Mixed Race Studies

Representation of Coloured Identity in Selected Visual Texts about Westbury, Johannesburg

University of the Witwatersrand
December 2006
132 pages

Phyllis D. Dannhauser

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Dramatic Art).

In post-apartheid South Africa, Coloured communities are engaged in reconstructing identities and social histories. This study examines the representation of community, identity, culture and historic memory in two films about Westbury, Johannesburg, South Africa. The films are Westbury, Plek van Hoop, a documentary, and Waiting for Valdez, a short fiction piece. The ambiguous nature of Coloured identity, coupled with the absence of recorded histories and unambiguous identification with collective cultural codes, results in the representation of identity becoming contested and marginal. Through constructing narratives of lived experience, hybrid communities can challenge dominant stereotypes and subvert discourses of otherness and difference. Analysis of the films reveals that the Coloured community have reverted to stereotypical documentary forms in representing their communal history. Although the documentary genre lays claim to the representation of reality and authentic experience, documentary is not always an effective vehicle for the representation of lived experience and remembered history. Fiction can reinterpret memory by accessing the emotional textures of past experiences in a more direct way.

Read the entire thesis here.

Being and Belonging: Space and Identity in Cape Town

Anthropology and Humanism
Volume 28, Issue 1 (June 2003)
pages 61–84
DOI: 10.1525/ahu.2003.28.1.61

Shannon M. Jackson, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Missouri, Kansas City

The post-apartheid transition has led to changes in the shape and meaning of urban space in South Africa. Cape Town is being described as a postmodern city where planning strategies and new development have begun to fragment and privatize space to the point of de-territorializing it. This has contributed to the effort by a local group, referred to as “Coloureds,” to reterritorialize Cape Town, to reinscribe history and meaning back into the urban landscape. In the process of reterritorializing the city, Coloureds are negotiating their own identities but are doing so in ways that both challenge racial boundaries and assert them. This article will explore the nature and history of the urban space being reclaimed as well as the way in which the meaning it inspires contributes to the contradictory and ambiguous quality of the boundaries of Coloured identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Then I Was Black: South African Political Identities in Transition

Yale University Press
2000-06-19
304 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 9780300080131

Courtney Jung, Associate Professor of Political Science
The New School

Do race and ethnicity present a danger to the consolidation of effective democratic government? Can liberal constitutionalism provide a stable basis for governance of a polity historically erected on racial and ethnic division? In this book Courtney Jung argues that when ethnic and racial identities are politically fluid and heterogeneous, as she finds they are in South Africa, ethnic and racial politics will not undermine the peaceful and democratic potential of the government.

Jung examines three important cases of politicized racial and ethnic identity in South Africa: Zulu, Afrikaner, and Coloured. Working from extensive field research and interviews, she develops a model to explain shifts in the political salience, goals, and boundaries of these groups between 1980 and 1995. Jung challenges the common assumption that cultural identities overdetermine political possibility, pointing out that individual members fail for the most part to internalize the political agenda of “their own” ethnic group. Group engagement with the state is also conditioned by contextual factors, not determined by its constitution in ethnic or racial terms. South Africa is no more divided than most other societies, she concludes, and no less likely to consolidate democracy as a result of its politicized cleavages of race and ethnicity.

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…

Purchase the dissertation here.

Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters

Stanford University Press
2009
312 pages
11 tables, 15 figures, 16 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780804759984
Paper ISBN: 9780804759991
E-book ISBN: 9780804770996

Edited by:

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Professor of Asian American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Shades of Difference addresses the widespread but little studied phenomenon of colorism—the preference for lighter skin and the ranking of individual worth according to skin tone. Examining the social and cultural significance of skin color in a broad range of societies and historical periods, this insightful collection looks at how skin color affects people’s opportunities in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America.

