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History from the Margins

Changing Perceptions of Its Past within the Coloured Community

The marginality of the Coloured community is reflected in South African historiography in that relatively little has been written on the history of this social group and much of what has been written is polemical, speculative, poorly researched, or heavily biased. In many general histories, Coloured people have effectively been written out of the narrative and marginalized to a few throwaway comments scattered through the text.¹ In addition, only a handful of works on the subject have been written by Coloured people themselves. As early as 1913, Harold Cressy, a Coloured educator and school principal, decried this state of affairs when he urged the Coloured teaching profession to help build self-confidence and pride in the community by dispelling the myth that Coloured people played little part in the history of their country.² Les Switzer, historian and professor of communication at the University of Houston, summed up the situation eloquently in 1995 when he wrote that “South Africa’s coloured community has remained a marginalized community—marginalized by history and even historians.”³

This chapter charts changing approaches to Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured people within that community itself by analyzing popular perceptions of this past as well as the writing of Coloured intellectuals on the subject. Both popular beliefs and intellectual discourse about the nature of Colouredness and its history played an important part in defining the identity and creating a sense of community among its bearers. In addition to epitomizing the thinking within sectors of the community, the texts chosen for analysis also reflect the social and political currents of the time. Importantly, they lay bare ideological contestation around the meaning of Colouredness and strategies for social and political action.

Contending Historiographical Paradigms

Historical writing on the Coloured community, both that of a popular nature and that emanating from the academy in the era of white supremacy, can be divided into three broad classes. The first, which may be termed the essentialist school, is by far the most common approach and coincides with the popular view of Coloured identity as a product of miscegenation going back to the earliest days of European settlement at the Cape. According to this approach, racial hybridity is considered the essence of Colouredness. For essentialists, there is usually no need to explain the nature or existence of Coloured identity because it is part of an assumed reality that sees South African society as consisting of distinct races, of which the Coloured people is one. The existence of Coloured identity poses no analytical problem because it is regarded as having developed naturally and self-evidently as a result of miscegenation.⁴ This approach is inherently racialized because it assigns racial origins and racial characteristics to the concept of Colouredness, though it has to be recognized that not all writing within this category is necessarily racist. Indeed, a good deal of it, including some of the best writing in this genre, was intended to help break down racial barriers and expose the injustices suffered by Coloured people under the South African racial system.⁵ Because the essentialist approach embodies the conventional wisdom about Coloured identity, virtually all of the popular writing and most of the older and more conservative academic works are cast in this mold.⁶

A second approach to the history of the Coloured people emerged in the 1980s in reaction to the prejudicial assumptions of the traditional mode of analysis and a desire among scholars within the “liberal” and “radical” paradigms of South African history to distance themselves from any form of racist thinking. This school, whose adherents will be referred to as the instrumentalists, regarded Coloured identity as an artificial concept imposed by the white supremacist state and ruling groups on a weak and vulnerable sector of the population.⁷ Positions in this respect range from seeing Coloured identity simply as a device for excluding people of mixed race from the dominant society to viewing it as a product of deliberate divide-and-rule strategies by the ruling white minority to prevent black South Africans from forming a united front against racism and exploitation.⁸ The instrumentalist approach was grounded in the growing rejection of Coloured identity that gained impetus from the latter half of the 1970s onward and was buttressed by the nonracism of the mass democratic movement of the 1980s. This approach represented the politically correct view of the post-Soweto era and stemmed from a refusal to give credence to apartheid thinking or, in the case of the expedient, from a fear of being accused of doing so.⁹

A third paradigm, to which this study subscribes and which may be dubbed social constructionism, emerged from the latter half of the 1980s in response to the inadequacies of both the essentialist and instrumentalist approaches. It criticizes both those approaches for their tendency to accept Coloured identity as given and to portray it as fixed. Their reification of the identity, it is argued, fails to recognize fluidities in processes of Coloured self-identification or ambiguities in the expression of the identity. In essentialist histories, this is a product of a profoundly Eurocentric perspective and a reliance on the simplistic formulations of popular racialized conceptions of Coloured identity. The problem in instrumentalist writing partly stems from a narrow focus on Coloured protest politics and the social injustices suffered by the community, which has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance of Coloured people to white supremacism and playing down their accommodation with the South African racial system. The overall result has been an oversimplification of the phenomenon in this literature.¹⁰

