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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
REMEMBERING DIFFERENTLY: REPOSITIONED COLOURED IDENTITIES IN A DEMOCRACY
Post-apartheid South Africa has witnessed notable shifts in the scholarly and identitiary treatment of coloured subjectivities. Such shifts challenge earlier hegemonic conceptions of coloured people without necessarily completely dislodging them. These changes in the scholarly and political understandings of what coloured identities mean make sense given the specific prominence that colouredness has taken on in a general revisiting of racial identification and its languaging in a democratic South Africa, and:
A number of scholars of coloured identity in South Africa have suggested that the onset of democracy has permitted the creative and affirmative re-articulation of colouredness as a social identity in ways that were impossible under white supremacist rule. (Strauss 2009: 30)
In this chapter, I argue that such ‘re-articulations’ both challenge and rhyme with postcolonial discursive phenomena from elsewhere. This is especially the case when such shifts are read as mnemonic activity related to slavery, as foregrounded in the theorisation of shame by Zoë Wicomb (1996, 1998), and creolisation by Zimitri Erasmus (2001). The interventions of both Wicomb and Erasmus, key figures in the post-apartheid shifts in understanding constitutions of coloured identities, are analysed below.
In her influential essay ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’, Zoë Wicomb (1998) argues that shame is a constitutive part of coloured identities. This shame infuses historic inscriptions of coloured people with miscegenation, degeneracy and non-belonging. It is this shame which undergirds the absence of a slave memory among coloured people, many of whom are descended from slaves, according to Wicomb. This repression of memory:
presumably has its roots in shame: shame for our origins of slavery, shame for the miscegenation, and shame, as colonial racism became institutionalized, for being black, so that with the help of our European names we have lost all knowledge of our Xhosa, Indonesian, East African or Khoi origins. (Wicomb 1998: 100)
For Wicomb, shame is partly constituted by the historical connections of ‘colouredness’ with degeneracy through associations with ‘miscegenation’ and its internalisation by members of the communities described as such. The additional part is linked to the devaluation of Black bodies and subjectivities under white supremacist periods. Consequently, those who are seen to embody both aspects of ‘inferior’ histories in the form of African ancestry and who are defined through discourses of miscegenation cannot avoid contamination by shame. Because shame attaches to all conditions of humiliation, a past which foregrounds precisely the debasement of the ancestry of coloured people engenders shame. This shame is therefore a response to a series of degrading periods in the past. Shame, however, is a relationship to this historical consciousness. As Wicomb theorises it, it is a collective self-protection from the trauma of slavery and successful colonisation and dispossession. It is ‘easier’ than remembering the complex myriad of collective traumas which precede the present. Wicomb’s shame is a relationship with the past which forecloses on memory.
Coloured definitions are structured in ways that challenge postcolonial perceptions of cultural hybridity as freeing. In the case of the ‘coloured’, Wicomb observes, it is ‘precisely the celebration of inbetweenness that serves conservatism’ (1998: 102–103). This conservative impulse does not only appear in the noticeably problematic guise of ‘racial mixedness’, but is founded on cultural hybridity as well. In other words, when coloured South Africans are historically read as both biologically and culturally hybrid, such framing is conservative since such logic posits the cultural and biological as intertwined. It is in such light that Wicomb distances herself from Bhabha’s (1994) reading of coloured subjectivity as in-between and subversive in his analysis of a South African novel, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story. Wicomb (1998: 102) notes that:
Bhabha speaks of the halfway house of ‘racial and cultural origins that bridges the “inbetween” diasporic origins of the Coloured South African and turns it into the symbol of the disjunctive, displaced everyday life of the liberation struggle’. This link, assumed between colouredness and revolutionary struggle, seems to presuppose a theory of hybridity that relies, after all, on the biological, a notion denied in earlier accounts where Bhabha claims that colonial power with its inherent ambivalence itself produces hybridization.
While postcolonial proponents of hybridity as subversion in the terrain of race see it, after Bhabha, as being able to ‘provide greater scope for strategic manoeuvre’ (Bhabha 1994: 145), and therefore clearly problematise the deployment of hybridisation in the discourses which transcribe ‘miscegenation’, cultural hybridity is not always subjected to the same rigours. Desirée Lewis (2000: 23, emphasis added) suggests that:
[t]he fluidity suggested by hybridization is a feature of all discursively constructed subjects and cultural experiences. In self-consciously disruptive theoretical writing and political practice, however, hybridization becomes a response to fixed positions and binarisms.
Like Wicomb, Lewis warns against the dangerous assumption that social and cultural hybrid forms or declarations are as a given more subversive than discourses centred on ‘miscegenation’. The ‘case of the coloured’ testifies to the textures of these dangers.
Coloured identities are no more stable than other (racial) markers in South Africa in the current dispensation. This is evident in the shifting, sometimes confusing uses of b/Black and C/coloured, ‘coloured’ and so-called coloured. Many who under apartheid rejected the label of ‘coloured’ wholesale, now see possibility for its reclamation in freeing ways (Ruiters 2006, 2009). However, such acceptance and/or reclamation of ‘coloured’ as a form of self-identification is characterised by contestation. That subjects switch back and forth across time between the various labels complicates matters even further (Kadalie 1995: 17). Noting this flexibility, Wicomb (1998: 83–84) writes:
[s]uch adoption of different names at different historical junctures shows perhaps the difficulty which the term ‘coloured’ has in taking on fixed meaning, and as such exemplifies postmodernity in its shifting allegiances, its duplicitous play between the written capitalisation and speech that denies or at least does not reveal the act of renaming – once again the silent inscription of shame.
Here, Wicomb highlights the fluidity of self-identification as coloured ‘undermin[ing] the new narrative of national unity’ whilst showing how ‘different groups created by the old system do not participate equally in the category postcoloniality’ (Wicomb 1998: 94). Consequently, there are shifts in assertions of coloured identities, and mnemonic activity is a part of these turns among groups classified coloured under apartheid, just as there are for some white subjectivities, as demonstrated in the examples I examine in Chapter 3. However, the meanings and implications of shifting registers of self-identification as c/Coloured and/or Black and positioning in relation to slavery diverge.
Groups such as the Kleurling Weerstandsbeweging (KWB) call for self-determination in a separate state for the ‘pure third race’ of Coloureds. The KWB, whose name translates into English as the ‘Coloured Resistance Movement’, echoes the right-wing, white supremacist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), but it also validates the discourses of biologist notions of natural races and the appropriate positions occupied along a clearly delineated hierarchy. For Wicomb, the naming of ‘black bodies that bear the marked pigmentation of miscegenation and the way that relates to culture [is linked to] attempts by coloureds to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame’ (1998: 92). This racial purity is named as ‘Brown’ within KWB discourse in ways that fix it as a ‘third pure race’. It is the stress on the purity of a separate category, here coloured/brown, which forms the central organising principle of this movement. As Michele Ruiters argues, the KWB ‘wish[es] to be involved in mainstream politics yet create[s] identities that partition their constituencies off from the rest of South African society’ (2006: 195). According to Wicomb, this ambiguity is an engagement with shame.
