Mixed Race Studies

Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius

Duke University Press
2004
360 pages
5 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3402-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3399-9

Megan Vaughan, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History
Cambridge University

The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency.

Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• One – In the Beginning
• Two – Engineering a Colony, 1735-1767
• Three – Enlightenment Colonialism and Its Limits, 1767-1789
• Four – Roots and Routes: Ethnicity without Origins
• Five – A Baby in the Salt Pans: Mothering Slavery
• Six – Love in the Torrid Zone
• Seven – Reputation, Recognition, and Race
• Eight – Speaking Slavery: Language and Loss
• Nine – Metissage and Revolution
• Ten – Sugar and Abolition
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Converging Spectres of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Prewar Afro-German History

Callaloo
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
pages 322-341
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2003.0036

Tina Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

This article examines two of the earliest historical contexts in which Germans articulated a public discourse on its black population. The essay explores the discourse of racial endangerment enunciated in the German colonies in the debates on the status of racially-mixed marriages and the Afro-German progeny of these relationships and links this discourse to a second recurrence of the spectre of racial mixture in the interwar years, the figure of the “Rhineland Bastard.” Setting these discourses in relation to one another, the article maps the trajectory of an imagined spectre of racial danger that served as a powerful and resilient construct for the expression of German national anxieties on blackness in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Africa’s Latin Quarter

The Walrus
July 2008 (Escape: Summer 2008)

Stephen Henighan

Despite bleak poverty, Mozambique’s multi-ethnic literary culture thrives

In downtown Maputo, the monument to the origins of apartheid is just off Karl Marx Street. Maputo, with its manageable proportions, dreamy views over Delagoa Bay, and cosmopolitan restaurant scene, is one of Africa’s most pleasant capital cities. I walked to the apartheid monument through windblown red dust and young people lugging buckets of water into high-rise buildings. Most modern conveniences—such as traffic lights, credit cards, and cellphones—work in Maputo, but a few, such as the water supply in apartments, are unreliable.

Mozambican literary culture, which I’d come to Maputo to explore, is rooted in the country’s history as a Portuguese colony that gained its independence through a Marxist-Leninist revolution in 1975, and in its proximity to neighbouring South Africa. Nowhere are this history’s contradictions more evident than in the Louis Trichardt Memorial Garden. On the back wall of a patio sunk below the street, a plaster frieze depicts Trichardt, a stout Afrikaner, leading oxen through the wilderness in the late 1830s. A trilingual inscription in Afrikaans, Portuguese, and English, under the heading “They Harnessed the Wilds,” lauds the Portuguese colonialists for their hospitality to the South African Voortrekkers, and their solidarity in fighting off “native tribesmen.” Most self-respecting Marxist revolutions would have demolished this racist kitsch, but Mozambique, a coastal nation with a tolerance for strangers, prefers to allow all the dissonant chords of its past to resonate at once.

“Mozambique is a crossroads,” Mia Couto, the country’s best-known writer, tells me. “Things happened here that are unique in the history of Africa. There’s an acceptance of others, a way of receiving others, that I haven’t found in other African countries. This doesn’t mean that we’re better than others, but rather that there’s a very long history of relating to outsiders.”…

…Mozambique’s racial mixing dates back to between AD 300 and 800, when a vast wave of people of Indonesian descent invaded the East African coastline. Travelling in coastal Mozambique, I passed through areas inhabited by tiny, fine-boned people with remotely Asian physiques. The African languages spoken by these people contain vestiges of Malay vocabulary. There was even significant trade with China, and the spread of Islam brought a tradition of marriage alliances with the Arab traders who dominated Mozambique’s economy in the early Middle Ages. The residue of this period is evident not only in the high-cheekboned racial inheritance of people in northern Mozambique, but in the country’s many mosques, ranging from the Aga Khan’s shimmering Ismaili mosque in downtown Maputo to the tiny, green-painted huts used for worship in villages. Too poor to build minarets, the villages designate their mosques with crescents raised on poles.

Portuguese colonialism, which began with the arrival of Vasco da Gama in 1498, intensified Mozambique’s racial mixing. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, unable to manage the sprawling, distant colony, Lisbon assigned Mozambique’s governance to the Viceroyalty of Goa, the Indian jewel in the crown of the Portuguese empire. In defiance of every stereotype of colonialism, Africans in Mozambique had a European language imposed on them by administrators who were ethnically Indian. Many of these Portuguese-speaking Indian civil servants or adventurers intermarried with local leaders. In the Zambezi Valley, in central Mozambique, mixed Indo-Portuguese-African elites broke away from government structures to form autonomous settlements known as prazos.