The cardinal sin of both these schools, however, is their condescension in denying Coloured people a significant role in the making of their own identity. Essentialist interpretations do this by assuming Colouredness to be an inbred quality that arises automatically from miscegenation. Instrumentalists share the essentialist premise that Coloured identity is something negative and undesirable, but they try to blame it on the racism of the ruling white minority. Though they may have had the laudable intention of countering the racism of essentialist accounts, instrumentalist histories have nevertheless contributed to the marginalization of the Coloured people by denying them their role in the basic cognitive function of creating and reproducing their own social identities. Even the best of these histories, Gavin Lewis’s Between the Wire and the Wall, despite its firm focus on the Coloured people themselves and its stress on their agency in the political arena, is nevertheless condescending by suggesting that “the solution to this dilemma [of defining Coloured identity] is to accept Coloured identity as a white-imposed categorization.”¹¹ Both approaches treat Coloured identity as something exceptional, failing to recognize it for what it is—a historically specific social construction, like any other social identity. In this respect, both schools reflect the undue influence of contemporary ideological and political considerations.

The main concerns of the social constructionist approach have therefore been to demonstrate the complexity of Coloured identity and, most important, to stress the agency of Coloured people in the making of their own identity. Emphasis has also been placed on the ways in which ambiguities in Coloureds’ identity and their marginality influenced their social experience and political consciousness. This approach also seeks to demonstrate that far from being the anonymous, inert entities of the essentialist school or the righteous resisters of instrumentalist histories, Coloured people exhibited a much more complex reaction to white supremacism that encompassed resistance as well as collaboration, protest as well as accommodation. By its very nature, social identity is largely and in the first instance the product of its bearers and can no more be imposed on people by the state or ruling groups than it can spring automatically from miscegenation or their racial constitution. Social identity is cultural in nature in that it is part of learned behavior and is molded by social experience and social interaction. At most, social identities can be manipulated by outsiders—but even then, only to the extent that it resonates strongly with the bearers’ image of themselves and their social group as a whole.

Up from Servitude and Savagery: Earlier Perspectives on Coloured History

Within the broader category of essentialist writing, it is possible to distinguish three further divisions. First, there are those I refer to as traditionalists, who analyze Coloured identity and history in terms of the racist values and assumptions prevalent in white supremacist thinking. Second, there are the liberal essentialists, who dissent from the dominant racist view and seek to demonstrate that cooperation and interdependence rather than racial antagonism marked historical interaction between South Africa’s various peoples.¹² The third distinct strand within the essentialist school might be termed the progressionist interpretation of Coloured history, and for the greater part of the twentieth century, this interpretation represented the conventional view of members of the Coloured community regarding their own history. Until challenged by ideas emanating from a Marxist-inspired radical movement during the 1940s and 1950s, the progressionist version reigned supreme within the better-educated and politicized sector of this group. This approach was progressionist in that it was based on the assumption that human society and, with it, the Coloured people were on a path of inevitable progress to a future of peace, prosperity, and social harmony.¹³

In essence, the progressionist perspective wove together an affirmative view of Coloured history with key elements from the traditionalist and liberal strands. This interpretation thus accepted the racist view that Coloured people formed a separate “race” and were socially and culturally “backward” by Western standards but stressed their common history and cultural affinities with whites while strongly emphasizing that theirs was a history that demonstrated a hunger for personal development and the achievement of social advancement against enormous odds. The progressionist interpretation was not so much an alternative to the white supremacist version as an acceptance of it in broad outline but with major qualifications. It reinterpreted crucial aspects of the dominant society’s version to give it a positive spin and an optimistic outlook for the future. For the Coloured people themselves, the critical difference between their progressionist visions of their history and those of the traditional genre of white South Africa was that, even though they admitted they were “backward,” they did not accept their inferiority as permanent or inherent. Combining an environmentalist concept of racial difference with liberal values of personal freedom, equality in the eyes of the law, interracial cooperation, and status based on individual merit, progressionists argued that the history of the Coloured people demonstrated that they were well advanced in the process of becoming as fully “civilized” as whites and thus deserved to be accepted into the dominant society. Espoused publicly by organic intellectuals and political leaders within the Coloured community, this interpretation was usually coupled with a plea for fair treatment or the preservation of their status of relative privilege within the South African racial hierarchy.

