Mixed Race Studies

Craniometric Study of the Cape Coloured Population

Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa
Volume 33, Issue 1 (1951)
pages 29-51
DOI: 10.1080/00359195109519876

J. A. Keena
Department of Anatomy
University of Cape Town

(With Plate XI and three Text-figures.)
(Read November 16, 1949.)

The Cape Coloured people inhabit Cape Town, the Cape Peninsula and the western corner of the Cape Province. Their emergence aa a distinct ethnic group is a matter of history, covering a time-period of three centuries. The basis of the Cape Coloured group is the original Hottentot population, and an early admixture occurred between the incoming European settlers and the Hottentots. The Hottentot people at that time were already a somewhat mixed racial group, having absorbed a good deal of Bushman blood (Maingard, 1932). The Bushman element in the genetic make-up of the Cape Coloured will be seen to be an important factor.

A further admixture occurred when the Dutch East India Company introduced slaves into the colony. Some of the slaves came from population groups in the far East, such as Java, or the nearer East, such as Ceylon and India, and they brought into the Cape Coloured group elements of the south-eastern races of Asia. Other slaves came from the east coast of Africa along the trade route of the Dutch East India Company, and these brought a negro clement into the racial make-up of the Cape Coloured. It should be noted, however, that this is not the same as the West African negro element which has entered into the formation of the mixed racial groups of the American continent. The East African negro populations contain a considerable admixture of Hamitic stock which differentiates them from the West African negro communities.

In the main, therefore, the Cape Coloured people contain a mixture of Hottentot, Bushman, European, Asiatic and Negro racial elements, the crossings between these major subdivisions of mankind being well established and having occurred within a comparatively short time-period. To such…

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South Africa: Is the Sun Setting on Afrikaners?

International Business Times
2011-07-27

Palash R. Ghosh

The recent death of Magnus Malan, the feared former general and defense minister of South Africa, might have ended an era in a country once defined by strict racial separation.

Malan, who ferociously fought to maintain racial apartheid until the very end, was removed from his post by then-President F.W. de Klerk in the early 1990s under pressure from recently freed political prisoner Nelson Mandela.
 
Malan was part of the White Afrikaner community, the people most associated with establishing and rigidly maintaining the apartheid system for many decades.
 
The Afrikaners are the descendants of mostly Dutch (as well as German and French Huguenots) who arrived in South Africa in the middle of the seventeenth century (English speakers from Britain came in the following century).

Indeed, the Afrikaners have lived in South Africa so long that they regard themselves as “Africans” or “the white tribe of Africa.”
 
However, today, Afrikaners find themselves in a brand new, and perhaps for them, perilous, South Africa.
 
For one thing, their numbers are shrinking….

…One of the bittersweet ironies of Afrikaner culture and history is that—despite being intimately associated with the philosophy of white supremacy and white ‘purity’—they are themselves of mixed race.
 
This has to do with the fact that when the original Dutch settlers arrived in South Africa almost four-hundred years ago, they brought almost no women. Consequently, they had to marry and mate with local women, or with Malays and East Indians.
 
Thus, some the oldest and most revered Afrikaner families, including the Krugers, Van Riebeecks, Bruyns, Van Rensburgs, and Zaimans are likely the descendants of mixed-race couples.
 
[Professor A.M.] Grundlingh [of the History Department at Stellenbosch University] said according to estimates, about 6 percent of so-called “white” Afrikaners are actually of mixed blood.
 
Allegedly, one of the greatest of Afrikaner heroes, Andries Pretorius, the leader of the Great Voortrek, was himself descended from East Indian slave women on both his maternal and paternal sides.
 
