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Continuity and Context

An Overview of Coloured Identity in White Supremacist South Africa

There is a general lack of familiarity with the history of the Coloured community of South Africa, except perhaps for an awareness that it has generally been a story of racial oppression and that for nearly the whole of the twentieth century, it followed a discernible trend of intensifying segregationism and a continual erosion of Coloured people’s civil rights. This blind spot in South African historical knowledge, which is elaborated on in the next chapter, is a direct consequence of the marginality of the Coloured people. As one Coloured commentator put it, “We don’t know our own history and out there in the community and schools there is no information about it because we are not empowered.”¹

A contexualizing opening chapter that sketches the social and historical background is thus a particular necessity. First, a thumbnail sketch of the history of the Coloured community is presented. This is followed by an elaboration of the core attributes that defined the manner in which Coloured identity operated in South African society during the era of white rule. The analysis here seeks to identify the fundamental impulses behind the assertion of a separate Coloured identity and to explain continuity and change in processes of Coloured self-definition. The overview is rounded off by a discussion of the popular stereotyping of Coloured people by dissecting a wellworn joke about their origin. This section demonstrates how a range of pejorative connotations coalesce in the stereotyping of Coloured people in the popular mind.

From Slavery to Khoisan Revivalism: A Synopsis of Coloured History

In South Africa, contrary to international usage, the term Coloured does not refer to black people in general. It instead alludes to a phenotypically varied social group of highly diverse cultural and geographic origins. Novelist, academic, and literary critic Kole Omotoso aptly described Coloured people’s skin color, the most important of these phenotypical features, as varying “from charcoal black to breadcrust brown, sallow yellow and finally off-white cream that wants to pass for white.”² The Coloured people were descended largely from Cape slaves,³ the indigenous Khoisan population, and other black people who had been assimilated to Cape colonial society by the late nineteenth century. Since they are also partly descended from European settlers, Coloureds are popularly regarded as being of “mixed race” and have held an intermediate status in the South African racial hierarchy, distinct from the historically dominant white minority and the numerically preponderant African population.

There are approximately three and a half million Coloured people in South Africa today.⁴ Constituting no more than 9 percent of the population throughout the twentieth century and lacking significant political or economic power, Coloured people have always formed a marginal group in South African society. There has, moreover, been a marked regional concentration of Coloured people: approximately 90 percent of them live within the western third of the country, with more than two-thirds residing in the Western Cape⁵ and over 40 percent in the greater Cape Town area.⁶ The Coloured category has also generally been taken to include a number of distinct subgroups, such as Malays, Griquas, Namas, and Basters.

Although Coloured identity crystallized in the late nineteenth century, the process of social amalgamation within the colonial black population at the Cape that gave rise to Coloured group consciousness dates back to the period of Dutch colonial rule. However, it was in the decades after the emancipation of the Khoisan in 1828 and slaves in 1838 that various components of the heterogeneous black laboring class in the Cape Colony started integrating more rapidly and developing an incipient shared identity. This identity was based on a common socioeconomic status and a shared culture derived from their incorporation into the lower ranks of Cape colonial society.⁷ The emergence of a full-fledged Coloured identity as we know it today was pre-cipitated in the late nineteenth century by the sweeping social changes that came in the wake of the mineral revolution. The introduction of large-scale mining after the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886, being South Africa’s equivalent of the industrial revolution, had a transformative impact on the social and economic landscape of the subcontinent. Significant numbers of Africans started going to the western Cape from the 1870s onward, and assimilated colonial blacks and a wide variety of African people who had recently been incorporated into the capitalist economy were thrust together in the highly competitive environment of the newly established mining towns. These developments drove acculturated colonial blacks to assert a separate identity as Coloured people, in order to claim a position of relative privilege in relation to Africans on the basis of their closer assimilation to Western culture and being partly descended from European colonists.⁸

Because of the marginality of the Coloured people and the determination with which the state implemented white supremacist policies, the story of Coloured political organization has largely been one of compromise, retreat, and failure. The most consistent feature of Coloured political history until the latter phases of apartheid was the continual erosion of the civil rights first bestowed on blacks in the Cape Colony by the British administration in the mid-nineteenth century.

The process of attrition started with the franchise restrictions imposed by the Parliamentary Registration Act of 1887 and the Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892.⁹ A spate of racially discriminatory measures in the first decade of the twentieth century further compromised the civil rights of Coloured people. The most significant were the exclusion of Coloured people from the franchise in the former Boer republics after the Anglo-Boer War; the promulgation of the School Board Act of 1905, which segregated the Cape’s education system by providing compulsory public schooling for white children only; and the denial of the right of Coloured people to be elected to parliament with the creation of the South African state in 1910.¹⁰ The subsequent implementation of a policy of segregation progressively entrenched white privilege and Coloured disadvantage before even more draconian measures were introduced with the coming of apartheid in 1948.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the economic advancement of the Coloured community was undermined by the civilized labor policy,¹¹ as well as a number of laws designed to favor whites over blacks in the competition for employment. For example, the 1921 Juvenile Affairs Act set up mechanisms for placing those who left white schools into suitable employment. Also, the Apprenticeship Act of 1922 put apprenticeships beyond the reach of most Coloured youths by stipulating educational entry levels that very few Coloured schools met but that fell within the minimum educational standard set for white schools. The 1925 Wage Act subverted the ability of Coloured labor to undercut white wage demands by setting high minimum-wage levels in key industries. Furthermore, in 1930, the influence of the Coloured vote was more than halved by the enfranchisement of white women only.¹²

It was during the apartheid era, however, that Coloured people suffered the most severe violations of their civil rights. Their forced classification under the Population Registration Act of 1950, which categorized all South Africans according to race, made the implementation of rigid segregation possible. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 outlawed marriage and sex across the color line, respectively. Under the Group Areas Act of 1950, over half a million Coloured people were forcibly relocated to residential and business areas, usually on the periphery of cities and towns. The Group Areas Act was probably the most hated of the apartheid measures among Coloureds because property owners were meagerly compensated, long-standing communities were broken up, and alternative accommodation was inadequate. The 1953 Separate Amenities Act, which introduced “petty apartheid” by segregating virtually all public facilities, also created deep resentment. In 1956, moreover, after a protracted legal and constitutional battle, the National Party succeeded in removing Coloured people from the common voters’ roll.¹³

Because their primary objective was to assimilate into the dominant society, politicized Coloured people initially avoided forming separate political organizations. By the early twentieth century, however, intensifying segregation forced them to mobilize politically in defense of their rights. Although the earliest Coloured political organizations date back to the 1880s, the first substantive Coloured political body, the African Political Organization (APO), was established in Cape Town in 1902.¹⁴ Under the leadership of the charismatic Abdullah Abdurahman, who served as president from 1905 until his death in 1940, the APO dominated Coloured protest politics for nearly four decades. It became the main vehicle for expressing this community’s assimilationist aspirations as well as its fears at the rising tide of segregationism until its demise in the mid-1940s. A number of ephemeral political organizations such as the United Afrikaner League of the late 1910s and the Afrikaanse Nasionale Bond (ANB) of the latter half of the 1920s—bodies that were promoted by Cape National Party politicians hoping to win Coloured electoral support—failed to subvert the dominance of the APO.¹⁵

Intensifying segregation and the failure of the APO’s moderate approach contributed to the emergence of a radical movement inspired by Marxist ideology within the better-educated, urbanized sector of the Coloured community during the 1930s. The National Liberation League (NLL), founded in 1935, and the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), established in 1943, were the most important of these radical organizations. Prone to fissure and unable to bridge the racial divisions within the society, the radical movement failed in its quest to unite blacks in the struggle against segregation.¹⁶ The South African Coloured People’s Organization (SACPO),¹⁷ which was founded in 1953 and affiliated with the Congress Alliance, led by the African National Congress (ANC), also organized protests and demonstrations, especially against the removal of Coloured people from the voters’ roll.¹⁸ Organized opposition to apartheid from within the Coloured community was effectively quelled by state repression following the Sharpeville shooting of March 1960. The Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 unarmed anti-pass protestors were killed and 180 injured by police, represents a dramatic turning point in South Africa’s history and resulted in a harsh crackdown on the extraparliamentary opposition by the apartheid state. Organized Coloured resistance reemerged only in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976. A few scantily supported political organizations that were prepared to work within apartheid structures, such as the Labour Party of South Africa and the Federal Coloured People’s Party, were, however, sanctioned during the heyday of apartheid.

