Decolonising the Coloured Question

The Coloured question has been back in the media with a vengeance again lately. This has been a debate that I have avoided with great angst, not only because it is a personal embarrassment to me to be grossly lumped into an anomalous grouping created by Colonial masters as a means to degrade and control me, but also because the debate is so deeply rooted in colonial tropes and framing and because most conversations about race have been shallow, generally bigoted and anachronistic and thus unable to help us to navigate toward a decolonised outcome.

This truth was brought home to me again when Wanelisa Xaba, a self-proclaimed “radical feminist and decolonial thinker”, recently posted an article calling on us to talk about the violent anti blackness of coloureds. This was shortly after I had read a Facebook post by respected journalist and activist Zenzile Khoisan who warned of an “uprising brewing among the Khoi and San descendants” and a heartfelt lament by Nicole Van Driel about The place of Coloured people in the ANC's South Africa. Add to this the incident at Klipspruit Secondary School and the deadbeat politicians such as Marius Fransman and every other Tom, Dick and Harry who are feverishly working to revive Khoisan traditional leadership structures, then the absurdity of a debate which seeks to move beyond the colonial, but which is steeped in colonialism, becomes abundantly apparent to anyone who endeavours to think beyond their learned subjectivity.

In order to expose this absurdity, one needs to unpack our colonial history, together with an understanding of the colonial project. Despite the limited space available here, I will endeavour to layout the salient features around which I propose a decolonised discussion on the coloured question should proceed. In order to do this I will rely extensively on Mahmood Mamdani`s extensive writing on the question of colonial statecraft and governmentality (the way in which the state exercises control over, or governs, the body of its populace).

Mamdani traces the origins of colonial governmentality to the works of two scholars ( Sir Henry Maine for the English and Christiaan Hurgronje for the Dutch) whose works essentially became compulsory reading for colonial administrators across the world.

These scholars, writing at a time of crises for the colonial powers that were facing increasing revolts in the colonies and after the 1857 Sepoy Rebelion, realised that the previous mode of direct rule was inadequate and that new more sophisticated means of control was required.

Whereas previous empires focused on conquering the colonised elites who in turn would control the masses, they now sought to control the masses in more insidious ways. Furthermore they advocated moving from a policy of eradicating difference through political and cultural assimilation of colonized elites, to not only acknowledge difference, but indeed to shape it in ways that allowed the colonists to define and rule the colonised.

The result was a mode of rule that were underpinned by institutions who produced a racialized and tribalised historiography, a separation between civil and customary law and an accompanying census that classified the native population into fixed identities which were closely linked to geographic location.

Under the guise of protecting and conserving institutions and groups, the native was classified and reclassified in response to political necessity. It is in this context that the census was introduced as a political device to drive a political agenda.  Divide and Rule. Thus the census was used not only as a way of acknowledging difference but also as a way to shape and even sometimes to create differences. Here the Law was central to the project that sought to manage and reproduce difference. 

The identities of colonised societies across the globe are not simply consensual, but are more often forced from above, through law.

The ambition of this new form of indirect rule was to remake subjectivities of entire populations. It shaped the past, the present and the future of the colonised. The past was reshaped by the telling of history through the gaze of the European, based on fixed identities created by the colonial masters, while the present was shaped through a set of identities in the census and the future through a legal and administrative project.

The colonial state created a system of state-enforced internal discrimination under the guise of tradition, effectively dividing the colonised majority into administratively driven political minorities called the tribe.

In most colonies, the census classified the population into two broad groups: one called race and the other tribe. The distinction was not between colonised and coloniser, but between native and non-native. Those who the coloniser classified as indigenous to Africa were classified tribe and those who the coloniser classified as not indigenous were classified as a race. But the race-tribe distinction cut through the single category – colonised.

Thus through the stroke of a pen these cultural identities were entrenched in the psyche of the colonised through an administratively driven political identity, and a false history was brought into the present and has ever since set our futures.

The way we tell our history is thus a critical part of what holds us and binds us to our colonial past and it is our past that defines us in the present.

The very concepts we use, such as tribe, race, coloured, zulu, pedi etc are historically determined and produced. History is written as a narrative and the mode of telling needs to be chosen deliberately and consciously.  Thus, who produces the narrative is critical.

Reading Wanelise Xaba and Zenzille Khoisan and hearing the stories of histories being told from a tribalist or race perspective, reminds one that the original frame of reference they use as their starting points are in effect still a colonised one.

It is important for us to remain conscious of the categories, conceptions and assumptions that inform our engagements. Unless this is done, one becomes a “conceptual prisoner of certain types of primary sources without one being aware of it”.

The preoccupation with race and tribe was a part of a larger preoccupation with tradition. All talk of tradition ossifies systems as “fixed and unchanging” instead of “always in historical flux”.

It is this conception that allows us to speak of coloureds as if we were all static and unchanging instead of an amalgamation of many different connected and linked histories and experiences and it is this type of conception that keeps us from moving beyond the limitations and framing set for us by our previous colonial rulers.

This falsely constructed narrative of tradition is more than a way of sanctifying the past, it is also about justifying the present. As Mamdani and other historians have argued, “what is believed to be traditional society is not something that has existed in any past. It is essentially what has existed in the colonial and neo-colonial present”.

Thus the efforts to reconstruct Khoisan traditional leadership structures, while commendable for linking many back to a history which was wiped out by the coloniser, is nonetheless steeped in colonial notions of tradition and potentially deepens the divisions among the previously colonised more than it advances us to a non-racial society.

These mistaken attempts to reclaim our history are of course not produced in isolation; it is instead fostered and nurtured, sponsored and supported by the very state that was intended to dismantle the colonial subjugation.

The post 94 state has, under difficult circumstances one must admit, kept and entrenched the racial classifications and tribal homelands based on traditional authority firmly in place. The have worked hard at entrenching further legislation that affirms the colonial governmentality (the way in which the state exercises control over, or governs, the body of its populace) and which continues to be the only frame of reference for our discourse on race.

In order for us to truly start a conversation on decolonising race, tribe and ethnicity, we need to do at least four things:

1.       We have to start to acknowledge and see our kinship relationships as porous and historical rather than as closed and unchanging. (In other words, we should avoid the trap of generalising race, tribe and kinship)

2.       Acknowledge that Kinship was never universal despite the colonial insistence that it was. Political communities are formed through multiple paths and not only based on kinship.

3.       Recognise that our political community was formed through multiple routes and plural histories and attempts to box others and ourselves into neat colonial labels does not advance the effort to decolonise our society.

4.       Recognise that while our state continues to classify the population according to race, tribe and ethnicity, and while it continues to promote tribal ethnicity as an integral part of our body politic, that it continues to entrench our colonial past into the present and into the future.