti-apartheid movement any recognition of Coloured identity was repudiated as a concession to apartheid thinking.16 In spite of this, the salience of Coloured identity endured. During the four-year transition to democratic rule under president F. W. de Klerk political parties across the ideological spectrum made ever more strident appeals to Coloured identity for support. Not only did it once again become
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politically acceptable to espouse a Coloured identity but post-apartheid South Africa has also witnessed a rapid retreat of Coloured rejectionism and a concomitant Coloured assertiveness. This has been due partly to a desire to project a positive self-image in the face of the pervasive negative racial stereotyping of Coloured people and partly as a result of attempts at ethnic mobilization to take advantage of the newly democratic political environment. The resurgence of Colouredism has, moreover, to a significant extent been due to fear of African majority rule and a perception that, as in the old order, Coloureds were once again being marginalized. Though far from allayed, these fears have in recent years been alleviated by the fading influence of swart gevaar (black peril) tactics by opposition parties and the acclimatization of people to the new political dispensation. The lament that first we were not white enough and now we are not black enough has become a common refrain amongst Coloured people who feel alienated from the post-apartheid order. Paradigms in perspective The marginality of the Coloured community is reflected in South African historiography in that relatively little has been written on the history of this social group and much of what has been written is journalistic, polemical, speculative, poorly researched or heavily biased. In many general histories Coloured people have effectively been written out of the narrative and marginalized to a few throw-away comments scattered through the text. This tendency was noted as early as 1913 by Harold Cressy, a Coloured educationist and school principal, when he called on the Coloured teaching profession to dispel the myth that Coloured people played little or no part in the history of their country.17 Les Switzer put it eloquently when he in 1995 wrote that, South Africas Coloured community has remained a marginalized community marginalized by history and even historians.18 There was, however, a notable increase in both scholarly and popular writing on the history of the Coloured community from the mid-1980s onwards.19 The emergence of a vocal Coloured rejectionist movement in the latter phases of the apartheid era raised the political profile of the community and upped the stakes in an increasingly bitter wrangle over the racial and ethnic distinctiveness of the Coloured people. This stimulated interest in the Coloured past, particularly their political struggles of the twentieth century. Shock and intrigue at the alignment of the majority of Coloured people with their former oppressors, the National Party, against the African-dominated parties of liberation in the post-apartheid era sustained this interest into the twenty-first century. Recent attempts at kindling a sense of ethnic pride and interest in their past within the Coloured community, such as the December 1 Movement and Khoisan revivalism, have also fed controversy around the identity by encouraging Coloured exclusivist tendencies. These more recent developments have generated
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public interest and some political heat but have not resulted in much scholarly work as yet.20 This will change in the next few years as there are a number of PhD dissertations on various aspects of Coloured identity and history in the making, mostly by people who would be considered Coloured in the South African context.21 As the conventional categories of South African historiography imperial, settler, Afrikaner nationalist, liberal and revisionist are of limited value in analyzing and comparing interpretations of the history of the Coloured people, an alternative set of categories based on authors approach to the nature of Coloured identity is suggested here. Within this framework, four distinct approaches to Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured community is identified. Firstly, there is what may be termed the essentialist school which has been by far the most common approach in historical writing about the Coloured people. This interpretation coincides with the popular view of Coloured identity as a product of miscegenation that goes back to the earliest days of European settlement at the Cape. Within this approach racial hybridity is taken to be the essence of Colouredness. For essentialists there is usually no need to explain the nature or making of Coloured identity because it is part of an assumed reality that sees South African society as consisting of distinct races of which the Coloured people are one. The existence of Coloured identity poses no analytical problem for essentialists because it is regarded as having developed naturally, and self-evidently to be the result of miscegenation.22 While it does not locate the origins of Coloured identity in the pre-historic mists of time as many racial and ethnic identities do, essentialist writing is primordialist in that it dates the origins of Coloured identity