Not White Enough, Not Black Enough

Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community

Mohamed Adhikari

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9780896804425
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The concept of Colouredness—being neither white nor black—has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community is the first systematic study of Coloured identity, its history, and its relevance to South African national life. Mohamed Adhikari engages with the debates and controversies thrown up by the identity's troubled existence and challenges much of the conventional wisdom associated with it. A combination of wide-ranging thematic analyses and detailed case studies illustrates how Colouredness functioned as a social identity from the time of its emergence in the late nineteenth century through its adaptation to the postapartheid environment.

Adhikari demonstrates how the interplay of marginality, racial hierarchy, assimilationist aspirations, negative racial stereotyping, class divisions, and ideological conflicts helped mold people's sense of Colouredness over the past century. Knowledge of this history, and of the social and political dynamic that informed the articulation of a separate Coloured identity, is vital to an understanding of present-day complexities in South Africa.

1

Continuity and Context

An Overview of Coloured Identity in White Supremacist South Africa

There is a general lack of familiarity with the history of the Coloured community of South Africa, except perhaps for an awareness that it has generally been a story of racial oppression and that for nearly the whole of the twentieth century, it followed a discernible trend of intensifying segregationism and a continual erosion of Coloured people’s civil rights. This blind spot in South African historical knowledge, which is elaborated on in the next chapter, is a direct consequence of the marginality of the Coloured people. As one Coloured commentator put it, “We don’t know our own history and out there in the community and schools there is no information about it because we are not empowered.”¹

A contexualizing opening chapter that sketches the social and historical background is thus a particular necessity. First, a thumbnail sketch of the history of the Coloured community is presented. This is followed by an elaboration of the core attributes that defined the manner in which Coloured identity operated in South African society during the era of white rule. The analysis here seeks to identify the fundamental impulses behind the assertion of a separate Coloured identity and to explain continuity and change in processes of Coloured self-definition. The overview is rounded off by a discussion of the popular stereotyping of Coloured people by dissecting a wellworn joke about their origin. This section demonstrates how a range of pejorative connotations coalesce in the stereotyping of Coloured people in the popular mind.

From Slavery to Khoisan Revivalism: A Synopsis of Coloured History

In South Africa, contrary to international usage, the term Coloured does not refer to black people in general. It instead alludes to a phenotypically varied social group of highly diverse cultural and geographic origins. Novelist, academic, and literary critic Kole Omotoso aptly described Coloured people’s skin color, the most important of these phenotypical features, as varying “from charcoal black to breadcrust brown, sallow yellow and finally off-white cream that wants to pass for white.”² The Coloured people were descended largely from Cape slaves,³ the indigenous Khoisan population, and other black people who had been assimilated to Cape colonial society by the late nineteenth century. Since they are 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.

There are approximately three and a half million Coloured people in South Africa today.⁴ Constituting no more than 9 percent 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: approximately 90 percent of them live within the western third of the country, with more than two-thirds residing in the Western Cape⁵ and over 40 percent in the greater Cape Town area.⁶ The Coloured category has also generally been taken to include a number of distinct subgroups, 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. However, it was in the decades after the emancipation of the Khoisan in 1828 and slaves in 1838 that various components of the heterogeneous black laboring class in the Cape Colony started integrating more rapidly and developing an incipient shared identity. This identity was based on a common socioeconomic status and a shared culture derived from their incorporation into the lower ranks of Cape colonial society.⁷ The emergence of a full-fledged Coloured identity as we know it today was pre-cipitated in the late nineteenth century by the sweeping social changes that came in the wake of the mineral revolution. The introduction of large-scale mining after the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886, being South Africa’s equivalent of the industrial revolution, had a transformative impact on the social and economic landscape of the subcontinent. Significant numbers of Africans started going to the western Cape from the 1870s onward, and 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 as Coloured people, in order to claim a position of relative privilege in relation to Africans on the basis of their closer assimilation to Western culture and being partly descended from European colonists.⁸

Because of the marginality of the Coloured people 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 was the continual erosion of the civil rights first bestowed on blacks 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 1892.⁹ A spate of racially discriminatory 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 after the Anglo-Boer War; the promulgation of the School Board Act of 1905, which segregated the Cape’s 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 creation of the South African state in 1910.¹⁰ The subsequent implementation of a policy of segregation progressively entrenched white privilege and Coloured disadvantage before even more draconian measures were introduced with the coming of apartheid in 1948.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the economic advancement of the Coloured community was undermined by the civilized labor policy,¹¹ as well as a number of laws designed to favor whites over blacks in the competition for employment. For example, the 1921 Juvenile Affairs Act set up mechanisms for placing those who left white schools 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 labor to undercut white wage demands by setting high minimum-wage levels in key industries. Furthermore, in 1930, the influence of the Coloured vote was more than halved by the enfranchisement of white women only.¹²