From the latter half of the 1970s onward, starting with the popularization of Black Consciousness ideology within the Coloured community,¹⁹ the nature of Coloured identity became an extremely contentious issue, for growing numbers of educated and politicized people who had been classified “Coloured” under the Population Registration Act rejected the identity. The Soweto revolt, which started as a protest by schoolchildren in June 1976 and soon spread to other parts of the country, including Coloured communities of the western Cape, greatly accelerated this trend because it fomented a climate of open resistance to apartheid and fostered a far stronger sense of black solidarity than had existed before. Colouredness increasingly came to be viewed as an artificial categorization imposed on the society by the ruling minority as part of its divide-and-rule strategies. The burgeoning of the mass, nonracial democratic movement in the 1980s under the leadership of the United Democratic Front (UDF), founded in 1983, fed Coloured rejectionism. Controversy over the participation of some Coloured leaders in the Tricameral Parliament of the P. W. Botha government from 1984 onward further inflamed rejectionist passions.²⁰ With the western Cape an epicenter of resistance to apartheid, Coloured identity became a highly charged issue, and within the antiapartheid movement, any recognition of Coloured identity was repudiated as a concession to apartheid thinking.²¹

In spite of this, the salience of Coloured identity has endured. During the four-year transition to democratic rule under president F. W. de Klerk, political parties across the ideological spectrum made ever more strident appeals to Coloured identity for support. Once again, it became politically acceptable to espouse a Coloured identity; moreover, postapartheid South Africa has witnessed a rapid retreat of Coloured rejectionism and a concomitant Coloured assertiveness. This has been due partly to a desire to project a positive self-image in the face of the pervasive negative racial stereotyping of Coloured people and partly to attempts at ethnic mobilization to take advantage of the newly democratic political environment. The resurgence of Colouredism has, to a significant extent, also been motivated by a fear of African majority rule and the perception that, as in the old order, Coloureds were once again being marginalized. Though far from allayed, these anxieties have, in recent years, been alleviated by the fading influence of swart gevaar (black peril) tactics in South African politics and by the acclimatization of people to the new political order.

Hope, Fear, Shame, Frustration: The Dynamic of Coloured Exclusivism

The central contention of this section—and of the book as a whole—is that Coloured identity is better understood not as having undergone a series of transformations during the era of white rule but rather as having maintained a high degree of stability despite obvious changes to the identity. This is not to imply that Coloured identity was in any way fixed or that it was not pliable but that it operated within a range of fairly predictable parameters. The changes that it did experience during that time did not fundamentally alter the way in which it functioned as an identity. These changes were more in the nature of the accretion and sloughing off of elements around a core of enduring characteristics, adding further complexity and subtlety to the way the identity found expression, rather than the evolution of the identity itself. Thus, viewed on the eve of the transition to democracy in 1994, Coloured identity was very much the same phenomenon it was at the inauguration of Union in 1910 despite radical changes in the social and political landscape and within the Coloured community itself.

Besides the conventional expression of Coloured identity derived from its stable core, it is possible to identify a number of developments during the twentieth century that influenced processes of Coloured self-perception. The emergence of a radical movement in Coloured politics from the second half of the 1930s, though limited in its impact, was significant because it introduced the idea that black unity or a class-based identity was possible and because it initiated some impetus in this direction within the Coloured petite bourgeoisie. From midcentury onward, apartheid thinking and the implementation of apartheid social engineering had the countervailing effect of reifying Coloured identity as never before. The latter phases of the apartheid era witnessed a reaction to this tendency with the growing rejection of Coloured identity within sections of the community. Coloured rejectionism was fostered by the revival of mass protest against apartheid after the Soweto revolt and by an intensifying disapproval of any form of racial thinking within the antiapartheid movement. As mentioned earlier, during the transition to democratic rule in the first half of the 1990s, insecurity at the prospect of majority rule and new opportunities for ethnic mobilization saw a resurgence of Coloured exclusivism.²² Finally, since the mid-1990s, there have been initiatives to reinvent Coloured identity, largely in the form of attempts to stimulate Coloured people’s pride in their Khoisan and slave pasts.

Nevertheless, until the late 1970s, there was a high degree of consensus both within the Coloured community and among outsiders about who the Coloured people were and what the concept of Colouredness embodied. The conventional wisdom—that Coloured people constituted a distinct racial group with its own historical trajectory and destiny—was first challenged in the 1930s when radical intellectuals rejected Coloured separatism as playing into the hands of the ruling classes who sought to divide the black majority and split the proletariat. The emphasis on non-European unity among Coloured radicals during the middle decades of the twentieth century was not so much a rejection of Coloured identity as an assertion that racial differences were not in any way intrinsic and that Coloured particularism undermined the freedom struggle. From the early 1960s, however, there was an explicit rejection of Coloured identity within NEUM circles. This incipient rejectionism remained extremely limited in its impact, in that it did not penetrate much beyond a section of the tiny intelligentsia within the Coloured elite. It was only toward the latter half of the 1970s, when Black Consciousness ideology took hold in significant sectors of the Coloured community, that the rejection of Coloured identity found popular support, growing to its zenith in the nonracial democratic movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even at its height the rejection of Coloured identity was limited to a relatively small minority of better-educated and more highly politicized people associated with the antiapartheid movement.²³

What is the essence of the stable core at the heart of Coloured identity, and how does one explain the continuities in that identity and the way in which it operated through the period of white domination? This chapter identifies four key characteristics that formed the foundation of Coloured identity.

One of these essential features was the desire to assimilate into the dominant society. This assimilationism was less an impulse for acculturation than a striving on the part of Coloured people for acknowledgment of their worth as individuals and citizens and acceptance as equals or partners by whites. Throughout the twentieth century, gaining such affirmation was one of the strongest imperatives within the Coloured community, especially among the petite bourgeois elite. The late nineteenth-century genesis of Coloured identity emanated from a worldview and a political strategy that was profoundly assimilationist. And during the twentieth century, despite criticism of the racist order, all that the Coloured political leadership and the petite bourgeoisie it represented really wanted was for Coloured people to be accepted into the dominant society and share in the benefits of citizenship on the basis of individual merit.²⁴ Though the majority of the Coloured elite aspired to acceptance into English-speaking, middleclass culture, there was also a significant movement within the Coloured community for accommodation within the fold of Afrikanerdom.²⁵ Despite occasional warnings that the continued oppression of Coloured people could have dire consequences for the society as a whole, the Coloured political leadership had no interest in overthrowing the system or changing South African society fundamentally, except for eliminating institutionalized racial discrimination. As is so often the case in any discussion of Coloured politics after the mid-1930s, the exception represented by a small minority of radicals needs to be noted here.