to the earliest phases of colonial rule. Within essentialist writing it is possible to identify three distinct approaches to the history of the Coloured people. Firstly, there are what might be termed traditionalists who analyze Coloured identity and history in terms of the racist values and assumptions prevalent in white supremacist South Africa. In general the traditionalist point of view sees black people as racially inferior and assumes that congruities of blood and race have automatically been passed down the generations. It has thus supported segregationism and regarded miscegenation as repugnant, even a threat to civilization in South Africa. It goes without saying that nearly all of the writing in this genre is produced by whites and is fundamentally Eurocentric. The isolated examples of Coloured people writing in this vein consist of school text books where the syllabus dictated that such an approach be taken.23 Not only are Coloured people marginalized in this writing but their historical agency is effectively denied. Where they do appear Coloured people are presented as inert, faceless beings who are acted upon by whites and are incidental to the main narrative of settler conquest and their creation of a Christian, civilized society in southern Africa. Coloured people and their ancestors are little more than bystanders to the unfolding drama of South African history or impediments
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to the noble struggle of hardy, pioneering colonists to tame the wild landscape and maintain a civilized existence in barbarous surroundings. Where explicit consideration is given to the history of the Coloured people the focus is very much on colonial institutions and colonizers who, despite onerous circumstances, do their Christian duty of raising Coloured people in the scale of civilization.24 Equally faceless are those whites, usually regarded as debased, who indulge in miscegenation with black people to produce the Coloured population. This perspective has been thoroughly discredited in the new South Africa and is no longer publicly propagated except within a fringe receptive to racist and white supremacist ideologies. Secondly, there are the liberal essentialists who dissent from the dominant racist view and have sought to ameliorate racial antagonisms and break down racial barriers. To the liberals the very existence of the Coloured people is confirmation of the central contention of the liberal interpretation of South African history, namely, that progress and economic modernization was predicated upon the integration, co-operation and inter-dependence of its peoples and that racial separation was not only abnormal and a survival of an outmoded frontier mentality but also detrimental to the countrys economic development. The miscegenation that is supposed to have given rise to the Coloured community is held up as living proof that South African society had not always been strictly segregated and that the dominant theme of its history was that of the inter-dependence and acculturation of its various peoples. Though sympathetic to the assimilationist aspirations of Coloured people the liberal essentialist approach is nevertheless racialized in that it conceptualizes Colouredness in terms of race and defines it as a product of miscegenation. And while the Coloured people were not regarded as inherently inferior they tended to be seen as relatively uncivilized and in need of white tutelage. The liberal interpretation was common within the English-speaking sector of the academy, the minority of whites opposed to the segregatory ethos of the ruling establishment and some Coloured intellectuals of moderate political persuasion. Before the mid-1980s by far the best quality and most thoroughly researched writing on the history of the Coloured community came from within the liberal school of South African historiography.25 The third distinct strand within the essentialist approach is what might be termed the progressionist interpretation of Coloured history and which, for the greater part of the twentieth century, represented the conventional view within the Coloured community of its own history. It accepted elements of the racist view that Coloured people formed a separate race and were socially and culturally backward compared to whites but did not accept this condition as innate. This perspective was in effect a variation on the liberal essentialist theme in that it combined an environmentalist conception of racial difference with liberal values of personal freedom, inter-racial co-operation and status based on individual merit to argue that
