Not White Enough, Not Black Enough. Mohamed Adhikari

elite as conventionally understood, they can nevertheless be distinguished from the Coloured proletariat by their relative affuence, literacy, and adherence to the norms and values of white middle-class respectability. A general consciousness of their superior status within the Coloured community also set them apart from the Coloured laboring poor. Having an elite status only within the context of the Coloured community, this group in reality consisted of a combination of petite bourgeois and “respectable” working-class elements and would perhaps be more accurately referred to as an emergent petite bourgeoisie for much of the twentieth century. It is only toward the close of the period under discussion that a substantive petite bourgeoisie in the usual sense of the term can be observed within the Coloured community.⁴

      The advent of the new South Africa has complicated the use of racial terminology, as both the racist and the politically correct conventions of the apartheid era break down. Old terms have taken on new meanings and are invested with changing values as people have greater freedom to give expression to social identities and ethnopolitical preferences. Thus, for example, it has become much more fashionable for whites to identify as African, if not de rigueur for those with high public profiles, and the term Coloured has been rehabilitated in public discourse since the rejectionist tide receded after 1990. In this study, the term black is used in its inclusive sense to refer to Coloured, Indian, and African people collectively, and African is used to refer to the indigenous Bantu-speaking peoples of South Africa. The use of the term Coloured is still complicated by a residual politically correct lobby that rejects this practice and argues for a broader black or South African identity.⁵ The emergence of a rejectionist voice within the Khoisan revivalist movement indicates that negative associations attached to Coloured identity still rankle with many. Given these and other sensitivities around the issue, I am driven to the tautology of stating that in this study, the term Coloured is used to refer to those people who regard themselves as Coloured. And wherever it is necessary to mention people who are generally regarded as being Coloured but who are known to reject the identity, this is indicated by placing the word between quotation marks if this is not apparent from the context of the discussion.

      During the apartheid period and after, some scholars, myself included, refused to capitalize the first letter of the term Coloured in order to indicate both opposition to the enforced classification of people into racial and ethnic categories and distaste for ethnocentric values. The practice was further justified by the assertion that since the word was not derived from a proper noun, there was no need to capitalize it. In this study, however, I resort to the more normal practice of capitalizing the “C word,” except for quotations using the lower case. This is partly a response to the gradual normalization of South African society in the postapartheid period and partly in recognition of a growing grass-roots sentiment neatly expressed by journalist Paul Stober: “As a distinct ethnic group with over three million members, we deserve a capital letter.”⁶ It is also an indication of the rapid change the identity is experiencing in the postapartheid environment, as old sensitivities die down and as new concerns and agendas impinge on people’s consciousness.

       Abbreviations

AAC	All African Convention
ANB	Afrikaanse Nasionale Bond
ANC	African National Congress
APO	African Political Organization
BLAC	Black Literature, Art and Culture
CAC	Coloured Advisory Council
CAD	Coloured Affairs Department
CATA	Cape African Teachers’ Association
CPC	Coloured People’s Congress
CPNU	Coloured People’s National Union
CPSA	Communist Party of South Africa
CRC	Coloured Representative Council
FIOSA	Fourth International Organization of South Africa
ICU	Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union
NEUF	Non-European United Front
NEUM	Non-European Unity Movement
NLL	National Liberation League
SACPO	South African Coloured People’s Organization
SAIC	South African Indian Congress
TARC	Train Apartheid Resistance Committee
TLSA	Teachers’ League of South Africa
UCCA	Union Council of Coloured Affairs
UDF	United Democratic Front
UMSA	Unity Movement of South Africa

      1

      Continuity and Context

      An Overview of Coloured Identity in White Supremacist South Africa

      There is a general lack of familiarity with the history of the Coloured community of South Africa, except perhaps for an awareness that it has generally been a story of racial oppression and that for nearly the whole of the twentieth century, it followed a discernible trend of intensifying segregationism and a continual erosion of Coloured people’s civil rights. This blind spot in South African historical knowledge, which is elaborated on in the next chapter, is a direct consequence of the marginality of the Coloured people. As one Coloured commentator put it, “We don’t know our own history and out there in the community and schools there is no information about it because we are not empowered.”¹

      A contexualizing opening chapter that sketches the social and historical background is thus a particular necessity. First, a thumbnail sketch of the history of the Coloured community is presented. This is followed by an elaboration of the core attributes that defined the manner in which Coloured identity operated in South African society during the era of white rule. The analysis here seeks to identify the fundamental impulses behind the assertion of a separate Coloured identity and to explain continuity and change in processes of Coloured self-definition. The overview is rounded off by a discussion of the popular stereotyping of Coloured people by dissecting a wellworn joke about their origin. This section demonstrates how a range of pejorative connotations coalesce in the stereotyping of Coloured people in the popular mind.

       From Slavery to Khoisan Revivalism: A Synopsis of Coloured History

      In South Africa, contrary to international usage, the term Coloured does not refer to black people in general. It instead alludes to a phenotypically varied social group of highly diverse cultural and geographic origins. Novelist, academic, and literary critic Kole Omotoso aptly described Coloured people’s skin color, the most important of these phenotypical features, as varying “from charcoal black to breadcrust brown, sallow yellow and finally off-white cream that wants to pass for white.”² The Coloured people were descended largely from Cape slaves,³ the indigenous Khoisan population, and other black people who had been assimilated to Cape colonial society by the late nineteenth century. Since