This assimilationism, which in more recent times has often been misunderstood and denounced by radicals as mere rationalizations of self-serving sycophants and collaborationists, was rooted in a worldview informed by nineteenth-century Cape liberal values. For much of the twentieth century, moderate Coloured political opinion still clung to a weltanschauung reminiscent of mid-nineteenth century progressionism. The first key assumption of this utopian outlook was that humanity was on a path of inevitable progress toward the ultimate attainment of an elysian future of social harmony and prosperity. The second assumption was that all people, no matter what their current condition, were capable of self-improvement and the acquisition of “civilization,” which equated to Western bourgeois culture in the minds of the Coloured elite. These assumptions were reinforced by deeply held religious beliefs that not only posited the equality of all humans in the eyes of God but also fed the progressionist vision with ideas about the ultimate redemption of humankind and the notion that its destiny was directed by the guiding hand of a just God.²⁶

These assimilationist hopes were remarkably resilient and underlay the longer-term vision of the Coloured communal leadership regarding the future of the Coloured people and the destiny of humanity in general. The Coloured elite continued to nurture hopes of being accepted into the dominant society even as new obstacles were placed in their way and as the prospect of realizing these aspirations deteriorated with the continued tightening of segregationist measures through most of the twentieth century. Though the elite were disconcerted by each new discriminatory regulation and alarmed by the more draconian developments, setbacks were usually rationalized as temporary reversals, and acceptance into white middle-class society was often seen as something that Coloured people still needed to earn—something that would only be attained after a struggle worthy of the prize.²⁷ Indeed, this notion often served as justification for clinging to their assimilationist hopes in the face of intensifying segregation. Not even the utter rejection of any form of assimilation with the implementation of apartheid policies entirely extinguished these dreams. The desire for acceptance into the dominant society was evident in its most acute form among those individuals willing to disown their identity as Coloured; turn their backs on friends, family, and former lives; and take the considerable risk of exposure by attempting to pass for white.²⁸ To a significant degree, the durability of these yearnings for acceptance explain the eager response of so many Coloured people to the National Party’s overtures in the 1994 general election campaign.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that these dreams of assimilation were badly misplaced and out of step with the social and political realities of white supremacist South Africa. Such optimism might have had a degree of compatibility with nineteenth-century Cape liberalism or have resonated with Western liberal or Left opinion in the twentieth century. And in the first decade of the century, though the prospects were increasingly remote, it was not entirely unrealistic to hope that individual Coloured people would be accepted into white middle-class society on the basis of personal merit and that the community as a whole might, in time, assimilate into the mainstream of Cape society. These desires were, however, completely out of place in the unified South African state, whose policies were increasingly informed by social Darwinist and segregationist assumptions.

Yet the Coloured elite and the political leadership could not avoid coming to terms in some way with the reality of intensifying segregationism that confronted them. Because they were denied their first choice of assimilation into the dominant society, politicized Coloureds had little alternative but to mobilize along racial lines to defend their rights and promote their interests as a group. This brings to the fore a second fundamental attribute of Coloured identity in South Africa, namely, its intermediate status in the South African racial hierarchy.

Coloured people experienced the South African racial hierarchy as a three-tiered system in which Coloureds held an intermediate position between the dominant white minority and the large African majority. As sociologist Zimitri Erasmus put it, “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).”²⁹ Similarly, in 1943, radical activist Ben Kies criticized the self-segregationist ethos of the Teachers’ League: “For thirty years they accepted the idea that their children were not fit to be taught with white children and were too good to be taught with African children.”³⁰

The symbolism of referring to Coloured people as “brown” neatly captures this intermediate status. The equation of Coloured people with the color brown is even more entrenched in the Afrikaans language, in which words such as bruinman (brown man) and bruinmens (brown person) are translated as “(Cape) Coloured man” and “(Cape) Coloured person.”³¹ Indeed, writing in 1960, leading Afrikaner literary figure N. P. van Wyk Louw declared the conventional Afrikaans term for Coloured, Kleurling, to be a nauseating word, stating that he preferred bruinmens.³² That Coloured people have, on the whole, accepted this description of themselves is indicated by the fact that Coloured intellectual Christian Ziervogel entitled his late-1930s book on the Coloured people Brown South Africa and Coloured poet and educator S. V. Petersen, in a 1956 address to the Stellenbosch Afrikaanse Studentebond, protested he was not a “kleurling” but a “bruinman”; similarly, in the mid-1990s, Coloured politician Peter Marais described himself as a “bruin Afrikaner” (brown Afrikaner). In additon, this particular usage is common in Cape Vernacular Afrikaans.³³

Because their assimilationist aspirations were thwarted and their intermediate position gave Coloured people significant privileges relative to Africans, the basic dynamic behind the assertion of Coloured identity and the main thrust of mobilizing politically as Coloured people was to defend this position of relative privilege. Their minority status and political powerlessness as well as intensifying segregationism engendered fears that Coloureds might end up being relegated to the status of Africans and lose their position of relative privilege. These concerns reinforced Coloured exclusivity and encouraged a separatist strategy with respect to Africans within the Coloured political leadership.³⁴ Only a tiny minority of Coloured people chose the alternatives of communism or black unity or some combination of the two.

Their assimilationism, together with the insecurities engendered by their intermediate status, meant that in daily life the most consistent—and insistent—element in the expression of Coloured identity was an association with whiteness and a concomitant distancing from Africanness, whether in the value placed on fair skin and straight hair, in the prizing of white ancestors in the family lineage, or in taking pride in the degree to which they were able to conform to the standards of Western bourgeois culture. This “white-mindedness,” as one commentator referred to it,³⁵ could give rise to a sense of shame with regard to any personal associations with blackness or an aggressive bigotry toward Africans. The former is illustrated by the ludicrous yet poignant example of Betty Theys, who was considerably darker than her light-skinned father. Throughout her life, she felt inadequate, and considered herself a disappointment to him. She finally felt vindicated when she gave birth to her fair-complexioned daughter and immediately sent her father the message, “Your black hen has laid a white egg.”³⁶ The latter is demonstrated by a 1993 interview, in which a working-class Coloured woman, identified as Mrs. D. E., gave voice to the racist chauvinism that often resulted from this affiliation with whiteness: “And a kaffir, even if he wears a golden ring, still remains an ape…. They have nothing, they say they have a culture, they don’t have a culture, they’re raw. They say we brown people are mixed masala, but we brown people are closer to white people, than they are to white people. Because our culture and the white people’s culture are the same.”³⁷ Colloquially, this deference to whiteness is often referred to as the Coloured or slave mentality.

In spite of the racially egalitarian rhetoric that characterized so much of the discourse of Coloured protest politics, it has to be recognized that Coloured political organizations were, on the whole, racially exclusive and strove to entrench the relative privilege Coloured people enjoyed. If the ultimate aim of much of Coloured political organization was acceptance into the dominant society, then most of its day-to-day politicking was a narrow concern with the advancement of Coloured interests. Thus, though there was an assertion of nonracial values and protest against discrimination, there was also an accommodation with the racist order and an attempt to manipulate it in favor of Coloured people.³⁸

That members of the Coloured community, especially within the petite bourgeoisie, were ambivalent about their identity should not come as a great surprise. Even as their assimilationism tended to dampen separatist tendencies from whites, their desire to protect their status of relative privilege pushed Coloured people into asserting a separate identity with respect to Africans. And although being the victims of racial discrimination promoted the principle of non-racism, political realities forced them to organize on a racial basis. The attempt to exploit segregationism to their own advantage confirms John Cell’s observation that though “force lay behind segregation … most of the time segregation was self-enforcing.”³⁹ The structurally ambiguous position of the Coloured community within the South African racial hierarchy thus played an important part in reinforcing and reproducing the identity.