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the history of the Coloured people demonstrated that they were well advanced in the process of becoming as fully civilized as whites and thus deserved inclusion in the dominant society. This view was predicated on an assumption that humanity, and with it the Coloured people, were on an inevitable trajectory of progress and an Elysian future of prosperity and social harmony. Espoused publicly by organic intellectuals and community leaders, this interpretation was usually coupled with a plea for fair treatment or the preservation of their status of relative privilege within the South African racial hierarchy.26 Until the 1980s essentialism was in effect the only paradigm in Coloured historical writing. The only exception was the standpoint of a handful of radical intellectuals within the Trotskyist tradition of the South African left whose critique of South African society and whose interpretation of South African history implied an alternative interpretation of Coloured history. While these radicals never wrote explicitly about the history of the Coloured people their analyses of South African society and history implied that racial identities, and hence also Coloured identity, were a capitalist ploy to divide, rule and exploit the South African masses. The impact of these radical analyses dating from the early 1940s onwards remained confined to a small elite within the Coloured community until their ideas and insights were taken up by a series of studies produced in the 1980s. A new paradigm in historical writing relating to the history of the Coloured people emerged in the post-Soweto era in reaction to the essentialist mode of analysis and a desire amongst scholars both within the liberal and revisionist schools of South African history to distance themselves from any form of racialized thinking or any idea that Coloured group consciousness was based on biological or primordial ties. This school, which will be referred to as the instrumentalists, regarded Coloured identity to be an artificial concept imposed by the white supremacist state and the ruling establishment upon weak and vulnerable people as an instrument of social control. Positions in this respect range from seeing Coloured identity simply as a device for excluding people of mixed race from the dominant society to viewing it as a product of deliberate divide-and-rule tactics by the ruling white minority to prevent blacks from forming a united front against racism and exploitation.27 The distinction of being the first instrumentalist history lies with Maurice Hommels Capricorn Blues which took up the ideas and arguments of preceding radical theorists, switching the focus of historical writing on the Coloured community from narratives of miscegenation in pre-industrial South Africa to Coloured protest politics in the twentieth century.28 The instrumentalist approach was grounded in the growing rejection of Coloured identity that gained initial impetus from Black Consciousness thinking. The idea of Coloured identity as a product of white supremacist social engineering was also rooted in Marxist notions of false consciousness used by ruling groups to manipulate populations under their control. This
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view was actively propagated at a popular level by political activists in the anti-apartheid movement. Written from a point of view explicitly opposed to the apartheid system, instrumentalist histories have tended to focus on Coloured politics, especially resistance to white domination. Instrumentalism represented the politically correct view of the turbulent two decades that followed the Soweto uprising and stemmed from a refusal to give credence to apartheid thinking, or in the case of the expedient, the fear of being accused of doing so. Although this approach was far removed from the social reality of racial divisions within black South Africa, it did score significant political successes in that it helped foster non-racism and played a role in undermining the apartheid system. The instrumentalist interpretation lost much of its potency when the unbanned ANC in the early 1990s side-lined the anti-racist lobby within the UDF and recognized the reality of Coloured ethnic identity in an attempt to win Coloured political support. Its appeal has all but evaporated in a post-apartheid era in which inter-black racial tensions cannot be explained away as the dastardly machinations of the white supremacist establishment. A few die-hard instrumentalists nevertheless remain within the small anti-racist lobby and the Khoisan revivalist movement is essentially instrumentalist in that its followers reject Colouredness as the colonizers caricature of the colonized. A third paradigm, referred to here as social constructionism29 and in which I place myself, emerged from the latter half of the 1980s onwards in response to the inadequacies of both the essentialist and instrumentalist approaches.30 The basic assumption of this genre is that Coloured identity cannot be taken for granted as an inevitable part of South African society, ordained either by God or nature but that it is a product of human agency dependent on a range of historical, social, cultural, political and other contingencies. The creation of Coloured identity is also taken to be an ongoing, dynamic process in which groups and individuals make and re-make their perceived realities and thus also their personal and social identities. The fundamental concerns of social constructionists are thus to explain how and why Coloured identity came into existence and to unravel the intricate ways in which has found expression. While Bickford-Smith and Muzondidya portray the making of Coloured identity as a dialectic process of imposition by the ruling establishment from above and Coloured initiative from below, Adhikari stresses the primacy of Coloured agency in the making of their own identity. The main criticisms of both the essentialist and instrumentalist approaches from the perspective of social constructionists are that they tend to accept Coloured identity as given and portray it as fixed. They, in addition, generally fail to take cognizance of the fluidity of Coloured self-definition and ambiguities inherent in the process. In essentialist histories this is a product of a profoundly Eurocentric perspective and a reliance on the simplistic formulations of popular racialized conceptions of Coloured identity. The problem in instrumentalist writing partly stems from a narrow focus on Coloured protest politics and the social injustices suffered by the
