Not White Enough, Not Black Enough. Mohamed Adhikari

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