The intermediate status of the Coloured grouping contributed in two ways to a third key characteristic of Coloured identity, namely, that it was largely the bearer of a range of negative and derogatory connotations. First, because of their lack of political and economic clout and because they formed a relatively small stratum within the racial hierarchy, the Coloured people tended to be perceived in terms of the larger groups. This was most notable in official definitions of the term Coloured, in which the category was usually described as consisting of those people who were neither white nor African.⁴⁰ Consequently, the Coloured community was usually not identified in a positive manner, as social groups typically are, in terms of a set of distinctive characteristics but was instead conceived in a negative fashion with reference to other groups, in terms of what it was not—as Erasmus put it, “in terms of ‘lack’ or taint, or in terms of ‘remainder’ or excess which does not fit a classificatory scheme.”⁴¹

This was one of the more subtle ways in which negative associations came to be attached to the concept of Colouredness. It reinforced ideas that the Coloured people were not of the same standing as other groups, that their claims to autonomous group status—usually articulated in terms of “nation,” “people,” or “race”—were deficient or lacked a degree of authenticity. The ultimate expression of this belief came from none other than former first lady of South Africa, Marike de Klerk, who, in a 1983 interview, declared that Coloureds “are a negative group. The definition of a coloured in the population register is someone that is not black, and is not white and is also not an Indian, in other words a no-person. They are the leftovers. They are the people that were left after the nations were sorted out. They are the rest.”⁴² Such ideas were often internalized by Coloured people, for, as one working-class Coloured informant in the early 1990s put it to me, “We Coloured people are not a proper nation, we don’t have our own culture or land that we can say is our own. The Coloured people is like a mixed bredie [stew] made up of all different kinds of people.”⁴³ Comparing the Coloured people to a mixed bredie is a common colloquialism used to emphasize their racial and cultural hybridity.⁴⁴ The perception that the Coloured community lacked cultural distinctiveness and full status as an ethnic group reinforced not only their marginality but also the idea that Coloured people, being the product of miscegenation, were misfits and somehow inherently deficient. Charles Sebe, at the time director of state security in the Ciskei, the eastern Cape bantustan, exemplified these attitudes in his rejection of miscegenation during a speech reported by Joseph Lelyveld, a New York Times journalist: “‘What will you get from [black/white] in-ter-mar-riage? You get a Coloured.’ The word was pronounced with contempt. ‘You don’t get a white person, you don’t get a black person, but a frustated child which does not belong anywhere.’”⁴⁵

A second way in which the intermediate status of the Coloured people contributed to these negative perceptions is that it served as a residual category into which smaller groups that did not fit into either the white or the African categories were placed. This, again, was very much apparent in official practice, where, for example in census figures or in the compilation of statistics in official publications, those groups who were not manifestly white or African were lumped with the Coloured category. Thus, groups such as Malays, Griquas, Rehoboth Basters, Namas, and even Indians were sometimes treated as distinct groups and at other times included under the rubric of Coloured.⁴⁶ The Population Registration Act went to the ridiculous length of creating a category labeled “Other Coloured” for those people who did not fit into any of the other six subcategories into which it divided those classified as Coloured.⁴⁷

Because of negative associations attached to it, Colouredness was not enthusiastically embraced as an affirmation of self and group identity except in relatively rare or transient instances. The derogations were far too many and deeply entrenched—among both outsiders, especially whites, and, more important, many Coloured people themselves—for the identity to function in a positive, affirmative fashion. Coloured identity instead tended to be accepted with resignation and often with a sense of shame by its bearers, as a bad draw in the lottery of life.⁴⁸

Erasmus listed some of the negative associations attached to Coloured identity as “immorality, sexual promiscuity, illegitimacy, impurity and untrustworthiness.”⁴⁹ One could add other attributes to the list, as well, such as supposed propensities for criminality, gangsterism, drug and alcohol abuse, and vulgar behaviour. The most pervasive of the negative characteristics attached to Colouredness, however, and one that is usually seen as the source of other weaknesses was the idea that it was a product of miscegenation. For a popular mind-set suffused with social Darwinist assumptions, the implications of this notion were that Coloured people were therefore deficient in positive qualities associated with racial purity and handicapped by negative ones derived from racial mixture. Having internalized the racist values of the dominant society and having accepted racial mixture as the defining characteristic of their identity, Coloured people by and large viewed their community as indelibly stigmatized by their supposed condition of racial hybridity. This has been an extremely onerous burden, especially for the Coloured petite bourgeoisie, in a society obsessed with racial purity and the dangers of “mongrelization.” Reflecting on her own upbringing in a “respectable” Coloured family, Zimitri Erasmus commented, “I can see how respectablity and shame are key defining terms of middle class coloured experience.”⁵⁰

In this regard, the Coloured community was trapped in a catch-22 situation that was partly of its own making. In order to distance themselves from Africans and protect their status of relative privilege, Coloureds emphasized their partial descent from European colonists. But it was precisely this claim that encumbered them with the stigma of racial hybridity. The import of white supremacist discourse about the origins of the Coloured people was that they were the unwanted and unfortunate consequence of the colonization of southern Africa.⁵¹ The Coloured people were thus a source of embarrassment to the white supremacist establishment as reminders of past lapses in morality. As the Reverend Allan Boesak inimitably put it, “We were there looking them in the eye and saying to them, ‘Well here we are. So what about your pure race theory and what about your chosen-people-of-God theory?’ We were the living proof that [they were] not really able to lock up every human emotion.”⁵² To white racists, Coloured people also presented the danger of an ongoing infiltration of white society by light-skinned Coloureds and raised the specter of racial degeneration. This prompted fears that, in the long run, white supremacy and the very survival of Western civilization in southern Africa were at stake. One of South Africa’s most popular authors in the first half of the twentieth century who wrote extensively on the theme of race from a racist perspective, Sarah Gertrude Millin, quoted Prime Minister Jan Smuts as cautioning that “white South Africans (must) have a care lest one day … ‘little brown children play among the ruins of the Union Government Buildings.’”⁵³ The promulgation of the Immorality and Mixed Marriages Acts confirms just how seriously these threats were taken.

A concomitant problem was the inability of organic intellectuals within the community to delineate a positive set of symbols, a distinctive culture, or an acceptable myth of origin around which those who regarded themselves as Coloured could cohere with a sense of pride. Their slave past and Khoisan heritage were generally treated as embarrassments requiring a tactful silence rather than as affirmations of group identity. Although their assimilation to Western culture was emphasized because of their determination to distance themselves from Africans, organic intellectuals within the group were sensitive to the general perception that the Coloured people did not have a distinctive culture. This was illustrated by the emotional response of a prominent Coloured politician from the Western Cape on visiting the museum at the Genadendal mission station. Asked afterward why he had been visibly moved by the experience, the politician replied that he had always been under the impression that Coloured people did not have a culture but that the history of Genadendal had proved otherwise to him.⁵⁴

What is more, those cultural features commonly accepted as distinctively Coloured have generally been denigrated and accorded low status in South African society. The Afrikaans vernacular distinctive to the Coloured community and variously referred to as Capey, Gamtaal (language of Ham), or kombuis (kitchen) Afrikaans has, for example, customarily been stigmatized as a mark of social inferiority. Until relatively recently, before the argument for Afrikaans being a creole language gained popularity, there was widespread acceptance within the Coloured community of white and especially Afrikaner denigration of kombuis Afrikaans as a vulgar patois. By way of example, a middleclass Coloured informant in the mid-1990s told me that although kombuis Afrikaans was his home language, he felt ashamed of using it when speaking to whites or “respectable people,” as it would mark him as “low class.”⁵⁵ An Afrikaner school inspector in the mid-1970s exemplified white attitudes toward the dialect when, on hearing me speak the vernacular to some of my high school students, he admonished me, in a gentle but paternalistic tone, for using “daardie gebasterde taal” (that bastardized language) and perpetuating uncultured practices among my students.⁵⁶ The Coon Carnival, a celebration of the new year particular to the Coloured community—though embraced by most working-class Coloured people as their own and more recently touted as an example of colorful Cape culture to promote tourism—was similarly stigmatized among whites and middle-class Coloureds as boorish, disreputable, and even depraved.⁵⁷

The lack of positive identification with Colouredness meant that much of the social mobilization and political activity conducted in the name of the Coloured people was in reaction to white racism rather than a proactive marshaling of ethnic resources. Throughout the era of white domination, anger, anxiety, and fear engendered by the social injustices they suffered rather than a positive identification with Colouredness proved to be the more potent means for mobilizing people on the basis of their identity as Coloured. Coping with white racism rather than affirming Colouredness motivated a great deal of these separatist agendas. Virtually all Coloured communal organizations, whether cultural, professional, or political, either were formed because Coloured people were excluded from the corresponding white bodies or were established in response to one or another segregationist development. Coloured responses to segregationism, which, with the exception of the radical movement, generally sought to protect Coloureds’ position of relative privilege, thus tended to reinforce existing racial boundaries despite the nonracial rhetoric that usually accompanied them. The pervasiveness of racial identifications was such that even in the most obvious exception to this pattern, the Non-European Unity Movement, the outcome of fifteen years of endeavor was a split largely along racial lines in 1958.⁵⁸