Is skin color bias distinct from racial bias? How does skin color preference relate to gender, given the association of lightness with desirability and beauty in women? The authors of this volume explore these and other questions as they take a closer look at the role Western-dominated culture and media have played in disseminating the ideal of light skin globally. With its comparative, international focus, this enlightening book will provide innovative insights and expand the dialogue around race and gender in the social sciences, ethnic studies, African American studies, and gender and women’s studies.

Contents

Contributors
• Introduction: Economies of Color—Angela P. Harris
• Part I The Significance of Skin Color: Transnational Divergences and Convergences
  • 1. The Social Consequences of Skin Color in Brazil—Edward Telles
  • 2. A Colorstruck World: Skin Tone, Achievement, and Self-Esteem Among African American Women—Verna M. Keith
  • 3. The Latin Americanization of U.S. Race Relations: A New Pigmentocracy—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David R. Dietrich
• Part II Meanings of Skin Color: Race, Gender, Ethnic Class, and National Identity
  • 4. Filipinos and the Color Complex: Ideal Asian Beauty—Joanne L. Rondilla
  • 5. The Color of an Ideal Negro Beauty Queen: Miss Bronze 1961-1968—Maxine Leeds Craig
  • 6. Caucasian, Coolie, Black, or White? Color and Race in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora—Aisha Khan
  • 7. Ihe Dynamics of Color: Mestizaje, Racism, and Blackness in Veracruz, Mexico—Christina A. Sue
• Part III Consuming Lightness: Modernity, Transnationalism, and Commodification
  • 8. Skin Tone and the Persistence of Biological Race in Egg Donation for Assisted Reproduction—Charis Thompson
  • 9. Fair Enough? Color and the Commodification of Self in Indian Matrimonials—Jyotsna Vaid
  • 10. Consuming Lightness: Segmented Markets and Global Capital in the Skin-Whitening Trade—Evelyn Nakano Glenn
  • 11. Skin Lighteners in South Africa: Transnational Entanglements and Technologies of the Self—Lynn M. Thomas
• Part IV Countering Colorism: Legal Approaches
  • 12. Multilayered Racism: Courts’ Continued Resistance to Colorism Claims—Taunya Lovell Banks
  • 13. The Case for Legal Recognition of Colorism Claims—Trina Jones
  • 14. Latinos at Work: When Color Discrimination Involves More Than Color—Tanya Katerí Hernandez
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index

Read the Introduction here.

Negotiating Coloured Identity Through Encounters with Performance

University of the Western Cape
November 2005
148 Pages

Gino Fransman

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA in the Faculty of Arts University of the Western Cape

In this study theatre, as staged performance and as text, will be used as an exploratory and discursive tool to examine the negotiation of Coloured identity in the ‘New South Africa’. I investigate debates on Coloured identity while also drawing on theories of the performativity of identity. The role of performance in negotiating this identity is foregrounded; this provides a context for a case study which evaluates responses by Coloured and Black students at the University of the Western Cape to popular Coloured identity-related performances. These include Marc Lottering’s ‘Crash’ and ‘From the Cape Flats With Love’, and Petersen, Isaacs and Reisenhoffer’s ‘Joe Barber’ and ‘Suip’. These works, both as texts and as performance, will be used to analyse the way stereotypical representations of Coloured identities are played with, subverted or negotiated in performance. I attempt to establish how group stereotypes are constructed within the performance arena, and question whether attitudes can be negotiated through encounters with performance.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter One
  • Setting the Scene
• Staging, de-staging and re-staging the Coloured:
  • Chapter Two
    • Staging the Coloured––An Inter-disciplinary Approach
    • Comedy and Reflexivity
  • Chapter Three
    • De-staging the Coloured
    • The Theatre in Action: Using Stereotype
  • Chapter Four
    • Framing the Performances
    • The Performances as Texts
    • ‘Joe Barber’ – The Script
    • ‘Suip’ – The Script
  • Chapter Five
    • The Performances: Re-staging the Coloured
    • Conveying Meaning and Method
    • ‘From the Cape Flats With Love’
  • Chapter Six
    • The Case-Study: Methodology and Discussion
    • The Sample
    • Ethics Statement
    • The Participants as Spectators/Audience
    • Audiences and Venues
    • Special Features of the Performances Useful for the Investigation
    • Methods of Data Collection
  • Chapter Seven
    • Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Appendix A:
  • Images
  • Marc Lottering ‘From the Cape Flats With Love’
  • ‘Crash’ Promotional Material
  • ‘Joe Barber’
  • ‘Suip’ Promotional Material
• Appendix B:
  • Sample Questionnaire

