Mixed Race Studies

Word of Honour: Reclaiming Mandela’s Promise

Chace Studios
South Africa
2016
Color
Running Time: 01:13:00

Kiersten Dunbar Chace, Producer, Director, Editor

David Grant, Consultant/Writer

In 1997, just prior to his departure from politics, President Nelson Mandela delivered an informal speech to a predominately mixed-race Coloured community in the Western Cape. He reassured them they had nothing to fear from the ANC government once he left office… that his dream of a free and equal society for all South Africa’s citizens would continue in the hearts and minds of his successors. Now, twenty years later, with discriminatory practices affecting their economic, social and cultural rights, Word of Honour: Reclaiming Mandela’s Promise, illuminates the story of a people questioning the fate of their Coloured identity in the new South Africa.

From the Director of the award winning historical documentary, I’m Not Black, I’m Coloured: Identity Crisis at the Cape of Good Hope, Kiersten Dunbar Chace blends poetry, landscape imagery, and rare archive footage with a collection of powerful, indigenous voices who share their insight and experience regarding the issues facing their respective communities. Presented as regional vignettes, Word of Honour is an introspective look into South Africa’s young democracy as well as a meditation on what may be looming on the horizon. In order to weave this rich tapestry of post-apartheid conversations, Chace traveled 5,000 miles across South Africa with an all-South African crew to the townships of Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg and the rural desert village of Riemvasmaak. Cast members include retired High Court Judge Chris Greenland, photojournalist and HipHop promoter Rushay Booysen, former ANC freedom fighter Danny Brown, poet Khadijah Heeger, comedian and founder of Bruin-Ou.com Charles Ash, elder Anna Davids, community activist Jerome Lottering, and Elsie’s River resident Chantay Haynes.

‘Non-racialism’ in the struggle against apartheid

South African Review of Sociology (originally Society in Transition)
Volume 34, Issue 1 (2003)
pages 13-37
DOI: 10.1080/21528586.2003.10419082

Gerhard Maré, Professor of Sociology
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

This article examines the movement of South African society from a racialised past to a racialised present. It argues that an important opportunity, arising out of the transitional conjuncture, seriously to come to grips with the racist and racialised categories of apartheid, is rapidly being lost. Racism and a racially-ordered system is founded on the soft bed(rock) of race-thinking, and continues to draw on the banal perpetuation of notions of race in everyday life, as well as in political practice in a democratic South Africa. The author proposes that the undoubted commitment of the African National Congress to ‘non-racialism’ has remained unrealisable because there was no serious theoretical investigation of the status of race categories, either how they operated within apartheid South Africa or within the struggle for democracy itself. For this reason, it seems clear that the ANC’s ‘non-racialism’ more appropriately should be read as ‘non-racism’, as the notion of the existence of ‘races’ as socially meaningful categories have remained pivotal political categories and continue to operate as everyday common sense.

…In this paper I focus on the commitment to ‘non-racialism’ by the ANC, a commitment called the ‘unbreakable thread’ of decades of struggle against white domination (Frederikse 1990), and note some other positions and organisations. I will, in effect, take issue with the application of the term ‘non-racialism’ to describe the position of the ANC, which is much more accurately termed multi-racialism, despite Tambo’s rejection of such an interpretation. In conclusion I will suggest some of the implications of such misuse, most importantly that it cannot be the basis for ‘the primary goal [of] a completely restructured society’ (Frederikse, 1990:3-4).

Race thinking is embedded in our everyday thinking. It is located in racialised social identities, lived through what has been variously referred to as ‘stories of everyday life’(Wright, 1985:15; Heller, 1982), the ‘minutiae of everyday existence’ (Comaroff, 1996:166), the ‘banality’ of living within the ‘assumptions and common-sense habits’ (Billig, 1995:37) of a society permeated with race thinking. Such racialism will have to be disembedded from there, through deliberate social practice, institutional and legal change, and finding ways of subverting, rather than corroborating, daily experience and racialised ways of making sense. We continue to operate with race as a collective identity, and as the articulating and organising principle for other identities and/or moments when we draw on an array of alternate identities. Non-racialism remains without content if it continues to be a largely unexamined rhetorical commitment to an ideal.

At the same time, however, it is necessary immediately to note that my argument does not deny, in any way, the extreme dehumanisation and domination suffered under the system of apartheid, or under any racist system. Nor does it deny, as should be clear, that race thinking is located in real social conditions, and effectively makes sense of the way in which people have experienced, and continue to experience, that social reality, within a changing pattern of domination. It does not explore, here, the various ways in which race thinking serves, at times justificatory, exploitative, and other purposes. On the contrary, my argument depends on recognising the strength of pervasive racialisms, and demands and forms the basis for investigating racism. I will return to this point…

Read the entire article here.