Although there was no attempt from members of the Coloured community to produce any formal or systematic account of their history until the latter half of the 1930s, educated and politicized Coloured people nevertheless exhibited a clear sense of the trajectory of their history as a community. This much is evident from Harold Cressy’s 1913 exhortation to his colleagues to raise the profile of the community’s history. During the earlier part of the twentieth century, this historical consciousness, though it had not yet been formalized as written history, was implicit in discourse about Coloured people as a community, including their political ideals and social aspirations. This consciousness, usually expressed in terms of a common oppression dating back to slavery and the dispossession of the Khoisan, informed the endeavors of Coloured communal organizations and can be deduced piecemeal from a range of evidence in which Coloured people reflected on their community and its place in South African society. This sense of shared history was expressed not so much as an interest in the past for its own sake but as a means to justify social and political demands and support strategies for communal advancement. Abdullah Abdurahman’s presidential addresses to the 1909, 1923, and 1939 APO conferences are good examples of the progressionist interpretation of Coloured history harnessed to support particular social or political agendas.¹⁴

This popular perception of Coloured history looked back to the period of Dutch colonial rule as a dark night of slavery, savagery, and serfdom during which the Coloured people came into being as a result of miscegenation. In 1923, Abdurahman described the Dutch policy of conciliatie (conciliation) as having “always meant, for the Coloured races, the acceptance of servitude.” It was the introduction of liberal policies under British rule and the endeavors of missionaries on their behalf that was seen to mark the start of the Coloured people’s ascent from servile and brutish origins into the light of civilization. The 1828 repeal of the vagrancy laws that had enserfed the Khoisan and the emancipation of slaves in 1834 were regarded together as the main watershed in the history of the Coloured people because these acts gave them personal freedom and the opportunity to cultivate a communal life. The establishment of the principle of equality in the eyes of the law and the introduction of a nonracial franchise in 1853 were viewed as the other key developments because they bestowed citizenship rights on Coloured people and provided a means for their integration into the mainstream of Cape colonial society. In the words of Abdurahman during his 1939 presidential address to the APO, “The Ordinance [50 of 1828] was the real foundation of the broad political framework of 1852 [sic] within which White and Coloured were joined together by a bond of loyalty as free and equal citizens.” The Coloureds’ assimilation to Western culture and their acquisition of education were presented as proof of their ongoing integration into the civic life of the Cape Colony until unification in 1910, which allowed the triumph of northern racism over southern liberalism, reversed this process. Abdurahman summed up the course of this history in his 1923 presidential address: “Since van Riebeeck’s day there was a period of bitter struggle, then followed a period of comparative tranquility and hopefulness in the Cape … from 1854 to 1910 during which years the Non-European races enjoyed political privileges.” After that, however, “the policy of van Riebeeck has been steadily, vigorously, and relentlessly followed.”¹⁵

The earliest known attempt from within the Coloured community itself to provide an account of the history of the Coloured people is found in a history textbook entitled The Student Teacher’s History Course: For the Use in Coloured Training Colleges, which was published in Paarl by Huguenot Press in 1936 by two relatively junior members of the Coloured teaching profession, Dorothy Hendricks and Christian Viljoen. Hendricks was the daughter of Teachers’ League of South Africa (TLSA) stalwart Fred Hendricks and lectured at the Zonnebloem Training College. The twenty-six-year-old Viljoen, who taught at the Athlone Institute, a Coloured teachers’ training college in Paarl, was to become a leading member of the Teachers’ League, serving on its executive committee in the late 1930s and elected president in 1941.¹⁶ Hendricks, who had bachelor of arts and bachelor of education degrees, and Viljoen, with master of arts and bachelor of education degrees, not only were very highly qualified by the standards of their community at the time but also held some of the most prestigious teaching posts to which Coloured people could aspire.

