Shifting+discourse+on+racial+identity,+Jeremy+Cronin,+Sindy

Sunday Independent, Johannesburg, July 16, 2006 //Edition 1//
=Shifting discourse on racial identity=

//With his eye on Cape Town, **Jeremy Cronin** explores the 'elite politics of racialised self-righteousness'//

Trumpets. A roll of drums. And the bare-chested actor steps out proclaiming from the prow of his trireme: "I … am … Ajax!" "DA FOAMING CLEANSER!!" comes the response from a hundred choral voices up in the balcony, in tribute to a popular washing powder of the day.

The Criterion bioscope was opposite Jubilee Square and next door to the Rendezvous Café along Main Road in Simon's Town. It was there that I learnt two early lessons. The first was a lesson in the popular deconstruction of the imperial (in this case Greco-Hollywood) epic. The second was a related lesson about the possibilities of up-ending apartheid hierarchies.

Simon's Town's small African community had lived in Luyolo, a precarious camp built up the side of the winding road to Red Hill. In the late 1950s, by the end of the first decade of apartheid, the camp had been destroyed and the families forcibly removed to townships closer to the city.

But there was still a sizeable coloured community living in Simon's Town, and so the Criterion's regular matinee patrons (some of us very regular, watching the same film many times over) were segregated into a downstairs "European" and an upstairs balcony "non-European" section.

Cape Town, of which Simon's Town is an outlying suburb, has long been a contested space. In the post-apartheid era, the city has not generally been well-liked by many of the new professional and political elite.

There are many reasons for the dislike. There is Cape Town's political "unreliability". It is the one major city not securely under an overwhelming ANC majority. There is the liberal smugness of its leafy suburbs, secure in the knowledge that the property market will continue to regulate what apartheid administratively held asunder.

There is the history of a divide-and-rule "coloured labour preference area" policy. This policy is partly the reason why, uniquely for a major South African city, only around one-quarter of Cape Town's population is "African".

I say "partly" because, as Jared Diamond reminds us, the Western Cape's winter rainfall meant that, while there were indigenous hunter-gatherers and pastoralists in occupation of this space over millennia, Bantu-speaking farming cultures were excluded by their dependence upon summer-rainfall crops.

Our memories of our past tend to be overwhelmed, understandably, by the drama of the more immediate apartheid era. But if you think of our present simply as post-apartheid, you might be inclined to forget Cape Town as an administrative outpost not so much of enforced racial apartness as of genocide. Through the golden years of colonial Cape Town, well into the 19th century, San/Bushmen communities were systematically hunted down as vermin.

In a matter of a few hundred years, civilisations that had occupied this space for millennia were exterminated. Of course, these peoples have not absolutely disappeared. Up behind Simon's Town Main Road, next to the waterfall, is a cave; like so many others it has yielded from its middens beautifully worked stone-scrapers and ostrich shell beads.

The clicks of ancient civilisations continue to sound in the Nguni family of languages in our country, and, indeed, more and more in Cape Town as the long-collapsed peasant economies of the Eastern Cape create burgeoning squatter camps around the city.

Most South Africans, black and white, still unknowingly evoke words borrowed from the disappeared peoples. Our most homely of interjections, //eina!// and //sies!//, come to us from the Khoi, //e-na// and //tsi//.

Genetically you can recognise the features of the disappeared all around us. They are even, surely, present in that most iconic of post-apartheid physiognomies - the genial face of Nelson Mandela.

From the beginnings of colonial settlement in the mid 17th century, Cape Town was also a slave capital. Slaves were shipped in from far and wide - Bengal and south India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and the East and West African coasts. Some bequeathed to our city an unbroken, three-and-a-half-century Islamic tradition.

The first book to be published in Cape Town was not in Dutch or English, but Arabic. To understand Cape Town, you would need also to add to this mix white working-class men and women, sailors, cooks, bartenders, blacksmiths and coopers rubbing shoulders at work with all and sundry.

We should certainly not romanticise the pre-apartheid past of Cape Town, but neither should we lose sight of the proto-non-racialism that was forged unevenly in localities all about our city, as Capetonians went about their daily lives.