In the nineteenth century, these palisaded outposts fought a sixty-year war of resistance against Portuguese colonial authority, only succumbing to the central government in 1902. Miscegenation between Europeans and Africans was less common in Mozambique than in other Portuguese colonies, such as Angola or the Cape Verde islands, but the roots of Mozambican identity spring from a tradition that assumes everyone descends in part from an outsider.

The frelimo guerrilla movement, which led Mozambique to independence from Portugal in 1975, promoted interracialism and the Portuguese language—at the time spoken by just a sliver of the country’s population—as the keys to building a nation from the more than twenty distinct ethnic and linguistic groups inhabiting the country’s long Indian Ocean coastline. Photographs of early meetings of the new government, in the Museum of the Revolution in downtown Maputo, reveal a sprinkling of white, mixed-race, and South Asian faces among the black majority…

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From Mariage à la Mode to Weddings at Town Hall: Marriage, Colonialism, and Mixed-Race Society in Nineteenth-Century Senegal

The International Journal of African Historical Studies
Volume 38, Number 1 (2005)
pages 27-48

Hilary Jones, Assistant Professor of African History
University of Maryland

The institution of marriage served as the basis for the formation of mixed-race society in Senegal’s coastal towns. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, African and Afro-European women called signares entered into temporary marital unions with European merchants and officials stationed on the island of Saint Louis. These marriage practices, known in French as manage a la mode du pays, closely resembled notions of engagement and marriage found among Wolof populations of the mainland. By the early nineteenth century, the mixed-race inhabitants of the islands increasingly combined new concepts of marital exchange and ceremonial practices learned from visiting Catholic priests and European settlers with local marriage traditions. Writing in the 1840s, Abbe David Boilat, a member of the “indigenous clergy” and son of a signare, called for the Christian population to eliminate superstitious practices and abandon manage a la mode du pays. He advised Christian families to base their society on the “sacred ties of marriage” by adhering to marriage contracts that strictly conformed to the expectations of the Catholic Church and the requirements of the French state. By the establishment of Third Republic France in 1870, Senegal’s “mulatto” population no longer followed the marital practices of their foremothers but rather insisted on marital unions sanctioned by the Church and considered legal according to French civil law. For these families, the ritual ot declaring the intention to be married at town hall and having an officer of the civil state record it in the civil registry became an integral part of the marriage ceremony.

What accounted for this shift? How and why did men and women of mixed racial ancestry coming of age in late nineteenth-century Senegal develop new marriage strategies? A number of scholars have examined the formation and development of urban and coastal societies in British West Africa. These studies…

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Sonic spaces: Inscribing “coloured” voices in the Karoo, South Africa

University of Pennsylvania
2006
228 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3246175

Marie R. Jorritsma

A Dissertation in Music Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

A common stereotype of those classified as “coloured” in apartheid South Africa was that, because of their mixed racial heritage, they had no authentic racial or cultural identity and history. This dissertation counters that lingering stereotype by examining how musical performance enabled “coloured” community members around the town of Graaff-Reinet to claim a place for themselves collectively under apartheid and in post-apartheid South Africa. Nurtured and sustained by a policy of racial purity, the apartheid regime held a deeply ambivalent position towards those it categorized as “coloured,” the racial group it defined as “not a white person or a native.” Oral and written sources typically convey “coloured” people’s ethnic identity, cultural history, and musical heritage as similarly lacking. Despite this, music has been and continues to be an integral part of the religious practices of this community though its performance has survived practically unnoticed by those outside.

