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Black Ethnicities, Communities and Political Expression in Late Victorian Cape Town

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Vivian Bickford-Smith
Vivian Bickford-Smith
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
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Extract

In 1994 the National Party of Mr de Klerk defeated the African National Congress in only one of nine South African provinces, the Western Cape. The reason for this success lay in the support that the NP received from a large majority of Coloured South Africans in this region. Many were worried about the possibility of losing homes and jobs to ‘Africans’, and believed that the ANC was a specifically African party. These worries and beliefs were encouraged by Nationalist Party politicians. But the success of the latter's campaign was premised on the existence of more enduring self-identities, while simultaneously lending them new content.

This article attempts to explain the emergence of different black ethnicities, and particularly the emergence of Coloured ethnicity, in the British Cape Colony, and its capital, Cape Town. Because of a low non-racial franchise and (theoretical) equality of all before the law, the Victorian Cape provided the possibility of formal black political expression – the establishment of parties, electioneering and political mobilization.

The different black ethnicities that emerged were not the inevitable result of different ‘cultures’ or distant historical experiences. But nor were they simply created by élite Ethnic mobilizers in response to white racialization and discrimination, as was sometimes suggested in revisionist South African historiography of the Apartheid era. This historiography was understandably eager to challenge belief in the immutability of race and ethnicity that underpinned ‘separate development’ – a policy which itself served to reshape, perpetuate and reinforce perceptions of ethnic difference.

Labels, like ‘Coloured’ or ‘Native’ may have been imposed by whites and used by black élites to challenge state policies or to demand resources. But the labels had to continue to make sense to those they wished to mobilize. The content of ethnicities could not be purely ‘imagined’ by élites.

Type
South African History
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , November 1995 , pp. 443 - 465
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 By using terms like ‘black’ or ‘white’, or ‘African’ or ‘Coloured’, I do not wish to imply that they are anything other than ethnic labels or racialized categories. I use the synonym ‘African’ for contemporary terms more obviously offensive to South Africans today, such as ‘Native’ or ‘Kaffir’. Although white was a common self-description used by nineteenth century Capetonians, black was used much less often in this way. I have used black as a synonym for ‘other than white’, the latter being a category (probably) first used in late nineteenth century censuses. Therefore, I am using black as a collective noun for the range of people in South Africa who have thought of themselves, for instance and at times, as Coloured, African, Malay or Indian.

2 This article is a reworking and abbreviation of material contained in Bickford-Smith, V., Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge, 1995).Google Scholar Chapter 2 provides a detailed analysis of Cape Town's social formation in the 1870s.

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