This also helps to explains why many of the current “Coloured” of South Africa speak Afrikaans as their first language…

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Sonic spaces: Inscribing “coloured” voices in the Karoo, South Africa

University of Pennsylvania
2006
228 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3246175

Marie R. Jorritsma

A Dissertation in Music Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

A common stereotype of those classified as “coloured” in apartheid South Africa was that, because of their mixed racial heritage, they had no authentic racial or cultural identity and history. This dissertation counters that lingering stereotype by examining how musical performance enabled “coloured” community members around the town of Graaff-Reinet to claim a place for themselves collectively under apartheid and in post-apartheid South Africa. Nurtured and sustained by a policy of racial purity, the apartheid regime held a deeply ambivalent position towards those it categorized as “coloured,” the racial group it defined as “not a white person or a native.” Oral and written sources typically convey “coloured” people’s ethnic identity, cultural history, and musical heritage as similarly lacking. Despite this, music has been and continues to be an integral part of the religious practices of this community though its performance has survived practically unnoticed by those outside.

By placing the voices of “coloured” people at the center of this study, I move beyond the myopic apartheid view that saw “coloured” people purely in terms of their ethnic origins and capacity for labor. Instead, I approach “coloured” music and history in terms of the sounds and spaces of their religious performance culture. My research provides a narrative of “coloured” social history in the Graaff-Reinet region that is drawn from regional archives and empirical research in the form of fieldwork, specifically participant observation. I concentrate on religious musical practice, namely, hymns, koortjies (little choruses), choir performance, and the singing at women’s society meetings. Studying song performance creates a complex nexus of music, race, religion, and politics, and constitutes a vital way of retrieving history and oral repertories. This music thereby provides one vehicle for groups and individuals in this community to articulate a more “legitimate” place for themselves in the contemporary landscape of South African history and culture.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter One – Introduction: Sonic Spaces, Inscribing “Coloured” Voices
• Chapter Two – Senzeni na: Music, Religion, and Politics in Three Kroonvale Congregations
• Chapter Three – Singing the “Queen’s English”: Church Choirs in Kroonvale
• Chapter Four V – Mothers of the Church: Women’s Society Music and South African Gender Issues
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Glossary
• Bibliography

List of Illustrations

1. View of Umasizakhe, Graaff-Reinet, and Kroonvale
2. View of Kroonvale, Santaville, Asherville, Koebergville, and Geluksdal
3. Map of Kroonvale
4. Old DRMC Building in Graaff-Reinet
5. Last Church Service Held at the DRMC Building, c. 1964
6. URC Building in Kroonvale
7. Old PSCC Building in Graaff-Reinet
8. PSCC Building in Kroonvale
9. Old Klein Londen Building in Graaff-Reinet
10. ESCC Building in Kroonvale
11. View of URC and PSCC from ESCC Grounds
12. Parsonage Street Congregational Church, 13 February 2005
13. East Street Congregational Church, 17 July 2005
14. Uniting Reformed Church, 15 August 2004
15. Combined Congregational Church Broederband service, 17 February 2005
16. Wat bring jy myn die domme?: Cape Malay Ghomma-liedjie notated by I.D. du Plessis
17. Juig aarde juig sung by Mrs J.S. Beukes, Mr W.S. Adonis and Mr J.W. Beukes, 16 April 1980
18. Hy’s hier om ons te seen (He’s here to bless us), Uniting Reformed Church, 5 December 2004
19. Jesus is so lief virmy (Jesus loves me very much), East Street Congregational Church, 26 June 2005
20. Dit was nie om te oordeel nie (It was not to judge), Parsonage Street Congregational Church, 6 March 2005
21. Worstel mens (Wrestle sinner), Combined Congregational Church Broederband service, 17 February 2005
22. Graaff-Reinet Mayor Daantjie Jaftha
23. Zion, City of God (G. Froflich)
24. Holy Holy Holy (Franz Schubert)
25. Program of Concert Tour and Performance in Kimberley, 3 September 1972
26. Restored Slave Cottages at Stretch’s Court, Drostdy Hotel
27. Wees stil en weet, Women’s World Day of Prayer Service, East Street Congregational Church, 3 March 2005
28. Wees stil en weet, “Official” Hymnbook Version