Notably, shame is intractably tied to articulations of coloured identities, but is not limited to them. Wicomb punctuates her discussion of shame with references to other articulations of it in postcolonial (con)texts, such as Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame. There are intersections between the shame she discusses in relation to ‘colouredness’ and its expressions elsewhere; there are also divergences.
In an interview with Wolfgang Binder (1997), David Dabydeen theorises shame through the colonised’s awareness of their rejection by the coloniser and colonising culture. In this context, markers of the colonised’s Otherness become constant reminders which emphasise this rejection. For Dabydeen, this is a condition of the colonised–coloniser relationship which can only be undone when the position of the Other changes. Such unravelling usually accompanies the altered status of the colonised when, for example, corporeal and cultural difference begins to signify differently in the shared society. In a society where the visibility of Otherness serves to confirm the marginality of Black bodies, one of the consequences is an internalisation of this valuation process: shame. Racist humiliation leads to a disavowal of these points of belonging and a pressure to assimilate into the values of the colonising culture. In anti-colonial movements, Otherness is often reclaimed and recast as a site of pride – the antithesis of colonial shame. Although Dabydeen is speaking specifically of the Caribbean and Black British contexts here, this conception is equally valid for other colonial contexts.
Dabydeen’s is a discursive meaning of shame which has clear similarities with Wicomb’s. But, like Rushdie’s, it also highlights variation. In Wicomb’s theorisation, shame permeates general South African society to express a variety of feelings which have nothing to do with shame. Thus, she points to the constant utterance and circulation of the word ‘shame’ in South African-speak which also foregrounds it without addressing or needing to acknowledge it.
Thiven Reddy (2001) argues that colouredness reveals much about the constitution of the racial categories white, Indian and black in South Africa under colonialism, slavery and apartheid. Tracing historic legal constructions of coloured people in the South African Native Affairs Commission Report of 1903–05, as well as the 1950 Population Registration Act, he uncovers how ‘coloured’ often works to contain the ‘residue’ from the other classifications: ‘[t]he enormous emphasis placed on “pure blood” pervades the dominant discourse as well as the all-important assumption that “pure bloodlines” actually did exist in certain “races” ’ (Reddy 2001: 71). Thus, the response of the KWB critiqued by Wicomb above is to distance itself from this debasement because of ‘miscegenation’ through an insistence that brown people be read as racially pure. This political move attempts to intervene in colonialist and apartheid discourses by deploying the tools of that discourse. It does not question the premises through which ‘race’ is evaluated, given meaning and put to use. For the KWB, then, the task is not to undo white supremacist logic, or even to question it. What is focused on is the mere changing of the position of coloured/brown subjects by denying race mixing, and thereby disavowing the discursive history of ‘miscegenation’. It denies ‘mixing’, ‘left-over’, ‘neither-nor’ discourses through an insertion of brown/coloured subjectivity at a new point along the continuum of racial valuation. The apartheid state sought to limit the ambiguities present in legislating who counted as coloured in 1959 by proclaiming that the category would be subdivided into ‘Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian, Chinese, “other Asiatic”, and “Other Coloured” ’ (Reddy 2001: 73). Not only did the ambiguities which remained highlight the absurdities of this classifications system, they also betrayed the anxieties associated with the category ‘coloured’. The KWB effort is an attempt to engage this anxiety by concretising the position of coloured through naming it via a stabilised brownness.
The increased academic scrutiny of colouredness has also been influenced by the multiple frames used to analyse various coloured locations in public discourse. In their analysis of aspects of this public discourse, and with specific reference to voting patterns in the Western Cape in 1994, Zimitri Erasmus and Edgar Pieterse (1999: 167) declare:
we have heard that coloured people voted the way they did because they are white-identified, sharing language and religious affiliation with white voters; because they are racist towards africans and hence voted against the African National Congress (ANC); because they suffer from ‘slave mentality’ … and that this voting behaviour can be explained in terms of NP [National Party] propaganda and the ‘psychological damage’ this has caused in coloured communities who are yet to free themselves ‘from the stranglehold of psychological enslavement’.
The views explored above point to an apparent contradiction in how Black political action is made sense of in contemporary South Africa. For those arguing along the same lines as Erasmus and Pieterse, similar questions are not asked about groups of black South Africans who were never classified coloured, and who cast their votes for political parties which have a history of collaboration with the apartheid state, such as the Inkatha Freedom Party or parties led by former bantustan leaders. Some of the respondents in Ruiters (2006) share such sentiment. They point out that there is no parallel process by which those who vote for the parties headed by previous homeland ‘leaders’ are denied entry into Blackness, or accused of harbouring a similar ‘slave mentality’. Or, at least, where these discussions exist they are less prominent and more dismissive. In relation to the framing of coloured subjectivities, however, as Erasmus and Pieterse note, these are in the majority. Erasmus and Pieterse’s paper is a challenge to these explanations as reductionist and as linked to other limited ways of thinking through coloured identity formation. The latter encompass divergent ways of essentialising colouredness, among them conservative coloured nationalism, discussed by Wicomb in relation to the KWB, and imagining that coloured subjects are overdetermined by racist apartheid naming.
The above criticisms of what is constructed as ‘the coloured vote’ are valid because the very discursive constitution of voting tendencies in this manner is problematic. In other words, the very language used to describe Western Cape voting patterns in the first democratic elections through primarily resorting to constructing something called ‘the coloured vote’ is an oversimplification that itself deserves debunking through attention to the specificities of electoral choices (Hoeane 2004; Ruiters 2006). At the same time, the conflation of ‘coloured’ with ‘Western Cape coloured’ occludes other coloured subjectivities that are constructed differently, both from within and in public discourse. This conflation is explicitly rehearsed by those who discursively construct ‘the coloured vote’, but it is also implicitly endorsed in Erasmus and Pieterse’s (1999) critique. This is done when what happens in the Western Cape is seen to be representative of nationwide coloured subjectivities through the generalisation of Western Cape coloured historical specificities. Subsequent scholarship on aspects of ‘coloured’ identities warns against this overgeneralisation of Western Cape realities and debates (Adhikari 2009; Ruiters 2006).
Erasmus and Pieterse’s paper also raised concerns about the implications of these problems for the larger national democratic project. They call for the important recognition that ‘not all assertions of coloured identity are racist’ because ‘no identity is inherently progressive or reactionary’ (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 178, 179). It is important to acknowledge the variety of ways in which coloured subjects shape collective identities and make meaning of their lives. This enables the understanding that coloured formulations are ‘relational identities shaped by complex networks of concrete social relations’ (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 183).