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community. This has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance of Coloured people to white supremacism and playing down their accommodation with the South African racial system. The overall result has been an over-simplified image of the phenomenon in this literature. A cardinal sin of both these schools is that they deny Coloured people a significant role in the making of their own identity. Essentialist interpretations do this by assuming Colouredness to be an inbred quality that arises automatically from miscegenation. Instrumentalists share the essentialist premise that Coloured identity is something negative and undesirable but blame it on the racism of the ruling white minority. Though they may have had the laudable intention of countering the racism of essentialist accounts, instrumentalist histories are nevertheless condescending by denying Coloured people a role in the basic cognitive function of creating and reproducing their own social identities. Even the best of these histories, Gavin Lewis Between the Wire and the Wall, despite its firm focus on Coloured agency in the political arena, nevertheless asserts that the solution to this dilemma (of defining Coloured identity) is to accept Coloured identity as a white-imposed categorization.31 Both schools of writing treat Coloured identity as something exceptional, failing to recognize it for what it is a historically specific social construction, like any other social identity. In this respect, both schools have betrayed undue concern with contemporary ideological and political considerations.32 Muzondidyas suggestion that the social constructionist approach is a product of rational choice theory is misguided in that writers in this genre have not consciously used any such theory to analyze or explain Coloured identity and there is no evidence to suggest that they believe that social change or identity can be explained simply as a matter of rational choice.33 If anything, social constructionist analyses are marked by an emphasis on non-rational elements such as the ambiguities and contradictions within Coloured identity. The main concerns of social constructionists have therefore been to demonstrate the complexity of Coloured identity and, most importantly, to stress the agency of Coloured people in the making of their own identity. In my own work emphasis has been placed on the ways in which ambiguities in their identity and the marginality of Coloured people influenced their social experience and political consciousness. It also seeks to demonstrate that far from being the inert, anonymous entities of the essentialist school or the righteous resisters of instrumentalist histories, Coloured people exhibited a much more complex reaction to white supremacism that encompassed resistance as well as collaboration, protest as well as accommodation. Social identity is by its very nature the product of its bearers and can no more be imposed upon people by the state or ruling groups than it can spring automatically from miscegenation or peoples racial constitution. Social identity is cultural in nature in that it is a part of learnt behaviour and is moulded by social experience and social interaction.34 At most identities
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can be manipulated by outsiders but then only to the extent that it resonates strongly with peoples particular social identities. In this regard instrumentalists confuse status with identity in that a status can be imposed upon people while an identity is by its very nature primarily a creation of the bearers themselves. In the case of the Coloured community under white supremacist rule, it was both through customary means and the various ways in which the state was able to assert its power that a particular status was imposed upon Coloured people. Recently the rudiments of a fourth approach, of viewing Coloured identity as a product of creolization, have emerged. This approach, which draws on post modernist theory, shares much of the critical perspectives of social constructionists. It is, as one would expect, nuanced and sensitive to the complexity of identity politics and by its very nature, critical of the simplistic paradigms of essentialist and instrumentalist writing. Zimitri Erasmuss introduction to her edited volume, Coloured by History, Shaped by Place, is as yet the only significant example of creolization theory applied to Coloured identity. Erasmus proposes a new way of conceptualizing Coloured identity. The basic premise of her analysis is that Coloured identity is not a product of racial mixture as popular wisdom and much academic writing would have it, but of cultural creativity shaped by South Africas history of colonialism and white domination. Erasmus contends that Coloured identity is not characterized by borrowing per se but by cultural borrowing and