Mixed Race Studies

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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