The acknowledgement of creolisation is central to this process, as is the creolisation of the Dutch language into Afrikaans by slaves and of cultural practice by these communities and their descendants. Processes of creolisation happen in proximity to and within different relations of power under conditions of slavery. This conceptualisation of creolity within recent South African studies is one of two streams. Both have moved beyond addressing only linguistic creolisation in relation to the Afrikaans language. The first, espoused by Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael (2000), conceptualises creolity as any mixing of various strands to result in a hybrid formation which constantly draws attention to itself as dynamic and disruptive. The second branch is that in which Erasmus (2001a) theorises creolity under the very specific conditions of slavery and its ensuing inequalities. It draws on the extensive works of Françoise Verges and Eduoard Glissant on creolisation in the Indian Ocean Islands and Caribbean, respectively, as well as more broadly on the schools of thought on creolisation emerging from Caribbean studies. For the latter branch, not all hybrid formations are creolised. Here creolity is interpreted as encompassing a range of possibilities: creative and unstable. It is to be found in cultural practice with a slave history and is dynamic. For Erasmus’s formulation of creolity, and application to the coloured historical series of experiences in South Africa, the inequity of power is paramount. Unlike the hybridity-like creolisation model adopted by Nuttall and Michael, Erasmus roots creolisation, like scholars of the Caribbean, in the specific experience of histories of enslavement. Consequently, for example, while Afrikaner and coloured experiences and identities are hybridised, only coloured identities are creolised identities. This creolisation is part of the memory project for it values the history of enslavement as a constitutive, even if not total, influence on current collective positionings within coloured communities.
Adhikari (2009) argues that Erasmus ‘does little beyond proposing the idea’ of creolisation to coloured identities in her introduction to her book, while Helene Strauss (2009) asks very pertinent questions in her essay on creolisation as a useful framework for thinking about contemporary coloured identities post-apartheid:
Does creolisation help clarify processes of coloured identity formation, or does it reinforce apartheid-era essentialisms and undermine the very transgressive potential that has made it so attractive for revising cultural exclusivity? To what extent do received cultural and racial categories continue to inflect the ways in which processes of creolisation take place? (Strauss 2009: 23)
Strauss’s questions can be answered obliquely through engaging with Adhikari’s latest work on coloured identities in southern Africa, of which Strauss’s chapter forms part. Adhikari (2009) underlines the importance of varied registers of coloured identities in South African politics and scholarship. Although he delineates four streams, two are immediately relevant for my purposes here: the ‘essentialist school’ and the ‘instrumentalist school’. The introduction to this text is instructive, given the manner in which he reads assertions and/or definitions of coloured identities against one another, rather than solely against their perceived opposites.
Adhikari’s ‘essentialist school’ relies on conventional colonialist registers of miscegenation and either denies the agency of coloured people in history (conservative essentialist), celebrates miscegenation as evidence that racial segregation is not preferred across history (liberal essentialist), or accepts that coloureds were a separate race that was temporarily inferior to whites (progressionist essentialist). These nuances matter for a fuller understanding of shifts and reification in how coloured identities – or, for Adhikari, identity, differentiated but in the singular – articulate themselves in contemporary South Africa.
The second stream of concern here is the ‘instrumentalist school’, which contains much of the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid left. Within this school, Adhikari includes movements as varied as the Non European/New Unity Movement, the Black Consciousness Movement and other parts of the non-racist and non-racialist movements, all of which see coloured identity as ‘negative and undesirable but blame it on the racism and exploitative practices of the ruling white minority’ (Adhikari 2009: 15). Finally, both essentialist and instrumentalist schools ‘treat coloured identity as something exceptional, failing to recognise it for what it is – a historically specific social construction, like any other social identity’ (Adhikari 2009: 15).
My reading of articulations of coloured identity and rejections of the label by those previously classified as such is premised on the understanding that echoes of colonial memory are complex phenomena which are not trapped in the binaries of either complicity or resistance. My exclusion of articulations such as the KWB from detailed analysis is due to the considerable attention this movement has already received from scholars of coloured identities (Erasmus 2001b; Erasmus & Pieterse 1999; Lewis 2001; Ruiters 2006; Wicomb 1996, 1998).
It is naïve to continue insisting that there is only one progressive, complex manner to be mindful of history and to make sense of a slave past, and that to do this entails theorising colouredness through first acceding to the cultures of complicity and privilege even as these were rejected (Erasmus 2001b). There are multiple progressive engagements with a past of enslavement (Marco 2009). Denying this erases the variety of ways of inhabiting colouredness and reduces the agency and choice of historical subjects classified coloured to fashion and reinvent collective identity. However, the activity evident in contemporary negotiations of coloured identities demonstrates the importance of creativity in political memory processes. To the extent that memory is an imaginative process, and not simply a recuperative one, the dynamic articulations of colouredness, along with the rejection of the identity ‘coloured’, bear witness to the collective reinvention of identities which is at the heart of memory. The specific foregrounding of slavery in this repositioning and re-evaluative process links the memory project directly to slavery in ways that are sometimes explicit, and at other junctures more subtle. This resonates with Carolyn Cooper’s model of reading engagements with identity for creolised societies along a continuum. There are several ways in which assertions of progressive coloured identity or disavowal via the reclaiming of Khoi subjectivities reveal themselves to be along a continuum in the manner suggested by Cooper. One lens which illuminates this comparison is the theorisation of Black will and anti-will under conditions of enslavement by Patricia Williams.
Williams (1991) argues that slavery is predicated on the absence of Black will so that the perfect Black person becomes one without a will. An enslaved person is rendered object only because s/he becomes owned, therefore property, a thing. One of the basic assumptions about humanity, especially in the Judeo-Christian narrative, is the presence of spirit/intention, in other words, willpower. When the slaves are equated to other inanimate objects, or to non-human animals, this is a move which denies humanity. If what distinguishes human beings from other beings in the living world is this spirit/agency/will, the enslaved people cease to have will. This is in keeping with the construction of the enslaved as only corporeal in colonial discourse. For Williams, this leads to the conclusion that under conditions of slavery the perfect white person is the opposite of the perfect Black one: one with will. A reading of the variety of ways in which coloured subjects participate in an imaginative project in relation to their identity is the ultimate assertion of the presence of will and humanity in the concrete historical subjects who were enslaved, as well as those descended from them. This variety of articulations, in James Clifford’s (2001) sense, testifies to the heterogeneity of the historically enslaved as well as to their survival. In other words, it testifies to the strength of this will.
It becomes important not to read these articulations as exclusively related to or overdetermined by their relationship to whiteness and discourses which sought to inscribe this in terms of ‘racial purity’. A sensitive postcolonial engagement with these processes is attentive to their proximity to anti-apartheid discourses on Blackness as well. It is mindful of Zine Magubane’s (1997: 17) caution that:
[i]f we are looking at multiplicity and hybridity from a South African perspective, as important as it is to historicise, acknowledge, and celebrate our multiple identities, it is equally important to acknowledge the political gains that ‘totalising discourses’ like black nationalism have been able to effect. We need to understand the way in which speaking from an essentialised position can be a site of political power as well.