The essentially opportunistic nature of Coloured identity politics, especially in response to segregationism, points to the marginality of the Coloured people. This, the fourth of the key attributes of Coloured identity, was the most important core element because it dominated the day-to-day conditions under which the identity operated. The Coloured community’s response to its predicament of marginality was central to the manner in which the identity manifested itself socially and politically. The marginality of the Coloured people goes a long way toward explaining how they perceived themselves as a social group; it also helps explain the contradictions and ambiguities within the identity and the changes it experienced through the twentieth century. Further, that marginality was the source of a great deal of frustration and anger, as well as a degree of fatalism within the Coloured community.⁵⁹

The Coloured people comprised a marginal group in that they never formed more than about 9 percent of the South African population throughout the twentieth century.⁶⁰ Although it constituted a significant minority, the Coloured community did not enjoy anything near a commensurate level of influence or power under white supremacy. A heritage of slavery, dispossession, and racial oppression ensured that Coloured people lacked any significant economic or political power as a group and that by far the greater majority consisted of a downtrodden proletariat. Under white minority rule, the Coloured community had no meaningful leverage to bring about change in the society or to reform or influence the way in which it was governed. Indeed, Coloured communal and political leaders had great difficulty drawing attention to their standpoint and having their protestations taken seriously by the ruling authorities. Coloured political organizations were doomed to be bit players on the political stage, and Coloured protest politics was little more than a sideshow in the national arena. Even in the western Cape, where two-thirds of Coloured people were concentrated and formed a majority of the population,⁶¹ their political influence progressively declined through the greater part of the century. This impotence was highlighted early on by the APO’s protest campaign against the Act of Union. Despite being remarkably successful in mobilizing Coloured opinion behind the campaign, the APO was unable to change a single clause in the draft South Africa Act.⁶² And in subsequent decades, Coloured protest politics was unable to boast a single clear-cut victory in the battle against white supremacism. The clearest demonstration of the community’s powerlessness came with the removal of Coloured people from the common voters’ roll in 1956, notwithstanding mass protests and substantial support from liberal whites.

The marginality of the Coloured community meant that it had little choice in the matter of accepting an inferior social status to whites or the second-class citizenship imposed on it by the state. To a large extent, this marginality accounted for the pragmatism and opportunism of much of Coloured protest politics, as well as the incrementalism that characterized its strategies. Grappling with this predicament of marginality also goes some way toward explaining key developments in the history of the Coloured community, such as the emergence of a radical movement in the mid-1930s, the rejection of Coloured identity from the late 1970s onward, and the resurgence of Colouredism at the end of the twentieth century. Whatever else may have gone into their making, frustration engendered by impotence played a part in the adoption of new political strategies.

Trapped by their condition of marginality, Coloureds found their options for social and political action severely constrained. With their assimilationist overtures spurned by whites and with joint organization with the African majority either impractical or unattractive, they were left isolated and powerless. To the majority of the political and communal leaders, the only realistic option open to them was to bow to white power and work toward an incremental improvement in conditions for their constituency. Consequently, they adopted an outlook that was highly opportunistic, taking advantage of every chance to reinforce Coloureds’ status of relative privilege.⁶³

The various radical movements were too narrowly based and ephemeral to have broken this isolation decisively. It was only relatively late in the twentieth century, when a significant sector within the Coloured community broke categorically with the separatist agenda and embraced nonracialism as part of a populist strategy, that individuals from within its ranks such as Allan Boesak, Trevor Manuel, and Patricia de Lille started having a significant impact on national politics and the broader society. Even then, however, the majority of Coloured people in the 1990s felt vulnerable and alienated from the African majority, prefering to ally themselves with their former oppressors. Their insecurity is captured in the colloquial expression “We are the jam,” which likens Coloured people to the thin layer of jam squeezed between two slices of bread. The metaphor gives expression to both their marginality as well as their intermediate status. This expression, usually uttered in a resigned tone of voice and used to express alienation and political apathy or to justify support of the National Party, became especially popular during the uncertain times facing the Coloured community in the mid-1990s.⁶⁴

The dynamic behind the assertion of a separate Coloured identity and the continuities in its expression identified here have been reinforced by the popular stereotyping of Coloured people. This stereotyping has played an important part in the social construction of Coloured identity within the Coloured community and especially within the dominant society. Because of their marginality, Coloured people have been more vulnerable than most to this form of prejudice. The stereotyping of Coloured people in the popular mind will be explored through the analysis of a well-known joke from the apartheid era that has been making the rounds in South Africa for several decades.

God, Jan van Riebeeck, and the Coloured People: The Anatomy of a South African Joke

The joke in question hinges on the audience’s awareness of the status of Jan van Riebeeck, the commander of the first Dutch settlement established at the Cape in 1652, as the “founding father” of white South Africa. One of the most basic “facts” drummed into children in school history lessons in apartheid South Africa was that van Riebeeck’s landing marked the start of South African history proper and of civilized life in the subcontinent.⁶⁵ Elaborate state-sponsored celebrations of the tercentenary of his arrival at the Cape to establish a victualing station for the Dutch East India Company ensured van Riebeeck a prominent place in apartheid propaganda from the early days of National Party rule.⁶⁶ The presence of van Riebeeck became even more ubiquitous when his image appeared on the obverse side of the currency after South Africa became a republic in 1961. Van Riebeeck was thus not only an icon of white supremacism in South Africa but also an important element in the mythmaking and ideological manipulation used to justify apartheid ideology.

The joke begins by describing a scenario that provokes a Coloured person into hurling racial insults at an African and repudiating him as an inferior being. A typical setting for the joke would be an apartheidera situation in which an African person tries to gain entrance to some facility, such as a movie theater or a public conveyance reserved for Coloured people. In a fashion all too familiar in the apartheid experience, the Coloured protagonist expels the African from the facility and ends a racist diatribe by exclaiming, “No Kaffirs are allowed here!”⁶⁷ The African then counters this tirade with the punch line: “God made the white man, God made the black man, God made the Indian, the Chinese and the Jew—but Jan van Riebeeck, he made the Coloured man.”⁶⁸

This joke, which has taken on a variety of forms, became a wellestablished means of teasing or deriding Coloured people, and the premises on which it is based are understood over a broad spectrum of South African society. Although typical of the apartheid era, the assumptions, images, and values that underlie the joke would nevertheless have resonated with South Africans from all walks of life from at least the late nineteenth century onward. In my experience, it was a very common joke often openly told to and by Coloured people during the apartheid period. Though never acceptable in politically progressive circles, the coming of the “new” South Africa, with its heightened sensitivity to anything that might be deemed racially offensive, has caused the joke to lose much of its appeal; where still in evidence, the joke is mainly restricted to private discourse among people who share a high degree of personal trust.

The van Riebeeck joke harnesses several key features of the racial stereotyping of Coloured people in apartheid South Africa and, indeed, reveals much about the popular concept of Colouredness. The punch line makes sense only if both teller and audience share particular assumptions about Coloured people or, at the very least, acknowledge the existence of a popular image of Coloured people that embodies these characteristics. The joke’s broad appeal is apparent from a local entrepeneur who arranged tours of Cape Town’s black townships for foreign visitors in the late 1980s, kicking off these tours with a version of this story “about old Jan van Riebeeck and his comrades frolicking with the local maidens … giving birth to the ‘colourful folk.’”⁶⁹ Clearly, these assumptions about Coloured people were shared widely enough that even foreigners were able to get the joke.

