Not White Enough, Not Black Enough. Mohamed Adhikari
political activists in the Trotskyist tradition were prone to a more cerebral and highly theorized approach and the precept expressed by FIOSA member Kenneth Jordaan: “In history [lies] the key to understanding the present which in turn is the indispensable guide to the future.”34
Like its progressionist counterpart, the radical view of the trajectory of Coloured history was implicit in the ideology and aspirations of the left-wing movement as well as in its political strategy. In addition, this historical consciousness was sometimes invoked for political purposes, such as arguing that black unity was a prerequisite for overthrowing white rule in South Africa, or to score points off opponents in ideological infighting. The best example of such an exchange involving the history of the Coloured people is Kenny Jordaan’s riposte to Willem van Schoor’s history of segregation in South Africa.35 Besides wanting to refine the relatively crude analysis of van Schoor, Jordaan was also clearly engaged in a contest of one-upmanship between FIOSA and the NEUM, of which van Schoor, president of the TLSA for much of the 1950s, was a leading member.
This radical discourse, however, differed from the progressionist interpretation in that little attention was paid, directly or exclusively, to the history of the Coloured people per se, and it did not find expression in a focused history in the way the progressionist view was represented in Brown South Africa. Drawing on Marxist theory, radical historical analyses were usually situated within a framework of the development of international capitalism and the imperatives behind imperialism. In contrast to the more parochial concerns of the progressionist perspective, social issues tended to be viewed in the context of international relations and global history by radicals.36 And given the radicals’ explicit goal of fomenting social revolution, their reflections on South African society and its history by and large trancended narrower issues relating to localized identities, such as the specific role or significance of the Coloured people on any particular question. Their emphasis on black and working-class unity also discouraged separate consideration of the Coloured community. In the writings of radical Coloured intellectuals, issues relating specifically to the Coloured community were therefore either ignored, subsumed under a broader black rubric, or referred to obliquely or parenthetically. The collective radical perception of the history of the Coloured people thus needs to be unraveled and extracted by inference from broader analyses of the history of South Africa or of the “oppressed.”
Although Coloured radical politics had always been rent by fierce ideological infighting and irreconcilable doctrinal splits, there was sufficient common ground for one to discern a generic radical notion of the history of the Coloured people. The spirit with which Coloured activists in the radical movement, especially the Trotskyist faction, approached history in general and the history of South Africa in particular is neatly summed up in the opening sentence of van Schoor’s address on segregation to the Teachers’ League of South Africa in October 1950 and repeated for emphasis as its closing sentence: “A people desiring to emancipate itself must understand the process of its enslavement.” He went on to explain that “we who have thus far been the victims of South African history, will play the major role in the shaping of a new history. In order to make that history we must understand that history.”37 Radicals would also have shared Edgar Maurice’s view that “the phenomenon of colour prejudice and the colour bar is largely one of capitalist exploitation of peoples … a purposeful social instrument, politically manufactured to serve certain ends.”38 Insofar as it referred to the Coloured people, radical historical writing was framed in these broad terms.
Historical analyses by radical Coloured intellectuals, though recognizing the existence of the Coloured people as a separate social entity, avoided treating them as an analytical category distinct from the African majority. Van Schoor’s monograph on the origin and development of segregation in South Africa, for example, focused almost entirely on the African experience and hardly made any mention of Coloureds or Indians. It is noteworthy that in this review of South African history stretching back to the arrival of van Riebeeck, the first substantive comment by van Schoor on the Coloured people related to the establishment of the Coloured Advisory Council in 1943. He indirectly justified this approach by claiming that Africans formed a large majority of the oppressed and that exploitative measures had largely been directed at them.39
Jordaan criticized this tendency of “placing the Cape Coloured people in the same category as the Bantu” as ahistorical and a distortion of the past.40 It should thus come as no surprise that it is in his writing that one finds the most explicit treatment of the history of the Coloured people in radical writing. But even he did not address the history of the Coloured people directly as an independent topic of inquiry. In his disquisition, “Jan van Riebeeck: His Place in South African History,”41 Jordaan chalked out the barest outline of the history of the Coloured people as a by-product of his analysis of the “social systems” that have characterized South African history and a concomitant attempt to provide a rough periodization of the South African past.42 Besides using his analysis to support the call for a boycott of the van Riebeeck tercentenary festival, one of Jordaan’s aims was to correct ahistorical perceptions that the treatment of South African blacks through history could be explained in terms of an abstract, uniform white racism. He wanted to demonstrate that each social system had its own set of policies “toward the black and mixed people,” grounded in their specific “living historical reality which grew out of a definitive stage in the productive process.”43 For all its sketchiness, Jordaan’s text will have to serve as the model for the radical perception of Coloured history in the absence of any more explicit example.
Born in Cape Town in 1924 and a teacher by profession, Kenneth Jordaan was a prominent member of FIOSA in the latter half of the 1940s. Together with a small band of associates who declined to comply with the Fourth International’s recommendation that FIOSA amalgamate with the rival Cape Town Trotskyist grouping, the Worker’s Party of South Africa, Jordaan formed the Forum Club, an independent left-wing discussion group that met during the early 1950s. In the 1950s, Jordaan won broad respect in left-wing circles for a number of theoretical papers he wrote on the nature of South African society, its history, and the implications this held for revolutionary strategy.44
The first social system of South African history identified by Jordaan existed during the era of Company rule at the Cape, from 1652 to 1795. He claimed that because the Cape served mainly as a refreshment station and military outpost, the economy was not expansionist and there was no attempt to bring indigenous peoples under direct Dutch control. Because of the colony’s simple social organization and its imperative of consolidating control over the southwestern tip of the continent, Jordaan asserted that “there was no colour policy” and that Cape colonial society “absorbed all mixed elements—the result of miscegenation between whites, blacks and imported slaves.” Jordaan was emphatic about the miscegenated origins of the Coloured people, and he emphasized that they were an integral part of Dutch colonial society: “The father of the Cape Coloured people is therefore van Riebeeck. It is he who, by encouraging mixed unions, called them to life and it is he who, realizing their close affinity to the Dutch, made them an indissoluble and indistinguishable part of the European population.” Although he indicated that substantial numbers of miscegenes passed into the settler community, he did not explain how and why the rest of this supposedly “indistinguishable part of the European population” nevertheless remained separate.45
According to Jordaan, the second stage of South Africa’s development, which lasted from 1795 to 1872, was dominated by the ideology of British liberalism. Under this social system, the integration of Coloured people was taken further, in that “all the Coloureds and detribalized Hottentots were assimilated into European society on the basis of complete legal and political equality for all.”46 At the same time that black people were being integrated into Cape society, a third social system that implemented a rigid constitutional colour bar coexisted in the Boer republics. Jordaan characterized this system, which he saw as having lasted from 1836 until 1870, as consisting of isolated and isolationist peasant communities.
Then, from 1870, argued Jordaan, “the entire face of South Africa was radically transformed by the discovery of gold and diamonds which heralded the Industrial Revolution.” With the introduction of wage labor and industrial methods of production,