What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola
these discussions exist they are less prominent and more dismissive. In relation to the framing of coloured subjectivities, however, as Erasmus and Pieterse note, these are in the majority. Erasmus and Pieterse’s paper is a challenge to these explanations as reductionist and as linked to other limited ways of thinking through coloured identity formation. The latter encompass divergent ways of essentialising colouredness, among them conservative coloured nationalism, discussed by Wicomb in relation to the KWB, and imagining that coloured subjects are overdetermined by racist apartheid naming.
The above criticisms of what is constructed as ‘the coloured vote’ are valid because the very discursive constitution of voting tendencies in this manner is problematic. In other words, the very language used to describe Western Cape voting patterns in the first democratic elections through primarily resorting to constructing something called ‘the coloured vote’ is an oversimplification that itself deserves debunking through attention to the specificities of electoral choices (Hoeane 2004; Ruiters 2006). At the same time, the conflation of ‘coloured’ with ‘Western Cape coloured’ occludes other coloured subjectivities that are constructed differently, both from within and in public discourse. This conflation is explicitly rehearsed by those who discursively construct ‘the coloured vote’, but it is also implicitly endorsed in Erasmus and Pieterse’s (1999) critique. This is done when what happens in the Western Cape is seen to be representative of nationwide coloured subjectivities through the generalisation of Western Cape coloured historical specificities. Subsequent scholarship on aspects of ‘coloured’ identities warns against this overgeneralisation of Western Cape realities and debates (Adhikari 2009; Ruiters 2006).
Erasmus and Pieterse’s paper also raised concerns about the implications of these problems for the larger national democratic project. They call for the important recognition that ‘not all assertions of coloured identity are racist’ because ‘no identity is inherently progressive or reactionary’ (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 178, 179). It is important to acknowledge the variety of ways in which coloured subjects shape collective identities and make meaning of their lives. This enables the understanding that coloured formulations are ‘relational identities shaped by complex networks of concrete social relations’ (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 183).
The acknowledgement of creolisation is central to this process, as is the creolisation of the Dutch language into Afrikaans by slaves and of cultural practice by these communities and their descendants. Processes of creolisation happen in proximity to and within different relations of power under conditions of slavery. This conceptualisation of creolity within recent South African studies is one of two streams. Both have moved beyond addressing only linguistic creolisation in relation to the Afrikaans language. The first, espoused by Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael (2000), conceptualises creolity as any mixing of various strands to result in a hybrid formation which constantly draws attention to itself as dynamic and disruptive. The second branch is that in which Erasmus (2001a) theorises creolity under the very specific conditions of slavery and its ensuing inequalities. It draws on the extensive works of Françoise Verges and Eduoard Glissant on creolisation in the Indian Ocean Islands and Caribbean, respectively, as well as more broadly on the schools of thought on creolisation emerging from Caribbean studies. For the latter branch, not all hybrid formations are creolised. Here creolity is interpreted as encompassing a range of possibilities: creative and unstable. It is to be found in cultural practice with a slave history and is dynamic. For Erasmus’s formulation of creolity, and application to the coloured historical series of experiences in South Africa, the inequity of power is paramount. Unlike the hybridity-like creolisation model adopted by Nuttall and Michael, Erasmus roots creolisation, like scholars of the Caribbean, in the specific experience of histories of enslavement. Consequently, for example, while Afrikaner and coloured experiences and identities are hybridised, only coloured identities are creolised identities. This creolisation is part of the memory project for it values the history of enslavement as a constitutive, even if not total, influence on current collective positionings within coloured communities.
Adhikari (2009) argues that Erasmus ‘does little beyond proposing the idea’ of creolisation to coloured identities in her introduction to her book, while Helene Strauss (2009) asks very pertinent questions in her essay on creolisation as a useful framework for thinking about contemporary coloured identities post-apartheid:
Does creolisation help clarify processes of coloured identity formation, or does it reinforce apartheid-era essentialisms and undermine the very transgressive potential that has made it so attractive for revising cultural exclusivity? To what extent do received cultural and racial categories continue to inflect the ways in which processes of creolisation take place? (Strauss 2009: 23)
Strauss’s questions can be answered obliquely through engaging with Adhikari’s latest work on coloured identities in southern Africa, of which Strauss’s chapter forms part. Adhikari (2009) underlines the importance of varied registers of coloured identities in South African politics and scholarship. Although he delineates four streams, two are immediately relevant for my purposes here: the ‘essentialist school’ and the ‘instrumentalist school’. The introduction to this text is instructive, given the manner in which he reads assertions and/or definitions of coloured identities against one another, rather than solely against their perceived opposites.
Adhikari’s ‘essentialist school’ relies on conventional colonialist registers of miscegenation and either denies the agency of coloured people in history (conservative essentialist), celebrates miscegenation as evidence that racial segregation is not preferred across history (liberal essentialist), or accepts that coloureds were a separate race that was temporarily inferior to whites (progressionist essentialist). These nuances matter for a fuller understanding of shifts and reification in how coloured identities – or, for Adhikari, identity, differentiated but in the singular – articulate themselves in contemporary South Africa.
The second stream of concern here is the ‘instrumentalist school’, which contains much of the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid left. Within this school, Adhikari includes movements as varied as the Non European/New Unity Movement, the Black Consciousness Movement and other parts of the non-racist and non-racialist movements, all of which see coloured identity as ‘negative and undesirable but blame it on the racism and exploitative practices of the ruling white minority’ (Adhikari 2009: 15). Finally, both essentialist and instrumentalist schools ‘treat coloured identity as something exceptional, failing to recognise it for what it is – a historically specific social construction, like any other social identity’ (Adhikari 2009: 15).
My reading of articulations of coloured identity and rejections of the label by those previously classified as such is premised on the understanding that echoes of colonial memory are complex phenomena which are not trapped in the binaries of either complicity or resistance. My exclusion of articulations such as the KWB from detailed analysis is due to the considerable attention this movement has already received from scholars of coloured identities (Erasmus 2001b; Erasmus & Pieterse 1999; Lewis 2001; Ruiters 2006; Wicomb 1996, 1998).
It is naïve to continue insisting that there is only one progressive, complex manner to be mindful of history and to make sense of a slave past, and that to do this entails theorising colouredness through first acceding to the cultures of complicity and privilege even as these were rejected (Erasmus 2001b). There are multiple progressive engagements with a past of enslavement (Marco 2009). Denying this erases the variety of ways of inhabiting colouredness and reduces the agency and choice of historical subjects classified coloured to fashion and reinvent collective identity. However, the activity evident in contemporary negotiations of coloured identities demonstrates the importance of creativity in political memory processes. To the extent that memory is an imaginative process, and not simply a recuperative one, the dynamic articulations of colouredness, along with the rejection of the identity ‘coloured’, bear witness to the collective reinvention of identities which is at the heart of memory. The specific foregrounding of slavery in this repositioning and re-evaluative process links the memory project directly to slavery in ways that are sometimes explicit, and at other junctures more subtle. This resonates with Carolyn Cooper’s model of reading engagements with identity for creolised societies along a continuum. There are several ways in which assertions of progressive coloured identity or disavowal via the reclaiming of Khoi subjectivities reveal