The exchange of insults between the Coloured and African protagonists in the van Riebeeck joke is set within the context of the racial hierarchy of white supremacist South Africa. The conventional perception of this racial stratification has the ruling white minority on top, the African majority at the bottom, and the Coloured people in between. It is evident from the treatment of the African protagonist that the Coloured person in the joke shares this perception of the social order. In terms of the value system in which the joke operates, Coloured people are accorded a superior status to Africans within the racial hierarchy because they can claim to be partly descended from whites and more closely assimilated to Western bourgeois culture. As the riposte from the African demonstrates, however, the conventional perception of the social order was open to dispute. Although the punch line does not necessarily challenge the dominant status of whites, the African rejects the relatively privileged status of Coloureds by asserting that racial purity trumps genetic proximity to whiteness or assimilation to Western culture.

The punch line of the van Riebeeck joke invokes the most salient characteristic associated with Colouredness in the popular mind, namely, racial hybridity. Through hybridity, the closely allied attributes of racial inferiority and illegitimacy are also assigned to Coloured people as a group. The joke turns on a shared perception between teller and audience of the pejorativeness of racial hybridity and illegitimate conception. Without these associations, the joke would hardly be considered funny.

The attribute of racial hybridity is virtually inherent to the concept of Colouredness in the popular mind and is the most prominent of the array of negative qualities associated with it. Coloured people are generally considered to be of “mixed race” or, less flatteringly, to be a “half-caste” or even a “bastard” people, with racial mixture viewed as their defining characteristic. The idea of racial hybridity has been so intrinsic to the concept of Colouredness that even an ultra-left-wing Coloured intellectual such as Kenny Jordaan, a leading member of the Trotskyist Fourth International Organization of South Africa, writing in 1952, accepted that Jan van Riebeeck was the “father of the Cape Coloured people.”⁷⁰ The Torch, the mouthpiece of the Non-European Unity Movement—the most prominent of the Marxist liberation organizations to gain support within the Coloured community—also accepted that the Coloured people “arose as a result of the glandular carelessness of van Riebeeck and his men.”⁷¹ For evidence that the perception of Colouredness as the automatic product of miscegenation has survived into the “new” South Africa among people regarded as politically progressive, one could point to Tokyo Sexwale, the former Gauteng premier who is married to a white woman and has described his children as Coloured;⁷² similarly, the novelist Achmat Dangor declared that “in my own case, I’m so bastardized I can only call myself Coloured.”⁷³

If racial hybridity is the defining attribute associated with Colouredness in the popular mind, then the idea that Colouredness is an inherent racial condition that results automatically from miscegenation between black and white people is the fundamental misconception associated with the identity. In popular thinking, Colouredness is not treated as a social identity but tends to be reified into a cluster of innate qualities that spontaneously and inexorably are assumed to manifest themselves in the offspring of black-white sexual intercourse. As with another version of the joke, which dates the genesis of the Coloured people at nine months after the landing of van Riebeeck’s party,⁷⁴ the popular mind looks back to primal acts of interracial sex rather than processes of social interaction and identity formation in nineteenth-century southern African society for the making of Coloured identity. Thus, no matter how “respectable” a Coloured person may have become or what his or her level of personal achievement is, the taint of that original sin has persisted in racial thinking that remains entrenched in the broader South African society.

Indeed, the risqué element of the van Riebeeck joke is derived from the image of the Coloured people having been conceived through illicit sexual intercourse immediately on the landing of the first Dutch colonists. Implicit in most people’s understanding of the joke is what “Coloured” novelist Zoë Wicomb referred to as “the nasty, unspoken question of concupiscence that haunts coloured identity.”⁷⁵ This racially attributed trait is not nearly as unmentionable as Wicomb’s comment might suggest—except perhaps in genteel company, especially within “respectable” sectors of the Coloured community itself—as the widely recognized stereotype of the goffel confirms. Goffel is a highly pejorative term that generally refers to working-class Coloured women and characterizes them as socially inferior, usually physically unattractive, but sexually available.⁷⁶ Zimitri Erasmus attested that for her, “being Coloured is about living an identity that is clouded in sexualized shame.”⁷⁷ There can be little doubt that for most people, the van Riebeeck joke is enhanced by tacit assumptions about Coloured females’ lasciviousness or the ease with which they may be sexually exploited.

Throughout Western society and probably more so in South Africa, racial hybridity has carried a heavy stigma, with ideas of miscegenation and “mixed blood” conjuring up a host of repugnant connotations for most people. Negative attitudes toward “hybridization” as opposed to “purity of breed” are well entrenched in modern popular culture, whether applied to livestock, household pets, or humans.⁷⁸ Writing at the end of the 1930s, historian J. S. Marais confirmed that “this philosophy of blood and race … leads to a passionate aversion to miscegenation … which is the primary article of faith of the South African nation.”⁷⁹ In South Africa, these attitudes found concrete expression in the notorious Mixed Marriages and Immorality Acts.⁸⁰ This kind of prejudice was still very much in evidence in the latter phases of white rule. Take, for example, the way Maria van Niekerk, a conservative white South African woman, expressed her horror at the repeal of the Mixed Marriages Act in 1985. Van Niekerk claimed that she “did not stand for bastardizing our land” and that she wanted South Africa “to be pure white, pure Indian, pure blacks [sic] and the Coloureds must be proud of what they are now.”⁸¹ This repugnance is a product of the commonly held belief that miscegenation of necessity pollutes the resulting offspring and renders them inferior. Although archconservative Andries Treurnicht’s claim that “Coloureds are our 12-year-old children and must remain under our guardianship” is at the extreme end of the spectrum of racist opinion,⁸² there was a general acceptance among whites that Coloured people were intellectually and morally inferior, to varying degrees, as a result of their miscegenated origins.⁸³

As the van Riebeeck joke illustrates, Africans broadly shared these negative perceptions of racial hybridity and therefore of Coloured people. The Xhosa-derived Afrikaans colloquialism malau, a pejorative reference to Coloured people signifying a supposed lack of cultural or racial integrity and suggesting that they are thus rootless and uncouth, is a clear indication of this.⁸⁴ Sol Plaatje, in a telling if exaggerated example, gave expression to these negative perceptions of racial hybridity among Africans in his novel Mhudi, which had been written between 1917 and 1920 but was published only in 1930 and is generally accepted as the first South African novel in English by an African writer. In a speech to rally the defeated and dispirited Ndebele people, Mzilikazi is made to denounce the alliance between Bechuana and Boer ranged against him. He predicts that after betraying and subjugating the Bechuana, the Boers “shall take Bechuana women to wife and, with them, breed a race half man and half goblin, and … these Bechuana will waste away in helpless fury till the gnome offspring of such miscegenation rise up against their cruel sires.”⁸⁵ The poignant story of Thuli Nhlapo, who endured a life of ridicule and rejection by both her family and the wider community that taunted her as “boesman” (bushman) and “this yellow thing” because she was the “love child” of an African mother and a white father, provides an intimate insight into the torment that can result from the odium that is often attached to racial hybridity in African society.⁸⁶ “Coloured” academic Roy du Pre summed up a common attitude among Africans toward Coloured people: “Africans despise Coloured people in general. They [look] upon them as ‘mixed-breeds’ with no nationhood, no identity, no land, no culture. The African, on the other hand, is a proud, full-blooded, ‘pure-breed’ with a history, culture and identity going back centuries.”⁸⁷

In keeping with the social Darwinist and eugenicist assumptions that have thoroughly permeated South African racial thinking at the popular level, it has generally been assumed that miscegenation breeds weakness. This was predicated on the notion that the progeny of racially mixed sexual unions tend to exhibit the combined or even exaggerated weaknesses of their progenitors and for the positive qualities to be diluted or lost altogether. Indeed, many of the racial traits attributed to Coloured people have often been explained in terms of the deleterious effects of racial mixture. Allegedly inherent characteristics of Coloured people—such as being physically stunted, lacking in endurance, and naturally prone to dishonesty, licentiousness, and drink—have often been explained or justified in terms of the effects of racial mixture or of gebastenheid (bastardization), resulting in physical and moral weakness.⁸⁸ In my experience, it was not uncommon to find both serious and tongue-in-cheek explanations suggesting that Coloured people are morally weak, confused, and vacillating by nature because their white “blood” pulls them in one direction and their black “blood” pulls them in another.⁸⁹