The textbook followed the history syllabus for training Coloured primary school teachers and provided a broad outline of modern European, British imperial, and South African history from 1652 to the 1930s. Interspersed in the section on the history of South Africa are short subsections on Coloured history, which, if stitched together, would provide a coherent sketch of the history of the Coloured people.¹⁷ Hendricks and Viljoen’s rendition of South African history conformed to white settler views, as one would expect of a textbook diligently following the syllabus set out by the Cape Education Department. Accordingly, the writing on the history of the Coloured community was suffused with the phraseology and assumptions of white supremacist discourse.

The authors largely accepted settler stereotyping of the indigenous peoples, in that they present the “Bushmen” as primitive, dangerous, and essentially unassimilable whereas the “Hottentots” were described as an incorrigibly lazy and thieving people. Slaves were depicted as having adapted well to civilized life under the paternalistic care of colonists and the relatively benign conditions prevalent at the Cape. Hendricks and Viljoen followed the customary line that miscegenation and a limited degree of interracial marriage early on in the life of the Cape Colony gave rise to a “half-breed” population that formed the nucleus of “a new race that was emerging.” They claimed that “this hybrid race, together with pure-blooded slaves and detribalized Hottentots, became known as the Cape Coloured people and gradually developed more and more homogeneity as they became subjected to positive and constructive forces of European society.” According to Hendricks and Viljoen, the emergent Coloured race benefited not only from the civilizing efforts of the colonists but also from “the unconscious influence of example and suggestion which acted with peculiar power upon an imitative and susceptible race.”¹⁸

The authors asserted that with the emancipation of the Khoi in 1828 and then of slaves in 1834, the Coloured people “entered a new era of development … to work out their own salvation, to rise as a class or revert to barbarism.” By 1834, the Coloured people were seen to have come into existence as an identifiable race, for “when emancipation took place they had already developed the physical and psychological characteristics which they today exhibit.” Not able to adapt well to the competitive environment engendered by the mineral revolution, the Coloured people “remained hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Hendricks and Viljoen concluded that they then “gradually began to develop into a distinct community and withdraw to the slums and locations [where] the church continued to take care of them.”¹⁹

In part, this abject complicity in the denigration of their own community was clearly the result of the authors’ need to comply with the syllabus in order for their text to be accepted as a course reader. Although there was only the slightest trace of the progressionist vision in their interpretation, there can be little doubt that Hendricks and Viljoen, being typical members of the moderate faction within Coloured politics, subscribed to this view but were prepared to suppress it for the sake of having the volume approved as a textbook. Their meek conformity with the expectations of the Education Department was also an indication of Coloured marginality, as negotiation with its officials or any form of protest or assertive action on their part would have been futile.²⁰ The only alternative was not to publish at all.

That Hendricks and Viljoen, in line with the progressionist vision, would presumably have believed that the Coloured people were indeed “backward” and had relatively recently emerged from a barbarous past probably helped make their distasteful task a little easier. And at the very least in the case of Hendricks, a personal identification with whiteness and a dissociation from Colouredness played a role. Ralph Bunche, an African American professor of political science at Howard University who spent three months traveling through South Africa toward the end of 1937, reported that the “very fair” Hendricks, “though known to staff [at Zonnebloem] as coloured, has nothing to do with coloured people.”²¹ Although it is not known whether Hendricks and Viljoen’s volume was approved as a textbook or how widely it was used, it is clear that their version of Coloured history was representative of what Coloured teacher trainees were fed and in turn passed on to their pupils.²²

The “Benefit of Their White Blood”: A Late 1930s Progressionist Interpretation

Given the schematic nature of Hendricks and Viljoen’s outline history and the constraint of having to conform to the syllabus, Christian Ziervogel’s Brown South Africa, a slim volume that appeared a mere two years later, deserves recognition as the first history of the Coloured people to have been written by a Coloured person. An autodidact who had worked his way up from humble origins, Ziervogel devoted his energies to the spiritual, cultural, and socioeconomic uplifting of the Coloured community, particularly in District Six, a depressed inner-city area of Cape Town, where he lived. Ziervogel, a noted bibliophile and librarian, had a reputation as one of the leading Coloured intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s and was nicknamed “the Professor of District Six.”²³ In this book, he wrote self-consciously as a Coloured intellectual deliberating on the history and current condition of his community.