creation under the very specific conditions of creolization. Creolization is defined as cultural creativity under conditions of marginalization and the construction of an identity out of elements of ruling class as well as subaltern cultures. She would thus by implication also emphatically reject the notions that Coloured identity is either a product of miscegenation or little more than a white-imposed categorization. Erasmus insists that Coloured identity was made and remade by Coloured people themselves to give meaning to their everyday lives.35 Moving from what, up to that point, had been an intellectual argument about the nature of Coloured identity to what is essentially an ideological and personal project to change perceptions about the identity, Erasmus insists that the relatively privileged position of Coloured people, their disrespect for, and disassociation from, all things African, as well as their degree of complicity in maintaining white supremacism, be recognized. These acknowledgements she argues are necessary for re-imagining Coloured identity and breaking with its apartheid baggage in terms of which it was never an identity in its own right, always having been negatively defined in terms of lack or taint or in terms of remainder or excess which does not fit a classificatory scheme. A concomitant condition she stipulates for re-imagining Coloured identity is that there be a move away from the tendency to assign moral authenticity or political credibility to blackness or Africanness , attitudes that amount to African chauvinism. In the
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anti-apartheid struggle, Erasmus argues, this chauvinism resulted in Coloured comrades either renouncing their Coloured identity or being regarded as blacks of a special type. This has meant the continued marginalization of the Coloured community in post-apartheid South Africa.36 Interpreting Coloured identity in terms of creolization is an innovative and potentially fruitful line of enquiry. It is a pity that Erasmus does not go much beyond proposing the idea and does not follow through with a more comprehensive analysis or even an outline of what a fully-fledged study of the subject might encompass. None of the contributors to this volume take up her line of argument in any substantive way though some may, in one way or another, be seen to be illustrating aspects of her argument. Coloured social experience in white-dominated South Africa is mirrored in the historiography of Coloured identity in a number of ways. Features of this historiography that stand out are its relatively poor quality, its paucity and the degree to which political and ideological considerations have influenced positions staked out by contributors. There is also a clear tendency for opinions to be polarized with Coloured identity either being taken for granted or imbued with intense political significance and often rejected with vehemence. The poor quality and scantness of this historiography are to a considerable extent products of racial oppression and the marginalization of the Coloured community. Controversy over Coloured identity in historical writing stems from more than one source, not least of which is the ambiguous status of Coloured people in the South African racial hierarchy. Given the subjective nature of historical enquiry as well as long-standing and highly politicized disputes over the nature of Coloured identity, it is not at all surprising that there is fierce disagreement over Coloured identity within this historiography or that individual authors exhibit a degree of confusion over the issue. Historical writing on the Coloured community also reflects the hegemony of racial thinking with regard to Coloured identity. The idea that Colouredness was the product of miscegenation was so deeply entrenched in South African society that nearly all people, including academics and radical polemicists, accepted this assumption until the latter phases of the apartheid era. Even a hard-nosed Trotskyist intellectual such as Kenny Jordaan could accept Jan van Riebeeck as the father of the Cape Coloured people.37 Notes
1 2

Cape Times, 14 January 2002. The People of South Africa Population Census, 1996: Primary Tables The Country as a Whole (Report No. 03-01-19), p. 6; Statistics South Africa, 2000 (Pretoria, Government Publications Dept., 2001), 1.1. 3 Compare statistics in Census of the Union of South Africa, 1911 (U.G.321912), Annexure 1, pp. 7 11 with South African Census, 1996, p. 6. 4 M. Adhikari, The sons of Ham: Slavery and the making of Coloured identity, South African Historical Journal, 27, 1992, pp. 1078; N. Worden, Adjusting to emancipation: Freed slaves and farmers in mid-nineteenth century southwestern Cape in The Angry Divide: Social and Economic