The recasting and meaning-making processes of Blackness in liberation movement discourses have been analysed at great length. The scholarship which has participated in this project has unearthed the ways in which discourses of Black nationalism, especially as proposed by the Black Consciousness Movement, relied on a unified Black experience rather than on physiognomy. While it is important to draw attention to the manner in which the unifying gestures of many Black nationalist and anti-colonial movements policed Blackness, and to recognise the thorny character of this monitoring, it is crucial to recognise that the effect of this unity was a direct contribution to the successes of activism.
At a time when Black people were routinely subjected to racial terror, suppressing a realistic engagement with heterogeneity within led to two contradictory effects. First, it silenced certain experiences of Blackness and was not attentive to the difference that gender, sexuality, class, ‘ethnicity’,1 geographical location, and so forth, made. In this manner, it was implicated in oppressive tendencies and systems. The second effect realised the establishment, in so far as was possible under apartheid, of a ‘safe’ space to identify those who were in positions of collaboration with the state. Given that this was an issue of survival, the fiction that politics could be read from immediately observable behaviour meant that political affiliation was signified in a series of identifiable actions. These notions of what ‘authentic’ Blackness is did not successfully eliminate diversity within, but theoretically made it more possible to negotiate the delicate terrain of who could be trusted in relation to apartheid resistance and who not. They were a fiction which bore directly on imprisonment, torture and state-sponsored murder. To recognise the second as beneficial is not to justify the existence of the first impulse, nor is it to participate in the argument that discussions of gender, class, sexuality, location and so forth could be rightly postponed until the moment of liberation from colonial/slave/apartheid oppression. This argument remains nonsensical even when we recognise that the onset of democracy has enabled a different quality of exploration.
Heeding Adhikari on avoiding coloured exceptionality, what happens when we recognise that:
Coloured identities are neither inherently progressive nor inherently reactionary. Instead articulations of coloured identity are resources available for use by both progressive and reactionary social movements. These movements are more likely to articulate to reactionary movements under some circumstances. (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 184)
Erasmus has, in a variety of fora, foregrounded the possibilities which exist for claiming coloured identity and inscribing this as a progressive space. She has repeatedly suggested that to assert a coloured identity can have a variety of implications with divergent ideological impetuses. In ‘Re-imagining Coloured Identities in Post-apartheid South Africa’, which serves as introduction to her book on coloured identities in Cape Town, she argues in favour of reading coloured subjectivities as a dynamic presence with attendant tensions and contradictions. Locating colouredness ‘as part of the shifting texture of a broader black experience’ is important (Erasmus 2001a: 14). Her argument is anchored through four parts, to which I will briefly turn before I analyse their greater significance.
First, she suggests that rather than continuing to interpret coloured identities in terms of ‘race mixing’ or thinking of them as being invested with a special hybridity, they should be read in their own context and this is one which needs to seriously engage history. This will enable a processing and thinking of them as ‘cultural formations born of appropriation, dispossession and translation in the colonial encounter’ (Erasmus 2001a: 16). The presence of historical significance suggests, in Erasmus’s first position, that the current assertions and activity within coloured collective subjectivities cannot be decoded with merely an eye to the present. These formations make sense, then, only when read as memory activity in conversation with, responding to and processing events of the past as a crucial part of imagining and inventing the present.
Her second pillar advances an argument for viewing colouredness through processes of creolisation where oppression was operational. This recognition will be unproductive if it then denies the agency of communities under attack to reshape and make new meanings for their lives and trajectories. Thus, although slavery, colonialism and apartheid cannot be left out of the equation, using them to assert that these systems of violence were wholly constitutive of these communities is dangerous. It is to be complicit in the denial of Black will; it is to be blind to the obvious demonstration of agency by coloured subjects.
As colouredness becomes reshaped and rethought, the discomfiting constituents of this identity need to be courageously opened up. Thus, this position requires from coloured subjects an acknowledgement of the contradictions that characterised the identity ‘coloured’ in colonial and apartheid discourse. Given that colouredness was framed as existing between white and black/African, and that subjects thus classified did not always resist this positioning, the role of complicity should be acknowledged; so too should the privilege that accorded to being coloured, especially in the Western Cape where the presence of preferential employment legislation placed certain categories of jobs outside the reach of other Blacks. Erasmus (2001a: 16) notes:
[c]oming to terms with these facts is one of the most important and difficult challenges for coloured people. Coloured, black and African ways of being do not have to be mutually exclusive. There are ways of being coloured that allow participation in a liberatory and anti-racist project. The task is to develop these.
Finally, she calls for a self-reflexive engagement with the variety of ways of inhabiting African and Black identities by unfixing the meanings attached to them. This is only achievable with the destabilisation of those positions within Blackness/Africanness which are seen to have assumed ‘moral authenticity and political credibility’ (Erasmus 2001a: 17). Asserting that a progressive coloured politics necessarily requires discomfort, she resists the position of identifying only as Black, seeing this as a safety net which ‘denies the “better than black” element of coloured formation’ (Erasmus 2001a: 25).
Erasmus’s propositions have immense implications for thinking through specifically coloured but also more broadly Black cultural and identity formations in the post-apartheid moment. Because her first tenet stresses the need to historicise identity formation, its invitation is for an unpacking of how processes of hybridisation play themselves out in related identities. A reconceptualisation of colouredness cannot be an isolated project nor can it be locked in acontextual and simplistic declarations of its mixedness. It is positioned within the terrain of memory, and since memory is helix-shaped, à la Pennington, it shifts shape whilst constantly re-examining itself and its own process. Memory activity is relational, as are indeed all identity activities. Its reading requires a move beyond the mere fashionable declaration that all identity is hybrid to an interrogation of the consequences of this assertion for those identities which are labelled ‘pure’. This project has direct bearing on the conceptualisation of the creolity of coloured identities and therefore demands that we imagine coloured subjects as human beings invested with agency who were not simply hybridised but participate(d) in creolisation. Viewed like this, they cannot be the objects of history but retain visibility as subjects.
Erasmus stresses the need to acknowledge the middle-of-the-hierarchy position occupied by coloured subjects under apartheid and colonialism. She returns to this as core to a progressive conceptualisation of this identity. In these classificatory systems, coloured people were oppressed and denied full subjecthood because they were Black whilst at the same time made complicit in processes which maintained the oppression of other Black people.
