A thought-provoking and timely publication

Andries Walter Oliphant

Coloured by History Shaped by Place
Edited by Zimitri Erasmus

Published by Kwela Books and History on Line
2001

The current vogue in identity research in South Africa, while related to recent developments in the field of post-colonial studies, stems largely from South Africa’s reconfiguration into a democracy in 1994. Abebe Zegeye, the series editor of Social Identities South Africa, of which Coloured by History Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, edited by Zimitri Erasmus, forms a part, says this much in a blurb which accompanies each publication in the series. It seeks, we are told, to explore the “new identities” taking shape in post-apartheid South Africa.

As textualised in the Constitution, South Africa is now founded on the principles of “democracy”, “human dignity”, “equality”, “non-racialism” and “non-sexism”. These are not hollow words. They encode the refashioning of South from a colonial order to a democracy. They signal the sharp break with the chromatic hierarchies of colonialism in which “white” was a marker of privilege and power and “black” the brand of oppression. This destabilised the social identities constructed for and by the various peoples in previous times. The effects of this were and continue to be felt and processed differently by the various groups.

The publication reviewed here contends that notwithstanding the political changes, the once all-pervasive colonial tradition continues to affect local life. This is particularly so with regard to cultural identities. However, while this is plausible, the question is: how is this persistence explained without sliding back into the morass of a discredited history? In ten essays and an introduction, Coloured by History Shaped by Place focuses on identity issues pertaining to a specific group: those people classified “coloured” under apartheid and before. Of all the identities proffered, it asserts that “coloured” identity was perhaps the most fraught and traumatically charged category under apartheid.

Before going any further, I want to observe that in dealing, as it does, with a specific and spatially circumscribed group, the publication is not without its dangers. These arise from the fact that identity is always a relational matter. It cannot be discussed meaningfully if it is removed from the discursive field in which it is conceptually situated, articulated and produced. Concerning this, Thiven Reddy, one of the contributors, writes in “The Politics of Naming: The Constitution of Coloured Subjects in South Africa” that identities should be approached “... as part of a discourse of classification where each category of classification has its meaning in relation to other categories and the system of classification as a whole ...” Such an approach, he points out, enables one to grasp the constructed nature of all identities.

This caution is best heeded in studies like this. An exclusive focus is perilously at risk of reproducing the very ideological conditions under which an identity considered problematic was first produced. Therefore the question arises: Why “coloured” identities in Cape Town? Why not, more broadly, “social” identities in the Cape?

The answer is obvious. The Western Cape is the historical home of most of the people who under the changing systems of chromatic taxonomy of colonial rule, dating back to the 17th century and even earlier, came to be labelled “coloureds”. In the new system of non-racial democracy this diverse group holds the electoral key to political power in the province. In the first democratic elections of 1994, their support kept the National Party in power in the province. Although support for the ANC increased in the 1998 provincial elections, local government elections in 2000 confirmed support for the New National Party.

The above points towards political and cultural formations in the communities previously excluded from political representation, which stand in a different relationship to the national democratic struggle which pursued a strategy of trans-ethnic solidarity in opposition to the rigid ethnic separation of minority rule. While this strategy succeeded in other parts of the country, its failure in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal suggests that other alliances with different political agendas are operative in these two provinces. For all their differences, they seem to have in common the desire to retain aspects of the old power patterns under changed conditions.

While this publication does not explicitly seek to answer why the people designated “coloured” voted they way they did, it is haunted and troubled by this question on almost every page. Relying on post-colonial theory forged to deal with comparable but different conditions in other parts of the world, it reflects on the concept of “coloured”. This is not a critical reflection. In the words of the editor, it is an attempt at “rethinking what it means to be coloured in post-apartheid South Africa”. Not concerned with refuting the classificatory category of “coloured”, it rejects its colonial conceptualisation as a “mixture of pure races” and proposes a positive reconceptualisation.

Such an approach is likely to be frowned upon, if not dismissed, by political activists who, in resisting all apartheid-based classifications, have always placed the term “coloured” under erasure. This has been done either by using the lower case “c”, or by prefacing the decapitalised noun with the dismissive “so-called”. An example of this is Alan Boesak’s recent reference, in a speech to the Johannesburg Press Club, to some “so-called coloureds on the Cape Flats who called Nelson Mandela a kaffir” at the inception of democracy.

The pitfalls of reconceptualising this highly controversial term instead of scuppering it can be read in the introduction by Zimitri Erasmus. The salvage attempt becomes ensnared in a critique of the heuristically overrated and limited epistemology of binarism. Erasmus writes that the governing “argument” of the publication is “that coloured identities are not based on ‘race mixture’ but on cultural creativity, creolized formations shaped by South Africa’s history of colonialism, slavery, segregation and apartheid”. According to her, “[t]his conceptualisation undermines the common sense view that conceives ‘colouredness’ as something produced by the mixture of other ‘purer’ cultures.”

