Not White Enough, Not Black Enough. Mohamed Adhikari

the identity. The Soweto revolt, which started as a protest by schoolchildren in June 1976 and soon spread to other parts of the country, including Coloured communities of the western Cape, greatly accelerated this trend because it fomented a climate of open resistance to apartheid and fostered a far stronger sense of black solidarity than had existed before. Colouredness increasingly came to be viewed as an artificial categorization imposed on the society by the ruling minority as part of its divide-and-rule strategies. The burgeoning of the mass, nonracial democratic movement in the 1980s under the leadership of the United Democratic Front (UDF), founded in 1983, fed Coloured rejectionism. Controversy over the participation of some Coloured leaders in the Tricameral Parliament of the P. W. Botha government from 1984 onward further inflamed rejectionist passions.²⁰ With the western Cape an epicenter of resistance to apartheid, Coloured identity became a highly charged issue, and within the antiapartheid movement, any recognition of Coloured identity was repudiated as a concession to apartheid thinking.²¹

      In spite of this, the salience of Coloured identity has endured. During the four-year transition to democratic rule under president F. W. de Klerk, political parties across the ideological spectrum made ever more strident appeals to Coloured identity for support. Once again, it became politically acceptable to espouse a Coloured identity; moreover, postapartheid South Africa has witnessed a rapid retreat of Coloured rejectionism and a concomitant Coloured assertiveness. This has been due partly to a desire to project a positive self-image in the face of the pervasive negative racial stereotyping of Coloured people and partly to attempts at ethnic mobilization to take advantage of the newly democratic political environment. The resurgence of Colouredism has, to a significant extent, also been motivated by a fear of African majority rule and the perception that, as in the old order, Coloureds were once again being marginalized. Though far from allayed, these anxieties have, in recent years, been alleviated by the fading influence of swart gevaar (black peril) tactics in South African politics and by the acclimatization of people to the new political order.

       Hope, Fear, Shame, Frustration: The Dynamic of Coloured Exclusivism

      The central contention of this section—and of the book as a whole—is that Coloured identity is better understood not as having undergone a series of transformations during the era of white rule but rather as having maintained a high degree of stability despite obvious changes to the identity. This is not to imply that Coloured identity was in any way fixed or that it was not pliable but that it operated within a range of fairly predictable parameters. The changes that it did experience during that time did not fundamentally alter the way in which it functioned as an identity. These changes were more in the nature of the accretion and sloughing off of elements around a core of enduring characteristics, adding further complexity and subtlety to the way the identity found expression, rather than the evolution of the identity itself. Thus, viewed on the eve of the transition to democracy in 1994, Coloured identity was very much the same phenomenon it was at the inauguration of Union in 1910 despite radical changes in the social and political landscape and within the Coloured community itself.

      Besides the conventional expression of Coloured identity derived from its stable core, it is possible to identify a number of developments during the twentieth century that influenced processes of Coloured self-perception. The emergence of a radical movement in Coloured politics from the second half of the 1930s, though limited in its impact, was significant because it introduced the idea that black unity or a class-based identity was possible and because it initiated some impetus in this direction within the Coloured petite bourgeoisie. From midcentury onward, apartheid thinking and the implementation of apartheid social engineering had the countervailing effect of reifying Coloured identity as never before. The latter phases of the apartheid era witnessed a reaction to this tendency with the growing rejection of Coloured identity within sections of the community. Coloured rejectionism was fostered by the revival of mass protest against apartheid after the Soweto revolt and by an intensifying disapproval of any form of racial thinking within the antiapartheid movement. As mentioned earlier, during the transition to democratic rule in the first half of the 1990s, insecurity at the prospect of majority rule and new opportunities for ethnic mobilization saw a resurgence of Coloured exclusivism.²² Finally, since the mid-1990s, there have been initiatives to reinvent Coloured identity, largely in the form of attempts to stimulate Coloured people’s pride in their Khoisan and slave pasts.

      Nevertheless, until the late 1970s, there was a high degree of consensus both within the Coloured community and among outsiders about who the Coloured people were and what the concept of Colouredness embodied. The conventional wisdom—that Coloured people constituted a distinct racial group with its own historical trajectory and destiny—was first challenged in the 1930s when radical intellectuals rejected Coloured separatism as playing into the hands of the ruling classes who sought to divide the black majority and split the proletariat. The emphasis on non-European unity among Coloured radicals during the middle decades of the twentieth century was not so much a rejection of Coloured identity as an assertion that racial differences were not in any way intrinsic and that Coloured particularism undermined the freedom struggle. From the early 1960s, however, there was an explicit rejection of Coloured identity within NEUM circles. This incipient rejectionism remained extremely limited in its impact, in that it did not penetrate much beyond a section of the tiny intelligentsia within the Coloured elite. It was only toward the latter half of the 1970s, when Black Consciousness ideology took hold in significant sectors of the Coloured community, that the rejection of Coloured identity found popular support, growing to its zenith in the nonracial democratic movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even at its height the rejection of Coloured identity was limited to a relatively small minority of better-educated and more highly politicized people associated with the antiapartheid movement.²³

      What is the essence of the stable core at the heart of Coloured identity, and how does one explain the continuities in that identity and the way in which it operated through the period of white domination? This chapter identifies four key characteristics that formed the foundation of Coloured identity.

      One of these essential features was the desire to assimilate into the dominant society. This assimilationism was less an impulse for acculturation than a striving on the part of Coloured people for acknowledgment of their worth as individuals and citizens and acceptance as equals or partners by whites. Throughout the twentieth century, gaining such affirmation was one of the strongest imperatives within the Coloured community, especially among the petite bourgeois elite. The late nineteenth-century genesis of Coloured identity emanated from a worldview and a political strategy that was profoundly assimilationist. And during the twentieth century, despite criticism of the racist order, all that the Coloured political leadership and the petite bourgeoisie it represented really wanted was for Coloured people to be accepted into the dominant society and share in the benefits of citizenship on the basis of individual merit.²⁴ Though the majority of the Coloured elite aspired to acceptance into English-speaking, middleclass culture, there was also a significant movement within the Coloured community for accommodation within the fold of Afrikanerdom.²⁵ Despite occasional warnings that the continued oppression of Coloured people could have dire consequences for the society as a whole, the Coloured political leadership had no interest in overthrowing the system or changing South African society fundamentally, except for eliminating institutionalized racial discrimination. As is so often the case in any discussion of Coloured politics after the mid-1930s, the exception represented by a small minority of radicals needs to be noted here.

      This assimilationism, which in more recent times has often been misunderstood and denounced by radicals as mere rationalizations of self-serving sycophants and collaborationists, was rooted in a worldview informed by nineteenth-century Cape liberal values. For much of the twentieth century, moderate Coloured political opinion still clung to a weltanschauung reminiscent of mid-nineteenth century progressionism. The first key assumption of this utopian outlook was that humanity was on a path of inevitable progress toward the ultimate attainment of an elysian future of social harmony and prosperity. The second assumption was that all people, no matter what their current condition, were capable of self-improvement and the acquisition of “civilization,” which equated to Western bourgeois culture in the minds of the Coloured elite. These assumptions were reinforced by deeply held religious beliefs that not only posited the equality