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History of the Western Cape, ed. W. James and M. Simons (Cape Town, David Philip, 1989), pp. 334. 5 See M. Adhikari, Let Us Live for Our Children: The Teachers League of South Africa, 19131940 (Cape Town, University of Cape Town Press, 1993), pp. 1118 and Sons of Ham, pp. 95112 for a more detailed discussion of the origins of Coloured identity. For case studies of the process in Cape Town and Kimberley respectively, see V. Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town, 18751902 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 186209; P. Lawrence, Class, colour consciousness and the search for identity at the Kimberley diamond diggings, 18671893, MA thesis (University of Cape Town, 1994). 6 S. Trapido, The friends of the Natives: Merchants, peasants and the political and ideological structure of liberalism in the Cape in Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa, ed. S. Marks and A. Atmore (London, Longman, 1980), p. 266. 7 R. van der Ross, The Rise and Decline of Apartheid: A Study of Political Movements Among the Coloured People of South Africa, 18801985 (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 1986), pp. 4355; G. Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African Coloured Politics (Cape Town, David Philip, 1987) pp. 309, 4663. 8 This policy sought to ameliorate the poor white problem by absorbing newly urbanized whites into industrial occupations and replacing black workers with whites at wages that ensured a civilized standard of living. See T. Davenport and C. Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History (London, Macmillan, 2000), pp. 6367. 9 L. Thompson, The Cape Coloured Franchise ( Johannesburg, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1949), pp. 2021, 55; G. Lewis,The reaction of the Cape Coloureds to segregation, PhD dissertation (Queens University, 1984), pp. 3301. 10 van der Ross, Rise and Decline of Apartheid, ch. 16; Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, pp. 26170; R. du Pre, Separate but Unequal: The Coloured People of South Africa A Political History ( Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball, 1994), chs 48;V. Bickford-Smith, E. van Heyningen and N. Worden, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History (Cape Town, David Philip, 1999), pp. 14396. 11 Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, pp. 1025; van der Ross, Rise and Decline of Apartheid, pp. 130. 12 M. Adhikari, Abdullah Abdurahman, 1872 1940 in They Shaped Our Century: The Most Influential South Africans of the Twentieth Century (Cape Town, Human and Rousseau, 1999), p. 438; Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, pp. 12433, 2506. 13 M. Hommel, Capricorn Blues: The Struggle for Human Rights in South Africa (Toronto, Culturama, 1981), pp. 65ff.; Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, pp. 1798, 20744; van der Ross, Rise and Decline of Apartheid, pp. 209ff.; A. Drew, Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left (Aldershot,Ashgate, 2000), pp. 26670. 14 SACPO was renamed the Coloured Peoples Congress in December 1959. 15 Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, pp. 26371; Hommel, Capricorn Blues, pp. 13542, 1579. 16 For discussion of attitudes toward Coloured identity in the anti-apartheid movement see M. Adhikari, You have the right to know: South, 19871994, pp. 34954 and I. Van Kessel, Grassroots: From washing lines to Utopia, pp. 30810, both in South Africas Resistance Press: Alternative Voices in the Last Generation Under Apartheid, ed. L. Switzer and M. Adhikari (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2000). 17 Cape Argus, 22 March 1913; Cape Times, 22 March 1913. 18 L. Switzer, Review of Adhikari, Let us Live for our Children, The Journal of African History, 36 (2), 1995, p. 338. 19 The appearance of the three books by van der Ross, Lewis and Goldin within twelve months of each other during 19867 represents something of a landmark in this historiography. 20 See W. James, D. Caliguire and K. Cullinan (eds.), Now that We are Free; Coloured Communities in a Democratic South Africa (Boulder, Lynne Riener, 1996) and Z. Erasmus (ed.), Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town (Cape Town, Kwela Books, 2001) for recent edited volumes on Coloured identity. Mohamed Adhikaris Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2005) has a short section on Coloured identity in the new South Africa. 21 Some people, especially intellectuals, who are generally regarded as Coloured still reject the designation. Two PhD dissertations, one on Khoisan revivalism by Mike Besten at the University of the Western Cape and another on Coloured identity in post-apartheid South Africa by Michelle Ruiters at Rutgers University are in the making. E. Salo, Respectable mothers, tough men and
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good daughters: Producing persons in Manenberg township, South Africa, PhD dissertation (Emory University, 2004) has recently been completed. There are at least half a dozen other dissertations on the subject being researched. 22 See H. P. Cruse, Die Opheffing van die Kleurlingbevolking: Deel I; Aanvangsjare, 1652 1795 (Stellenbosch, Christen Studentevereniging, 1947); W. M. MacMillan, The Cape Colour Question: A Historical Survey (Cape Town, Balkema, 1968), first published in London by Faber and Gwyer, 1927 as examples. 23 The earliest example is D. Hendricks and C. Viljoen, Student Teachers History Course: For the Use in Coloured Training Colleges (Paarl, Huguenot Drukkery, 1936). 24 Cruse, Opheffing van die Kleurlingbevolking; D. P. Botha, Die Opkoms van Ons Derde Stand (Cape Town, Human and Rousseau, 1960) are good examples. 25 The best-known examples are MacMillan, Cape Colour Question and J. S. Marais, The Cape Coloured People, 16521937 ( Johannesburg,Witwatersrand University Press, 1968), first published in London, by Longmans, Green and Co., 1939. R. van der Ross, Rise and Decline of Apartheid is an example of a moderate Coloured writer espousing the liberal interpretation. 