PREFACE

As a child, the Karoo always symbolised an escape for me. It was a refuge from the routine of school attendance, extra-mural activities, and the restlessly windy, unpredictable weather of the coastal city of Port Elizabeth. The family farm lay only three and a half hours1 drive away from the city, where huge breakfasts of porridge, toast, and tea fortified me for seemingly endless sunny and windless days spent walking in the surrounding veld, participating in (and most likely, hindering) the usual farming activities, and playing in the water furrows. A typical Karoo child displays an endless fascination with the precious commodity of water, and diverting the small rivulets in the furrow to flow smoothly over the muddy gravel guaranteed countless hours of captivation.

My grandmother used to tell me, as a child, to look for San tools such as grinding stones or arrowheads when walking in the Karoo veld. To this day, this collection remains displayed in the farmhouse. It never occurred to me then that the San people, the forebears of many present-day “coloured” people, suffered merciless persecution on the part of my ancestors, the colonial settlers.

When I returned to the Karoo for fieldwork on the music of “coloured” people, this memory of looking for San ”treasure” and proof of their existence in this area contrasted very strangely with the historical accounts I read about the violent treatment of the San people by the settlers. Immersed in my research, I seldom visited the veld, and instead explored my childhood memories in new contexts of colonial history and apartheid. As much as this project was originally driven by a deep appreciation of and interest in this music and then an ongoing desire that it not be ignored, my own background as the granddaughter of a Karoo farmer had to be revisited and recontextualised as the project continued.

I remember sitting in June Bosch’s home one day when for once my childhood memories did not clash with the historical and contemporary stories of “coloured” people’s oppression and marginalization. June Bosch and her cousin, Loretta Fortune, told me a story from their childhood days in Caroline Street, Graaff-Reinet. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, water from the Van Ryneveld’s Pass Dam outside the town would be led into the cement furrows lining the streets for the townspeople to use. As the neighborhood children spotted the water, they would shout up the street to announce its presence and run for any and every available container. June was under strict instructions from her grandmother to water the garden roses first, and then to spray the unpaved street in order to settle the dust. After fulfilling these duties, the children would play in the furrows until the water flow ceased. Recognizing the similarity in our childhood games and activities with their focus on water made it poignantly apparent to me that we were all once children of the Karoo.

This research project thus stems from my own connection to Graaff-Reinet and its surrounding area. Combined with a strong scholarly fascination with this music, my reasons for undertaking the project also included the opportunity to revisit and perhaps, in some small way, to recapture the past. No longer a childhood escape, it is the spaces and sounds of this Karoo community that have offered me a new perspective on my relationship to this place and its people…

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Mixed race vote key to Cape Town in S. Africa polls

The Citizen
2011-05-16

Justine Gerardy

Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.

CAPE TOWN – Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.

“No other option: DA,” said the mixed race supporter of the Democratic Alliance over the ruling African National Congress (ANC) that led South Africa into democracy.

“I’ll never vote any ANC, never. I’ll never vote for a black man, never,” said Cox, 72. “They don’t worry for us.”

Politicians have scrambled to woo mixed race voters, known locally as coloureds, who are the majority in Cape Town, South Africa’s only major city not in ruling party hands.

The battle is a two-party race between President Jacob Zuma’s ANC, which lost the city five years ago, and the DA led by Helen Zille, who is the first female leader of the party.

The coloured group is tipped to back the DA—years after many cast their first votes in 1994 for apartheid’s white minority nationalists that oppressed them but ranked them higher than blacks…

…Coloureds who have African, European, East Asian and South Indian roots had more privileges than the darker-skinned black majority in apartheid’s strict hierarchy designed to keep South Africa’s people apart and protect white power.

The divisions cut across separate housing, education and even language with Dutch settler-derived Afrikaans spoken instead of local African languages.