The imperatives identified above point to the specificity of coloured identities. They invite the continued fashioning of a politics and theory which is informed by history and the everyday. Whilst they chart a more vigilant engagement with the ways in which we participate in identity, they also point to their own theoretical limitations. Erasmus’s final pillar relies heavily on and conflates the stability of the categories black and African in South Africa. Erasmus, of course, knows that African identity is contested in South Africa in ways that make little sense to people who identify as African beyond its borders. In a country where ‘Afrikaner’ and ‘Afrikaans’ have been appropriated and reserved exclusively for white people of Dutch descent, it is not entirely accurate to refer to a stable category that is marked ‘African’. This is especially so given that the two examples cited above demonstrate that there are pathways into identification with Africa which are always foreclosed to indigenous South Africans of any kind. There are certain expressions of ‘African’, for example ‘Afrikaner’, which are foreclosed to indigenous Africans, be they black or coloured. This remains the case even amidst assertions that there is such a category as ‘bruin Afrikaners’, whose very naming demonstrates the racism of what ‘Afrikaner’ means.
Furthermore, post-apartheid public spherical contestations over the meanings of ‘African’ have been precisely about the instability of the label. The widely publicised polemic between the late John Matshikiza, journalist Max du Preez and fellow journalists, Lizeka Mda, and academic Thobeka Mda from 17 June to the end of July 1999 in the pages of The Star and Weekly Mail & Guardian is one incarnation of an exchange characteristic of post-apartheid South Africa. Sparked in this instance by Max du Preez’ article ‘I am an African … an Afrikaner’ (The Star 17 June 1999), the debate asked questions about whether this assertion of ‘white African’ identity in South Africa was not without problems. Thobeka Mda’s first challenge to du Preez was tellingly titled ‘Can whites truly be called Africans?’ (The Star 24 June 1999). While du Preez’ claim to the identity foregrounded affiliation and geographical entitlement, the Mdas argued – differently – that white claims to African identity had a continuing history of displacement and non-recognition of Black South Africans. Even responses to Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech delivered on 8 May 1996 foregrounded how contested such identification remains.
Another visible manner in which African identity is not stable for Black South Africans inscribed with discourses that stress ‘race purity’, in other words, for black South Africans, is the adaptation of the signifier ‘African’ to mean ‘born in Africa’ more broadly than just ‘Afrikaner’. Although b/Black subjects, in South Africa and beyond, heavily critique and resist this redefinition as appropriative and implicated in the history of colonisation and enslavement of African peoples, it nonetheless retains much currency in South Africa. Indeed, its precise contestation points to the weight of its circulation since those who resist it would expend their energies elsewhere were this not perceived as an urgent task. What societies revisit in heated public conversations is a measure of their importance.
The cheapening of the adjective ‘African’ to name commodities which range from recycled cans (Afri-cans) to the more elusive Diesel campaign about ‘Afreaks’ is part of the instability of what ‘African’ means.2 These and numerous other positions on display in contemporary South Africa demonstrate that the identity African is contested and cannot generally be said to be invested with ‘authenticity’ in the manner that Erasmus argues. This is not to deny the presence of tendencies to essentialise and fix who can be African by excluding coloured subjects, but to postulate that coloured is the only Black position that this conservative impulse excludes is to invest the rather chaotic and reactionary project she critiques with excessive coherence. Having said that, it is ironic to note that in contemporary South Africa whites claim Africanness, blacks continue to embrace this identity, yet coloured claims to it are seen to be the most vocally contested.
I have linked reservations about the coherence with which Erasmus invests ‘black’ as a signifier, especially in relation to what she labels the ‘moral authenticity or political credibility’ (Erasmus 2001a: 17) bestowed upon the ‘africanist lobby’ (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 170). Her ‘africanist lobby’ includes those who police b/Blackness in terms of authenticity. So her use of ‘africanist’ here does not relate to the location of these authenticity police within an Africanist politics. For Erasmus, the most discernible manner in which Blackness is policed refers to the exclusion of coloured subjects from a Black and indigenous African identity by some black subjects. Here, she correctly critiques the conservative nature of this tendency, and points to the highly troubled and painful existence of such impulses, especially within what parades as the progressive ambit of national politics.
My point of departure stems from Erasmus’s inference that reducing Blackness and African identity to the ambit of black people then invests the category ‘black’ with automatic security. The split and contestation is not between secure ways of being black/African versus insecure ones within colouredness. The same anti-coloured sentiment which Erasmus accuses of destabilising the Blackness/Africanness of non-coloured Black/African groups is credited with treating other ethnicities within black communities similarly. The reactionary political attacks from what Erasmus names the ‘africanist lobby’, when not targeted at suggested coloured racism, are aimed at ‘uprooting’ ‘the Nguni conspiracy’ or the ‘Xhosa nostra’, or demonising the ‘Shangaan uncontrollability’.3 These impulses can be gleaned in public culture, for example, in newspapers as apparently diversified in their politics as the Mail & Guardian and The City Press.
To discuss the silencing of coloured ways of being Black/African as though they are the object of a collective conspiracy by all other black/ African groups is to ignore the successes of apartheid policies of divide and rule, as well as all evidence that they retain currency. It is to credit blacks with a unity of purpose which they obviously do not have in spite of all attempts by the Black Consciousness Movement. Thus, when Erasmus declares, ‘If ever there is an unstable, restless, highly differentiated, hybrid place to be, it is the one I occupy’ (Erasmus 2000: 199), her words ring true beyond coloured Black subjectivity. It is therefore not only a matter of barring access for coloured subjects into a safe Black collective. This emerges quite clearly when coloured subjects are seen as one of a range of Black subjectivities.
Indeed, contestations of Blackness through the bestowal of progressive subjectivities to specific Black ethnicities, and the Othering of other Black ethnicities through the projection of ‘slave mentality’ and/or ‘collaborationist’ lines, are typical of broader political contestations in post-apartheid South Africa. If we interpret coloured subjectivity as ‘race’ rather than as ‘ethnicity’, then it is possible to read coloured subjects as positioned in the unique position against which other Black people position themselves, as Erasmus and Pieterse (1999) argue. However, such a lens rests on the invisibilisation of similar political moves directed at different Black ethnic members at different political times.
Post-apartheid public discussions and controversies reveal that although there are groups of Blacks who can always be subsumed under that label, coherence does not mark the spot where these people reside. The certainty ends with being able to claim that name. What lies beyond that is silence about what else constitutes b/Black identity, and resistance to acknowledging the connections between this silence and the internal division within the ranks Erasmus (2000) and Erasmus and Pieterse (1999) use as examples. They justly critique the tendency to question coloured people’s position within Blackness/Africanness at all and thus deny them unconditional entry into even this very small certainty.