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, which categorized all South Africans according to race, made the implementation of rigid segregation possible. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 outlawed marriage and sex across the color line, respectively. 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 among 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. In 1956, moreover, after a protracted legal and constitutional battle, the National Party succeeded in removing Coloured people from the common voters’ roll.¹³

Because 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 defense of their rights. Although the earliest Coloured political organizations date back to the 1880s, the first substantive Coloured political body, the African Political Organization (APO), was established in Cape Town in 1902.¹⁴ Under the leadership of the charismatic Abdullah Abdurahman, who served as president from 1905 until his death in 1940, the APO dominated Coloured protest politics for nearly four decades. It became the main vehicle for expressing this community’s assimilationist aspirations as well as its fears at the rising tide of segregationism until its demise in the mid-1940s. A number 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.¹⁵

Intensifying segregation and the failure of the APO’s 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 radical 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.¹⁶ The South African Coloured People’s Organization (SACPO),¹⁷ which was founded in 1953 and affiliated with the Congress Alliance, led by the African National Congress (ANC), also organized protests and demonstrations, especially against the removal of Coloured people from the voters’ roll.¹⁸ Organized opposition to apartheid from within the Coloured community was effectively quelled by state repression following the Sharpeville shooting of March 1960. The Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 unarmed anti-pass protestors were killed and 180 injured by police, represents a dramatic turning point in South Africa’s history and resulted in a harsh crackdown on the extraparliamentary opposition by the apartheid state. Organized Coloured resistance reemerged only in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976. A few scantily supported political organizations that were prepared to work within apartheid structures, such as the Labour Party of South Africa and the Federal Coloured People’s Party, were, however, sanctioned during the heyday of apartheid.

From the latter half of the 1970s onward, starting with the popularization of Black Consciousness ideology within the Coloured community,¹⁹ the nature of Coloured identity became an extremely contentious issue, for growing numbers of educated and politicized people who had been classified “Coloured” under the Population Registration Act rejected the identity. The Soweto revolt, which started as a protest by schoolchildren in June 1976 and soon spread to other parts of the country, including Coloured communities of the western Cape, greatly accelerated this trend because it fomented a climate of open resistance to apartheid and fostered a far stronger sense of black solidarity than had existed before. 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, nonracial democratic movement in the 1980s under the leadership of the United Democratic Front (UDF), founded in 1983, fed Coloured rejectionism. Controversy over the participation of some Coloured leaders in the Tricameral Parliament of the P. W. Botha government from 1984 onward further inflamed rejectionist passions.²⁰ With the western Cape an epicenter of resistance to apartheid, Coloured identity became a highly charged issue, and within the antiapartheid movement, any recognition of Coloured identity was repudiated as a concession to apartheid thinking.²¹

In spite of this, the salience of Coloured identity has 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. Once again, it became politically acceptable to espouse a Coloured identity; moreover, postapartheid South Africa has 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 to attempts at ethnic mobilization to take advantage of the newly democratic political environment. The resurgence of Colouredism has, to a significant extent, also been motivated by a fear of African majority rule and the perception that, as in the old order, Coloureds were once again being marginalized. Though far from allayed, these anxieties have, in recent years, been alleviated by the fading influence of swart gevaar (black peril) tactics in South African politics and by the acclimatization of people to the new political order.

Hope, Fear, Shame, Frustration: The Dynamic of Coloured Exclusivism

The central contention of this section—and of the book as a whole—is that Coloured identity is better understood not as having undergone a series of transformations during the era of white rule but rather as having maintained a high degree of stability despite obvious changes to the identity. This is not to imply that Coloured identity was in any way fixed or that it was not pliable but that it operated within a range of fairly predictable parameters. The changes that it did experience during that time did not fundamentally alter the way in which it functioned as an identity. These changes were more in the nature of the accretion and sloughing off of elements around a core of enduring characteristics, adding further complexity and subtlety to the way the identity found expression, rather than the evolution of the identity itself. Thus, viewed on the eve of the transition to democracy in 1994, Coloured identity was very much the same phenomenon it was at the inauguration of Union in 1910 despite radical changes in the social and political landscape and within the Coloured community itself.

Besides the conventional expression of Coloured identity derived from its stable core, it is possible to identify a number of developments during the twentieth century that influenced processes of Coloured self-perception. The emergence of a radical movement in Coloured politics from the second half of the 1930s, though limited in its impact, was significant because it introduced the idea that black unity or a class-based identity was possible and because it initiated some impetus in this direction withi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• 1. Continuity and Context: An Overview of Coloured Identity in White Supremacist South Africa
• 2. History from the Margins: Changing Perceptions of Its Past within the Coloured Community
• 3. The Predicament of Marginality: Case Studies from the Earlier Period of White Rule
• 4. The Hegemony of Race: Coloured Identity within the Radical Movement during the Mid-twentieth Century
• 5. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Coloured Rejectionism during the Latter Phases of the Apartheid Era
• 6. New Responses to Old Dilemmas: Coloured Identity in a Transforming South Africa
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index