Marcia Wright
New York
December 1999
NOTES
1. Coloured, a term referring to mixed-race individuals in South Africa, is discussed with more texture later in this introduction. In the context material for this edition of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, coloured appears, for the most part, without quotation marks and an initial capital. Cape Coloured has been capitalized as a historical marker; similarly, when the term denotes the specific apartheid classification named in the Population Registration Act of 1950, it appears with an initial capital and in quotations. In an essay on shame and identity, Zoë Wicomb briefly comments on the changing use of the term coloured, especially with respect to apartheid and liberation politics. She writes, “Such adoption of different names [i.e., black, “Coloured,” Coloured, etc.] at various historical junctures shows perhaps the difficulty that the term coloured has in taking on a fixed meaning, and as such exemplifies postmodernity in its shifting allegiances, its duplicitous play between the written capitalization and speech that denies or at least does not reveal the act of renaming” (“Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 93–94).
2. Griqua, an ethnicity among coloured South Africans, is a designation and political identity treated later in this introduction.
3. J. S. Marais, The Cape Coloured People, 1652–1937 (1939; reprint, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1968), chap. 3. The other classic study is W. M. Macmillan, The Cape Colour Question: A Historical Survey (1927; reprint, London: Hurst, 1968).
4. Martin Legassick, “The Northern Frontier to c. 1840: The Rise and Decline of the Griqua People,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, 2d ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 382. Such distillations of one trace element from a number of sources (in this case, the naming of a common ancestral link) is, of course, part of ethnicity-building, as a vigorous literature on the invention of tradition makes clear.
5. Marais, Cape Coloured, 85. Poppie Nongena is a poignant example of an acculturated, Afrikaans-speaking woman of the Western Cape; see Elsa Joubert, Poppie Nongena (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).
6. Thomas G. Karis and Gail M. Gerhart, introduction to Challenge and Violence, 1953–1990, vol. 3, From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1964, ed. Thomas G. Karis and Gwendolyn M. Carter (Stanford: Hoover Press, 1977), 10–11.
7. A Western Cape woman who married a “Bantustan” citizen from the Eastern Cape lost her rights of residence. This situation is powerfully reflected in Joubert’s Poppie Nongena. The account of Poppie’s experiences working in fish processing factories on the west coast of the Cape Province, not far from the interior of Little Namaqualand, opens the opportunity for reflection on underclass women’s lives as compared with the aspirant, precarious middle class explored by Wicomb.
8. Elaine Unterhalter, Forced Removaclass="underline" The Division, Segregation and Control of the People of South Africa (London: International Defence and Aid Fund, 1987), 146.
9. Thomas G. Karis and Gail M. Gerhart, eds., Nadir and Resurgence, 1964–1979, vol. 5, From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1990, ed. Thomas G. Karis and Gail M. Gerhart (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 525.
10. Ibid., 103.
11. Bill Nasson, “Political Ideologies in the Western Cape,” in All, Here, and Now: Black Politics in South Africa in the 1980s, ed. Tom Lodge, Bill Nasson, Steven Mufson, Khenla Shubane, and Nokwanda Sithole (New York: Ford Foundation, 1991).
12. Peter Marais, “Too Long in the Twilight,” in Now That We Are Free: Coloured Communities in a Democratic South Africa, ed. Wilmot James, Daria Caliguire, and Kerry Cullinan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996), 60.
13. See, for example, Julia Wells, “Eva’s Men: Gender and Power in the Establishment of the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–74,” Journal of African History 30(1998): 417–37, and Yvette Abrahams, “Was Eva Raped? An Exercise in Speculative History,” and Christina Landman, “The Religious Krotoa (c. 1642–1674),” Kronos: Journal of Cape History 23: 3–21, 22–35.
14. Richard Elphick and Robert Shell, “Intergroup Relations: Khoikhoi, Settlers, Slaves and Free Blacks, 1652–1795,” chap. 4 in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, 2d ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).
15. Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1996), 238. See also Robert Ross, “Missions, Respectability and Civil Rights: The Cape Colony, 1828–1854,” Journal of Southern African Studies 25 (September 1999): 333–45.
16. Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997), 116, 127–28.
17. As quoted in Scully, Liberating, 155–56.
18. Marais, Cape Coloured, 266.
19. Apartheid: The Facts (London: International Defense and Aid Fund, 1983), 16. The original default category “Coloured” also included “Indian,” “Chinese,” and “other Asiatic.”
20. Muriel Horrell, et al., comp., A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1971, vol. 25 (Johannesburg: Institute of Race Relations, 1972), 60.
21. W. A. de Klerk, The Puritans in Africa: A Story of Afrikanerdom (London: Rex Collings, 1975), 268–70. De Klerk, a maverick Cape Afrikaner writer, criticizes the apartheid regime and makes a major point of the case of Sandra Laing as one evidence of the absurdity of the system. A docudrama, The Search for Sandra Laing (video: 50 minutes, color, ATV production in affiliation with the African National Congress, 1978; distributed by IDERA, Canada), provides a searing reenactment of the story.
YOU CAN’T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN
Origins trouble the voyager much, those roots
that have sipped the waters of another continent.
it is solitude that mutilates,
the night bulb that reveals ash on my sleeve.
Don’t travel beyond