My reservations about Erasmus’s (and Erasmus and Pieterse’s) reading of internal Black insecurities do not diminish the courageous and insightful ways in which she continues to theorise colouredness and its various entanglements in contemporary South Africa. Nor do they detract from the urgency of the project she charts, which forces a more nuanced engagement with national identities that are always differentially racialised, gendered and marked by class, among others. Her work continues to echo Amina Mama’s reminder that:
we are formed out of contradictions and yes we do have to live with them and with ambivalence and they need not necessarily be resolved, although at some level you know extreme contradictions are uncomfortable. A sense of well-being is not about being not contradictory; it is about being able to live comfortably with one’s contradictions and to be tolerant of ambivalence. (in Magubane 1997: 22)
In order to attain a state where it is possible to live comfortably with these tensions and ‘be tolerant of ambivalence’, wounds need to be reopened and attended to. The processes by which the sores are focused on require penetrating honesty and initiative. For Erasmus, they begin with an insistence on claiming coloured, African and Black identities simultaneously and participating in what those categories describe. In this manner she challenges other Blacks/Africans, and specifically blacks, to go to that dangerous place where it is no longer possible to, through self-censure, disown what else they are. There are parallel processes of difficulty in identifying along ethnic lines for all Black subjectivities. Apartheid legislation and violence have made it difficult to assert a progressive position within Blackness in ways that are not construed as ‘tribalist/ethnicist’, just like they made identifying as coloured complicated for those who reject that terminology. In opening up studies of coloured identities to progressive signification, she challenges other Blacks to reconceptualise the specific identities we dare not name except under heavily policed circumstances. This full project can be undertaken when we take Adhikari’s warning of avoiding analyses predicated on coloured exceptionalism. Taking the dynamic agency within coloured identities seriously requires an accompanying attentiveness to the complementary complexity and contestations which characterise other Black subject positions.
Relationships to a history of classification as coloured vary. The path outlined by Erasmus above presents one alternative. A second alternative can be glimpsed through an analysis of the synthesis of Black and African identities by the !Hurikamma Cultural Movement (!HCM), whose membership identifies as Khoi and Brown. This self-identification is informed as much by the rejection of the label ‘coloured’ as it is by its proximity to other varieties of Blackness and African identities. It is also an engagement with a history of dispossession and enslavement. Section 1 of the Constitution of the !HCM (1993) defines its membership as only open to those:
who are descended from the Khoi-Khoin (or Mens-Mens) and the slaves brought here from St Helena and Indian Ocean Islands, and who share a common history, culture and identity and pledge their alliance only to their Khoi ancestors, and who, because of their identity and history, have been deprived of their birthright, namely their right to their land, language, history, culture and freedom.
Central to the identification is the valuing of Khoi ancestry, itself a move that is in conversation with history in varied ways. This is particularly true given representations of Khoi/San peoples as backward and undesirable, or disappeared, which retain currency even today. In this respect, although the racial identification of the !HCM appears linked to that of the KWB, there is a marked difference. The valuing of Khoi and slave ancestry already participates in discursive terrain outside of, and partly subversive of, the colonial valuing of a hierarchy of races. By foregrounding the choice to identify with that part of their ancestry which has been most debased, the !HCM’s engagement with history and memory is politically antithetical to that of the KWB. That both should appear so similar is only stressed by the commonality of B/brownness. At the same time, the exclusion of other African histories is telling and echoes some of the purity contained within the KWB’s self-definitions.
The conceptualisation of b/Brownness gestures towards adverse political effects. Where the KWB, with its foregrounding of a ‘pure brown’ coloured race, echoes and allies with the right-wing AWB’s insistence on racial purity as preferable and self-determination as necessary for these ‘minorities’ in light of the ‘hostile black’ government, the !HCM is clearly in conversation with other political traditions in South Africa. The !HCM chooses not to articulate a ‘purity’, and indeed demonstrates a lack of interest in this project. The mere foregrounding of slave and Khoi ancestry as a starting point demonstrates the !HCM’s lack of interest in engaging with racist discourses of miscegenation by asserting purity. Rather, what is seen as central to the identity ‘Brown’ for the !HCM links to historically, socially and culturally constructed events and experience. The focus is on ‘language, history, culture and freedom’ as birthright in as much as this was disrupted through dispossession, genocide, slavery and apartheid.
Additionally, section 3.1 of the !HCM’s Constitution states that one of the objectives is to ‘restore in Brown people a pride in the culture of their forebears’. The intertextual political references here are multifold. First it is an engagement with the discourses which inscribe the relationships of those previously classified ‘coloured’ with shame when a relationship with their past is uncovered. In the place of the shame Wicomb observed, the !HCM intends to put ‘pride’. It appears, then, that the !HCM recognises that the current relationship that people descended from the enslaved and Khoi people have with their past is characterised by shame. To choose to participate in a project which disarticulates this shame is to embark on a task of restoring pride and disavowing shame. This emphasis on pride resonates with the discussion of Wicomb’s and Dabydeen’s shame earlier. The !HCM’s stress on pride links with other liberatory Black discourses in South Africa, such as the Black Consciousness Movement, and globally. The installation and reinscription of pride challenges the historic processes of humiliation. However, where other anti-racist Black movements foreground pride through inclusion, the !HCM’s paradoxical exclusion gestures to other ambiguities about adjacent South African subjectivities.
The !HCM targets Khoi ancestry as its focus, not through an explicit negation of other foreparents who were also enshackled, but by prioritising the Khoi forebears in ways that implicitly deny the unnamed excluded others. It is an impulse which roots itself in African reality through accessing a stabilised indigeneity. In this respect, discursively, the processes of self-definition, backward- and forward-looking as they are like Pennington’s helix, access the past through Pan-African liberation discourse. At the basic linguistic level this is echoed in the emphasis on the combination of descent and choice of loyalty to Africa. This echoes parts of Pan-Africanist ideology globally, but it also distances itself from these same ideologies.
The !HCM project is imaginative as much as it is recuperative. The Constitution sets out specific ways in which to use cultural and artistic production as grounds through which to participate in achieving the position of pride. This is because, according to the Preamble to the !HCM Constitution, ‘culture is an integral part of our struggle to reclaim what is rightfully ours’.
These conversations with other liberation traditions which addressed themselves to the liberation of Black and African people globally permeate the remainder of the Constitution. That the connections are most markedly to Black Consciousness and Pan-African politics cannot be incidental given the prominence accorded to the cultural activities of the !HCM. Given the context set out in the founding document, it seems facile to assume that the mere use of the same word, brown/Brown, allies it to the KWB or other similar movements in straightforward ways. Attention to the use of language, which it to say the self-representation of the !HCM, suggests otherwise. It confirms Stuart Hall’s (1997: 5) stance that:
[r]epresentation, here, is closely tied up with both identity and knowledge. Indeed, it is difficult to know what ‘being English’, or indeed French, German, South African or Japanese, means outside of all the ways in which our ideas and images of national cultures have been represented. Without these ‘signifying’ systems, we could not take on such identities (or indeed reject them) and consequently could not build up or sustain that common ‘life-world’ which we call culture.
