Journal of Southern African Studies
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:This article seeks to explain the basic impulses behind coloured exclusivity in white supremacist South Africa and to elaborate on continuity and change in the processes of coloured self-definition by identifying the core attributes of coloured identity and outlining the ways in which they operated to reinforce and reproduce that identity. The central argument is that coloured identity is better understood not as having evolved through a series of transformations, as conventional historical thinking would have it and as the existing literature assumes, but as having remained remarkably stable throughout the era of white rule. It is argued that this stability derived from a core of enduring characteristics that informed the manner in which colouredness functioned as an identity during this period. This is not to contend that coloured identity was static or that it lacked fluidity, but that there were both important constraints on the ways in which it was able to find expression and sufficiently strong continuities in its day-to-day functioning for coloured identity to have remained recognisably uniform despite radical changes in the social and political landscape during this time. The principal constituents of this stable core are the assimilationism of the coloured people, which spurred hopes of future acceptance into the dominant society; their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, which generated fears that they might lose their position of relative privilege and be relegated to the status of Africans; the negative connotations, especially the shame attached to racial hybridity, with which colouredness was imbued; and finally, the marginality of the coloured community, which severely limited their options for social and political action, giving rise to a great deal of frustration.
Ever since its emergence in the late nineteenth century Coloured identity, its nature and the implications it holds for southern African society, have been the subject of ideological and political contestation. Because contending and changing perceptions of Colouredness imply different interpretations of their past there have been a wide range of approaches to the history of the Coloured people in both popular thinking and the academy. Also, controversy around the nature of Coloured identity has tended to intensify in recent decades, especially after the popularization of Coloured rejectionism in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976. Disagreements have thus often become quite heated because political and ideological agendas, as well as matters of high principle, have increasingly been seen to be at stake. After sketching the main contours of Coloured history this article outlines the full range of competing interpretations of this history and of the nature of Coloured identity that have emerged and explores the main contestations that have arisen.
San (Bushman) society in the Cape Colony was almost completely annihilated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of land confiscation, massacre, forced labour and cultural suppression that accompanied colonial rule. Whereas similar obliterations of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world have resulted in major public controversies and heated debate amongst academics about the genocidal nature of these episodes, in South Africa the issue has effectively been ignored aside from passing, often polemical, references to it as genocide. Even recent studies that have approached the mass killing of the Cape San with sensitivity and insight do not address it as a case of genocide. This article sets out to redress this imbalance in part by analysing the dynamic of frontier conflict between San and settler under Dutch colonial rule as genocide. It demonstrates both the exterminatory intent underlying settler violence as well as the complicity of a weak colonial state in these depredations, including its sanctioning of the root-and-branch eradication of the San.
The central argument of the dissertation is that Coloured identity is better understood not as having evolved through a series of transformations during this period, as conventional historical thinking would have it, but to have remained surprisingbly stable throughout the era of white rule. This is not to contend that Coloured identity was static or that it lacked fluidity, but that the continuities during this period were more fundamental to the way in which it operated as a social identity than the changes it experienced. It is argued at some length that this stability was derived from a central core of enduring characteristics that regulated the way in which Colouredness functioned as an identity during this period. For the core of the argument, see especially pp. 7-8 and 24-43.
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