Ziervogel was an enigmatic and contradictory figure. On the one hand, he was active in left-wing circles, supporting the National Liberation League and contributing to its journal, The Liberator.²⁴ He confided to Ralph Bunche that he not only had “‘left’ inclinations” but also “hates white people and can’t help it.”²⁵ Yet Brown South Africa as well as his other publications were politically conservative, racist in outlook, and, although critical of white supremacism, nevertheless deferential toward white authority. His work, moreover, contained not the slightest trace of class analysis or radical rhetoric of the sort that would ordinarily have been expected from someone with left-wing sympathies. In tone and content, the book was typical of moderate, assimilationist discourse within the Coloured elite. And in keeping with the moderate political agenda, a key objective of the book was to plead with whites for fair treatment of the Coloured people and to aid their social advancement.

Ziervogel’s use of the term brown in the title signaled his acceptance of popular racialized perceptions of Colouredness. Indeed, he regarded the term coloured to be inaccurate and preferred brown hybrid. His interpretation differed little from white supremacist versions of Coloured history in broad principle except that he wove a strongly progressionist strand into his narrative, arguing that in the case of Coloured people, racial differences should not lead to their exclusion from the dominant society. The contorted logic and profoundly racist assumptions that at times informed Ziervogel’s tract can be gauged from his explanation of why various sections of the Coloured community could be expected to develop at different rates:

The hybrids of South Africa, the coloured people, are in many cases partly descended from English people, and must of necessity have inherited some of the virtues of that race. Hence, though they are comparatively backward at the present time, it is reasonable to suppose that it will not take them nine centuries to reach their ancestors’ high standard of development. Those descended from Asiatics will naturally develop in accordance with the stage of development previously reached by their ancestral race. That is, the people of Indian descent will develop more rapidly than those of Javanese descent, since the former come from a stock where there has been greater enlightenment. On the other hand, the hybrids of Bantu origin cannot be expected to develop as rapidly as others, since the degree of development reached by the Bantu is not equal to that of the Europeans or the Asiatics.

All this was offered despite the author’s declared standpoint that “humanity is greater than race,” that “‘pure races’ are hypothetical … and have no present existence,” and that he rejected the “Nordic Myth” of Aryan superiority.²⁶

Ziervogel’s interpretation of the history of the Coloured people not only typified the progessionist vision but was also the most comprehensive and fully developed example of this paradigm. Its appearance was conveniently timed, coming as it did just as Marxist-inspired views of this history were about to challenge the conventional wisdom. The unifying thread of his none-too-coherent and often rather vague narrative was the persistent struggle of the Coloured people to rise from a benighted past to ever higher levels of civilization, their distinctive characteristic as a people being that they were “constantly responsive” to the “progressive” influence of Western civilization.²⁷

Brown South Africa followed the conventional pattern of having the Coloured people originate as a result of miscegenation during the Dutch colonial period, describing van Riebeeck’s landing as “the beginning of White South Africa, and also of Brown South Africa.” He regarded the emancipation of slaves as pivotal to the emergence of a specifically Coloured identity, although he gave no explanation of how Coloured identity came about; he offered no more than “before and after 1834, the half-castes, Hottentots and slaves were merged together as the Cape Coloured people.” The real significance of emancipation for Ziervogel was that it “released coloured energies for self-improvement and ambition up to then repressed by social injustices.” Their newfound freedom gave the people the incentive to profit from their own efforts and aroused a quest “for education, the acquiring of property and the cultivation of the mind.” And although “mental and spiritual progress” was slow at first, the Coloured people, with the help of sympathetic whites, always managed to find ways to overcome obstacles—not least of which were the legal impediments raised by the colonial government—to their “upward course in the common life of South Africa.”²⁸

Ziervogel depicted Coloured people as well on their way to being integrated into the dominant society on an equal footing with colonists by the mid-nineteenth century, when the “strong rush of the Bantu peoples sweeping downwards from the north, and the European advance upward from the south, meant that the two virile forces came face to face.” The ensuing struggle for supremacy and the growing incorporation of Africans into the South African economy after the discovery of minerals instilled a “fear complex in whites.” The consequent hardening of racial prejudices not only put an end to Coloureds’ integration into the dominant society but also reversed the trend to the extent that in the twentieth century, they fell victim to white South Africa’s segregationist policies.²⁹