Introduction

Where is the theatre now located in the ‘New South Africa’? To what extent has the focus shifted to “the representation of present struggle” (Orkin, 1996:61), rather than the struggle for a democracy enshrined within a constitution? How does this contribute to establishing an emergent national identity, and simultaneously affect specific group identities? These questions are key to the discussions that follow, as the national identity encompasses different groups assembled under one banner: the ‘New South Africa’. These groups, in turn, are all subject to group negotiations of identity.

In the study that follows, theatre as staged performance and as text will be used as exploratory and discursive tools to investigate the negotiation of identities. The aim is to explore this theme by examining the responses to four popular Coloured identity-related staged performances; Marc Lottering’s ‘Crash’ (2004) and ‘From the Cape Flats with Love’ (2001), as well as Petersen, Isaacs and Reisenhoffer’s ‘Joe Barber’ (1999) and ‘Suip’ (1996). These works, both as performance and as text, will be used to investigate the way stereotypical representations of Coloured identities are played with, subverted or negotiated in performance. In this work I attempt to establish how meanings are constructed within the performance arena. I also examine how they have been negotiated by using the responses of a selected group of students at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), as a case study, in order to explore current student attitudes.

The primary focus of the thesis examines Coloured identity as a construction still represented as a stereotype at times, but also as fluidly reflecting the changing South African society. The readings of the performances, as well as the performances as texts, illustrate occasions where this fluidity, or lack of fluidity in stereotypical instances, is represented on the stage. On the other hand the case study provides a student audience response to representations of Coloured people on the stage in South Africa. The slippages between being a cultural insider and investigating that very culture often manifest themselves, within the scope of this work and beyond its constraints. It is the difficulty of maintaining the theoretical trend that Coloured identity is fluid, which makes identifying these manifestations in the performances and case study so fascinating. The thesis explores this tension as far as possible within a limited scope for detail…

…Chapter One: Setting the Scene

‘Coloureds don’t feel included in mainstream South African society’… this sense of exclusion could in some ways explain why they had ‘no real stake in obeying the rules of this society’. (Ted Leggett, Institute of Security Studies- South Africa: 2004)

I am a Coloured. At least that is what I call myself. In South Africa today, ten years after democracy, it is surprising that this statement requires qualification. No qualification, in our democratic country, is required for someone stating, “I am Black,” or “I am White.” Yet, Coloured identity is mired in questions of, amongst others, belonging, status, and power. The contradictions implicit in claiming a Coloured identity are explored here, as my own claiming of the term places me in opposition to ‘being named’. To myself, it means one thing, but to someone else, it could carry an entirely different meaning when it is ascribed to me, and thus imposes a way of being onto the term Coloured.

Richard van der Ross, one of the former rectors of UWC (which was established in 1960 as a Coloured or ‘Bush’ College), states that at first, those now called Coloured were simply referred to as “from the Cape”. He says:

In time, however, through education and general development, the group has become aware of its situation and oppression, and has sought to shake off its feelings and position of inferiority… They base their claims on the long line of descent taking them back, in some cases, to the original inhabitants of the land of their birth… the new group which has emerged has been known by many names. (2005:94)

 In the 1600s, slaves of mixed parentage had already been afforded more privilege than Black slaves. Following this rationale, boys born of mixed slave parents were preferred over the descendants of Black slaves, as “the masters thought they learned rapidly” (2005:35). Following a progression of ascribed names, Robert Shell (quoted in Van der Ross) says the identification of the group occurred “after the abolition of the slave trade (1808) [when] the convenient name coloured was introduced into the South African vocabulary, where it stubbornly persists” (2005:98).

