Not White Enough, Not Black Enough. Mohamed Adhikari

misunderstanding regarding the nature and origin of Coloured identity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Yet the targets of demeaning humor are not entirely powerless because humor can, of course, also be harnessed for retaliation. This would explain the immense popularity of “van der Merwe” jokes among Coloured people during the apartheid era. The “stupid and uncultured Afrikaner” stereotype represented by van der Merwe provided the perfect foil