The author accepted that the Coloured people were “comparatively backward at the present time” but rejected the view of racists such as Sarah Gertrude Millin who regarded this condition as permanent. He asserted that during nearly three centuries of miscegenation and acculturation, “this half-caste type has evolved into something very like the Southern Europeans.” Despite huge impediments, the Coloured people had made great strides in the last generation and were rapidly catching up with whites. He viewed educated Coloureds as a dynamic, modernizing group fully imbued with the “spirit of civilization” and the most progressive elements of Western culture. He thus resented white perceptions that “the coloured man is only fit to be a messenger or a hawker” and the tendency not to judge Coloured people as individuals but to assume that they were “of an inferior race, whose most striking characteristics are those of lower intelligence, lower knowledge and lower general constitution.” Ziervogel was also frustrated by the indifference of the state and whites in general to the plight of the Coloured working classes living in squalor and the detrimental effect that the civilized labor policy and other discriminatory measures had on their progress as a people.³⁰

Writing in a context of intensifying racial chauvinism internationally and tightening segregationism at home, Ziervogel feared that Coloureds could suffer a fate similar to that of Africans, to the extent of perhaps even finding themselves subject to territorial segregation. He was thus at pains to stress the long history and cultural affinities that Coloured people shared with whites. Although he did not broach the issue directly in Brown South Africa, in his pamphlet The Coloured People and the Race Problem, published two years earlier, he explicitly raised a related question: “On which side of the dividing line is he (the coloured man) to be placed?” Asserting that the two groups were so closely related that it was often difficult to distinguish between Coloured and white individuals, he argued that Coloureds “have practically nothing in common with the Bantu. While the Native is one who is at home in the countryside, has a language of his own, a culture of his own, and lives in many cases under tribal law, the coloured people came into being and live the whole of their lives in the midst of European civilization and culture.”³¹ On this basis, he invoked the call attributed to Lord Selborne, high commissioner for South Africa from 1905 to 1910—“Give the coloured people the benefit of their white blood”—and appealed for “absorption” and not segregation as the solution to the “Coloured problem.”³²

“A Purposeful Social Instrument”: Radical Counter-positions of the 1940s and 1950s

It was fully forty-three years after the publication of Brown South Africa that the next significant book on the history of the Coloured community by a “Coloured” author—Maurice Hommel’s Capricorn Blues—appeared. Meanwhile, during the 1940s and 1950s, the radical movement in Coloured politics developed an interpretation of Coloured history that provided an alternative to the progressionist version.

The elaboration of a contending version of Coloured history was spearheaded by intellectuals within the Trotskyist tradition of radical politics, of which the Non-European Unity Movement and the Fourth International Organization of South Africa (FIOSA) were the main factions during the 1940s.³³ The rival radical tradition, allied to the Communist Party and later the Congress Movement, made little contribution to the fleshing out of this new interpretation. With its emphasis on political activism, the Communist Party faction appears to have been too caught up in the cut and thrust of day-to-day politicking to pay too much attention to polemics about the significance of history and debate over the implications of South Africa’s past for current and future revolutionary strategy. Coloured political activists in the Trotskyist tradition were prone to a more cerebral and highly theorized approach and the precept expressed by FIOSA member Kenneth Jordaan: “In history [lies] the key to understanding the present which in turn is the indispensable guide to the future.”³⁴

Like its progressionist counterpart, the radical view of the trajectory of Coloured history was implicit in the ideology and aspirations of the left-wing movement as well as in its political strategy. In addition, this historical consciousness was sometimes invoked for political purposes, such as arguing that black unity was a prerequisite for overthrowing white rule in South Africa, or to score points off opponents in ideological infighting. The best example of such an exchange involving the history of the Coloured people is Kenny Jordaan’s riposte to Willem van Schoor’s history of segregation in South Africa.³⁵ Besides wanting to refine the relatively crude analysis of van Schoor, Jordaan was also clearly engaged in a contest of one-upmanship between FIOSA and the NEUM, of which van Schoor, president of the TLSA for much of the 1950s, was a leading member.