Popular assumptions about the racial hybridity of the Coloured community are based on the premise that miscegenation gives rise to offspring that are related but nevertheless racially distinct from their parents.⁹⁰ In this way, from the very start of Dutch colonization, sexual relations between European male settlers, on the one hand, and Khoi and slave women, on the other, were thought to have given birth to a distinct racial entity, the Coloured people. This much is apparent from the way the joke employs Jan van Riebeeck as the symbolic father of the Coloured people and the alternative version of the joke dates the origin of the Coloured people at nine months after the landing of van Riebeeck.⁹¹ The common characterization of Coloured people as “mixed-race”—which presupposes the prior existence of “pure races” and their “mixture” to be unnatural and undesirable or even pathological—demonstrates an unreflective popular acceptance of Coloured people as both different and inferior.⁹²

In popular thinking and in a great deal of academic writing as well,⁹³ there is very little if any recognition of the necessary historical reality that Coloured identity arose as a result of social change and human agency rather than simply being an automatic product of miscegenation. Indeed, the assertion of a separate Coloured identity in the late nineteenth century proved to be a highly successful strategy precisely because it utilized those very ideas and assumptions of racial difference and hybridity on which the doctrine of white supremacy rested. The key assumption in this respect was that humanity consisted of a hierarchy of races in which status was determined by the degree to which a particular group conformed to the somatic and cultural norms of Western Europe.⁹⁴ Being able to assert partial descent from European settlers was thus essential to Coloureds being able to justify, and receiving, favored treatment relative to Africans.

The claim to kinship with whites was, as noted before, a double-edged sword for members of the Coloured community. Although it allowed them to argue for a status of relative privilege, it also meant accepting racial hybridity as an integral part of their being. For the white establishment, there was, of course, no question that such kin-ship could be the basis for a claim to equality. For some, however, kin-ship underpinned attitudes of paternalism. For example, Jan Boland Coetzee, a former rugby hero who gained a reputation for progressive labor practices on his farm in the 1980s, believed that his “Coloured labourers were like children … didn’t know what was good for them, only wanted their daily dop (tot) of wine.”⁹⁵ But when asked whether Afrikaners were different from Coloureds, he replied, “We made them,” evading the question but acknowledging paternity as well as a degree of responsibility toward Coloured people.⁹⁶ For others, the claim to kinship was embarrassing and even threatening, as demonstrated by the story of Mrs. C. S., a Coloured woman who was born on a farm in Swellendam in 1922 and lived in a Windermere squatter camp on the outskirts of Cape Town in the 1950s. Employed on a white-owned farm as a young girl, she rejected the claim of the farmer and his wife that Coloureds were different from and inferior to whites. Resorting to the van Riebeeck mythology, she countered, “The blood is then the same, there is not a white blood or a black blood or a brown blood … from Jan van Riebeeck’s time he mated with the brown people and the whites with the brown people.” Both as a form of denial and as a reinforcement of master-servant relationships, the farmer dragged her into his garage and gave her a thrashing for her insolence.⁹⁷

It is through the misconception about their racial hybridity that the stigma of illegitimacy has also been imputed to Coloured people. In terms of popular thinking, Coloured people originated largely from black-white sexual unions outside of wedlock. There is an enduring myth that they resulted from prostitution and casual sex between slave and Khoisan women and passing soldiers, sailors, and white riffraff.⁹⁸ Cedric Dover’s memorable description of the “half-caste” in Western literature—“His father is a blackguard, his mother is a whore”—suggests that it is not a peculiarly South African perception that miscegenation tends to be a failing of the lowest elements of society.⁹⁹ These associations have contributed to the perception that Coloured people lack a proper heritage or pedigree, for, as Hombi Ntshoko, an African woman from Langa, maintained, “Coloureds don’t know where they come from. We know where we come from. Whites know where they come from.”¹⁰⁰ Winnie Mandela’s comment in 1991 that the Coloured people came about as a result of white men raping black women demonstrates that the idea that the Coloured community originated from extramarital unions across the color line is not only current among white racists but also broadly accepted in South African society.¹⁰¹ Despite coming from an ideological position diametrically opposed to that of white racism and meant as a rebuke to white maledom, Mandela’s remark reveals a similar misunderstanding regarding the nature and origin of Coloured identity.

Perceived to have originated largely from illicit sexual relations, the Coloured community as a whole has also been indelibly stained by the mark of illegitimacy. The idea that at their very genesis, the Coloured people had been conceived in “sin” contributes to the notion among racists that Coloureds are somehow defective and form a special breed of lesser beings—God’s stepchildren, as Sarah Gertrude Millin vividly put it.¹⁰² This is also apparent from the way the punch line of the van Riebeeck joke sets Coloured people apart from the rest of humanity. This outlook is, furthermore, reflected in jokes that depict Coloured people as the unintended consequence of the devil’s hapless attempts at imitating God’s creation of humanity. In these jokes, the devil’s creations turn out to be brown and not white, and when placed on earth, they walk off singing, dancing, and drinking wine.¹⁰³ A variant on this joke has God baking figures of clay that come to life when placed on earth. Every now and then, God is heard to exclaim in frustration, “Damn, I burnt another one!” before tossing the figure into Africa. Depending on the degree of scorching, the damaged figures would turn out to be either Coloured or African and exhibit behavior appropriate to their respective racial stereotypes.

To evoke laughter, the punch line of the van Riebeeck joke draws mainly on a shared perception between teller and audience that both racial hybridity and illegitimacy are humiliating and shameful. It is clear that for people to react spontaneously to this joke, the images, values, and assumptions about Colouredness that are evoked have to be part and parcel of their waking consciousness and instantaneously accessible to their minds, given the appropriate cues. The joke, however, goes beyond the imputed traits of hybridization and illegitimacy and draws on other aspects of Coloured stereotyping for embellishment.

Although not raised directly by the joke, the implicit question of who van Riebeeck and his merry band’s sexual partners were evokes the popular association of Coloured people with the Khoisan and hence with a “savage” past. Whereas the Coloured protagonist in the van Riebeeck joke might put much store by his or her partial European descent and assimilation to Western culture, both teller and audience are nevertheless likely to be mindful of the Khoisan heritage associated with Colouredness.

In the popular mind, the association is an extremely derogatory one. This much is evident from the terms Boesman (Bushman or San) and Hotnot (Hottentot or Khoikhoi) being among the most opprobrious of racial slurs that can be hurled at Coloured people. The contractions Hottie, Bushy, or Boesie are also sometimes used.¹⁰⁴ The extreme derogation of these words lies in the images of physical ugliness, repulsive social practices, and mental and social inferiority they conjure up. In 1919, a correspondent to the S. A. Clarion, a newspaper aimed at a Coloured readership, remarked that “one would have a quarrel on one’s hands if one addressed a coloured in a Cape Town street as Hot-not even if that person had three-quarters Hotnot blood in his veins.”¹⁰⁵ Gerald Stone’s description of the meaning of Boesman in the lexicon of working-class Coloured people more than half a century later is “a seriously insulting reference to coloured person, denoting putatively San features: sparse peppercorn hair, flat nose, wizened face, dry yellow skin, steatopygic posture, small stature: connoting insignificance, ugliness, poverty, vagrancy, treachery.”¹⁰⁶ From my experience of the way in which the term has been used by out-groups to describe Coloured people, moral and intellectual inferiority should be added to this list. Generations of South Africans, both black and white, have had negative stereotypes of “Bushmen” and “Hottentots” instilled into them, especially during school history lessons.¹⁰⁷ Indicative of the deep opprobrium and emotive associations attached to these terms, a riot was sparked in the sleepy west coast town of Laaiplek in 1987 when a local white resident called one of the Coloured townsmen a “Hotnot.”¹⁰⁸

