Mixed Race Studies

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community [Review]

H-Net Reviews
May 2007

Sean H. Jacobs
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Mohamed Adhikari. Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. Africa Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xvii + 252 pp. Paper ISBN 978-0-89680-244-5.

Coloured Categories

What are “Coloureds“? For most South Africans and others familiar with South Africa the answer will be “people of mixed race.” This invocation of “mixing” inevitably links to a racial binary that relies on two opposing and ossified (primordial) identities of black and white. Linked to this view is of course the persistence of the stereotype of “tragic mulattoes“—long a trope in South African writing—in which the “products of miscegenation” can never be “true” South Africans. These were the views of apartheid’s planners and retain their resonance for most South Africans today, including many whom self-identify as Coloured.

Mohamed Adhikari’s work attempts a corrective to this kind of de-contextualized portrayal and assessment of Coloured politics and identity. In Not White Enough, Not Black Enough—a slim volume of 187 pages—Adhikari attempts to place Colouredness as a product, not of any biological process such as “mixture,” but rather as one of the politics of the last century or so. For him, Coloured identity is, in fact, both a product of apartheid category-making and of vigorous identity-building on the part of Coloured political actors themselves. That is, Adhikari also targets attempts to “do away” with Coloured identity, as by proclaiming it a species of false consciousness. The book’s main focus is on attempts by Coloureds themselves to construct identity and history. While much of the material he covers is useful and interesting, it is not clear that Adhikari has quite managed to get out from under the weight of inherited categories and analytic frames in quite the way he sets out to do.

Coloureds make up 4.1 million of South Africa’s 46.9 million people. Mostly working class and concentrated in (but not restricted to) the Western Cape Province (where they comprise 53.9 percent of the total population) and the more rural Northern Cape, they, along with Africans—despite some changes at the apex of the class pyramid—account for most of South Africa’s urban and rural poor…

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The Rise and Decline of Hybrid (Metis) Societies on the Frontier of Western Canada and Southern Africa

The Canadian Journal of Native Studies
Volume 3, Number 1 (1983) (Special Issue on the Metis)
ISSN  0715-3244

Alvin Kienetz

A comparison of the development of the Metis in Canada and similar peoples in Southern Africa reveals some remarkable similarities between the two groups. The existence of these parallels suggests that a more extensive comparative study of peoples of mixed race throughout the world would be of value.

Une comparaison de l’évolution des Métis au Canada et de celle de certains peuples similaires dans le Sud africain révèle des ressemblances frappantes entre les deux groupes. Ce parallèle suggère qu’une étude comparative plus complete des peuples de race mixte dans le monde entier présenterait une valeur incontestable.

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The development of memory for own- and other-race faces

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Volume 98, Issue 4 (December 2007)
pages 233–242
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2007.08.004

Gail S. Goodman
Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis
University of Oslo

Liat Sayfan
Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis

Jennifer S. Lee
Department of Psychology
Cabrillo College, Aptos, California

Marianne Sandhei
University of Oslo

Anita Walle-Olsen
University of Oslo

Svein Magnussen
University of Oslo

Kathy Pezdek
Department of Psychology
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

Patricia Arredondo
Department of Psychology
California State University, Los Angeles

This study demonstrates that experience and development interact to influence the ‘‘cross-race effect.’’ In a multination study (n = 245), Caucasian children and adults of European ancestry living in the United States, Norway, or South Africa, as well as biracial (Caucasian–African American) children and adults living in the United States, were tested for recognition of Asian, African, and Caucasian faces. Regardless of national or biracial background, 8- to 10-year-olds, 12- to 14-year-olds, and adults recognized own-race faces more accurately than other-race faces, and did so to a similar extent, whereas 5- to 7-year-olds recognized all face types equally well. This same developmental pattern emerged for biracial children and adults. Thus, early meaningful exposure did not substantially alter the developmental trajectory. During young childhood, developmental influences on face processing operate on a system sufficiently plastic to preclude, under certain conditions, the cross-race effect.

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‘You Can Get Lost in Cape Town’: Transculturation and Dislocation in Zoë Wicomb’s Literary Works

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 2, Number 3 (2008)
10 pages

María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno, Professor of English
University of Córdoba

In Zoë Wicomb’s novels and short stories, main characters tend to share Wicomb’s coloured condition—mixed-race identity as defined by South African apartheid legislation—and her diasporic experience as a South African living in Scotland. Transculturation, dislocation and inbetweenness emerge as central notions for the experience of many of Wicomb’s characters, who often occupy an ambivalent and fluid space in which different cultural worlds and identities come into conflict and negotiation.

