Elite (re-)constructions of coloured identities in a post-apartheid South Africa: Assimilations and bounded transgressions
Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
2006
328 pages
AAT 3249339
Michele René Ruiters
A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Political Science
This thesis engages with issues of identity, diversity and democracy through a study of the reconstruction of colouredness, a marginal identity, in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that coloured elites reconstruct their apartheid-designated racialized identities in order to create new identities that reflect their own and their communities’ experiences and needs. This reconstruction process often results in a reification of past expressions of each identity, which needs to be negotiated in a contemporary era. Ultimately, self-definition creates agency and therefore a stronger citizen who participates more effectively within their polity and thus strengthens democratic practices. I argue that diversity enhances democracy only if a politics of recognition is practiced.
The thesis also examines the possibility of releasing identities from historical baggage in the sense that a new identity could be constructed. I show that ‘new’ identities are constrained by the past and often struggle to free themselves from existing constructions. I argue that this is possible only if elites are willing to let go of past constructions and to be more inclusive in their visions for the future. The state, however, should continue to recognize marginal groups in order to combat the emergence of isolationist and reactionary politics from those groups.
My project examines one community’s search for recognition from a state that has, since 1994, rejoined a larger African community, which is largely unknown to ordinary South Africans. I argue that this process of reconstructing a coloured identity, which certain coloured elites have undertaken, is not a social movement but is a spiritual search for belonging, which provides a social network of similar minded people who wish to redefine their identities. I also contend that the reconstruction of coloured identities has to occur within a new framework in which an African identity is more inclusive and within which attempts have been made to move away from past constructions of identities.
Table of Contents
- II. ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
- III. DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- Chapter 1: Introduction and Methodology
- Who is ‘Coloured’?
- Why Identity?
- Race and Ethnicity
- Insider Re-vision of History
- A National Identity
- Methodology
- Chapter Synopses
- Conclusion
- Chapter 2: Elites, Marginal Identities and the Public Sphere
- Political identities
- Marginal Identities
- Censuses and control
- Passing
- ‘Errors’ and ‘Mistakes’
- The Public Sphere
- Elites, Institutions and Ideology
- Citizenship and Belonging
- ‘New’ constructions of Race-Ethnic Identities
- Marginal Groups and Agenda-setting
- Conclusion
- Chapter 3: Colonial Constructions of Coloured Identity
- Arrival of the Colonists
- Race at the Cape
- Social life and gender
- Slavery at the Cape
- Impositions and Adoptions
- Miscegenation and Misfits
- Imagined Communities
- ‘I am Coloured’
- Expressions of ‘coloured’ politics
- Conclusion
- Chapter 4: Apartheid Opportunities and Constraints
- Apartheid Apparatus
- Definitions of ‘Coloured’
- Social spaces and Political issues
- Imagined Community Realized
- Black Politics and State Repression
- Challenging Identities
- Language
- Political Constraints and Opportunities post-1984
- The End of Apartheid
- Conclusion
- Chapter 5: Emerging Constructions of Coloured Identity – Post-1994
- The National Question
- Elites Change Identities
- New Coloured Identities
- Brown Identities
- The December First Movement and Slave Identities
- KhoiSan Identities
- Creoles and Africans
- Way Forward
- Chapter 6: The Politics of Newly Constructed Identities in South Africa
- What is the African Renaissance?
- Who is an African?
- Marginal voices on African identities
- The State’s Options
- Existing Options
- New Identities?
- Conclusion
- Chapter 7: Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Appendices: Transcriptions of Three Interviews
- Curriculum Vitae
Chapter I: Introduction and Methodology
In 1994, South Africa entered a new political era. Racialism was outlawed and Black people could take their rightful place in a new democracy. The dominant party, the African National Congress, introduced a new ideological framework that was to guide our relations with each other within the country and to guide South Africa’s relations with the region, continent and world. The overarching ideology was based on an African renaissance which was to favorably reposition Africa in a global system. In this context, identity re-cmcrged as an important category in South Africa, despite the ANC’s call to non-racialism, as people jostled for what they perceived to be scarce resources. Social relations in South Africa have always been defined in terms of difference based on whether people were ‘white’, ‘Black African’, ‘Indian’ or ‘coloured’. The term Black African is newly constructed. ‘Black’ or ‘African’ were used in the past to denote people who were of Nguni origin, or in ‘other’ terms, people who were not white or coloured. Black was also used to denote a political identity in the liberation struggle and it included everyone that was not white (see Kuhn 2001:21). I have chosen to use Black African because ‘African’ presently refers to all who live on the continent while ‘Black African’ has the same constricted meaning as ‘African’ did under apartheid rule.
