Not White Enough, Not Black Enough. Mohamed Adhikari

Jordaan did not pursue this line of inquiry any further, making it clear that his concern in this essay was with preindustrial South African society.⁴⁷

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

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

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

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