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From Manenberg to Soweto: race and coloured identity in the black consciousness poetry of James Matthews 

African Studies
Volume 62, Issue 2 (December 2003)
pages 171-186
DOI: 10.1080/0002018032000148740

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

The Black Consciousness poetry of James Matthews, internationally recognised Coloured writer from the Cape Flats, reflects the growing popularisation amongst politicised Coloured people during the 1970s of the idea that racial distinctions in general, and Coloured identity in particular, had historically been used by the white supremacist establishment to divide and rule the black majority. This insight, by no means novel, provided the main thrust to the popular rejection of Coloured identity in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Coloured rejectionism had, however, originated within a small section of the Coloured intelligentsia, in particular amongst those active within the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) in the early 1960s (Adhikari 2002: 186-87, 213-14, 243-48) and grew into a significant movement by the time it peaked at the end of the 1980s. Though confined to a politicised minority within the Coloured community itself, and observed mainly in public discourse or for pragmatic reasons, the disavowal of Coloured identity had by the early 1980s nevertheless become a politically correct orthodoxy within the anti-apartheid movement, especially in the Western Cape. In response to the overt racism of apartheid, the democratic movement embraced non-racism as a cornerstone of its philosophy and any recognition of Coloured identity was condemned as a concession to apartheid thinking. This tendency was, however, reversed during the four-year transition to democratic rule as radical changes to the political landscape in the first half of the 1990s once again made the espousal of Coloured identity acceptable in left-wing and “progressive” circles (Adhikari 2000: 349; 2002: 23-24, 281-87). 

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Race Classification at the University of KwaZulu-Natal: Purposes, Sites and Practices

IOLS‐Research, Dr. Shaun Ruggunan and ccrri
For: Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity (ccrri)
University of Kwazulu-Natal
2010-11-08
59 pages

Race classification has long been a feature of South African life, in daily life and its cognitive processes, and also in formal state-driven bureaucratic forms. In the post-apartheid period, classification of individuals on the basis of race has continued despite a stated commitment to principles of non-racialism. Primarily, this is justified in its formal manifestation because of the acknowledged need for redress of apartheid generated inequalities both in the labour market and in access to opportunities and resources (such as higher education).

Investigating the purposes and practices of race classification in an institution of higher learning in South Africa—in this case, the University of KwaZulu-Natal as one of the largest employers in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, as well as one of the largest national universities—offers a particularly interesting insight into these issues and provides an example of sites where this occurs. The research project has three key aims. Firstly it seeks broadly to identify the purpose of race classification, secondly the project investigates the processes followed in classifying people according to race, thirdly the study is interested in the effects, if any, of both classifying and being classified (from the perspective of the classifier) and the challenges involved in race classification. The project concludes by suggesting alternatives to race based classification.

…7. Challenges of classification

The challenges of classification on the basis of race at UKZN identified by interviewees mainly relate to ‘misclassifications’ (a term that holds true only if there is a notion of true/accurate classification of race). These cases of misclassification result from a myriad of problems including:

1. Problems with inaccurate data capturing. For example the data capturer could accidentally misclassify someone, or even make a subjective judgement call and change the person’s self classification to match a racial category deemed more appropriate by the data capturer.
2. The difficulties in making judgements of race classification in a society that is increasingly integrated and becoming increasing racially mixed. This problem extends beyond the mixed race category of ‘coloured’ (Erasmus, 2007).
3. The problem presented by the current four categories in use (African, Indian, Coloured and White). The use of these four categories has meant that Chinese South Africans, for example, have seen their identity collapsed under the generic category of Black. Racial classification in this sense assumes an economic currency and imperative (see Erasmus and Park, 2008) when related to Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) for example.
4. The challenges related to race classification where it is perceived to relate to access to jobs, funding or placement at University were noted…

…7.2. The ‘Coloured’ question

Classifying people of ‘mixed race’ heritage is becoming more and more difficult and this challenge was noted by a number of respondents. ‘Coloured’ in South Africa may be understood to refer to people of ‘mixed race’ heritage but it is also sometimes seen as tied to a particular cultural identity, that of ‘Cape Coloured’; or of specific races in the mix. As a result, people of mixed race heritage that do not belong to this cultural formation that is tied to a ‘black-white’ racial heritage may feel uncomfortable adopting this category for classification. Interviewees observed:

The one might be when it comes to this classification of coloured which is a bit of a, you know, what does it mean (Interview Fihlela, 2009).

If they want to keep the mixed box or the bi-racial box they can maybe have subsections under that because I think that is really going to grow in the future. There’s more interracial families […] coming forward (Interview Van Soelen et al, 2009).