To extend Hall above then, ‘being b/Brown’, like ‘being c/Coloured’ can only mean in relation to how it is framed, and functions politically in the terrain of culture. Identifying as Khoi, African, Black and Brown simultaneously has several effects which serve to regulate the workings and meanings which ensue from self-representation in this manner. These meanings also participate in the necessary politics of interrogating colonialist and apartheid definitions of the descendants of slaves, whilst interrogating trajectories of self-representation. They are simultaneously grounded in and informed by Black Consciousness thinking and open up its silences and ambiguities for (re)interpretation. It is a narrow reading which reads the !HCM as wishing away history. The project is premised on the fact that members of this group, who claim all of the identities outlined above, are descended from slaves. Theirs is therefore not an ahistorical position since the chronological trajectory of this identity is foregrounded.
Rather, it is the meanings which ensue from this history which are contested. In other words, to the questions, ‘What does it mean to be a descendent of slaves for your racial politics today?’ and, ‘Who does it make you?’ the proponents of this view respond with a redefinition of how to inhabit Blackness in a post-apartheid South Africa: by identifying as b/Black, African, Brown and Khoi all at the same time. Thus, this legacy is interpreted in ways which are in accordance with the anti-racist projects of this location. They challenge not only racist labels but also conservative ideas about who can count as black (and within that, Khoi) and Black in contemporary South Africa. This space draws attention to the limitations of thinking about an anti-racism which influences the relationship people previously classified as ‘coloured’ have with not only a racist trajectory but also with liberation politics in South Africa.
Here the expressions of ‘deformation, masking and inversion’ in their application have the subversive potential to:
demonstrate that forces of social authority and subversion or subalternity may emerge in displaced, even decentred strategies of signification. This does not prevent these positions from being effective in a political sense, although it does suggest that positions of authority may themselves be part of a process of ambivalent identification. Indeed the exercise of power may be both politically effective and psychically affective because the discursive liminality through which it is signified may provide greater scope for strategic manoeuvre and negotiation. (Bhabha 1994: 145)
First, identifying as Khoi in the context of the !HCM rejects the belonging to a third race marked ‘coloured’ in colonial and apartheid legislation. This is conscious anti-racist work that goes further than drawing attention to this appellation, as was necessary through the use of ‘so-called coloured’. To engage with that history of naming is to participate in a particular kind of anti-racist practice which privileges colonial inscription. It entails a ‘talking back to’ as part of the larger initiative of contesting identity. The politics of dis-identification with ‘colouredness’ rejects a stance of talking back to and moves instead to a project of self-definition. It establishes a distance from such white supremacist forms of framing this identity and at the same time it disses and deconstructs them. This move to rename the self echoes earlier Black Consciousness rejections of ‘non-white’ for Black. For Black Consciousness activists in South Africa, ‘non-white’ represented a negation which had attendant materiality. Consequently, there were immeasurable gains to be made from moving from a positive definition. To identify as Khoi and Brown for the !HCS echoes this and stems, then, from the same political urgency. The postcolonial memory imperative cannot be about just addressing the problematics of historical location; it also needs to be mindful of what lies ahead.
In his inaugural lecture for the interdisciplinary Postcolonial Studies Graduiertenkolleg of the University of Munich on 25 January 2002, Homi K. Bhabha spoke eloquently of what he explores in his forthcoming book as ‘political aspiration’, which participates in ethical and textual interpretation as well as positionality vis-à-vis enactment and entitlement. For Bhabha, ‘aspiration is not utopian, but imbued with the present imperfect and emerges from the desire to survive, not the ambition for mastery’. He goes further to discuss the meanings of the ‘present imperfect’ as mindful and informed by ‘non-resolvable ambiguities’. Although I could find no published version of this address, Bhabha articulated similar sentiments in his interview with Kerry Chance (2001: 3), where he asserted: ‘I think it is our intellectual responsibility to understand that the ground beneath our feet is a shifting, sliding ground, and to try to actually take account of that.’ Mindfulness to the shifting grounds informs the kinds of critical vocabulary we develop so that the cultural sites we read inform our cultural texts, rather than being the space on which we apply pre-crystallised lenses.
I find Bhabha’s theorisation of the aspirational particularly helpful to think about the activity of this space racially. In not being utopian the participants of this society are unwilling to frame their behaviour in terms of the binaries of utopia and its necessary other, dystopia; or the accompanying tropes of either racialised as ‘pure white’ or as ‘pure African’. Centring survival is to emphasise and celebrate slave agency. It is to deny the violence of slavery and colonialism complete power over the body of the colonised and/or enslaved. In Patricia Williams’s terms, to assert Khoi identity in the manner of the !HCM is to claim Black will. Rather than highlighting the position of the colonised and/or enslaved, it focuses on her/his activity – her/his survival – and celebrates this. It is to think about this ancestry as invested with agency, as humans living under constant physical and epistemological attack who survive genocidal attempts, and not as property. It is an invitation to rethink the position of people as slaves, a descriptive confinement, which is necessary for the fallacy of Black anti-will which is the ‘description of master-slave relations as “total” ’ (Williams 1991: 219).
To root a self-identification as Khoi, B/black, Brown and African in the face of previous classification as ‘coloured’ is to assert the presence of will in the lives of the ancestors who were objectified – dehumanised as property. This self-definition contests what it means to be descended from people who were property. Williams (1991: 217), in the essay ‘On Being the Object of Property’, declares:
Reclaiming that from which one has been disinherited is a good thing. Self-possession in the full sense of that expression is the companion to self-knowledge. Yet claiming for myself a heritage the weft of whose genesis is my own disinheritance is a profoundly troubling paradox.
Self-representation as Khoi, African, Brown and B/black is a way of engaging this history of erasure and disinheritance. It is not the path of claiming a reshaped colouredness since the word is deemed irredeemably implicated in the aforementioned history of racial terror and genocide. It is to contest the narrative of the disappearance of the Khoi from the political, social and physical landscape of South Africa. It is anti-racist in privileging the excavation of the subaltern’s voice not just in the present but also in the past. This is an example of postcolonial mnemonic work in practice. The enslaver’s and coloniser’s force does not need any help: it is the hegemonic power which silences the subaltern. The !HCM’s self-construction does not deny the given: that those (previously) classified coloured feature in colonialist and apartheid discourse as the result of ‘racial mixing’ and constitute a ‘third race’ at once privileged (preferential treatment legislation) and ‘inferior’ due to ‘lack’ (without culture, ‘barbaric’, ‘bush’). Nor is it informed by a refusal to mediate the dominant circulatory discourses on race which are responsible for the instances of their somatic reading as ‘coloured’ in accordance with the conservative meanings of that category.
Thus, foregrounding Khoi identity is not to pretend that these racist discourses do not exist, but to choose a particular self-positioning in relation to them. It is to contest the racist academic and popular discourses which declare that Khoi and San identities are vacated spaces. In Bhabha’s terms, it is to exert/assert ‘the right to narrate’, to speak (not just talk) and be narrated, to draft a history, something to be interpreted. It also forces the remainder of the Black South African populace, regardless of which identity they prioritise or how they mediate their position within Blackness and in relation to Africa, to contend with what it means to celebrate identity. It forces the question of what it means politically to celebrate a history of survival. It is to assert, in the words of the old slave song, ‘we are here because we are here’ and to invite an interrogation of the untidy meanings we attach to survival.