In popular discourse, the Khoisan origins of Coloured people are often used to explain racial traits ascribed to them. Negative characteristics attributed to the Khoisan have thus been projected onto the Coloured grouping as a whole, invoking images of inveterate laziness, irresponsibility, dirtiness, and a penchant for thievery, all of which are often assumed to have been inherited by Coloured people from their Khoisan ancestors. This much is apparent from another popular joke that sometimes also served as an utterance of frustration, especially among employers, at the alleged waywardness of Coloured employees—“You can take the Coloured out of the bush but you cannot take the bush out of the Coloured”—or alternatively and more to the point—“You can take the Coloured out of the bush, man, but you cannot take the Bushman out of the Coloured.”¹⁰⁹

It is worth noting that although Coloured people have been strongly associated with their Khoisan progenitors, the identification with a slave heritage has been tenuous. There are two basic reasons for this. First, the Cape Colony, unlike most New World slave societies, did not develop a vigorous slave culture, largely because of the atomized pattern of slaveholding, the extreme ethnic diversity of the slave population, and the high death rate among importees.¹¹⁰ Since slaves were thus, by and large, not able to transmit a coherent body of learned behavior and communal experience from one generation to the next, an identifiably slave culture remained weak and attenuated at the Cape.¹¹¹ Therefore, the conscious identification with a slave past did not survive much beyond the lives of the freed slaves themselves. Second, because slaves were defined in terms of their legal status, their descendants were able to escape the stigma of slave ancestry fairly easily after emancipation. In popular consciousness, vague connotations of a servile past have been attached to Coloured identity, for example, through the annual reminder of the Coon Carnival and the use of the pejorative label Gam (Ham) to describe working-class Coloured people.¹¹²

Coloured people, however, could not so easily avoid being associated with the Khoisan because the defining characteristics, in this instance, were racially attributed and genetically transmitted physical traits. Many Coloured people have had little choice but to live with physical traits that have served as markers of the Khoisan physical type, as indicated by the colloquialisms boesman korrels (Bushman corns or tufts) and Hotnot holle, vernacular Afrikaans for steatopygia. The nicknames Boesman or Hotnot for people who display what are taken to be typical Khoisan physical features have also been fairly common within the Coloured working class.¹¹³ Although these nicknames could signify endearment or be ironic and self-deprecating,¹¹⁴ they are generally derogatory and are an indication that white racist values have, to a considerable degree, been internalized by those Coloured people who use them.

The van Riebeeck joke also draws on the marginality of the Coloured community for heightened effect. Whites are represented by a proactive and familiar figure symbolic of white supremacy, but in the supposed making of the Coloured people, their black ancestors remain essentially faceless and passive. There has been an abiding perception that Coloured people played little or no constructive part in the making of South African society and thus do not deserve the recognition of historical personalities beyond what is necessary for whites to make sense of their own history. This is very much part of the depersonalization that is almost universally present in the way that dominant groups perceive those whom they dominate.

Coloured marginality is evoked in a second and more subtle way by the joke. In human interaction, one of the psychosocial functions of humor is to demonstrate and affirm power. Jokes therefore often seek to humiliate and demean or depend on vituperation to raise a laugh, as the international examples of “Paddy” jokes or blonde jokes and local examples of “Gammatjie and Abdoltjie” or “Raj” jokes demonstrate.¹¹⁵ Thus, those who considered themselves superior to Coloureds were likely to have found the joke all the funnier because it reinforced their conceit that they were able to laugh at Coloured people with impunity. However, Coloured people who laughed at it—and in my experience, many more Coloured people laughed at the joke than took offense—confirmed their marginality by acquiescing in their own denigration.

Yet the targets of demeaning humor are not entirely powerless because humor can, of course, also be harnessed for retaliation. This would explain the immense popularity of “van der Merwe” jokes among Coloured people during the apartheid era. The “stupid and uncultured Afrikaner” stereotype represented by van der Merwe provided the perfect foil for Coloured people to assert their worth as human beings and to hit back at those whom they regarded as the most rabidly racist and their main oppressors.

The popularity of the van Riebeeck joke has waned in recent years. The amelioration of interblack political divisions in the post-1976 environment, the growth of a mass, nonracial democratic movement during the 1980s, and the dawning of the “new South Africa” have progressively made the values and sentiments embodied in the joke less acceptable in public discourse. The growing rejection of Coloured identity by politicized Coloureds from the mid-1970s onward meant that crude racist thinking of the sort embodied in this joke became unacceptable to a widening constituency of people. By the late 1980s, even the likes of the Reverend Allan Hendrickse, the leader of the collaborationist Labour Party, at times rejected Coloured identity. In a heated moment in parliament, for example, he lashed out at the National Party: “God made me a man, the National Party made me a Coloured man.”¹¹⁶

Although the image of van Riebeeck is far less pervasive than it was in the “old South Africa,” it has nevertheless remained a powerful symbol of white supremacism in the new millennium.¹¹⁷ Bizarre confirmation of this occurred at a formal dinner on 31 October 2000, organized by a local black economic empowerment company to celebrate Cape Town’s cultural diversity and to promote racial tolerance. At the dinner, held in the banquet hall of the Castle in Cape Town, one of the guests, Priscilla De Wet-Fox, who claims to be the headperson of the Chainnoquia Khoi-Khoi tribe of the Oudtshoorn region, heckled speakers and subjected the gathering to a tirade about the colonial oppression of the Khoi. On being escorted out of the function, she attacked a bronze bust of van Riebeeck in the foyer, damaging it and causing its eyes to pop out when she pushed it off its pedestal. De Wet-Fox later justified her actions by saying that “van Riebeeck lied to my ancestors” and that he was a symbol of European colonialism that had made her feel “ashamed of being me, of looking like me.”¹¹⁸

Humor is intrinsic to human interaction and forms an integral part of popular culture. For these reasons, jokes disclose much about the societies and communities in which they become current. Because people reveal their values, aspirations, fears, hatreds, and most other aspects of their social experience through humor, jokes—especially the more enduring and popular ones—are authentic reflections of the perceptions, attitudes, and mores of the societies in which they circulate and are often more reliable indicators of popular thinking than the conventional sources used by historians and social analysts.¹¹⁹ This authenticity is guaranteed to the extent that jokes not only have to resonate with the values, sensibilities, and experiences of their target audiences to survive but also have to make sense instantaneously to elicit the appropriate response.

The van Riebeeck joke, by any yardstick, provides an accurate and dependable gauge of popular attitudes toward Coloured people during the apartheid era. At the core of its success and longevity as a joke lie the popular assumptions that Colouredness is an automatic product of miscegenation and that racial hybridity, together with its associations of illegitimacy and racial inferiority, are shameful and therefore open to ridicule. The joke also indirectly draws on a wide range of derogatory imagery about the Khoisan, the marginality of the Coloured people, and the racially attributed trait of their profligacy for embellishment. That most Coloured poeple were able to laugh at this ribbing and accept Jan van Riebeeck as the “father” of the Coloured people is a measure of just how hegemonic the racist ideas and assumptions behind the joke were in apartheid South Africa. The evidence indicates that this mindset has been slow to change in the postapartheid period, despite the dictates of political correctness that now govern South African public life.

This overview of Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured people in white-ruled South Africa has provided insight into the way Coloureds viewed themselves, their community, and its place in the broader society. It has elucidated the dynamic behind the expression of a separate Coloured identity, highlighting continuities in processes of Coloured self-definition. This analysis has identified their assimilationism, their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, the negative associations attached to the identity, and their marginality as core elements of Coloured identity and demonstrated how they meshed to reproduce and stabilize that identity through the twentieth century. In addition, the role of popular stereotyping in the social construction of Coloured identity has been explored, explaining how associations of hybridity, illegitimacy, Khoisan primitiveness, and marginality converged in reinforcing and reproducing the racial typecasting of Coloured people. These themes are elaborated on in the following chapter, which investigates the ways in which Coloured people viewed their history and how interpretations of this history changed over time.