During the apartheid era, the state imposed racialized identities onto people and, more often than not, did not take into consideration people’s everyday experiences with their identities. Two processes are occurring simultaneously. The state is reinventing itself as an African nation with an 4 African’ identity that has not been clearly defined to date. Secondly, groups within South Africa are grappling with the process of (re-)naming themselves within this new political milieu. The South African state needs to redefine itself in a post-apartheid, globalizing world and is attempting to do so through the creation of a ‘new’ South African identity that can be shared by all South Africans. The introduction of an overarching ‘African’ identity has created insecurities in South African society and has resulted in people holding on to their apartheid-defined identities. How can South Africanness be created in the light of a fragmented society? Can we use old identities to forge a new identity and can we move beyond race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century? What can the state and groups do to construct identities that depict novel ‘imagined communities’? How docs the state overcome the past to forge a new society based on political ideals of justice, democracy, equality and humanism?…
…Who is ‘Coloured’?
The coloured people were defined as a ‘mixed’ race group that was neither white nor Black. It was constructed as a buffer group between the two racially divided extremes in this country. Some people accepted the imposed apartheid identities while others opposed the state’s denial of their agency to choose their own identities. For this reason coloured identity is very peculiar to the South African context, however, it also provides a snapshot of the experiences of many marginal groups across the world. The Cold Warand the reconfiguration of power relations within the world have provided opportunity spaces for marginal groups to claim a space and identity for themselves. How are marginal identities reconfigured and re-imagined in this globalizing world? How do they define themselves, obtain recognition and negotiate with power? These questions make it imperative that we provide a historical overview of how the state and coloured elites construct coloured identity. Under the colonial and apartheid eras colouredness was an in-between category, supposedly without a culture, without an obvious and authoritative history; and arguably without a political home. Coloured identity in South Africa remains a hotly contested subject in the twenty-first century and will continue to be so as more and more people disrupt imposed racial categorizations (see Erasmus 2001, Wasserman and Jacobs 2003, Hendricks 2000b, Jung 2000, Zegeye 2001a). This work provides a new perspective on coloured identities as they relate to the social, political and economic constraints placed on the identity by larger structural relations.
Colouredness historically dates to social interaction with the first Dutch settlers who arrived in the 1600s. The local people of the southernmost region of the continent, the Khoi and San, entered into economic and social relationships with the white settlers. When East African, Indonesian and Indian slaves came into the region and the indigenous tribes from the north moved south, a ‘new’ identity evolved through social and political interaction between the various race groups. ‘Miscegenation‘ between the white settlers, the indigenes and the slaves, gave rise to a ‘mixed’ race person. The assumption that coloured identity was born from a combination of different people is problematic because it incorrectly assumes that identities arc primordial and fixed. Identities are not immutable therefore they should be examined temporally to determine how they have addressed and dealt with changing relations within a society.
Coloured identities occupied a space that previously did not exist; one that was deemed to be ‘better than Black African but not quite white. Courtney Jung asserts:
Coloureds by their very existence, inhabited an oppositional space. They existed at the intersections of multiple racial classifications, occupying a residual, clearly non-racial category. Coloureds defied racialization. Under apartheid, those ‘outside’ racial stereotypes were redefined in racial terms, to support the ideological proposition that the world was naturally divided into separate races that belonged apart (2000:168).
Under colonial rule the state created a new racialized identity into which people labeled ‘coloured’ could fit. The apartheid government legislated those identities into formal existence and maintained racial differences until the early 1990s when F. W. de Klerk’s watershed speech unbanned the liberation movements and released Nelson Mandelaafter twenty-seven years in prison. Coloured elites have opened up debates since 1994 on coloured identities and have proposed that communities and individuals re-imagine their identities and frame them in terms they have chosen for themselves: KhoiSan, Creole, slave-descendent, and African being the more common self-chosen identities. Elites who have chosen these identities have begun to debate with the overarching concept of ‘ Africanness’ in an attempt to determine where they fit into the new political, economic and social dispensation…
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