Mixed Race Studies

Playing in the dark/ playing in the light: Coloured identity in the novels of Zoë Wicomb

Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
Volume 20, Issue 1, 2008
pages 1-15
DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2008.9678286

J. U. Jacobs, Senior Professor of English and Fellow
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Zoë Wicomb’s three fictional works—You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David’s Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006)—all engage with the question of a South African ‘coloured’ identity both under apartheid with its racialised discourse of black and white, and in the context of the post apartheid language of multiculturalism and creolisation. This essay examines the representation of ‘colouredness’ in Wicomb’s writing in terms of the two different conceptions of cultural identity that Stuart Hall has defined: an essential cultural identity based on a single, shared culture, and the recognition that cultural identity is based not only on points of similarity, but also on critical points of deep and significant difference and of separate histories of rupture and discontinuity. The politics of South African ‘coloured’ identity in Wicomb’s works reveals a tension between, on the one hand, acceptance of the complex discourse of colouredness with all its historical discontinuities, and, on the other, the desire for a more cohesive sense of cultural identity, drawn from a collective narrative of the past. In David’s Story the possibility of an essential cultural identity as an alternative to the unstable coloured one is considered with reference to the history of the Griqua ‘nation’ in the nineteenth century. And in Playing in the Light the alternative to colouredness is examined with reference to those coloured people under apartheid who were light enough to pass for white and crossed over, reinventing themselves as white South Africans. The essay approaches coloured identity through the lens of postcolonial diaspora theory, and more specifically, diasporic chaos theory.

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Commentary: Debating Coloured Identity in the Western Cape

African Security Review
Volume 14, Number 4 (2005)
pages 118-119

Cheryl Hendricks, Senior Research Fellow
Security Sector Governance Programme
Institute of Security Studies, (Tshwane) Pretoria

The nature and form of coloured identity in the Western Cape has been vociferously debated. Coloured identity became a particular concern after the 1994 general elections when the coloured vote returned the National Party to the Western Cape provincial government. More recently, a spate of incidents in the Western Cape have propelled the group into the national spotlight.
 
Many coloureds have indicated that they feel marginalised in the post-apartheid dispensation, and are especially resentful at what they perceive to be a preferential allocation of resources to Africans in the Western Cape, when their needs are just as great. These tensions were highlighted when a group of coloureds protested against the relocation of Africans, whose informal housing had been destroyed in a fire, to a hostel in the coloured township of Bokmakkierie…

…The typical response has been to debate coloured identity. The underlying assumption is that there is something fundamentally wrong with this identity and that some ideological transformation of the bearers of the identity will resolve the problems. This type of response draws on the dominant discourse that has portrayed that identity as bureaucratically constructed and therefore deviant. The onus is then placed on coloureds to change. This is a limited response that forecloses debate on the identity, does not grapple with the larger context of identity constructions in South Africa, and does not adequately address the issues that generate conflict in the Western Cape.
 
We cannot have a meaningful discussion on coloured identity in isolation from other identities that shape its expression. When discussing the identity we need to take into account conceptual issues (Whom are we speaking about?), discursive issues (How has the identity been constructed? By whom? In which contexts?), and perceived power relations in South Africa…

…Who are the coloureds?

Coloureds are often identified as South Africans who are of mixed race. Since everyone is of mixed race (as there is no such thing as a pure race), the identity is ipso facto meaningless (but then so are all other racial identities presumed on the basis of authenticity or purity). However, we do not dismiss these identities because they have social meaning and material consequences. Coloureds are descendants of the sexual liaisons between colonialists, slaves and the indigenous Khoisan. This ‘mixing’ took place centuries ago and state-enforced self-reproduction has largely been the means through which the group multiplied.

However, coloureds are not simply the offspring of inter-racial liaisons. And, conversely, children of ‘mixed marriages’ do not automatically lay claim to a coloured identity. This is a complex historically located identity that stems from the processes of slavery, genocide, rape and perceived miscegenation. The identity construction has been cloaked by the perceived shame of ‘illegitimacy’ and lack of authenticity that has to a large extent psychologically disempowered the bearers of the identity. For most of the history of this community, steeped in oppression and struggles for liberation, had been erased and/or silenced by successive regimes and the group members themselves…

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The Origins of the Afrikaners and their Language, 1652-1720: A Study in Miscegenation and Creole

Race & Class
Volume 15, Number 4 (April 1974)
pages 461-495
DOI: 10.1177/030639687401500404

Ken Jordaan

We are a bastard people with a bastard language. Ours is a bastard nature. That is good and fine. And like all bastards, uncertain of their identity, we have begun to cling to the concept of purity.

— Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaner poet

Introduction

The purpose and scope of this paper may be summarized as follows: 1. From the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Portuguese was a world language, having been spoken in the Caribbean and Latin America, Africa and Asia, consequent upon the expansion of the Portuguese empire. It was used as literary or High Portuguese, but mainly as Creole or Low Portuguese, the lingua franca. Europeans spoke it among themselves when they could not communicate with one another in their own languages. It was also spoken among slaves and between master and slave. Dutch officials, sailors and soldiers as well as African and Oriental slaves introduced the lingua franca into the Cape of…

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Miscegenation in South Africa

Cahiers d’études africaines
Volume 1, Number 4 (1960)
pages 68-84
DOI: 10.3406/cea.1960.3680

Pierre L. Van Den Berghe
University of Natal

A number of related factors make the Union of South Africa an ideal object of investigation in the field of miscegenation. The exceptionally virulent brand of racism that has developed in South Africa since the beginning of the 2oth century was accompanied by an increasingly morbid fear of miscegenation unparalleled in intensity anywhere else in the world. As consequence of this miscegenophobia South Africa went further than any other country in recent times in prohibiting by law all sexual relations whether marital or non-marital between whites and non-whites. Finally the South African government in its concern over bastardization provides the social scientist with the best data on inter-racial marriage and concubinage of any country known to the author.

The history of miscegenation in South Africa is as old as the first permanent Dutch settlement at the Cape in 1652. In the first few decades, some instances of marriage between Dutchmen and christianized Hottentot women took place as well as extensive non-marital relations between masters and female slaves. In the 1670’s, an estimated 3/4 of all children of female slaves had white fathers. With the rise of colour prejudice in the latter decades of the 17th century, legal unions of whites and non-whites became rare. A 1685 law prohibited marriage between white men and slave women; some legal unions of white men with free women of colour continued to take place, but with decreasing frequency. Miscegenation however, continued to flourish in the form common to most slave societies namely institutionalized concubinage between white men and non-white women.

The salient fact in the early history of miscegenation in South Africa is that while intermarriage became rapidly condemned, extra marital relations between white men and women of colour were not only tolerated, but even looked upon with amusement The slave lodge of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape was wide-open brothel of which Mentzel gives an interesting account:

“Female slaves are always ready to offer their bodies for trifle; and towards evening one can see string of soldiers and sailors entering the lodge where they misspend their time until the clock strikes 9… The Company does nothing to prevent this promiscuous intercourse since, for one thing it tends to multiply the slave population and does away with the necessity of importing fresh slaves. Three or four generations of this admixture for the daughters follow their footsteps have produced a half-caste population—a mestizo class—but a slight shade darker than some Europeans.”

Among the European bourgeoisie, interracial concubinage was also common:

“Boys who, through, force of circumstances have to remain at home during these impressionable years between 16 and 21 more often than not commit some folly, and get entangled with handsome slave-girl belonging to the household. These affairs are not regarded as very serious… the offence is venial in the public estimation. It does not hurt the prospects; his escapade is source of amusement, and he is dubbed young fellow who has shown the stuff he is made of.”

British visitor to the Cape in the beginning of the 19th century tells that slave girls were routinely assigned to the bedroom of white guests to enliven the latters’ nights. Slave girls were “loaned out” to Europeans by their masters:

“Female slaves sometimes live with Europeans as husband and wife with the permission of their masters who benefit in two ways: the cost of upkeep of the slave is reduced through the presents she receives from the man, and her children are the property of her master since children of female slaves are themselves slaves… In this manner the slave population is always increasing.”

Similarly, the whites interbred extensively with the nominally free Hottentots. Vaillant estimates the number of Bastards (for such was the contemporary designation of white-Hottentot half-breeds) in 1780’s as 1/6 of the inhabitants of the whole Cape Colony. In the first half of the 19th century, entire communities of Bastards settled along the Orange River where they established autonomous “states”. The offspring of these white-slave and white-Hottentot unions, as well as interbreeding between slaves and Hottentots gave rise to the people known today as the “Cape Coloureds”.