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Hope, Fear, Shame, Frustration: Continuity and Change in the Expression of  Coloured Identity in White Supremacist South Africa, 1910-1994

Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume 32, Number 3 (September, 2006)
pages 467-487

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

This article seeks to explain the basic impulses behind coloured exclusivity in white supremacist South Africa and to elaborate on continuity and change in the processes of coloured self-definition by identifying the core attributes of coloured identity and outlining the ways in which they operated to reinforce and reproduce that identity. The central argument is that coloured identity is better understood not as having evolved through a series of transformations, as conventional historical thinking would have it and as the existing literature assumes, but as having remained remarkably stable throughout the era of white rule. It is argued that this stability derived from a core of enduring characteristics that informed the manner in which colouredness functioned as an identity during this period. This is not to contend that coloured identity was static or that it lacked fluidity, but that there were both important constraints on the ways in which it was able to find expression and sufficiently strong continuities in its day-to-day functioning for coloured identity to have remained recognisably uniform despite radical changes in the social and political landscape during this time. The principal constituents of this stable core are the assimilationism of the coloured people, 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, especially the shame attached to racial hybridity, with which colouredness was imbued; and finally, the marginality of the coloured community, which severely limited their options for social and political action, giving rise to a great deal of frustration.

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Between Race; Beyond Race: The Experience of Self-Identification of Indian-White Biracial Young Adults and the factors Affecting their Choices of Identity

PINS (Psychology in Society)
Issue 34 (2006)
pages 1-16

Dennis Francis, Dean of Education
University of The Free State, South Africa

This study, based on my doctoral research, is an exploration of how nine Indian-White biracial young adults interpret their social reality, especially with regard to their understanding and experience of racial identity. I chose life histories as a method in line with my view of social identity as a resource that people draw on in constructing personal narratives, which provide meaning and a sense of continuity to their lives. As a life history researcher I started with the assumption that by asking the participants to tell me stories of their lives I would gain access to how biracial young adults interpret their social world and what they believe about themselves. All of the primary research took place within the Durban area. In giving an account of their identities, the nine biracial young adults in my study described their life worlds as the sum of many parts, which included but was not limited to their racial identity. With regards to racial identity, the participants chose a variety of ways to name themselves. Four self-identified as Indian, one chose not to place himself into a racial category, and four named themselves as Indian and White or mixed race. None of the nine Indian-White biracial young adults in my study named themselves as White, and none identified themselves as Coloured. The participants named a combination of factors as influencing how they identified – at times these were not without inconsistencies and contradictions. While some factors were more salient than others, I argue that no single factor that influences identity can be looked at in isolation or as assumed to be more important from any other. In their account of the various factors that contributed to their understanding of racial identity, none of the participants identified their assigned racial classification as having a direct influence on their choice of racial identity.

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The Language of Ham and the Language of Cain: “Dialect” and Linguistic Hybridity in the Work of Adam Small

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Volume 45, Number 3 (September 2010)
pages 389-408
DOI: 10.1177/0021989410377550

Nicole Devarenne, Lecturer in English
University of Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom

The “coloured” South African writer Adam Small has made an important and largely unrecognized contribution to anti-apartheid literature in Afrikaans. His pioneering use of “Kaaps” (a linguistic variety spoken by “coloured” Afrikaners at the Cape) in his poetry and plays complicated the racial designation of Afrikaans as a “white” language and challenged the dominance of the “white” Afrikaans literary tradition. In a literature where the variety used by the white nationalist government was also that used by (albeit some of them dissident) Afrikaans writers, he created an appetite and appreciation for vernacular language as a medium of resistance against white supremacy. His work has helped to make possible a continuing investment by Afrikaans writers (white as well as “coloured”) in non-standard language as resistance to cultural imperialism and nationalism. During apartheid, however, he faced considerable criticism for his use of what was seen as a degraded and degrading “dialect”, and for his ostensible complicity in apartheid as a self-avowed “brown Afrikaner”. This article examines some of the difficulties which faced “coloured”Afrikaans writers during apartheid, taking Small as a specific example of a writer whose career displays the impact of the collision between “coloured” separatism and a politically pragmatic universalism, and proposes a reconsideration of his work as a subversive, ironic and ground-breaking intervention in South African literature.

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Beyond borders: Multiracial identities in the shadow of blackness

53rd Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society
Francis Marion Hotel
Charleston South Carolina
2009-09-24

Fileve Palmer
Indiana University

Within the United States and South Africa the idea of multiracial identity has often been subverted beneath a collective, more powerful Black political identity. The idea of multiracial individuals within the larger realm of Blackness has varied throughout time. Often touted as being less than Black, inauthentic, or simply mimics of White, European culture; multiracial individuals in these two nations have similar experiences that form unique cultural traits. In this paper I compare multiracial communities within the United States and South Africa. Through first hand interviews and an in-depth literature review I will show that multiracial individuals living on either side of the equator share similar experiences and suffered like prejudices despite being worlds apart. From the stereotypical immoral, hypersexualized Coloured South African born from colonizers and colonized to weak, sterile Mulattos in the States born from slaves and masters I will demonstrate how these views affect identity formation and how one learns to be or not to be Coloured, Creole, Mulatto or forsake it to pass as Black or White, further problematizing rigid racial categories. How is the trend of multiculturalism within society and schools allowing for individuals within these categories to express themselves and be taken legitimately?