In the place of the common notions of bastardisation it “stresses the ambiguity and ceaseless fluidity of coloured identity formations while remaining conscious of the conditions under which they were produced.” This dynamic mutability, one should be reminded, is not unique to “coloured” identity; it is a property of all identities. In this publication, “fluidity”, “hybridity” and “creolization” are, however, treated as hallmarks of “coloured” identity. This ironically affirms, in different terms, the colonial conception of “coloured”. Hybridity, or rather, syncreticity, is a feature of all cultures and identities. To make it the distinctive property of the culture of a specific group is to make differences of degree into difference of kind.

Furthermore, in arguing as Erasmus and others do, that the notion of “mixed race” is inscribed as the negative term in a binary system of “white” and “black” purity is to err. More accurately stated, the positive term in the colonial discourses is “white” or “European”. The negative term is “black” or “African”. Viewed from the perspective of African nationalism, this hierarchy is overturned to render “African” as positive and “European” as its negative corollary.

This is the chromatic logic of sterile affirmation and negation that underpins colonial discourse. Given this, the extreme purist notions of both colonial discourse and African nationalist discourse are thus threatened by a category which cannot be aligned to this binary cage. “Coloured” or “mixed race” destabilises such rigidities. It does not, as Thiven Reddy concludes, function “to hold together the whole system of classification in South Africa”. Rather, it renders the system meaningless. What it does offer colonial discourse is a category which, when placed at a distance, can be used to absorb those who slipped through the net of white privilege. Under the changed conditions it is hardly surprising that this category is reclaimed, as it is in the Western Cape, to give a “black” tint to what was once posited as “pure” white identity.

Accordingly, it is also an error to posit colonialism and anti-colonialism in South Africa as reversible equivalents. Colonialism in South Africa was unremittingly racist and violently antithetical in its ambition to impose “white” domination. It sought to negate, displace or appropriate everything African. This was required to maintain exclusive power. The utterances of white supremacists such as Sarah Gertrude Millin are not so much a matter of negativity, but the unrepressed expression of fear and horror that endorsement of this process would lead to a collapse of the category of “whiteness” and its absorption into “blackness”, or something not white or not European. Hence its master negations: “non-white” and “non-European”, used unflinchingly for three centuries.

In contradistinction, African nationalism in South Africa, with all its shortcomings, from its earliest inscriptions sought an alternative to the grotesque division of human beings propagated by colonial discourse.

To be explicit: there is, then, no need to reinvest the term “coloured” with a positive meaning. If it cannot be abandoned it should remain under erasure. It is tautological because pure ethnic groups are a myth. Furthermore, it hardly covers the bewildering spectrum of peoples and cultures lumped under it. The people designated “coloured” in colonial discourse are not a group in the middle or on the margins of dominant groups. They constitute heterogeneous peoples without a centre. They arise within and penetrate into the extremes of the chromatic mythologies of “white” and “black”. The peoples — irreducibly plural — assigned to this group disrupt all taxonomies and render such exercises futile. It marks the open and dynamic fact of identity as opposed to the fixed and closed conceptions of racist mythology.

To seek to be a “coloured”, whether under old or new conceptions, is to risk residing in the history and discursive grids of colonialism. Recuperative enterprises such as the one Erasmus advocates, for all its profound articulation of denigration and “pain” can at best only result in a potentially tragic re-ethnification of South African society. It is perhaps more appropriate to be attentive to conceptual sophistication which went into the long local adventure of resistance to racist taxonomies for which the term “coloured” is a watchword.

Once this is grasped, and the people labelled “coloured” in the Western Cape and elsewhere in South Africa move to combine with all the historically oppressed and those sectors of the population who have relinquished the grotesque fantasy of “white” mastery, the nightmare of colonialism, not only in the political domain but also in much of what issued from it, will, if not instantaneously vanquished, be checked. It is through such strategic subversion to classification that “new identities” for everyone might be both imagined and actively constructed in South Africa.

Notwithstanding the above, this publication is at its most insightful when the contributors draw on historical research. Cheryl Hendricks’s essay, “‘Ominous’ Liaisons Tracing the Interface of ‘Race’ and Sex at the Cape” is a fine example. Using the vast resources documenting the perceptions of early European visitors and drawing on the research of historians such as Shell, Elphick and others on the founding of the Cape, she lays bare the logic of the sexual economy and the racial values on which colonialism in South Africa is based. The close critical readings of literary texts by Desiree Lewis and Pumla Dineo Gqola are also exemplary.

This, then, if nothing else, is a thought-provoking and timely publication.

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