In this early period then, miscegenation was not only common but sanctioned so long as it took the form of concubinage between higher-status men and lower-status women. There was no trace of feeling of horror against miscegenation per se. The main concern of the dominant white group was the preservation of its superior status, and the latter was left unthreatened by master-slave concubinage. Intermarriage on the other hand, entailed measure of social equality and was consequently opposed…

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Ambiguous Belongings: Negotiating Hybridity in Cape Town, 1940s-1990s

Kronos: Journal of Cape History
Number 25, Pre-millennium issue (1998/1999)
pages 227-238

Sean Field
University of Cape Town

You know you are in-between. You, you don’t fit with the Africans. You don’t fit with the coloureds. You live a normal life, but, you know you don’t fit into everything, you know? It’s with, with apartheid and whatnot, you were forced in-between (Mr. I.Z.).

Introduction

Cultural purity is a myth.For example, the apartheid system was constructed around the belief that pure ‘racial’, ethnic and cultural identities were not only real but that they were a desirable basis for ordering and controlling South Africa. However, at the messy level of personal experience and life strategies, the boundaries and categories of cultural identity are constantly blurred and impure. This paper documents and interprets storied fragments of interviewees who were individually classified as ‘African’ or ‘coloured’ under apartheid. These stories were selected from a broader collection of 54 oral history interviews conducted for a Doctoral study on the history of Windermere. Windermere was a part-brick, part-iron shanty community on the urban periphery of the city. This culturally mixed community emerged at the turn of the century and was eventually destroyed between 1958 to 1963 by the politicians and bulldozers of the apartheid regime.

The rise and demise of the Windermere community of Cape Town, serves as social landscape for the focus on these energetic and emotional men and women. While resident in Windermere they were either friends or neighbours, in the aftermath of forced removals they lived in separate racially defined African and coloured group areas on the Cape Flats. While the cultural hybridity of identities are often erased or concealed, for many South Africans—not only South Africans classified ‘coloured’—this hybridity was more visible to public scrutiny. To varying degrees, the seven interviewees quoted in this paper, experienced living ‘in-between’ (or in another sense across or through) the apartheid classifications ‘African’ and ‘coloured’.

I will argue that the mixed feelings and painful choices, experienced through living these hybrid identities must not be forgotten or ignored. A historical analysis of oral stories and story telling will be informed by psychoanalytic theory. The cultural hybridity of these interviewees have been shaped by different social, kinship and linguistic histories. They have experienced ambiguous cultural belongings, which have been interwoven with many other belongings. It is especially their sense of spatial belonging for a time and place called ‘Windermere’ which has helped them cope with their ambiguous culturalbelongings. It is particularly important that the feelings people invest in their sense of self and identity, and how others· make them feel about themselves, should be incorporated as an integral part of understanding  hybrid identity formation. It is also crucial to be sensitively aware of the forms of pain experienced by living in-between, through and across the boundaries and spaces constructed by the apartheid system…

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Protest and Accommodation: Ambiguities in the Racial Politics of the APO, 1909-1923

Kronos: Journal of Cape History
Number 20 (November 1993)
pages 92-106

Mohamed Adhikari, Associate Professor of Historical Studies
University of Cape Town

Historical writing on the coloured community of South Africa has tended to accept coloured identity as given and to portray it as a fixed entity. The failure to take cognizance of the fluidity of coloured self-definition and the ambiguities inherent to the process has resulted in South African historiography presenting an over-simplified image of the phenomenon. The problem stems partly from an almost exclusive focus on coloured protest politics which has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance of coloureds to white racism and the advance of segregationism. Furthermore, little consideration has been given to the nature of coloured identity or to the manner in which it shaped political consciousness within the coloured community. This is particularly true of analyses of the period following the inauguration of the Union of South Africa in 1910, a time when the legitimacy of coloured identity was not in any way questioned within the coloured community and when coloured protest politics was dominated by one body, the African Political Organization (APO).

These inadequacies are clearly evident in recent academic writing on coloured history. Richard van der Ross, in his account of the history of coloured political organization, for example, appears oblivious of the need to investigate these issues despite previously having written a polemical book on coloured racial identity. Gavin Lewis view that coloured identity is a ‘white imposed categorization’ is a simplistic formulation which ignores a wide range of evidence to the contrary. Ian Goldin’s book, written from a neo-Marxist perspective, at one point acknowledges the complexity of coloured identity but then proceeds to treat it as little more than a ploy the white supremacist state used to divide and rule the black population.