And while power has shifted, many still feel sidelined…

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Are we all ‘coloured’?

News 24 (South Africa)
2011-03-09

Max Du Preez

We really need to find new terminology for the different population groups in South Africa, especially now that we’re moving back into a political culture of obsession with race.

Problem One: if “coloured” means people of mixed blood, then the vast majority of people born in South Africa are coloureds, myself included.

Studies in the 1980s have found that white Afrikaners have an average of seven percent “black” blood, mostly because of early relationships and marriages between white settlers and slaves or Khoisan. Some Afrikaners, like my family, have considerably more than seven percent black blood.

This is also true of black South Africans. Three quick examples: ANC veteran Walter Sisulu’s father was a white man; Winnie Mandela’s mother had light skin, blue eyes and long hair and her mother-in-law called her a mlungu; Nelson Mandela’s mitochondrial DNA was found to be pure Khoisan. There were many runaway slaves from the East Indies and European shipwreck survivors in the 16th, 17th and 18th century who became part of the Zulu and Xhosa peoples.

Problem Two: Probably a majority of people classified “coloured” during the apartheid years were descendants of the Khoikhoi and the San or Bushmen, with, of course, some white, slave and black blood. But when the ANC and other so-called Africanists refer to “Africans”, they exclude these people.

This is sheer madness: the descendants of the first peoples of southern Africa are excluded from the term African? The Khoisan were here thousands of years before the first black farming groups arrived from further north. They are the original Africans…

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Representation of Coloured Identity in Selected Visual Texts about Westbury, Johannesburg

University of the Witwatersrand
December 2006
132 pages

Phyllis D. Dannhauser

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Dramatic Art).

In post-apartheid South Africa, Coloured communities are engaged in reconstructing identities and social histories. This study examines the representation of community, identity, culture and historic memory in two films about Westbury, Johannesburg, South Africa. The films are Westbury, Plek van Hoop, a documentary, and Waiting for Valdez, a short fiction piece. The ambiguous nature of Coloured identity, coupled with the absence of recorded histories and unambiguous identification with collective cultural codes, results in the representation of identity becoming contested and marginal. Through constructing narratives of lived experience, hybrid communities can challenge dominant stereotypes and subvert discourses of otherness and difference. Analysis of the films reveals that the Coloured community have reverted to stereotypical documentary forms in representing their communal history. Although the documentary genre lays claim to the representation of reality and authentic experience, documentary is not always an effective vehicle for the representation of lived experience and remembered history. Fiction can reinterpret memory by accessing the emotional textures of past experiences in a more direct way.

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Being and Belonging: Space and Identity in Cape Town

Anthropology and Humanism
Volume 28, Issue 1 (June 2003)
pages 61–84
DOI: 10.1525/ahu.2003.28.1.61

Shannon M. Jackson, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Missouri, Kansas City

The post-apartheid transition has led to changes in the shape and meaning of urban space in South Africa. Cape Town is being described as a postmodern city where planning strategies and new development have begun to fragment and privatize space to the point of de-territorializing it. This has contributed to the effort by a local group, referred to as “Coloureds,” to reterritorialize Cape Town, to reinscribe history and meaning back into the urban landscape. In the process of reterritorializing the city, Coloureds are negotiating their own identities but are doing so in ways that both challenge racial boundaries and assert them. This article will explore the nature and history of the urban space being reclaimed as well as the way in which the meaning it inspires contributes to the contradictory and ambiguous quality of the boundaries of Coloured identity.

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Then I Was Black: South African Political Identities in Transition

Yale University Press
2000-06-19
304 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 9780300080131

Courtney Jung, Associate Professor of Political Science
The New School

Do race and ethnicity present a danger to the consolidation of effective democratic government? Can liberal constitutionalism provide a stable basis for governance of a polity historically erected on racial and ethnic division? In this book Courtney Jung argues that when ethnic and racial identities are politically fluid and heterogeneous, as she finds they are in South Africa, ethnic and racial politics will not undermine the peaceful and democratic potential of the government.