In its political assertion, therefore, the !HCM does not deny history, but foregrounds it by contesting the meanings which ensue from it whilst underlining that historically its members are not invested with enough power to deny history in a way which would make any political sense, given that they must continue to live in a country and a world in which notions of ‘racial hybridity’ retain currency. So that even as the members self-identify as Khoi, Black and African, and as Brown instead of coloured, the possibility remains to be read and interpreted, through the signs mythologised as evidence of classification, as ‘coloured’, ‘mixed-race’ and so forth. The political imperative adopted by the members of this society does not gesticulate towards a mystical wholeness, but contests dominant discourses about the constitution of all South African racial identities. Such identification also draws attention to shifting meanings in ways akin to those of other western Cape Black anti-racists, examined in Chapter 4, who claim post-apartheid the very diasporic identity they disavowed as anti-apartheid activists.
The !HCM’s self-definition is to assert agency in the face of this changing political landscape, to insist on a self-representation which is more than somatic, but one which revolutionarily claims will and psychic presence. It shifts the terms of the debate and the terrain of race and self-representation in a democratic South Africa where, because the country cannot be an island cut off from the rest of the world or from its own past, there are always colonial discourses circulating.
It recognises the fact of multiple histories, diverse ancestry and therefore creolity even as it chooses to stress specific African ancestry. The choice of which ancestor to foreground is neither arbitrary nor unique. Most people with a known varied ancestry prioritise one with whose name to identify themselves. Whilst it has become almost mandatory in cultural studies to lay claim to the always already hybrid forms of all cultural production and identity formation processes, the case of the !HCM poses challenges for the meanings attached to this declaration. Dutch and British slaves forced to work in the Cape were captured from a variety of locations in South (East) Asia, East Africa, as well the South African interior. Those from the interior were mainly Khoi and/or San.
The !HCM insists on claiming and prioritising its Khoi legacy, rooting itself within an African history not just because of physical location. It can participate in other histories of Africa located elsewhere and also informed by slavery, but the premise must be different because it is not diasporic but continental. Identifying as Khoi declares !HCM entry into a specific African identity through means other than geography and sociology, although these are not completely eliminated either. It is thus not only a political assertion but a shifting of the terrain and a signalled rejection of the terms of participation in African identity spelled out by white South Africa – that is, birthright – because Khoi suggests links with the African world and other indigenous people as another kind of claim to African identity. It is to acknowledge that claiming an African identity for people of African descent in South Africa is always a process accompanied by contestation and denial, that it is a declaration of will in choosing an association with this particular continent.
The decision to identify as Khoi challenges the narrowness of conservative definitions of who can people the space labelled ‘African’. Brown identity within !HCM parlance and its relationship to emancipatory language, among other things, marks it as different from Afrikaners who pretended to be ‘racially pure’ and premised their identity on the suppression of African foreparents. It is not premised on ‘racial purity’.
Further, it does not claim a position of privilege as its entitlement because of where it is. It broaches the difficult terrain, like Erasmus’s theorisation of colouredness, of identifying what else these subjects are in addition to and in proximity with always being Black and African. In other words, it is ‘aspirational and does not aspire to mastery or sovereignty’, in Bhabha’s (2002; see also Chance 2001) terms. It remains subversive because it is empowering to the concrete historical subjects who assert this identity without alienating others who are less powerful. It is also an anti-essentialist position because it destabilises all the categories it is in conversation with and draws attention to the processes of racial identity formation. By claiming this allegedly vacated space, it does not displace anybody else, even as it questions how indigeneity is constructed, and in this very action contests the vacancy of the identity ‘Khoi’. It challenges the lie of successful Khoi and San extermination by posing the question, ‘How can there be at once no Khoi people alive and there be thousands alive who identify as such?’ It works also as an alternative to ‘coloured’ because it chooses an indigenous African trajectory of naming over a colonially imposed one. It chooses to be Khoi instead of ‘mixed’. It therefore does not negate that others may inhabit colouredness differently and reclaim it, but this is not its political imperative.
Resistance to articulations of Khoi and San identities in contemporary South Africa is problematic. It tends to lump all these very different articulations together. In this manner those who question the ability of Khoi people to identify as such avoid addressing the specificities of each and betray contemporary (internalised) racist notions of what we expect a Khoi or San person to ‘look’ like. Much of the anxiety over the choice of ‘Khoi’ over ‘coloured’ stems from a hypocritical relationship that many South Africans have with Khoi identities. Thus, in spite of the assertion of all cultures’ dynamism, predominant concepts of the Khoi are as timeless people trapped in space. To be Khoi is to appear as ‘Bushmen’ in some tourist brochures, or as naked ‘Hottentots’ running around in the desert. The problem posed by progressive articulations of Khoi and San presence and identities is that they unsettle the belief that the somatic holds the key to meaning-making. This lie has been central to South African society in relation to race for over three centuries.
CONCLUSION: THE KHOI–COLOURED CONTINUUM IMAGINATIVELY RENDERED
The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century. (Hall 1999: 42)
I speak appropriating all the knowledge that interests me, that is accessible to me, and that can help me and my territory to deal with new emergent realities, since I am also a new and emergent reality. (de Torro 2002: 117)
The above demonstrate the complexity in contesting meanings which attach to identities that apparently cannot be inhabited progressively. There are charges that in a post-apartheid South Africa, given the rejection and problematisation of the label ‘coloured’ during the liberation struggle, it can only be racist to reclaim it (now). Similarly, it is argued that laying claim to Khoi identity is a denial of history of ‘mixing’ and an aspiration towards ‘purity’ and authenticity. Therefore, in crude terms the first is denounced for apparently ‘not being Black enough’, while the latter is seen to aspire to a Blackness that is ‘too authentic’. These readings are equally problematic for they read these subjectivities within the confines of the very discursive binaries that are rejected by those who claim ‘coloured’ or ‘Khoi’ identities, in the manner analysed above. Indeed, an attentive examination of the two articulations discussed above reveals that ‘[r]ather than expanding the category of “real” blackness, they suggest that if all identities are discursively produced and under negotiation, then all identities are inauthentic’ (Smith 1998: 67).
The challenges of fashioning new identities in a democratic South Africa include being able to move away from the few ‘safe’ spaces of racial identification that Black South Africans could inhabit under apartheid. Given the recent demise of the systems of violent state-sponsored racist terror which ended with apartheid, it is not difficult to see why exploring racial identity anew is a daunting task for South Africans. Black Consciousness gave us a Black skin to be proud of and one through which to contest the shame associated with everything Black.