By exploring how ambiguities and contradictions within coloured identity helped shape the political consciousness of coloureds this article seeks to draw attention to complexities of their political experience hitherto neglected by historians. It thereby also hopes to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of a crucial period in the political history of the coloured community. Special emphasis is placed on the ways in which the marginality and the intermediate status of this social group resulted in ambivalences in their political outlook. The APO, the first newspaper to be directed specifically at a coloured readership, is an ideal vehicle for such an enquiry. As the mouthpiece of an organization at the very heart of coloured communal life at a time when the direct testimony of coloured people in the historical record is scarce, the APO provides unique insights into the social identity and political attitudes within the coloured community…

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Deconstructing Jaco: Genetic Heritage of an Afrikaner

Annals of Human Genetics
Volume 71, Issue 5 (September 2007)
pages 674–688
DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-1809.2007.00363.x

J. M. Greeff, Professor of Genetics
University of Pretoria

It is often assumed that Afrikaners stem from a small number of Dutch immigrants. As a result they should be genetically homogeneous, show founder effects and be rather inbred. By disentangling my own South African pedigree, that is on average 12 generations deep, I try to quantify the genetic heritage of an Afrikaner. As much as 6% of my genes have been contributed by slaves from Africa, Madagascar and India, and a woman from China. This figure compares well to other genetic and genealogical estimates. Seventy three percent of my lineages coalesce into common founders, and I am related in excess of 10 times to 20 founder ancestors (30 times to Willem Schalk van der Merwe). Significant founder effects are thus possible. The overrepresentation of certain founder ancestors is in part explained by the fact that they had more children. This is remarkable given that they lived more than 300 years (or 12 generations) ago. DECONSTRUCT, a new program for pedigree analysis, identified 125 common ancestors in my pedigree. However, these common ancestors are so distant from myself, paths of between 16 and 25 steps in length, that my inbreeding coefficient is not unusually high (f≈0.0019).

Introduction

‘After three centuries of evolution the population structure of the Afrikaners is still far from stable, and there does not appear to be much prospect of its ever attaining uniformity… The numerous and often mutually contradictory genetic statements frequently made about them can consequently all be simultaneously true. The Afrikaner is a product of miscegenation, the last ‘pure European’, pathologically inbred and a manifestation of hybrid vigour, all at the same time.’ (Nurse et al. 1985)

Afrikaners are often considered a rather homogeneous, probably rather inbred, white population of Dutch ancestry. Yet, as the above quotation illustrates, there are uncertainties about the genetic composition of Afrikaners. Due to Afrikaners’ high linkage disequilibrium, they are seen as a fruitful hunting ground for genes associated with disease (Hall et al. 2002). It is thus important that we have a clear appreciation of the Afrikaners’ genetic heritage. In what follows I address the questions of racial admixture, nationalities, founder effects and inbreeding in the Afrikaner. I do so in a novel way: rather than taking a sample of modern Afrikaners and genotyping them, I start with one living Afrikaner and trace most of his South African ancestors. In this way I cast a net into his past and hope to get an impression of what the genetic heritage of a typical Afrikaner may be…

…Given that genealogists could show that as much as 7% of Afrikaner genetic heritage is not of European descent (Heese, 1971), I find it curious that a system such as apartheid worked in South Africa. Seven percent is not a trivial amount, and is equivalent to having slightly more than a great-great-grandparent who was non-European. Since most of this non-European genetic heritage came into the Afrikaner population via female slaves, one would expect that as much as 14% of Afrikaner mitochondrial DNA is not even European. This female bias influx stems from the fact that emigrants were predominantly male, resulting in a male biased sex ratio of adults (Gouws, 1981).