Jung examines three important cases of politicized racial and ethnic identity in South Africa: Zulu, Afrikaner, and Coloured. Working from extensive field research and interviews, she develops a model to explain shifts in the political salience, goals, and boundaries of these groups between 1980 and 1995. Jung challenges the common assumption that cultural identities overdetermine political possibility, pointing out that individual members fail for the most part to internalize the political agenda of “their own” ethnic group. Group engagement with the state is also conditioned by contextual factors, not determined by its constitution in ethnic or racial terms. South Africa is no more divided than most other societies, she concludes, and no less likely to consolidate democracy as a result of its politicized cleavages of race and ethnicity.

Elite (re-)constructions of coloured identities in a post-apartheid South Africa: Assimilations and bounded transgressions

Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
2006
328 pages
AAT 3249339

Michele René Ruiters

A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Political Science

This thesis engages with issues of identity, diversity and democracy through a study of the reconstruction of colouredness, a marginal identity, in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that coloured elites reconstruct their apartheid-designated racialized identities in order to create new identities that reflect their own and their communities’ experiences and needs. This reconstruction process often results in a reification of past expressions of each identity, which needs to be negotiated in a contemporary era. Ultimately, self-definition creates agency and therefore a stronger citizen who participates more effectively within their polity and thus strengthens democratic practices. I argue that diversity enhances democracy only if a politics of recognition is practiced.

The thesis also examines the possibility of releasing identities from historical baggage in the sense that a new identity could be constructed. I show that ‘new’ identities are constrained by the past and often struggle to free themselves from existing constructions. I argue that this is possible only if elites are willing to let go of past constructions and to be more inclusive in their visions for the future. The state, however, should continue to recognize marginal groups in order to combat the emergence of isolationist and reactionary politics from those groups.

My project examines one community’s search for recognition from a state that has, since 1994, rejoined a larger African community, which is largely unknown to ordinary South Africans. I argue that this process of reconstructing a coloured identity, which certain coloured elites have undertaken, is not a social movement but is a spiritual search for belonging, which provides a social network of similar minded people who wish to redefine their identities. I also contend that the reconstruction of coloured identities has to occur within a new framework in which an African identity is more inclusive and within which attempts have been made to move away from past constructions of identities.

Table of Contents

• II. ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
• III. DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Chapter 1: Introduction and Methodology
  • Who is ‘Coloured’?
  • Why Identity?
  • Race and Ethnicity
  • Insider Re-vision of History
  • A National Identity
  • Methodology
  • Chapter Synopses
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2: Elites, Marginal Identities and the Public Sphere
  • Political identities
  • Marginal Identities
  • Censuses and control
  • Passing
  • ‘Errors’ and ‘Mistakes’
  • The Public Sphere
  • Elites, Institutions and Ideology
  • Citizenship and Belonging
  • ‘New’ constructions of Race-Ethnic Identities
  • Marginal Groups and Agenda-setting
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3: Colonial Constructions of Coloured Identity
  • Arrival of the Colonists
  • Race at the Cape
  • Social life and gender
  • Slavery at the Cape
  • Impositions and Adoptions
  • Miscegenation and Misfits
  • Imagined Communities
  • ‘I am Coloured’
  • Expressions of ‘coloured’ politics
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: Apartheid Opportunities and Constraints
  • Apartheid Apparatus
  • Definitions of ‘Coloured’
  • Social spaces and Political issues
  • Imagined Community Realized
  • Black Politics and State Repression
  • Challenging Identities
  • Language
  • Political Constraints and Opportunities post-1984
  • The End of Apartheid
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5: Emerging Constructions of Coloured Identity – Post-1994
  • The National Question
  • Elites Change Identities
  • New Coloured Identities
  • Brown Identities
  • The December First Movement and Slave Identities
  • KhoiSan Identities
  • Creoles and Africans
  • Way Forward
• Chapter 6: The Politics of Newly Constructed Identities in South Africa
  • What is the African Renaissance?
  • Who is an African?
  • Marginal voices on African identities
  • The State’s Options
  • Existing Options
  • New Identities?
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendices: Transcriptions of Three Interviews
• Curriculum Vitae