Van der Ross outlines an intricate web of inter-group mixing, from slaves, colonists, locals, exiles and freed slaves. That these groups are all represented in his framework does not indicate that inter-mixing necessarily occurred amongst all of these groups in a single family line. For the purposes of this study, the combinations of these do “not mean that all the components are to be found in any individual [C]oloured person. There may be no more than two” (2005:98).

Read the entire thesis here.

A creolising South Africa? Mixing, hybridity, and creolisation: (re)imagining the South African experience

International Social Science Journal
Volume 58, Issue 187 (March 2006)
pages 165–176
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2451.2006.00600.x

Denis-Constant Martin [in French], Senior Research Fellow
Centre for International Research and Studies (CERI) of the National Foundation for Political Science (Paris)

The present state of South Africa’s society is the outcome of protracted processes of contacts and mixing, in the course of which people coming from different cultural areas blended and produced an original culture. More than three centuries of racism and apartheid have bequeathed representations in which South Africa is construed as an addition of different people, each with its own culture and language. Such representations do not take into account the interactions between them that produced what is today a mix that is impossible to disentangle. This article attempts to look at theories of métissage and creolisation that have been devised to analyse societies in South America and the West Indies and check whether they could contribute to producing a better understanding of the history of South Africa. Édouard Glissant’s [(1928-2011)] theories of métissage and creolisation, because they stress processes and relations, because they consider that creolisation is a continuous process, could be relevant to South Africa. However, the example of Brazil shows that re-imagining the past does not suffice to pacify memories of violence and segregation; it remains ineffective if it is not accompanied by economic and social policies aiming at redressing the inequalities inherited from this very past.

Read or purchase the article here.

Griqua Identity: A Bibliography

2010
47 pages

Allegra Louw, Librarian
African Studies Library
University of Cape Town

Introduction

Most scholars acknowledge that the origins of the Griqua people are rooted in the complex relationships between autochthonous KhoeSan, slaves, Africans and European settlers. Coupled with the intricacies that underpin the issue of Griqua identity—and often as equally contested—is the matter of terminology.

Christopher Saunders and Nicholas Southey describe the Griquas as

Pastoralists of Khoikhoi and mixed descent, initially known as Bastards or Basters, who left the Cape in the late 18th century under their first leader, Adam Kok 1 (c.1710-c.1795).

They explain the name “bastards” as

[The] term used in the 18th century for the offspring of mixed unions of whites with people of colour, most commonly Khoikhoi but also, less frequently, slaves.”

Even in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, issues of identity and ethnicity continue to dominate the literature of the Griqua people. As the South African social anthropologist, Linda Waldman, writes:

The Griqua comprise an extremely diverse category of South Africans. They are defined neither by geographical boundaries nor by cultural practices.

Waldman goes on to illustrate the complexities surrounding attempts to categorise the Griqua people by explaining how the Griqua have been described by some as a sub-category of the Coloured people, by others as either constituting a separate ethnic group, by others as not constituting a separate ethnic group, and by still others as a nation…

Read the entire bibliography here.

Introduction: Re-imagining coloured identities in post-Apartheid South Africa

Introduction to: Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town
Kwela Books
2001
320 pages
ISBN-10: 0795701365
ISBN-13: 978-0795701368

Edited by:

Zimitri Erasmus, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
University of Cape Town

Introduction by:

Zimitri Erasmus, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
University of Cape Town

Hou jou linne binne (Keep your linen hidden). Hou jou koek in jou broek (Keep your fanny in your panties). Vroeg ryp, vroeg vrot (Early to ripen, early to rot). Such expressions abound in coloured communities in South Africa. They stipulate the bounds of sexual behaviour for young coloured women. Such expressions are considered undignified in my family. With our roots in the rural outback, the family’s journey to the city, combined with a Protestant work ethic, has made it now middle class and ‘respectable’. Although not said in quite the same way, the message of my family was that girls who ‘came home with babies’ were ‘not respectable’. Many of my peers as a matter of fact were ‘not respectable’. The price for coming home pregnant was clear: my father would disown me. In my imagination, informed by countless examples in my community, this meant living on the streets, consigned to the fate of being a ‘halfcaste outcast’. These were the possibilities in my young life: respectability or shame.

