What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola
Like Wicomb, Lewis warns against the dangerous assumption that social and cultural hybrid forms or declarations are as a given more subversive than discourses centred on ‘miscegenation’. The ‘case of the coloured’ testifies to the textures of these dangers.
Coloured identities are no more stable than other (racial) markers in South Africa in the current dispensation. This is evident in the shifting, sometimes confusing uses of b/Black and C/coloured, ‘coloured’ and so-called coloured. Many who under apartheid rejected the label of ‘coloured’ wholesale, now see possibility for its reclamation in freeing ways (Ruiters 2006, 2009). However, such acceptance and/or reclamation of ‘coloured’ as a form of self-identification is characterised by contestation. That subjects switch back and forth across time between the various labels complicates matters even further (Kadalie 1995: 17). Noting this flexibility, Wicomb (1998: 83–84) writes:
[s]uch adoption of different names at different historical junctures shows perhaps the difficulty which the term ‘coloured’ has in taking on fixed meaning, and as such exemplifies postmodernity in its shifting allegiances, its duplicitous play between the written capitalisation and speech that denies or at least does not reveal the act of renaming – once again the silent inscription of shame.
Here, Wicomb highlights the fluidity of self-identification as coloured ‘undermin[ing] the new narrative of national unity’ whilst showing how ‘different groups created by the old system do not participate equally in the category postcoloniality’ (Wicomb 1998: 94). Consequently, there are shifts in assertions of coloured identities, and mnemonic activity is a part of these turns among groups classified coloured under apartheid, just as there are for some white subjectivities, as demonstrated in the examples I examine in Chapter 3. However, the meanings and implications of shifting registers of self-identification as c/Coloured and/or Black and positioning in relation to slavery diverge.
Groups such as the Kleurling Weerstandsbeweging (KWB) call for self-determination in a separate state for the ‘pure third race’ of Coloureds. The KWB, whose name translates into English as the ‘Coloured Resistance Movement’, echoes the right-wing, white supremacist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), but it also validates the discourses of biologist notions of natural races and the appropriate positions occupied along a clearly delineated hierarchy. For Wicomb, the naming of ‘black bodies that bear the marked pigmentation of miscegenation and the way that relates to culture [is linked to] attempts by coloureds to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame’ (1998: 92). This racial purity is named as ‘Brown’ within KWB discourse in ways that fix it as a ‘third pure race’. It is the stress on the purity of a separate category, here coloured/brown, which forms the central organising principle of this movement. As Michele Ruiters argues, the KWB ‘wish[es] to be involved in mainstream politics yet create[s] identities that partition their constituencies off from the rest of South African society’ (2006: 195). According to Wicomb, this ambiguity is an engagement with shame.
Notably, shame is intractably tied to articulations of coloured identities, but is not limited to them. Wicomb punctuates her discussion of shame with references to other articulations of it in postcolonial (con)texts, such as Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame. There are intersections between the shame she discusses in relation to ‘colouredness’ and its expressions elsewhere; there are also divergences.
In an interview with Wolfgang Binder (1997), David Dabydeen theorises shame through the colonised’s awareness of their rejection by the coloniser and colonising culture. In this context, markers of the colonised’s Otherness become constant reminders which emphasise this rejection. For Dabydeen, this is a condition of the colonised–coloniser relationship which can only be undone when the position of the Other changes. Such unravelling usually accompanies the altered status of the colonised when, for example, corporeal and cultural difference begins to signify differently in the shared society. In a society where the visibility of Otherness serves to confirm the marginality of Black bodies, one of the consequences is an internalisation of this valuation process: shame. Racist humiliation leads to a disavowal of these points of belonging and a pressure to assimilate into the values of the colonising culture. In anti-colonial movements, Otherness is often reclaimed and recast as a site of pride – the antithesis of colonial shame. Although Dabydeen is speaking specifically of the Caribbean and Black British contexts here, this conception is equally valid for other colonial contexts.
Dabydeen’s is a discursive meaning of shame which has clear similarities with Wicomb’s. But, like Rushdie’s, it also highlights variation. In Wicomb’s theorisation, shame permeates general South African society to express a variety of feelings which have nothing to do with shame. Thus, she points to the constant utterance and circulation of the word ‘shame’ in South African-speak which also foregrounds it without addressing or needing to acknowledge it.
Thiven Reddy (2001) argues that colouredness reveals much about the constitution of the racial categories white, Indian and black in South Africa under colonialism, slavery and apartheid. Tracing historic legal constructions of coloured people in the South African Native Affairs Commission Report of 1903–05, as well as the 1950 Population Registration Act, he uncovers how ‘coloured’ often works to contain the ‘residue’ from the other classifications: ‘[t]he enormous emphasis placed on “pure blood” pervades the dominant discourse as well as the all-important assumption that “pure bloodlines” actually did exist in certain “races” ’ (Reddy 2001: 71). Thus, the response of the KWB critiqued by Wicomb above is to distance itself from this debasement because of ‘miscegenation’ through an insistence that brown people be read as racially pure. This political move attempts to intervene in colonialist and apartheid discourses by deploying the tools of that discourse. It does not question the premises through which ‘race’ is evaluated, given meaning and put to use. For the KWB, then, the task is not to undo white supremacist logic, or even to question it. What is focused on is the mere changing of the position of coloured/brown subjects by denying race mixing, and thereby disavowing the discursive history of ‘miscegenation’. It denies ‘mixing’, ‘left-over’, ‘neither-nor’ discourses through an insertion of brown/coloured subjectivity at a new point along the continuum of racial valuation. The apartheid state sought to limit the ambiguities present in legislating who counted as coloured in 1959 by proclaiming that the category would be subdivided into ‘Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian, Chinese, “other Asiatic”, and “Other Coloured” ’ (Reddy 2001: 73). Not only did the ambiguities which remained highlight the absurdities of this classifications system, they also betrayed the anxieties associated with the category ‘coloured’. The KWB effort is an attempt to engage this anxiety by concretising the position of coloured through naming it via a stabilised brownness.
The increased academic scrutiny of colouredness has also been influenced by the multiple frames used to analyse various coloured locations in public discourse. In their analysis of aspects of this public discourse, and with specific reference to voting patterns in the Western Cape in 1994, Zimitri Erasmus and Edgar Pieterse (1999: 167) declare:
we have heard that coloured people voted the way they did because they are white-identified, sharing language and religious affiliation with white voters; because they are racist towards africans and hence voted against the African National Congress (ANC); because they suffer from ‘slave mentality’ … and that this voting behaviour can be explained in terms of NP [National Party] propaganda and the ‘psychological damage’ this has caused in coloured communities who are yet to free themselves ‘from the stranglehold of psychological enslavement’.
The views explored above point to an apparent contradiction in how Black political action is made sense of in contemporary South Africa. For those arguing along the same lines as Erasmus and Pieterse, similar questions are not asked about groups of black South Africans who were never classified coloured, and who cast their votes for political parties which have a history of collaboration with the apartheid state, such as the Inkatha Freedom Party or parties led by former bantustan leaders. Some of the respondents in Ruiters (2006) share such sentiment. They point out that there is no parallel process by which those who vote for the parties headed by previous homeland ‘leaders’ are denied