By placing the voices of “coloured” people at the center of this study, I move beyond the myopic apartheid view that saw “coloured” people purely in terms of their ethnic origins and capacity for labor. Instead, I approach “coloured” music and history in terms of the sounds and spaces of their religious performance culture. My research provides a narrative of “coloured” social history in the Graaff-Reinet region that is drawn from regional archives and empirical research in the form of fieldwork, specifically participant observation. I concentrate on religious musical practice, namely, hymns, koortjies (little choruses), choir performance, and the singing at women’s society meetings. Studying song performance creates a complex nexus of music, race, religion, and politics, and constitutes a vital way of retrieving history and oral repertories. This music thereby provides one vehicle for groups and individuals in this community to articulate a more “legitimate” place for themselves in the contemporary landscape of South African history and culture.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter One – Introduction: Sonic Spaces, Inscribing “Coloured” Voices
• Chapter Two – Senzeni na: Music, Religion, and Politics in Three Kroonvale Congregations
• Chapter Three – Singing the “Queen’s English”: Church Choirs in Kroonvale
• Chapter Four V – Mothers of the Church: Women’s Society Music and South African Gender Issues
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Glossary
• Bibliography

List of Illustrations

1. View of Umasizakhe, Graaff-Reinet, and Kroonvale
2. View of Kroonvale, Santaville, Asherville, Koebergville, and Geluksdal
3. Map of Kroonvale
4. Old DRMC Building in Graaff-Reinet
5. Last Church Service Held at the DRMC Building, c. 1964
6. URC Building in Kroonvale
7. Old PSCC Building in Graaff-Reinet
8. PSCC Building in Kroonvale
9. Old Klein Londen Building in Graaff-Reinet
10. ESCC Building in Kroonvale
11. View of URC and PSCC from ESCC Grounds
12. Parsonage Street Congregational Church, 13 February 2005
13. East Street Congregational Church, 17 July 2005
14. Uniting Reformed Church, 15 August 2004
15. Combined Congregational Church Broederband service, 17 February 2005
16. Wat bring jy myn die domme?: Cape Malay Ghomma-liedjie notated by I.D. du Plessis
17. Juig aarde juig sung by Mrs J.S. Beukes, Mr W.S. Adonis and Mr J.W. Beukes, 16 April 1980
18. Hy’s hier om ons te seen (He’s here to bless us), Uniting Reformed Church, 5 December 2004
19. Jesus is so lief virmy (Jesus loves me very much), East Street Congregational Church, 26 June 2005
20. Dit was nie om te oordeel nie (It was not to judge), Parsonage Street Congregational Church, 6 March 2005
21. Worstel mens (Wrestle sinner), Combined Congregational Church Broederband service, 17 February 2005
22. Graaff-Reinet Mayor Daantjie Jaftha
23. Zion, City of God (G. Froflich)
24. Holy Holy Holy (Franz Schubert)
25. Program of Concert Tour and Performance in Kimberley, 3 September 1972
26. Restored Slave Cottages at Stretch’s Court, Drostdy Hotel
27. Wees stil en weet, Women’s World Day of Prayer Service, East Street Congregational Church, 3 March 2005
28. Wees stil en weet, “Official” Hymnbook Version

PREFACE

As a child, the Karoo always symbolised an escape for me. It was a refuge from the routine of school attendance, extra-mural activities, and the restlessly windy, unpredictable weather of the coastal city of Port Elizabeth. The family farm lay only three and a half hours1 drive away from the city, where huge breakfasts of porridge, toast, and tea fortified me for seemingly endless sunny and windless days spent walking in the surrounding veld, participating in (and most likely, hindering) the usual farming activities, and playing in the water furrows. A typical Karoo child displays an endless fascination with the precious commodity of water, and diverting the small rivulets in the furrow to flow smoothly over the muddy gravel guaranteed countless hours of captivation.

My grandmother used to tell me, as a child, to look for San tools such as grinding stones or arrowheads when walking in the Karoo veld. To this day, this collection remains displayed in the farmhouse. It never occurred to me then that the San people, the forebears of many present-day “coloured” people, suffered merciless persecution on the part of my ancestors, the colonial settlers.

When I returned to the Karoo for fieldwork on the music of “coloured” people, this memory of looking for San ”treasure” and proof of their existence in this area contrasted very strangely with the historical accounts I read about the violent treatment of the San people by the settlers. Immersed in my research, I seldom visited the veld, and instead explored my childhood memories in new contexts of colonial history and apartheid. As much as this project was originally driven by a deep appreciation of and interest in this music and then an ongoing desire that it not be ignored, my own background as the granddaughter of a Karoo farmer had to be revisited and recontextualised as the project continued.

