On many mornings, the angry faces of convicts peered at me and their voices greeted me from behind the window-like gaps, secured with steel netting, of a grey gomo, a police vehicle used to transport prisoners between their cells and the courts. These were the faces and voices of men who were classified Coloured. Oom Piet (Uncle Pete) – a large, friendly man with missing teeth, a deep voice and a firearm dangling from his left hip – drove the gomo. En route from collecting convicts for courts in the city centre, he stopped at our home to transport my father to work, and me to pre-school. My father lifted me onto the middle of the long front seat of the gomo, releasing me from the convicts’ gaze. Squeezed between an always slightly dishevelled Oom Piet and his firearm on my right, and my impeccably uniformed father on my left, I travelled to pre-school.
The view from our stoep (the veranda in front of the house) was a factory yard. The home of our neighbour next door was built of wood and zinc sheeting, referred to as ‘wood ‘n irons’. When I was a baby, my mother wrapped and handed me to Mrs Pearce through the gate in the zinc fence between our homes. She minded over me while my mother taught at Helenvale Primary School. Twice daily, Mrs Pearce or a member of her family, often accompanied by one or two children, visited our back yard to fetch water from our newly plumbed, lit and lawned home. She cooked on a Primus stove, the same one on which she heated the hot-comb used to style her hair. Her home was wrapped in the smell of paraffin and laced with the smell of starch, freshly solidifying under the iron which was also heated on the Primus stove. During winter, when we used a paraffin heater to keep warm, our home smelt like hers. It also smelt of Lavender Cobra floor polish, Surf washing powder, Sunlight soap, Sheen hair straightener, police uniforms, home-baked bread, shoe polish used to spit-and-shine, the blue scribblers of my mother’s pupils and Goya Magnolia talcum powder – signs of a family steeped in working class respectability.
I grew up in our brick-walled home on 146 Stanford Road, a busy thoroughfare for both public and private transport from Port Elizabeth’s exclusively white city centre to its Coloured and even further-flung ‘African’ townships, KwaZakhele, Motherwell and New Brighton. At the time Korsten hovered between remnants of residents bitten and chewed by apartheid’s racialised social engineering and the violently gobbling jaws of its bulldozers doing the work of its Group Areas Act. The first urban zoning of Port Elizabeth under this Act had begun in 1961 (Christopher 1994), three years before my birth and my family’s relocation to Korsten. For at least the next twenty-five years forced removals were the order of the day. Areas like Fairview and South End were subjected to mass removals which residents vehemently resisted. In Korsten forced removals were quietly executed, one household at a time. This was apparent in the eventual ‘disappearance’ of Mrs Pearce, of Aunty Dolly and Colleen, and of Kimmy and Stanley, the Chinese traders who lived in close proximity to our home. Aunty Dolly and her daughter, Colleen, lived up the stony pathway behind our back yard, in an old brick house with sprung wooden floors. These women were classified White and considered ‘poor white’ by the neighbours and by the communities they served.5 Their home doubled as a fruit and vegetable store. My older brother worked in this store on weekends and during his school holidays. The smells of fresh and decayed vegetable matter blended with Aunty Dolly’s mustard poultice, leaving me with a distinct memory of this warm and welcoming home-cum-store.
A SHIFTING SELF
Living inside apartheid was necessarily double-edged. People defied the boundaries imposed by apartheid logics as much as they used these logics to ‘pass’ for White or Coloured (Wicomb 2000), and to ‘expel blackness’ from family histories (Stone 2007; Thomas 1977). These acts, fraught with emotion, were intricately interwoven with everyday struggles for access to various degrees of rights, opportunities, respectability and leeway conferred by the higher tiers of apartheid’s legalised racial classification system. For much of my teenage life I, like many other people so classified, came to see myself as Coloured, making apartheid’s race category subjectively real. This self-making was limited by apartheid’s constrictions regarding who I could become as a person, and with and amongst whom my personhood could be made. It was restrained by the power configurations produced by apartheid logics. Apartheid prescribed where one could live, learn, play and pray; what one could learn; where one could shop; on which public bench one could sit; through which public doors one could enter; where and whether one could eat in public; from which speck of land one could see and feel the sea; and whom one could love. Its nebulous logics seemed amplified in the constantly shifting, often discrepant visual and non-visual coordinates and intersections of class, racial markers, heterosexuality, gender and social status that shaped my father’s judgement of who might qualify as a male suitor for his youngest daughter. These moving complexities rendered unsuitable almost any young man in our and surrounding neighbourhoods. Their racialised gendered logics made me – ‘curly-haired’ and ‘round-nosed’ – an ‘unsuitable girl’ for young men from families with social status. My father’s gendered judgements came with a terrifying dictum: if I were to fall pregnant while at school, the damage incurred to the respectability of my family would demand that he disown me. This would leave me to a life akin to that of my uncle: intoxicated by methylated spirits, homeless, alone, wandering and rejected. To fall pregnant while at school was considered shameful.
My father’s judgements were no different from those that had been inflicted on him – as my mother’s suitor – by her parents. Her father’s concern had been that my mother was involved with a man whom he regarded as beneath her social status. Among her parents’ concerns was the apparently coarse texture of my father’s hair. These were matters sufficiently significant to keep my maternal grandparents from visiting my parents’ marital home. With the birth of their first child – a son – these dynamics in my immediate family eased. But they were alive in the communities of which I was a part. I was a recipient of shaming stares and commentary on my hair at school and at home when certain family members visited or passed through. Having suffered the pain of her parents’ racialised looking regime, my mother was able to mediate my experience of it.
In her writing on Coloured identity formations in South Africa, Zoe Wicomb demonstrates the ways in which these formations – commonly assumed to be products of ‘miscegenation’ – are intricately bound up with shame. She posits that this shame was ‘exploited in apartheid’s strategy of the naming of a Coloured race’ and that it recurs in attempts since 1994 ‘to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame’ (1998: 92). This shame is commonly understood to be a consequence of the racial degeneracy that supposedly results from ‘race mixing’, which is assumed to cause moral and sexual degeneracy. ‘The look’ as a normative way of knowing race projects these imagined forms of degeneration onto black bodies that ‘bear the marked pigmentation of miscegenation’ (1998: 93) and invest black female bodies so marked with the shame of having ‘mated with the coloniser’ (1998: 92).
At seventeen I stumbled upon a defiance of these racialised logics in the story of Steven Bantu Biko written by Donald Woods (1978). Steve Biko was the leader of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement that refused the racial category Black as a technique of domination, and redefined it in emancipatory political terms to refer to all people oppressed in contexts of white supremacy. I read about Biko’s story when I stayed in a village in the south-east of Holland (close to its border with Germany) as the first black Rotary Exchange student from South Africa to visit this part of the Netherlands. My journey to Holland and my time there brimmed with contradictions and possibility.
It was the first time I had left home unaccompanied by close friends or family; the first time I had left the Eastern Cape; my first journey by air; and the first time I had had my hair cut short. The wash-straighten-curl-and-swirl routine for my long hair and its accoutrements – a hooded hairdryer and no fewer than thirty-five extra-large curlers (see Z. Erasmus 2000) – could not go to Europe with me. These items would not fit into my limited luggage. More importantly, these local hairstyling practices would not fit into what my family and I imagined Europe to be: a place of