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human beings and to hit back at those whom they regarded as the most rabidly racist and their main oppressors.

      The popularity of the van Riebeeck joke has waned in recent years. The amelioration of interblack political divisions in the post-1976 environment, the growth of a mass, nonracial democratic movement during the 1980s, and the dawning of the “new South Africa” have progressively made the values and sentiments embodied in the joke less acceptable in public discourse. The growing rejection of Coloured identity by politicized Coloureds from the mid-1970s onward meant that crude racist thinking of the sort embodied in this joke became unacceptable to a widening constituency of people. By the late 1980s, even the likes of the Reverend Allan Hendrickse, the leader of the collaborationist Labour Party, at times rejected Coloured identity. In a heated moment in parliament, for example, he lashed out at the National Party: “God made me a man, the National Party made me a Coloured man.”¹¹⁶

      Although the image of van Riebeeck is far less pervasive than it was in the “old South Africa,” it has nevertheless remained a powerful symbol of white supremacism in the new millennium.¹¹⁷ Bizarre confirmation of this occurred at a formal dinner on 31 October 2000, organized by a local black economic empowerment company to celebrate Cape Town’s cultural diversity and to promote racial tolerance. At the dinner, held in the banquet hall of the Castle in Cape Town, one of the guests, Priscilla De Wet-Fox, who claims to be the headperson of the Chainnoquia Khoi-Khoi tribe of the Oudtshoorn region, heckled speakers and subjected the gathering to a tirade about the colonial oppression of the Khoi. On being escorted out of the function, she attacked a bronze bust of van Riebeeck in the foyer, damaging it and causing its eyes to pop out when she pushed it off its pedestal. De Wet-Fox later justified her actions by saying that “van Riebeeck lied to my ancestors” and that he was a symbol of European colonialism that had made her feel “ashamed of being me, of looking like me.”¹¹⁸

      Humor is intrinsic to human interaction and forms an integral part of popular culture. For these reasons, jokes disclose much about the societies and communities in which they become current. Because people reveal their values, aspirations, fears, hatreds, and most other aspects of their social experience through humor, jokes—especially the more enduring and popular ones—are authentic reflections of the perceptions, attitudes, and mores of the societies in which they circulate and are often more reliable indicators of popular thinking than the conventional sources used by historians and social analysts.¹¹⁹ This authenticity is guaranteed to the extent that jokes not only have to resonate with the values, sensibilities, and experiences of their target audiences to survive but also have to make sense instantaneously to elicit the appropriate response.

      The van Riebeeck joke, by any yardstick, provides an accurate and dependable gauge of popular attitudes toward Coloured people during the apartheid era. At the core of its success and longevity as a joke lie the popular assumptions that Colouredness is an automatic product of miscegenation and that racial hybridity, together with its associations of illegitimacy and racial inferiority, are shameful and therefore open to ridicule. The joke also indirectly draws on a wide range of derogatory imagery about the Khoisan, the marginality of the Coloured people, and the racially attributed trait of their profligacy for embellishment. That most Coloured poeple were able to laugh at this ribbing and accept Jan van Riebeeck as the “father” of the Coloured people is a measure of just how hegemonic the racist ideas and assumptions behind the joke were in apartheid South Africa. The evidence indicates that this mindset has been slow to change in the postapartheid period, despite the dictates of political correctness that now govern South African public life.

      This overview of Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured people in white-ruled South Africa has provided insight into the way Coloureds viewed themselves, their community, and its place in the broader society. It has elucidated the dynamic behind the expression of a separate Coloured identity, highlighting continuities in processes of Coloured self-definition. This analysis has identified their assimilationism, their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, the negative associations attached to the identity, and their marginality as core elements of Coloured identity and demonstrated how they meshed to reproduce and stabilize that identity through the twentieth century. In addition, the role of popular stereotyping in the social construction of Coloured identity has been explored, explaining how associations of hybridity, illegitimacy, Khoisan primitiveness, and marginality converged in reinforcing and reproducing the racial typecasting of Coloured people. These themes are elaborated on in the following chapter, which investigates the ways in which Coloured people viewed their history and how interpretations of this history changed over time.

      2

      History from the Margins

      Changing Perceptions of Its Past within the Coloured Community

      The marginality of the Coloured community is reflected in South African historiography in that relatively little has been written on the history of this social group and much of what has been written is polemical, speculative, poorly researched, or heavily biased. In many general histories, Coloured people have effectively been written out of the narrative and marginalized to a few throwaway comments scattered through the text.¹ In addition, only a handful of works on the subject have been written by Coloured people themselves. As early as 1913, Harold Cressy, a Coloured educator and school principal, decried this state of affairs when he urged the Coloured teaching profession to help build self-confidence and pride in the community by dispelling the myth that Coloured people played little part in the history of their country.² Les Switzer, historian and professor of communication at the University of Houston, summed up the situation eloquently in 1995 when he wrote that “South Africa’s coloured community has remained a marginalized community—marginalized by history and even historians.”³

      This chapter charts changing approaches to Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured people within that community itself by analyzing popular perceptions of this past as well as the writing of Coloured intellectuals on the subject. Both popular beliefs and intellectual discourse about the nature of Colouredness and its history played an important part in defining the identity and creating a sense of community among its bearers. In addition to epitomizing the thinking within sectors of the community, the texts chosen for analysis also reflect the social and political currents of the time. Importantly, they lay bare ideological contestation around the meaning of Colouredness and strategies for social and political action.

       Contending Historiographical Paradigms

      Historical writing on the Coloured community, both that of a popular nature and that emanating from the academy in the era of white supremacy, can be divided into three broad classes. The first, which may be termed the essentialist school, is by far the most common approach and coincides with the popular view of Coloured identity as a product of miscegenation going back to the earliest days of European settlement at the Cape. According to this approach, racial hybridity is considered the essence of Colouredness. For essentialists, there is usually no need to explain the nature or existence of Coloured identity because it is part of an assumed reality that sees South African society as consisting of distinct races, of which the Coloured people is one. The existence of Coloured identity poses no analytical problem because it is regarded as having developed naturally and self-evidently as a result of miscegenation.⁴ This approach is inherently racialized because it assigns racial origins and racial characteristics to the concept of Colouredness, though it has to be recognized that not all writing within this category is necessarily racist. Indeed, a good deal of it, including some of the best writing in this genre, was intended to help break down racial barriers and expose the injustices suffered by Coloured people under the South African racial system.⁵ Because the essentialist approach embodies the conventional wisdom about Coloured identity, virtually all of the popular writing and most of the older and more conservative academic works are cast in this mold.⁶

      A second approach to the history of the Coloured people emerged in the 1980s in reaction to the prejudicial assumptions of the traditional mode of analysis and a desire among scholars within the “liberal” and “radical” paradigms of South African history to distance themselves from any form of racist thinking. This school, whose adherents will be referred

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