Similarly, genetic studies also give support for this mixed racial ancestry. Working with a number of blood group gene frequencies, Botha & Pritchard (1972) estimated that beween 6–7% admixture between western European and slaves from Africa and the East, and/or Khoikhoi, would be required to explain the allele frequencies. Nurse et al. (1985) listed a number of alleles typical to the Khoisan and Bantu-speaking peoples that are found in low frequencies in Afrikaners (ABO system: A^bantu; glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase: Gd^A- and Gd^A; Rhesus: Rº; Haemoglobin C)…

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Between Black and White: An Exploratory Investigation of Biracialism in the United States and South Africa

McNair Scholars Journal
Volume 11, Issue 1 (2007)
Article 7

Whitney Laster
Grand Valley State University

The United States and South Africa both endured periods of intense racism produced from rigid social hierarchies. While European populations controlled these institutions, black populations remained marginalized. Critical race theory proposes that race is socially constructed as opposed to inherently biological. Although social construction of the white and black ethnicities formed similarly, the development of the mixing of white and black into biracial peoples developed uniquely in each country. This study will apply concepts from critical race theory to analyze similarities and differences within the constructions, highlighting the elements of colonization, slavery, and de facto segregation and investigating the effects on the social identity.

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Peeping Through the Reeds: A story about living in apartheid South Africa

AuthorHouse
August 2010
284 pages
6×9
ISBN: 9781452028774

Musuva (June C. Hutchison)

Peeping Through the Reedsis a fictionalised story about growing up “Coloured” under apartheid in South Africa. Based on real events, the story is told through the frank and insider voice of Musuva who narrates the story of a girl, Tumelo. The story draws on many conversations with elders and provides spine chilling insight into what enslavement, colonialism, class and apartheid and the struggle for freedom did to people and their mental health, to families and to relationships in South Africa, and celebrates a people’s deep resilience in their fight for human rights and dignity. Though South Africa has had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of apartheid, much of what is told in this book is little known, little acknowledged and little spoken about. In spite of the bottomless pain and loss endured through many generations, the story reflects the brave and enduring spirit of the people of the Cape. Peeping Through the Reeds hopes to make its contribution to a further understanding of unknown dimensions of South Africa’s miraculous survival of a crime against humanity, and the necessity of the ongoing healing project for all South Africans today. For those who would have visited South Africa and the Cape for the World Cup in 2010, or at any other time in the past, and also for those who hope to do so in future, this story hopes to help readers gain an empathetic and rare insight into a little understood genetically most diverse, brutalised, impoverished and marginalised people who today inhabit an enchanting landscape of the earth – the southernmost region of the continent of Africa which is the closest to the South Pole. In this story, the reader gets to know of a place and people of world significance to all humanity.

Musuva is the Khoisan pen name of June C. Hutchison, an award-winning South African educator and community leader, who grew up as an oppressed person under apartheid in South Africa. Born at the time of the infamous Rivonia Trials in 1962, when freedom eventually came for South Africans in 1994, she was already a mother of two sons and in her early thirties. She spent much of her teenage years and life fighting injustice in South Africa and to instill (through education) in people a pride in their identity and belonging as part of the ancient global human race. She has published several books in education and works in community development and race equality in the United Kingdom. As a research fellow on identity and belonging at the University of York (Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past) and as a visiting research fellow in human rights and heritage at Kingston University (Faculty of Business and Law), June has deep maternal Khoisan ancestral roots and continues to work to the benefit of her beloved country and people, as a proud Global South African.

Creolization, colonial citizenship(s) and degeneracy: A critique of selected histories of Sierra Leone and South Africa

Current Sociology
Volume 59, Number 5 (September 2011)
pages 635-654
DOI: 10.1177/0011392111408678

Zimitri Erasmus, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
University of Cape Town

This work examines the nexus between creolization, colonial citizenship(s) and discourses of degeneration. It focuses on two sites: (1) 19th- and 20th-century Freetown, Sierra Leone, and (2) the early Cape and 20th-century South Africa. The author engages three key thinkers: Édouard Glissant, Jean-Loup Amselle and Mahmood Mamdani to illustrate how these colonial administrations deployed creolization to construct partial citizenships derived from ideas of ‘mixed race’ and ‘corrupted’ or ‘lacking’ culture. The author argues that ‘Creole’ and ‘creole’ signified, in the colonial imagination, a ‘degenerate type’ behind its legal category, ‘non-native’, and shows how uses of the concepts ‘creolization’ and ‘creole’, in selected histories of the Cape and Freetown, surrender to their colonial meanings, obscure their biopolitical significance and so, collude with discourses of degeneration. The article concludes first, that Edouard Glissant’s conception of creolization as method counters ethnological reasoning and second, that his concept ‘Relation’ enables citizenship(s) that contest social inequality and live with difference.

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