Walk about Cape Town and you can still hear and see the undisappeared-disappeared, the multiphonic wrested from schizophrenia. Cape Town's subconscious has long guessed what contemporary science is now confirming: we are all the bearers of the same mixed-up genetic bredie. Humanity is coloured. Our proto-non-racial Cape Town has always teetered on the brink of the possibilities of its Creole reality.

And it is this reality that is, I think, such an important and corrective challenge to the dominant political discourse of our post-1994 South Africa.

It is a discourse of representative redistribution. Transformation has come to mean not transformation but the elite redistribution of some racial, class and gendered power (whether in the boardroom or the Springbok rugby team). Representative individuals from formerly disadvantaged groups are the beneficiaries.

Informing these politics are three buttressing paradigms - an individualistic liberal rights politics (individuals are entitled to a slice of the action); an identity politics that posits relatively fixed and pre-given identities ("blackness" or Africanness, for instance); and a paradigm of democratic transformation that tends to reduce democracy to "representation".

This is what, in poetics, we call "metonymy", a part for the whole. In the new South Africa, a small number of representatives enjoy new powers and privileges on behalf of the historically disadvantaged majority. This gives us an elite politics of racialised self-righteousness.

It is this dominant paradigm of our times that the mixedness, the Creole reality of Cape Town, is disturbing. Cape Town's colouredness, the fact that it is not really African like South Africa's other major cities, constitutes a niggling problem for this discourse of representative redistribution, which grounds so much of the politics of our time.

For instance, how, as a newly enriched multi-millionaire, do you continue to justify your continuing benefit from black economic empowerment deals? It is only by maintaining an equal sign (=) between yourself, the millionaire individual, and the historically (and still presently) disadvantaged majority that you can pull this off. Only the assumption of a fixed black identity will allow this. No wonder the history and present social reality of Cape Town have proven problematic.

The worthy idea of an African Renaissance, which has been a dominant theme of the Mbeki presidency, can also sometimes play into this new politics of elite self-righteousness. The European Renaissance could imagine itself re­birthing an earlier golden age of classical Greece and Rome, the age prefigured by Ajax - the epic hero, brought to you by Homer (and not Hollywood, or Lever Brothers, or Colgate-Palmolive, or whatever the manufacturer of the foaming cleanser then was). But it is a short step between the idea of a renaissance and the construction of some god-given and timeless European "genius".

Likewise, the pursuit of an African Renaissance can have us scurrying backwards in search of some presumptive, authentic, pure, rooted and timeless African identity. The history and reality of Cape Town are likely to be disruptive of that pursuit.

But it will not be an effective disruption if we fall into a counteractive chauvinism, imagining a Cape Town rooted in the marriage of Europe and Asia to the exclusion of Africa. It is President Thabo Mbeki who articulated a moving celebration of a new South African identity, identity as process and not origin, identity as heterogeneity and not some univocal root, identity as mixedness:

"I owe my being to the Khoi and the San … they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen… I am formed by the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still part of me. In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East.

Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture is part of my essence… I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mhephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom… I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas… I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign …"

Mbeki delivered this justly celebrated speech on the occasion of the adoption of South Africa's new constitution in May 1996. He titled it: "I am an African".

"I am an African"? the chorus in my head starts to murmur. I take out my Criterion bioscope lucky-draw winning ticket. I've kept it from the late 1950s. It's a ticket that entitles me to stay on in this imaginary Cape Town.

"I am an African" … I think about that with the voice of the balcony chorus buzzing in my head. 'I … am … an African' and the chorus wants to respond - not with a dismissive "Da foaming cleanser" - but with a query.

What if Mbeki had said: "I am a coloured"? How subversive, how transformational, how right that might have been. Then again, how open to misinterpretation.

That's the chorus in my head. You can choose to ignore it, if you will.


 * **//Jeremy Cronin//** is an ANC member of parliament and deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party. This is an edited version of **//Creole Cape Town//**. The essay is published in **//A City Imagined//**; edited by Stephen Watson (Penguin Books) **//R120//**


 * From: http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3340388**

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