26 C. Zievogel, Brown South Africa (Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1938) and some speeches of Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman, the most prominent Coloured political leader of the first half of the twentieth century provide good examples of this approach. See R. van der Ross, Say It Out Loud: The APO Presidential Addresses and Other Major Political Speeches, 19061940, of Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman (Bellville, University of the Western Cape Institute for Historical Research, 1990) for a collection of Abdurahmans speeches. 27 du Pre, Separate but Unequal and I. Goldin, Making Race: The Politics and Economics of Coloured Identity in South Africa (Cape Town, Maskew Miller Longman, 1987) respectively represent the two standpoints. 28 The other major instrumentalist interventions of the 1980s were Lewiss Between the Wire and Wall and Goldins Making Race. 29 The first known usage of this term in relation to Coloured historiography occurs in H. Trotter, What is a Coloured?: Definitions of Coloured South African identity in the academy, unpublished paper (Yale University, 2000), pp. 1112, 21. Trotter does not explain precisely what he means by social constructionism and distinguishes between positive (myself and Bickford-Smith) and negative (what I call instrumentalists) social constructionists. 30 See Adhikari, Teachers League, Adhikari, Not White Enough, and Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride as the main examples of this genre. J. Muzondidya, Sitting on the fence or walking a tightrope? A political history of the Coloured community of Zimbabwe, 1945 1980, PhD dissertation (University of Cape Town, 2001) draws on Adhikari and Bickford-Smith in applying this paradigm to Zimbabwe and makes the occasional comparison with South Africa. 31 Lewis, Between Wire and Wall, p. 4. 32 See M. Adhikari,The product of civilization in its most repellent manifestation: Ambiguities in the racial perceptions of the APO (African Political Organization), 19091923, Journal of African History, 38 (2), 1997, pp. 283300 and M. Adhikari, A drink-sodden race of bestial degenerates: Attitudes toward race and class in the Educational Journal, 19131940 in Studies in the History of Cape Town, 7, ed. E. van Heyningen, (Cape Town, University of Cape Town Press, 1994), pp. 10932 for more detailed critiques of essentialist and instrumentalist histories and for case studies within the social constructionist approach. 33 Muzondidya,Sitting on the fence, p. 13. 34 This much can be established from introductory social psychology texts. See, for example, D. Abrams,Social identity, psychology of in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, ed. N. Smelser and B. Baltes (Oxford, Elsevier, 2001), vol. 21, pp. 143069. 35 Erasmus, Coloured by History, p. 16. 36 Ibid., pp. 17, 19. 37 K. Jordaan,Jan van Riebeeck: His place in South African history, Discussion, 1 (5), 1952, p. 34. For detailed elaboration on the issues raised in this paragraph, especially amongst Coloured writers themselves see M. Adhikari, Hope, fear, shame, frustration: Continuity and change in the expression of Coloured identity in white supremacist South Africa, 19101994, PhD dissertation (University of Cape Town, 2002), pp. 63120.

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Bibliography
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du Pre, R., Separate but Unequal: The Coloured People of South Africa-A Political History (Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball, 1994). van der Ross, R., The Rise and Decline of Apartheid: A Study of Political Movements Among the Coloured People of South Africa, 18801985 (Cape Town,Tafelberg, 1986). van der Ross, R., Say It Out Loud: The APO Presidential Addresses and Other Major Political Speeches, 1906 1940, of Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman (Bellville, University of the Western Cape Institute for Historical Research, 1990). Salo, E., Respectable mothers, tough men and good daughters: Producing persons in Manenberg township, South Africa, PhD dissertation (Emory University, 2004). Thompson, L., The Cape Coloured Franchise (Johannesburg, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1949). Trapido, S., The friends of the Natives: Merchants, peasants and the political and ideological structure of liberalism in the Cape in Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa , ed. S. Marks and A. Atmore (London, Longman, 1980), pp. 24774. Trotter, H., What is a Coloured?: Definitions of Coloured South African identity in the academy, unpublished paper (Yale University, 2000). Van Kessel, I., Grassroots: From washing lines to utopia in South Africas Resistance Press: Alternative Voices in the Last Generation Under Apartheid, ed. L. Switzer and M. Adhikari (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2000), pp. 283326. Worden, N., Adjusting to emancipation: Freed slaves and farmers in mid-nineteenth century southwestern Cape in The Angry Divide: Social and Economic History of the Western Cape, ed. W. James and M. Simons (Cape Town, David Philip, 1989), pp. 319. Zievogel, C., Brown South Africa (Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1938).

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