Not White Enough, Not Black Enough. Mohamed Adhikari

This kind of prejudice was still very much in evidence in the latter phases of white rule. Take, for example, the way Maria van Niekerk, a conservative white South African woman, expressed her horror at the repeal of the Mixed Marriages Act in 1985. Van Niekerk claimed that she “did not stand for bastardizing our land” and that she wanted South Africa “to be pure white, pure Indian, pure blacks [sic] and the Coloureds must be proud of what they are now.”⁸¹ This repugnance is a product of the commonly held belief that miscegenation of necessity pollutes the resulting offspring and renders them inferior. Although archconservative Andries Treurnicht’s claim that “Coloureds are our 12-year-old children and must remain under our guardianship” is at the extreme end of the spectrum of racist opinion,⁸² there was a general acceptance among whites that Coloured people were intellectually and morally inferior, to varying degrees, as a result of their miscegenated origins.⁸³

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

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

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

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

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

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