I remember sitting in June Bosch’s home one day when for once my childhood memories did not clash with the historical and contemporary stories of “coloured” people’s oppression and marginalization. June Bosch and her cousin, Loretta Fortune, told me a story from their childhood days in Caroline Street, Graaff-Reinet. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, water from the Van Ryneveld’s Pass Dam outside the town would be led into the cement furrows lining the streets for the townspeople to use. As the neighborhood children spotted the water, they would shout up the street to announce its presence and run for any and every available container. June was under strict instructions from her grandmother to water the garden roses first, and then to spray the unpaved street in order to settle the dust. After fulfilling these duties, the children would play in the furrows until the water flow ceased. Recognizing the similarity in our childhood games and activities with their focus on water made it poignantly apparent to me that we were all once children of the Karoo.

This research project thus stems from my own connection to Graaff-Reinet and its surrounding area. Combined with a strong scholarly fascination with this music, my reasons for undertaking the project also included the opportunity to revisit and perhaps, in some small way, to recapture the past. No longer a childhood escape, it is the spaces and sounds of this Karoo community that have offered me a new perspective on my relationship to this place and its people…

Purchase the dissertation here.

Mixed race vote key to Cape Town in S. Africa polls

The Citizen
2011-05-16

Justine Gerardy

Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.

CAPE TOWN – Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.

“No other option: DA,” said the mixed race supporter of the Democratic Alliance over the ruling African National Congress (ANC) that led South Africa into democracy.

“I’ll never vote any ANC, never. I’ll never vote for a black man, never,” said Cox, 72. “They don’t worry for us.”

Politicians have scrambled to woo mixed race voters, known locally as coloureds, who are the majority in Cape Town, South Africa’s only major city not in ruling party hands.

The battle is a two-party race between President Jacob Zuma’s ANC, which lost the city five years ago, and the DA led by Helen Zille, who is the first female leader of the party.

The coloured group is tipped to back the DA—years after many cast their first votes in 1994 for apartheid’s white minority nationalists that oppressed them but ranked them higher than blacks…

…Coloureds who have African, European, East Asian and South Indian roots had more privileges than the darker-skinned black majority in apartheid’s strict hierarchy designed to keep South Africa’s people apart and protect white power.

The divisions cut across separate housing, education and even language with Dutch settler-derived Afrikaans spoken instead of local African languages.

And while power has shifted, many still feel sidelined…

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Are we all ‘coloured’?

News 24 (South Africa)
2011-03-09

Max Du Preez

We really need to find new terminology for the different population groups in South Africa, especially now that we’re moving back into a political culture of obsession with race.

Problem One: if “coloured” means people of mixed blood, then the vast majority of people born in South Africa are coloureds, myself included.

Studies in the 1980s have found that white Afrikaners have an average of seven percent “black” blood, mostly because of early relationships and marriages between white settlers and slaves or Khoisan. Some Afrikaners, like my family, have considerably more than seven percent black blood.

This is also true of black South Africans. Three quick examples: ANC veteran Walter Sisulu’s father was a white man; Winnie Mandela’s mother had light skin, blue eyes and long hair and her mother-in-law called her a mlungu; Nelson Mandela’s mitochondrial DNA was found to be pure Khoisan. There were many runaway slaves from the East Indies and European shipwreck survivors in the 16th, 17th and 18th century who became part of the Zulu and Xhosa peoples.

Problem Two: Probably a majority of people classified “coloured” during the apartheid years were descendants of the Khoikhoi and the San or Bushmen, with, of course, some white, slave and black blood. But when the ANC and other so-called Africanists refer to “Africans”, they exclude these people.

This is sheer madness: the descendants of the first peoples of southern Africa are excluded from the term African? The Khoisan were here thousands of years before the first black farming groups arrived from further north. They are the original Africans…

Read the entire editorial here.

Speaking About Southern Unionists… and Mixed-Race People: A Report and an Announcement

Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
2011-05-07

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

I just returned from a wonderful visit to Leiden University in the Netherlands, where I spoke generally about Civil War Southern Unionists and specifically about The Free State of Jones as part of that university’s yearly American Studies Lecture Series. In commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, this year’s theme was “The American Civil War After 150 Years: An Unfinished War?”