Today, looking back, I can see how these possibilities were shaped by the lived realities not only of gender and class but also of ‘race’. I can see how respectability and shame are key defining terms of middle class coloured experience. For me, growing up coloured meant knowing that I was not only not white, but less than white; not only not black, but better than black (as we referred to African people). At the same time, the shape of my nose and texture of my hair placed me in the middle on the continuum of beauty as defined by both men and women in my community. I had neither ‘sleek’ hair nor boesman korrels [or ‘bushman hair’ is a derogatory term used to refer to kinky hair]. Hairstyling and texturising were (and still are) key beautification practices in the making of womanhood among young coloured women. In my community practices such as curling or straightening one’s hair carried a stigma of shame. The humiliation of being ‘less than white’ made being ‘better than black’ a very fragile position to occupy. The pressure to be respectable and to avoid shame created much anxiety. These were discomfiting positions for a young woman to occupy…

Read the entire chapter here.

Coloured Identity: South Africa, A Select bibliography

November 2010
74 pages

Allegra Louw, Librarian
African Studies Library
University of Cape Town

Introduction

According to Mohamed Adhikari, a leading scholar on Coloured Identity, the concept of “Colouredness” functioned as a social identity from the time of the formation of the South African state in 1910 to the present. He believes that Coloured identity did not undergo a process of continuous change during the era of white rule in South Africa, but remained essentially stable. This was because of

the Coloured people‘s assimilationism, which spurred hopes of future acceptance into the dominant society; their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, which generated fears that they might lose their position of relative privilege and be relegated to the status of Africans; the negative connotations with which Coloured identity was imbued, especially the shame attached to their supposed racial hybridity; and finally, the marginality of the Coloured people, which caused them a great deal of frustration.

For the sociologist Zimitri Erasmus, “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.” She sees Coloured identities as cultural identities comprising detailed bodies of knowledge, specific cultural practices, memories, rituals and modes of being. Coloured identities were formed in the colonial encounter between colonists (Dutch and British), slaves from South and East India and from East Africa, and conquered indigenous peoples, the Khoi and San.

The South African Population Registration Act (Act 30 of 1950) defined a ‘Coloured person’ as a person who is not a white person or a Bantu. Section 5 (1) and (2) distinguished the following subgroups: Cape Coloureds, Malay, Griqua, Other Coloureds, Chinese, Indians and Other Asiatics.

There are those who deny the existence of a ‘Coloured’ identity. In the late 1990s, political activist and academic Neville Alexander wrote that coloured identity was white-imposed, reactionary and indicative of new forms of racism. Similarly, Zimitri Erasmus cites Norman Duncan, in an interview in the Cape Times, asserting that “…there‘s no such thing as a coloured culture, coloured identity. Someone has to show me what it is…”.

An interesting phenomenon is the proliferation of organisations which emerged after the April 1994 elections. Amongst these were the Kleurling Weerstandsbeweging vir die Vooruitgang van Bruinmense (Coloured Movement for the Progress of Brown People), the December First Movement and the Coloured Forum. A more recent development was the emergence of the Bruin Belange Inisiatief (Brown Interests Initiative) which was formed in July 2008. Most of these organisations were based in the Western Cape, and were formed not only for access to material resources, but also for political and social recognition.

This bibliography has been compiled to aid research on Coloured identity in South Africa, particularly in the Western Cape. It comprises all the divergent views on this phenomenon but is by no means complete. The bibliography is dynamic and will be updated from time to time.

Read the entire bibliography here.