Erasmus stresses the need to acknowledge the middle-of-the-hierarchy position occupied by coloured subjects under apartheid and colonialism. She returns to this as core to a progressive conceptualisation of this identity. In these classificatory systems, coloured people were oppressed and denied full subjecthood because they were Black whilst at the same time made complicit in processes which maintained the oppression of other Black people.
The imperatives identified above point to the specificity of coloured identities. They invite the continued fashioning of a politics and theory which is informed by history and the everyday. Whilst they chart a more vigilant engagement with the ways in which we participate in identity, they also point to their own theoretical limitations. Erasmus’s final pillar relies heavily on and conflates the stability of the categories black and African in South Africa. Erasmus, of course, knows that African identity is contested in South Africa in ways that make little sense to people who identify as African beyond its borders. In a country where ‘Afrikaner’ and ‘Afrikaans’ have been appropriated and reserved exclusively for white people of Dutch descent, it is not entirely accurate to refer to a stable category that is marked ‘African’. This is especially so given that the two examples cited above demonstrate that there are pathways into identification with Africa which are always foreclosed to indigenous South Africans of any kind. There are certain expressions of ‘African’, for example ‘Afrikaner’, which are foreclosed to indigenous Africans, be they black or coloured. This remains the case even amidst assertions that there is such a category as ‘bruin Afrikaners’, whose very naming demonstrates the racism of what ‘Afrikaner’ means.
Furthermore, post-apartheid public spherical contestations over the meanings of ‘African’ have been precisely about the instability of the label. The widely publicised polemic between the late John Matshikiza, journalist Max du Preez and fellow journalists, Lizeka Mda, and academic Thobeka Mda from 17 June to the end of July 1999 in the pages of The Star and Weekly Mail & Guardian is one incarnation of an exchange characteristic of post-apartheid South Africa. Sparked in this instance by Max du Preez’ article ‘I am an African … an Afrikaner’ (The Star 17 June 1999), the debate asked questions about whether this assertion of ‘white African’ identity in South Africa was not without problems. Thobeka Mda’s first challenge to du Preez was tellingly titled ‘Can whites truly be called Africans?’ (The Star 24 June 1999). While du Preez’ claim to the identity foregrounded affiliation and geographical entitlement, the Mdas argued – differently – that white claims to African identity had a continuing history of displacement and non-recognition of Black South Africans. Even responses to Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech delivered on 8 May 1996 foregrounded how contested such identification remains.
Another visible manner in which African identity is not stable for Black South Africans inscribed with discourses that stress ‘race purity’, in other words, for black South Africans, is the adaptation of the signifier ‘African’ to mean ‘born in Africa’ more broadly than just ‘Afrikaner’. Although b/Black subjects, in South Africa and beyond, heavily critique and resist this redefinition as appropriative and implicated in the history of colonisation and enslavement of African peoples, it nonetheless retains much currency in South Africa. Indeed, its precise contestation points to the weight of its circulation since those who resist it would expend their energies elsewhere were this not perceived as an urgent task. What societies revisit in heated public conversations is a measure of their importance.
The cheapening of the adjective ‘African’ to name commodities which range from recycled cans (Afri-cans) to the more elusive Diesel campaign about ‘Afreaks’ is part of the instability of what ‘African’ means.2 These and numerous other positions on display in contemporary South Africa demonstrate that the identity African is contested and cannot generally be said to be invested with ‘authenticity’ in the manner that Erasmus argues. This is not to deny the presence of tendencies to essentialise and fix who can be African by excluding coloured subjects, but to postulate that coloured is the only Black position that this conservative impulse excludes is to invest the rather chaotic and reactionary project she critiques with excessive coherence. Having said that, it is ironic to note that in contemporary South Africa whites claim Africanness, blacks continue to embrace this identity, yet coloured claims to it are seen to be the most vocally contested.
I have linked reservations about the coherence with which Erasmus invests ‘black’ as a signifier, especially in relation to what she labels the ‘moral authenticity or political credibility’ (Erasmus 2001a: 17) bestowed upon the ‘africanist lobby’ (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 170). Her ‘africanist lobby’ includes those who police b/Blackness in terms of authenticity. So her use of ‘africanist’ here does not relate to the location of these authenticity police within an Africanist politics. For Erasmus, the most discernible manner in which Blackness is policed refers to the exclusion of coloured subjects from a Black and indigenous African identity by some black subjects. Here, she correctly critiques the conservative nature of this tendency, and points to the highly troubled and painful existence of such impulses, especially within what parades as the progressive ambit of national politics.
My point of departure stems from Erasmus’s inference that reducing Blackness and African identity to the ambit of black people then invests the category ‘black’ with automatic security. The split and contestation is not between secure ways of being black/African versus insecure ones within colouredness. The same anti-coloured sentiment which Erasmus accuses of destabilising the Blackness/Africanness of non-coloured Black/African groups is credited with treating other ethnicities within black communities similarly. The reactionary political attacks from what Erasmus names the ‘africanist lobby’, when not targeted at suggested coloured racism, are aimed at ‘uprooting’ ‘the Nguni conspiracy’ or the ‘Xhosa nostra’, or demonising the ‘Shangaan uncontrollability’.3 These impulses can be gleaned in public culture, for example, in newspapers as apparently diversified in their politics as the Mail & Guardian and The City Press.
To discuss the silencing of coloured ways of being Black/African as though they are the object of a collective conspiracy by all other black/ African groups is to ignore the successes of apartheid policies of divide and rule, as well as all evidence that they retain currency. It is to credit blacks with a unity of purpose which they obviously do not have in spite of all attempts by the Black Consciousness Movement. Thus, when Erasmus declares, ‘If ever there is an unstable, restless, highly differentiated, hybrid place to be, it is the one I occupy’ (Erasmus 2000: 199), her words ring true beyond coloured Black subjectivity. It is therefore not only a matter of barring access for coloured subjects into a safe Black collective. This emerges quite clearly when coloured subjects are seen as one of a range of Black subjectivities.
Indeed, contestations of Blackness through the bestowal of progressive subjectivities to specific Black ethnicities, and the Othering of other Black ethnicities through the projection of ‘slave mentality’ and/or ‘collaborationist’ lines, are typical of broader political contestations in post-apartheid South Africa. If we interpret coloured subjectivity as ‘race’ rather than as ‘ethnicity’, then it is possible to read coloured subjects as positioned in the unique position against which other Black people position themselves, as Erasmus and Pieterse (1999) argue. However, such a lens rests on the invisibilisation of similar political moves directed at different Black ethnic members at different