I was impressed by the deep interest in the American Civil War displayed by Leiden students and faculty. I’m happy to report there were no arguments between True Believers in either the noble “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, or the total benevolence of Northern motives and goals in thwarting the South’s secession from the Union. Rather, discussions centered on understanding that many Southerners–white as well as black–opposed secession and the creation of the Confederacy, and that many more turned against the Confederacy as the war dragged on. How common across the South was guerrilla warfare such as that of Jones County, Mississippi?, they wanted to know. Who was Newt Knight? This question led to a discussion about the deep need displayed by Civil War partisans to turn Newt into either a murderous traitor to ”The South,” or, conversely, into an abolitionist whose racial views anticipated the modern Civil Rights Movement…

…There was special interest among the Leiden audience in the mixed-race community that grew out of Newt Knight’s wartime collaboration with Rachel Knight, the former slave of his grandfather, Jackie Knight. Many of the questions centered on issues of racial identity and the historical importance–and limits–of the “one drop rule” in determining such identities. Members of the audience were fascinated by the variety of racial identities assumed by, as well as imposed upon, descendants of Newt Knight, his white wife Serena, and the two mixed-race women–Rachel Knight and her daughter George Ann–by whom he had children.  Historically, they understood, race is a social, political, and legal construction rather than a biologically rational system…

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The influence of racial admixture in Egypt

Eugenics Review
Volume 7, Number 3 (October 1915)
pages 168-183

G. Elliot Smith, Professor of Anatomy
University of Manchester

I suppose it is inevitable in these days that one trained in biological ways of thought should approach the problems of anthropology with the idea of evolution as his guiding principle’; but the conviction must be reached sooner or later, by everyone who conscientiously and with an open mind seeks to answer most of the questions relating to man’s history and achievements—certainly the chapters in that history which come within the scope of the last sixty centuries—that evolution yields a surprisingly small contribution to the explanation of the difficulties which present themselves. Most of the factors that call for investigation concerning the history of man and his works are unquestionably the direct effects of migrations and the intermingling of races and cultures.

But I would not have you misunderstand my meaning. The forces of evolution to-day are at least as potent to influence human structure and capabilities as they were in the past to bring an ape to man’s estate. The effects of selection—not only the variety which Darwin qualified by the term “sexual,” but also what we have learned to call “organic” and “social” selection—are certainly emphasised by the heightened powers of discrimination which the intelligence and the fashions of civilised man create.

But one of the effects of the contact of races of different origins and traditions—each of which in its own particular way and in the seclusion of its own domain had successfully overcome the difficulties of existence, and incidentally become more or less specialised in structure and ability, as the result of thus meeting and overcoming its own special difficulties—was the benefitting of the whole community of intermingled races by the knowledge and experience acquired by each race individually. The pressure of maintaining the struggle for existence was thus enormously lightened and the influence of such factors correspondingly lessened. The apparent inhibition of some of the potentialities of the force of evolution among civilised men is not to be regarded as a token of its dwindling efficacy, but rather as an effect of the superior knowledge and experience of mankind enabling him to shield himself against those destructive factors that weeded out and so more rapidly modified his ancestors before they had acquired this wider experience and accumulated wisdom.

Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that during the last sixty centuries the distinctive features of the main subdivisions of mankind have undergone surprisingly little modification…

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Creolization of the Atlantic World: The Portuguese and the Kongolese

Portuguese Studies
Volume 27, Number 1 (2011-03-01)
pages 56-69

Francisco Bethencourt, Professor of History
King’s College, London

In the 1930s, Gilberto Freyre’s praise of mixed-race people in Brazil challenged the idea of white supremacy, contributing to the building of a new Brazilian identity. In the 1950s, Freyre projected the idea of openness and racial mixture onto the Portuguese empire, fuelling Salazar’s colonial propaganda. The idea of Lusotropicalism was contested by Marvin Harris and Charles Boxer, who demonstrated that there were very few mixed-race people in Angola and Mozambique, and exposed the long history of racism in the Portuguese colonies. However, the fashionable notions of hybridism and creolization have been putting Freyre back on the map. The article exposes the limits of Freyre’s approach of inter-ethnic relations, structured around the flexibility (or otherwise) of white colonists. It engages with the much more interesting but problematic approach suggested by Linda Heywood and John Thornton, who shifted to Kongo and African agency the creolization of the Atlantic. It suggests a reassessment of the real Christianization of Kongo and its complex chronology, drawing attention to the royal interests of conversion, the limits of conversion among the population, and the conditions for erosion of Christianity in the long run.