This radical discourse, however, differed from the progressionist interpretation in that little attention was paid, directly or exclusively, to the history of the Coloured people per se, and it did not find expression in a focused history in the way the progressionist view was represented in Brown South Africa. Drawing on Marxist theory, radical historical analyses were usually situated within a framework of the development of international capitalism and the imperatives behind imperialism. In contrast to the more parochial concerns of the progressionist perspective, social issues tended to be viewed in the context of international relations and global history by radicals.³⁶ And given the radicals’ explicit goal of fomenting social revolution, their reflections on South African society and its history by and large trancended narrower issues relating to localized identities, such as the specific role or significance of the Coloured people on any particular question. Their emphasis on black and working-class unity also discouraged separate consideration of the Coloured community. In the writings of radical Coloured intellectuals, issues relating specifically to the Coloured community were therefore either ignored, subsumed under a broader black rubric, or referred to obliquely or parenthetically. The collective radical perception of the history of the Coloured people thus needs to be unraveled and extracted by inference from broader analyses of the history of South Africa or of the “oppressed.”

Although Coloured radical politics had always been rent by fierce ideological infighting and irreconcilable doctrinal splits, there was sufficient common ground for one to discern a generic radical notion of the history of the Coloured people. The spirit with which Coloured activists in the radical movement, especially the Trotskyist faction, approached history in general and the history of South Africa in particular is neatly summed up in the opening sentence of van Schoor’s address on segregation to the Teachers’ League of South Africa in October 1950 and repeated for emphasis as its closing sentence: “A people desiring to emancipate itself must understand the process of its enslavement.” He went on to explain that “we who have thus far been the victims of South African history, will play the major role in the shaping of a new history. In order to make that history we must understand that history.”³⁷ Radicals would also have shared Edgar Maurice’s view that “the phenomenon of colour prejudice and the colour bar is largely one of capitalist exploitation of peoples … a purposeful social instrument, politically manufactured to serve certain ends.”³⁸ Insofar as it referred to the Coloured people, radical historical writing was framed in these broad terms.

Historical analyses by radical Coloured intellectuals, though recognizing the existence of the Coloured people as a separate social entity, avoided treating them as an analytical category distinct from the African majority. Van Schoor’s monograph on the origin and development of segregation in South Africa, for example, focused almost entirely on the African experience and hardly made any mention of Coloureds or Indians. It is noteworthy that in this review of South African history stretching back to the arrival of van Riebeeck, the first substantive comment by van Schoor on the Coloured people related to the establishment of the Coloured Advisory Council in 1943. He indirectly justified this approach by claiming that Africans formed a large majority of the oppressed and that exploitative measures had largely been directed at them.³⁹

Jordaan criticized this tendency of “placing the Cape Coloured people in the same category as the Bantu” as ahistorical and a distortion of the past.⁴⁰ It should thus come as no surprise that it is in his writing that one finds the most explicit treatment of the history of the Coloured people in radical writing. But even he did not address the history of the Coloured people directly as an independent topic of inquiry. In his disquisition, “Jan van Riebeeck: His Place in South African History,”⁴¹ Jordaan chalked out the barest outline of the history of the Coloured people as a by-product of his analysis of the “social systems” that have characterized South African history and a concomitant attempt to provide a rough periodization of the South African past.⁴² Besides using his analysis to support the call for a boycott of the van Riebeeck tercentenary festival, one of Jordaan’s aims was to correct ahistorical perceptions that the treatment of South African blacks through history could be explained in terms of an abstract, uniform white racism. He wanted to demonstrate that each social system had its own set of policies “toward the black and mixed people,” grounded in their specific “living historical reality which grew out of a definitive stage in the productive process.”⁴³ For all its sketchiness, Jordaan’s text will have to serve as the model for the radical perception of Coloured history in the absence of any more explicit example.

