Not White Enough, Not Black Enough. Mohamed Adhikari
and, although critical of white supremacism, nevertheless deferential toward white authority. His work, moreover, contained not the slightest trace of class analysis or radical rhetoric of the sort that would ordinarily have been expected from someone with left-wing sympathies. In tone and content, the book was typical of moderate, assimilationist discourse within the Coloured elite. And in keeping with the moderate political agenda, a key objective of the book was to plead with whites for fair treatment of the Coloured people and to aid their social advancement.
Ziervogel’s use of the term brown in the title signaled his acceptance of popular racialized perceptions of Colouredness. Indeed, he regarded the term coloured to be inaccurate and preferred brown hybrid. His interpretation differed little from white supremacist versions of Coloured history in broad principle except that he wove a strongly progressionist strand into his narrative, arguing that in the case of Coloured people, racial differences should not lead to their exclusion from the dominant society. The contorted logic and profoundly racist assumptions that at times informed Ziervogel’s tract can be gauged from his explanation of why various sections of the Coloured community could be expected to develop at different rates:
The hybrids of South Africa, the coloured people, are in many cases partly descended from English people, and must of necessity have inherited some of the virtues of that race. Hence, though they are comparatively backward at the present time, it is reasonable to suppose that it will not take them nine centuries to reach their ancestors’ high standard of development. Those descended from Asiatics will naturally develop in accordance with the stage of development previously reached by their ancestral race. That is, the people of Indian descent will develop more rapidly than those of Javanese descent, since the former come from a stock where there has been greater enlightenment. On the other hand, the hybrids of Bantu origin cannot be expected to develop as rapidly as others, since the degree of development reached by the Bantu is not equal to that of the Europeans or the Asiatics.
All this was offered despite the author’s declared standpoint that “humanity is greater than race,” that “‘pure races’ are hypothetical … and have no present existence,” and that he rejected the “Nordic Myth” of Aryan superiority.26
Ziervogel’s interpretation of the history of the Coloured people not only typified the progessionist vision but was also the most comprehensive and fully developed example of this paradigm. Its appearance was conveniently timed, coming as it did just as Marxist-inspired views of this history were about to challenge the conventional wisdom. The unifying thread of his none-too-coherent and often rather vague narrative was the persistent struggle of the Coloured people to rise from a benighted past to ever higher levels of civilization, their distinctive characteristic as a people being that they were “constantly responsive” to the “progressive” influence of Western civilization.27
Brown South Africa followed the conventional pattern of having the Coloured people originate as a result of miscegenation during the Dutch colonial period, describing van Riebeeck’s landing as “the beginning of White South Africa, and also of Brown South Africa.” He regarded the emancipation of slaves as pivotal to the emergence of a specifically Coloured identity, although he gave no explanation of how Coloured identity came about; he offered no more than “before and after 1834, the half-castes, Hottentots and slaves were merged together as the Cape Coloured people.” The real significance of emancipation for Ziervogel was that it “released coloured energies for self-improvement and ambition up to then repressed by social injustices.” Their newfound freedom gave the people the incentive to profit from their own efforts and aroused a quest “for education, the acquiring of property and the cultivation of the mind.” And although “mental and spiritual progress” was slow at first, the Coloured people, with the help of sympathetic whites, always managed to find ways to overcome obstacles—not least of which were the legal impediments raised by the colonial government—to their “upward course in the common life of South Africa.”28
Ziervogel depicted Coloured people as well on their way to being integrated into the dominant society on an equal footing with colonists by the mid-nineteenth century, when the “strong rush of the Bantu peoples sweeping downwards from the north, and the European advance upward from the south, meant that the two virile forces came face to face.” The ensuing struggle for supremacy and the growing incorporation of Africans into the South African economy after the discovery of minerals instilled a “fear complex in whites.” The consequent hardening of racial prejudices not only put an end to Coloureds’ integration into the dominant society but also reversed the trend to the extent that in the twentieth century, they fell victim to white South Africa’s segregationist policies.29
The author accepted that the Coloured people were “comparatively backward at the present time” but rejected the view of racists such as Sarah Gertrude Millin who regarded this condition as permanent. He asserted that during nearly three centuries of miscegenation and acculturation, “this half-caste type has evolved into something very like the Southern Europeans.” Despite huge impediments, the Coloured people had made great strides in the last generation and were rapidly catching up with whites. He viewed educated Coloureds as a dynamic, modernizing group fully imbued with the “spirit of civilization” and the most progressive elements of Western culture. He thus resented white perceptions that “the coloured man is only fit to be a messenger or a hawker” and the tendency not to judge Coloured people as individuals but to assume that they were “of an inferior race, whose most striking characteristics are those of lower intelligence, lower knowledge and lower general constitution.” Ziervogel was also frustrated by the indifference of the state and whites in general to the plight of the Coloured working classes living in squalor and the detrimental effect that the civilized labor policy and other discriminatory measures had on their progress as a people.30
Writing in a context of intensifying racial chauvinism internationally and tightening segregationism at home, Ziervogel feared that Coloureds could suffer a fate similar to that of Africans, to the extent of perhaps even finding themselves subject to territorial segregation. He was thus at pains to stress the long history and cultural affinities that Coloured people shared with whites. Although he did not broach the issue directly in Brown South Africa, in his pamphlet The Coloured People and the Race Problem, published two years earlier, he explicitly raised a related question: “On which side of the dividing line is he (the coloured man) to be placed?” Asserting that the two groups were so closely related that it was often difficult to distinguish between Coloured and white individuals, he argued that Coloureds “have practically nothing in common with the Bantu. While the Native is one who is at home in the countryside, has a language of his own, a culture of his own, and lives in many cases under tribal law, the coloured people came into being and live the whole of their lives in the midst of European civilization and culture.”31 On this basis, he invoked the call attributed to Lord Selborne, high commissioner for South Africa from 1905 to 1910—“Give the coloured people the benefit of their white blood”—and appealed for “absorption” and not segregation as the solution to the “Coloured problem.”32
“A Purposeful Social Instrument”: Radical Counter-positions of the 1940s and 1950s
It was fully forty-three years after the publication of Brown South Africa that the next significant book on the history of the Coloured community by a “Coloured” author—Maurice Hommel’s Capricorn Blues—appeared. Meanwhile, during the 1940s and 1950s, the radical movement in Coloured politics developed an interpretation of Coloured history that provided an alternative to the progressionist version.
The elaboration of a contending version of Coloured history was spearheaded by intellectuals within the Trotskyist tradition of radical politics, of which the Non-European Unity Movement and the Fourth International Organization of South Africa (FIOSA) were the main factions during the 1940s.33 The rival radical tradition, allied to the Communist Party and later the Congress Movement, made little contribution to the fleshing out of this new interpretation. With its emphasis on political activism, the Communist Party faction appears to have been too caught up in the cut and thrust of day-to-day politicking to pay too much attention to polemics about the significance of history and debate