<Articles>South African Coloured Identity in the 1920s and 1930s (Special Issue : NATION and ETHNICITY)

HORIUCHI Takayuki

doi:10.14989/shirin_94_76

In South Africa, the word "Coloured" refers to indigenous people, emancipated slaves, and "mixed" inhabitants in and around Cape Town, while in other countries it is a general term used for the black population. This article explores the South African Coloured identity. in the 1920s and 1930s. In nineteenth-century Cape Colony, the British opposed the Dutch in cooperation with non-Europeans, who, in turn, acquired electoral votes by collaborating with the British. However, the non-Europeans faced more discrimination in the late nineteenth century, when the Europeans became more culturally integrated. In response to such racism, black elites in and around Cape Town founded the African Political Organization in 1902. Even after the unification of South Africa in 1910, the APO continued to support the British parties with the aim of defending their political rights. Furthermore, they called themselves "Coloureds, " and emphasized that they were superior to the "natives" because they were racially closer to the British (in the first two decades of the twentieth century many of them hoped to "pass for white"). In 1931, under the economic and political oppression by the Afrikaner nationalist government, the Coloured elites established the Coloured-European Council along with the anti-Afrikaner British intellectuals in Cape Town. Confronted with the problem of assimilation, these elites tried to construct their identity by narrating their own history. A historical pageant to commemorate the centenary of the emancipation was led by Reverend Francis Gow in 1935 ; a history textbook was written in 1936 by Dorothy Hendricks and Christian Viljoen for Coloured training colleges; and Christian Ziervogel wrote Brown South Africa (1938), the first self-narrative of Coloured history. In the face of government persecution, it became more important for them to assert that they had much in common with white people. Two British liberal historians played a vital role in this regard: William Miller MacMillan, professor of the University of Witwatersrand and chairman of the European-African Council in Johannesburg, sister organization of the Coloured-European Council, and Johannes Stephanus Marais, who lectured at the University of Cape Town and participated in the Coloured-European Council. They argued that Coloured people were civilized and therefore superior to Africans. MacMillan's The Cape Colour Question (1927) and Marai's The Cape Coloured PeoPle 1652-1937 (1939) exerted great influence on contemporary and future historical narratives.

<Articles>South African Coloured Identity in the 1920s and 1930s (Special Issue : NATION and ETHNICITY)

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