Born in Cape Town in 1924 and a teacher by profession, Kenneth Jordaan was a prominent member of FIOSA in the latter half of the 1940s. Together with a small band of associates who declined to comply with the Fourth International’s recommendation that FIOSA amalgamate with the rival Cape Town Trotskyist grouping, the Worker’s Party of South Africa, Jordaan formed the Forum Club, an independent left-wing discussion group that met during the early 1950s. In the 1950s, Jordaan won broad respect in left-wing circles for a number of theoretical papers he wrote on the nature of South African society, its history, and the implications this held for revolutionary strategy.⁴⁴

The first social system of South African history identified by Jordaan existed during the era of Company rule at the Cape, from 1652 to 1795. He claimed that because the Cape served mainly as a refreshment station and military outpost, the economy was not expansionist and there was no attempt to bring indigenous peoples under direct Dutch control. Because of the colony’s simple social organization and its imperative of consolidating control over the southwestern tip of the continent, Jordaan asserted that “there was no colour policy” and that Cape colonial society “absorbed all mixed elements—the result of miscegenation between whites, blacks and imported slaves.” Jordaan was emphatic about the miscegenated origins of the Coloured people, and he emphasized that they were an integral part of Dutch colonial society: “The father of the Cape Coloured people is therefore van Riebeeck. It is he who, by encouraging mixed unions, called them to life and it is he who, realizing their close affinity to the Dutch, made them an indissoluble and indistinguishable part of the European population.” Although he indicated that substantial numbers of miscegenes passed into the settler community, he did not explain how and why the rest of this supposedly “indistinguishable part of the European population” nevertheless remained separate.⁴⁵

According to Jordaan, the second stage of South Africa’s development, which lasted from 1795 to 1872, was dominated by the ideology of British liberalism. Under this social system, the integration of Coloured people was taken further, in that “all the Coloureds and detribalized Hottentots were assimilated into European society on the basis of complete legal and political equality for all.”⁴⁶ At the same time that black people were being integrated into Cape society, a third social system that implemented a rigid constitutional colour bar coexisted in the Boer republics. Jordaan characterized this system, which he saw as having lasted from 1836 until 1870, as consisting of isolated and isolationist peasant communities.

Then, from 1870, argued Jordaan, “the entire face of South Africa was radically transformed by the discovery of gold and diamonds which heralded the Industrial Revolution.” With the introduction of wage labor and industrial methods of production, the relationship between white and black, employer and employee changed as all preexisting social systems were rapidly eroded and the integration of Coloured people into the dominant society was reversed with the introduction of segregationist policies to facilitate the exploitation of black labor. Jordaan did not pursue this line of inquiry any further, making it clear that his concern in this essay was with preindustrial South African society.⁴⁷

What is most striking when comparing progressionist and radical visions of Coloured history are the similarities they share despite the ideological gulf and a vitriolic mutual antagonism that separated them. First, both accepted the Coloured people as originating from miscegenation during the earliest days of Dutch rule, which is an indication of just how hegemonic white supremacist conceptions of Coloured identity were in South African society. Second, both saw the Coloured people as experiencing a long period of acculturation and incorporation into the dominant society followed by a sudden reversal, leading to twentieth-century segregationism. Though the reasons for, and timing of, the about-face differed, the pattern remained consistent. This period of incorporation was presumably necessary to support the perception that Coloured people were the product of miscegenation and to explain their assimilation to Western culture. Finally, the radical view was also progressionist and even more dogmatically so than its moderate counterpart, in that it followed Marxist doctrine that society would progress through a series of stages culminating in a socialist utopia—only the timing and method of its attainment were in question. Instead of the inner impulse for self-improvement posited by Ziervogel, it was the objective conditions of capitalist development that were seen by radical intellectuals to drive progress.⁴⁸

“Contingent on the Liberation of the African People”: A Novel Approach in the Early 1980s

The views of Jordaan and other radical theorists had a very limited impact on popular consciousness because their ideas were confined to a tiny set of intellectuals within the Coloured elite. But these ideas remained alive within this intelligentsia, even through the quiescent heyday of apartheid, and they were to feed into the climate of resistance that arose from the mid-1970s onward. The views of radical theorists, especially Jordaan’s, would be extremely influential in the writing of Maurice Hommel, who took up their ideas and arguments—even verbatim chunks of their writing, some of it unacknowledged⁴⁹—in Capricorn Blues.

Maurice Hommel was born in 1930 in Uitenhage, South Africa, where he worked as a teacher and journalist. Unable to find suitable employment because of his radical sympathies, he emigrated in 1964. Taking up residence first in Zambia and then in the United States and Canada, Hommel made a living as a journalist and writer, obtaining a doctoral degree in political science from York University, Toronto, in 1978.⁵⁰