Chapter I: Introduction and Methodology

In 1994, South Africa entered a new political era. Racialism was outlawed and Black people could take their rightful place in a new democracy. The dominant party, the African National Congress, introduced a new ideological framework that was to guide our relations with each other within the country and to guide South Africa’s relations with the region, continent and world. The overarching ideology was based on an African renaissance which was to favorably reposition Africa in a global system. In this context, identity re-cmcrged as an important category in South Africa, despite the ANC’s call to non-racialism, as people jostled for what they perceived to be scarce resources. Social relations in South Africa have always been defined in terms of difference based on whether people were ‘white’, ‘Black African’, ‘Indian’ or ‘coloured’. The term Black African is newly constructed. ‘Black’ or ‘African’ were used in the past to denote people who were of Nguni origin, or in ‘other’ terms, people who were not white or coloured. Black was also used to denote a political identity in the liberation struggle and it included everyone that was not white (see Kuhn 2001:21). I have chosen to use Black African because ‘African’ presently refers to all who live on the continent while ‘Black African’ has the same constricted meaning as ‘African’ did under apartheid rule.

During the apartheid era, the state imposed racialized identities onto people and, more often than not, did not take into consideration people’s everyday experiences with their identities. Two processes are occurring simultaneously. The state is reinventing itself as an African nation with an 4 African’ identity that has not been clearly defined to date. Secondly, groups within South Africa are grappling with the process of (re-)naming themselves within this new political milieu. The South African state needs to redefine itself in a post-apartheid, globalizing world and is attempting to do so through the creation of a ‘new’ South African identity that can be shared by all South Africans. The introduction of an overarching ‘African’ identity has created insecurities in South African society and has resulted in people holding on to their apartheid-defined identities. How can South Africanness be created in the light of a fragmented society? Can we use old identities to forge a new identity and can we move beyond race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century? What can the state and groups do to construct identities that depict novel ‘imagined communities’? How docs the state overcome the past to forge a new society based on political ideals of justice, democracy, equality and humanism?…

…Who is ‘Coloured’?

The coloured people were defined as a ‘mixed’ race group that was neither white nor Black. It was constructed as a buffer group between the two racially divided extremes in this country. Some people accepted the imposed apartheid identities while others opposed the state’s denial of their agency to choose their own identities. For this reason coloured identity is very peculiar to the South African context, however, it also provides a snapshot of the experiences of many marginal groups across the world. The Cold Warand the reconfiguration of power relations within the world have provided opportunity spaces for marginal groups to claim a space and identity for themselves. How are marginal identities reconfigured and re-imagined in this globalizing world? How do they define themselves, obtain recognition and negotiate with power? These questions make it imperative that we provide a historical overview of how the state and coloured elites construct coloured identity. Under the colonial and apartheid eras colouredness was an in-between category, supposedly without a culture, without an obvious and authoritative history; and arguably without a political home. Coloured identity in South Africa remains a hotly contested subject in the twenty-first century and will continue to be so as more and more people disrupt imposed racial categorizations (see Erasmus 2001, Wasserman and Jacobs 2003, Hendricks 2000b, Jung 2000, Zegeye 2001a). This work provides a new perspective on coloured identities as they relate to the social, political and economic constraints placed on the identity by larger structural relations.

