Mohamed Adhikari is Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of several books on coloured identity, such as Burdened by Race (UCT Press, 2008), and teaches a course at UCT and at Stanford.

Burdened by Race

Coloured Identities in Southern Africa

By Mohamed Adhikari

Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd

Copyright © 2009 UCT Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-919895-14-7

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Notes on contributors,
Introduction,
Chapter 1: From narratives of miscegenation to post-modernist re-imagining: towards a historiography of coloured identity in South Africa Mohamed Adhikari,
Chapter 2: ‘… [C]onfused about being coloured’: creolisation and coloured identity in Chris van Wyk’s Shirley, Goodness and Mercy Helene Strauss,
Chapter 3: Trauma and memory: the impact of apartheid-era forced removals on coloured identity in Cape Town Henry Trotter,
Chapter 4: Identity and forced displacement: community and colouredness in District Six Christiaan Beyers,
Chapter 5: Collaboration, assimilation and contestation: emerging constructions of coloured identity in post-apartheid South Africa Michele Ruiters,
Chapter 6: ‘We are the original inhabitants of this land’: Khoe-San identity in post-apartheid South Africa Michael Besten,
Chapter 7: Race, ethnicity and the politics of positioning: the making of coloured identity in colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1980 James Muzondidya,
Chapter 8: Absent white fathers: coloured identity in Zambia Juliette Milner-Thornton,
Chapter 9: ‘A generous dream, but difficult to realize’: the making of the Anglo-African community of Nyasaland, 1929–1940 Christopher Lee,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

From narratives of miscegenation to post-modernist re-imagining: towards a historiography of coloured identity in South Africa

BY MOHAMED ADHIKARI

UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

The marginality of the coloured community under white supremacy is reflected in South African historiography in that relatively little was written on the history of this social group prior to the mid-1990s and much of what was written was journalistic, polemical, speculative, poorly researched or heavily biased. In nearly all general histories of South Africa, coloured people have effectively been written out of the narrative and marginalised to a few throw-away comments scattered through the text. This tendency was noted as early as 1913 by Harold Cressy, a coloured educationist and school principal, when he called on the coloured teaching profession to dispel the myth that coloured people played little or no part in the history of South African society. Les Switzer, professor of media studies at the University of Houston, put it eloquently when in 1995 he wrote that ‘South Africa’s coloured community has remained a marginalized community – marginalized by history and even historians’.

Ever since its emergence in the late 19th century, coloured identity, its nature and the implications it holds for South African society have nevertheless been the subject of ideological and political contestation. Because contending and changing perceptions of colouredness imply different interpretations of their past, there has 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 popularisation of coloured rejectionism in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976. Disagreements have often become quite heated because political and ideological agendas, as well as matters of high principle, were increasingly seen to be at stake in particular views of the identity. Indeed, by the mid-1980s issues around coloured identity had become acutely politic