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Coloured identity as an artificial concept imposed by the white supremacist state and ruling groups on a weak and vulnerable sector of the population.⁷ Positions in this respect range from seeing Coloured identity simply as a device for excluding people of mixed race from the dominant society to viewing it as a product of deliberate divide-and-rule strategies by the ruling white minority to prevent black South Africans from forming a united front against racism and exploitation.⁸ The instrumentalist approach was grounded in the growing rejection of Coloured identity that gained impetus from the latter half of the 1970s onward and was buttressed by the nonracism of the mass democratic movement of the 1980s. This approach represented the politically correct view of the post-Soweto era and stemmed from a refusal to give credence to apartheid thinking or, in the case of the expedient, from a fear of being accused of doing so.⁹

      A third paradigm, to which this study subscribes and which may be dubbed social constructionism, emerged from the latter half of the 1980s in response to the inadequacies of both the essentialist and instrumentalist approaches. It criticizes both those approaches for their tendency to accept Coloured identity as given and to portray it as fixed. Their reification of the identity, it is argued, fails to recognize fluidities in processes of Coloured self-identification or ambiguities in the expression of the identity. In essentialist histories, this is a product of a profoundly Eurocentric perspective and a reliance on the simplistic formulations of popular racialized conceptions of Coloured identity. The problem in instrumentalist writing partly stems from a narrow focus on Coloured protest politics and the social injustices suffered by the community, which has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance of Coloured people to white supremacism and playing down their accommodation with the South African racial system. The overall result has been an oversimplification of the phenomenon in this literature.¹⁰

      The cardinal sin of both these schools, however, is their condescension in denying Coloured people a significant role in the making of their own identity. Essentialist interpretations do this by assuming Colouredness to be an inbred quality that arises automatically from miscegenation. Instrumentalists share the essentialist premise that Coloured identity is something negative and undesirable, but they try to blame it on the racism of the ruling white minority. Though they may have had the laudable intention of countering the racism of essentialist accounts, instrumentalist histories have nevertheless contributed to the marginalization of the Coloured people by denying them their role in the basic cognitive function of creating and reproducing their own social identities. Even the best of these histories, Gavin Lewis’s Between the Wire and the Wall, despite its firm focus on the Coloured people themselves and its stress on their agency in the political arena, is nevertheless condescending by suggesting that “the solution to this dilemma [of defining Coloured identity] is to accept Coloured identity as a white-imposed categorization.”¹¹ Both approaches treat Coloured identity as something exceptional, failing to recognize it for what it is—a historically specific social construction, like any other social identity. In this respect, both schools reflect the undue influence of contemporary ideological and political considerations.

      The main concerns of the social constructionist approach have therefore been to demonstrate the complexity of Coloured identity and, most important, to stress the agency of Coloured people in the making of their own identity. Emphasis has also been placed on the ways in which ambiguities in Coloureds’ identity and their marginality influenced their social experience and political consciousness. This approach also seeks to demonstrate that far from being the anonymous, inert entities of the essentialist school or the righteous resisters of instrumentalist histories, Coloured people exhibited a much more complex reaction to white supremacism that encompassed resistance as well as collaboration, protest as well as accommodation. By its very nature, social identity is largely and in the first instance the product of its bearers and can no more be imposed on people by the state or ruling groups than it can spring automatically from miscegenation or their racial constitution. Social identity is cultural in nature in that it is part of learned behavior and is molded by social experience and social interaction. At most, social identities can be manipulated by outsiders—but even then, only to the extent that it resonates strongly with the bearers’ image of themselves and their social group as a whole.

       Up from Servitude and Savagery: Earlier Perspectives on Coloured History

      Within the broader category of essentialist writing, it is possible to distinguish three further divisions. First, there are those I refer to as traditionalists, who analyze Coloured identity and history in terms of the racist values and assumptions prevalent in white supremacist thinking. Second, there are the liberal essentialists, who dissent from the dominant racist view and seek to demonstrate that cooperation and interdependence rather than racial antagonism marked historical interaction between South Africa’s various peoples.¹² The third distinct strand within the essentialist school might be termed the progressionist interpretation of Coloured history, and for the greater part of the twentieth century, this interpretation represented the conventional view of members of the Coloured community regarding their own history. Until challenged by ideas emanating from a Marxist-inspired radical movement during the 1940s and 1950s, the progressionist version reigned supreme within the better-educated and politicized sector of this group. This approach was progressionist in that it was based on the assumption that human society and, with it, the Coloured people were on a path of inevitable progress to a future of peace, prosperity, and social harmony.¹³

      In essence, the progressionist perspective wove together an affirmative view of Coloured history with key elements from the traditionalist and liberal strands. This interpretation thus accepted the racist view that Coloured people formed a separate “race” and were socially and culturally “backward” by Western standards but stressed their common history and cultural affinities with whites while strongly emphasizing that theirs was a history that demonstrated a hunger for personal development and the achievement of social advancement against enormous odds. The progressionist interpretation was not so much an alternative to the white supremacist version as an acceptance of it in broad outline but with major qualifications. It reinterpreted crucial aspects of the dominant society’s version to give it a positive spin and an optimistic outlook for the future. For the Coloured people themselves, the critical difference between their progressionist visions of their history and those of the traditional genre of white South Africa was that, even though they admitted they were “backward,” they did not accept their inferiority as permanent or inherent. Combining an environmentalist concept of racial difference with liberal values of personal freedom, equality in the eyes of the law, interracial cooperation, and status based on individual merit, progressionists argued that the history of the Coloured people demonstrated that they were well advanced in the process of becoming as fully “civilized” as whites and thus deserved to be accepted into the dominant society. Espoused publicly by organic intellectuals and political leaders within the Coloured community, this interpretation was usually coupled with a plea for fair treatment or the preservation of their status of relative privilege within the South African racial hierarchy.

      Although there was no attempt from members of the Coloured community to produce any formal or systematic account of their history until the latter half of the 1930s, educated and politicized Coloured people nevertheless exhibited a clear sense of the trajectory of their history as a community. This much is evident from Harold Cressy’s 1913 exhortation to his colleagues to raise the profile of the community’s history. During the earlier part of the twentieth century, this historical consciousness, though it had not yet been formalized as written history, was implicit in discourse about Coloured people as a community, including their political ideals and social aspirations. This consciousness, usually expressed in terms of a common oppression dating back to slavery and the dispossession of the Khoisan, informed the endeavors of Coloured communal organizations and can be deduced piecemeal from a range of evidence in which Coloured people reflected on their community and its place in South African society. This sense of shared history was expressed not so much as an interest in the past for its own sake but as a means to justify social and political demands and support strategies for communal advancement. Abdullah Abdurahman’s presidential addresses to the 1909, 1923, and 1939 APO conferences are good examples of the progressionist interpretation of Coloured history harnessed to support particular social or political agendas.¹⁴

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