Colouredness historically dates to social interaction with the first Dutch settlers who arrived in the 1600s. The local people of the southernmost region of the continent, the Khoi and San, entered into economic and social relationships with the white settlers. When East African, Indonesian and Indian slaves came into the region and the indigenous tribes from the north moved south, a ‘new’ identity evolved through social and political interaction between the various race groups. ‘Miscegenation‘ between the white settlers, the indigenes and the slaves, gave rise to a ‘mixed’ race person. The assumption that coloured identity was born from a combination of different people is problematic because it incorrectly assumes that identities arc primordial and fixed. Identities are not immutable therefore they should be examined temporally to determine how they have addressed and dealt with changing relations within a society.

Coloured identities occupied a space that previously did not exist; one that was deemed to be ‘better than Black African but not quite white. Courtney Jung asserts:

Coloureds by their very existence, inhabited an oppositional space. They existed at the intersections of multiple racial classifications, occupying a residual, clearly non-racial category. Coloureds defied racialization. Under apartheid, those ‘outside’ racial stereotypes were redefined in racial terms, to support the ideological proposition that the world was naturally divided into separate races that belonged apart (2000:168).

Under colonial rule the state created a new racialized identity into which people labeled ‘coloured’ could fit. The apartheid government legislated those identities into formal existence and maintained racial differences until the early 1990s when F. W. de Klerk’s watershed speech unbanned the liberation movements and released Nelson Mandelaafter twenty-seven years in prison. Coloured elites have opened up debates since 1994 on coloured identities and have proposed that communities and individuals re-imagine their identities and frame them in terms they have chosen for themselves: KhoiSan, Creole, slave-descendent, and African being the more common self-chosen identities. Elites who have chosen these identities have begun to debate with the overarching concept of ‘ Africanness’ in an attempt to determine where they fit into the new political, economic and social dispensation…

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Negotiating Coloured Identity Through Encounters with Performance

University of the Western Cape
November 2005
148 Pages

Gino Fransman

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA in the Faculty of Arts University of the Western Cape

In this study theatre, as staged performance and as text, will be used as an exploratory and discursive tool to examine the negotiation of Coloured identity in the ‘New South Africa’. I investigate debates on Coloured identity while also drawing on theories of the performativity of identity. The role of performance in negotiating this identity is foregrounded; this provides a context for a case study which evaluates responses by Coloured and Black students at the University of the Western Cape to popular Coloured identity-related performances. These include Marc Lottering’s ‘Crash’ and ‘From the Cape Flats With Love’, and Petersen, Isaacs and Reisenhoffer’s ‘Joe Barber’ and ‘Suip’. These works, both as texts and as performance, will be used to analyse the way stereotypical representations of Coloured identities are played with, subverted or negotiated in performance. I attempt to establish how group stereotypes are constructed within the performance arena, and question whether attitudes can be negotiated through encounters with performance.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter One
  • Setting the Scene
• Staging, de-staging and re-staging the Coloured:
  • Chapter Two
    • Staging the Coloured––An Inter-disciplinary Approach
    • Comedy and Reflexivity
  • Chapter Three
    • De-staging the Coloured
    • The Theatre in Action: Using Stereotype
  • Chapter Four
    • Framing the Performances
    • The Performances as Texts
    • ‘Joe Barber’ – The Script
    • ‘Suip’ – The Script
  • Chapter Five
    • The Performances: Re-staging the Coloured
    • Conveying Meaning and Method
    • ‘From the Cape Flats With Love’
  • Chapter Six
    • The Case-Study: Methodology and Discussion
    • The Sample
    • Ethics Statement
    • The Participants as Spectators/Audience
    • Audiences and Venues
    • Special Features of the Performances Useful for the Investigation
    • Methods of Data Collection
  • Chapter Seven
    • Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Appendix A:
  • Images
  • Marc Lottering ‘From the Cape Flats With Love’
  • ‘Crash’ Promotional Material
  • ‘Joe Barber’
  • ‘Suip’ Promotional Material
• Appendix B:
  • Sample Questionnaire

Introduction

Where is the theatre now located in the ‘New South Africa’? To what extent has the focus shifted to “the representation of present struggle” (Orkin, 1996:61), rather than the struggle for a democracy enshrined within a constitution? How does this contribute to establishing an emergent national identity, and simultaneously affect specific group identities? These questions are key to the discussions that follow, as the national identity encompasses different groups assembled under one banner: the ‘New South Africa’. These groups, in turn, are all subject to group negotiations of identity.

In the study that follows, theatre as staged performance and as text will be used as exploratory and discursive tools to investigate the negotiation of identities. The aim is to explore this theme by examining the responses to four popular Coloured identity-related staged performances; Marc Lottering’s ‘Crash’ (2004) and ‘From the Cape Flats with Love’ (2001), as well as Petersen, Isaacs and Reisenhoffer’s ‘Joe Barber’ (1999) and ‘Suip’ (1996). These works, both as performance and as text, will be used to investigate the way stereotypical representations of Coloured identities are played with, subverted or negotiated in performance. In this work I attempt to establish how meanings are constructed within the performance arena. I also examine how they have been negotiated by using the responses of a selected group of students at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), as a case study, in order to explore current student attitudes.

The primary focus of the thesis examines Coloured identity as a construction still represented as a stereotype at times, but also as fluidly reflecting the changing South African society. The readings of the performances, as well as the performances as texts, illustrate occasions where this fluidity, or lack of fluidity in stereotypical instances, is represented on the stage. On the other hand the case study provides a student audience response to representations of Coloured people on the stage in South Africa. The slippages between being a cultural insider and investigating that very culture often manifest themselves, within the scope of this work and beyond its constraints. It is the difficulty of maintaining the theoretical trend that Coloured identity is fluid, which makes identifying these manifestations in the performances and case study so fascinating. The thesis explores this tension as far as possible within a limited scope for detail…

…Chapter One: Setting the Scene

‘Coloureds don’t feel included in mainstream South African society’… this sense of exclusion could in some ways explain why they had ‘no real stake in obeying the rules of this society’. (Ted Leggett, Institute of Security Studies- South Africa: 2004)

I am a Coloured. At least that is what I call myself. In South Africa today, ten years after democracy, it is surprising that this statement requires qualification. No qualification, in our democratic country, is required for someone stating, “I am Black,” or “I am White.” Yet, Coloured identity is mired in questions of, amongst others, belonging, status, and power. The contradictions implicit in claiming a Coloured identity are explored here, as my own claiming of the term places me in opposition to ‘being named’. To myself, it means one thing, but to someone else, it could carry an entirely different meaning when it is ascribed to me, and thus imposes a way of being onto the term Coloured.

Richard van der Ross, one of the former rectors of UWC (which was established in 1960 as a Coloured or ‘Bush’ College), states that at first, those now called Coloured were simply referred to as “from the Cape”. He says:

In time, however, through education and general development, the group has become aware of its situation and oppression, and has sought to shake off its feelings and position of inferiority… They base their claims on the long line of descent taking them back, in some cases, to the original inhabitants of the land of their birth… the new group which has emerged has been known by many names. (2005:94)

 In the 1600s, slaves of mixed parentage had already been afforded more privilege than Black slaves. Following this rationale, boys born of mixed slave parents were preferred over the descendants of Black slaves, as “the masters thought they learned rapidly” (2005:35). Following a progression of ascribed names, Robert Shell (quoted in Van der Ross) says the identification of the group occurred “after the abolition of the slave trade (1808) [when] the convenient name coloured was introduced into the South African vocabulary, where it stubbornly persists” (2005:98).

Van der Ross outlines an intricate web of inter-group mixing, from slaves, colonists, locals, exiles and freed slaves. That these groups are all represented in his framework does not indicate that inter-mixing necessarily occurred amongst all of these groups in a single family line. For the purposes of this study, the combinations of these do “not mean that all the components are to be found in any individual [C]oloured person. There may be no more than two” (2005:98).

Read the entire thesis here.