Reshaping Remembrance ~ A Coloured Expert’s Coloured

‘I am hoping fervently and in faith that the divine resides in every living being; that  nobody is anybody’s superior or boss […] give us the strength to become South Africans’ – Jan Rabie[i]

‘One may indeed ask: with friends such as Jakes Gerwel, Allan Boesak, Hein Willemse and Neville Alexander, does the Afrikaner really need more enemies?’ – Dan Roodt[ii]

1.
In 1983, a Minister’s wife made the following off-the-record remarks during a campaign speech:
But traditionally the Coloureds have no history of nationhood. They’re a different group, i.e. all different types of people.

Between us and [our] small group when the press aren’t present. You know, they’re a separate group. The definition of a Coloured in the population register is of someone who is not a Black, and not an Indian, in other words a non-person. He is not … not … not. They’re leftovers.

They’re people who were left over after the nations were sorted out. They’re the rest. When Ida [?] had the Cape Corps here in Vereeniging last week or two weeks ago, I looked at them and my heart bled because not one of them had the same facial features.

You know we all at least look European, but they … some looked Indian, some looked Chinese, some looked white, some looked black. And that is their dilemma. They have no binding power.

Their binding power lies in the fact that they speak Afrikaans, that they’re members of the [Dutch Reformed] Church. That is their binding power.

The Indians are a small group, also a splinter group of a nation somewhere in Africa (sic) and, between us, […] they need a bit of supervision. And the supervision [and] our authority (baasskap)[iii] of the white [man] are built in the whole system.[iv]

The person who expressed her self so categorically was Mrs Marike de Klerk (1937–2001) – for what it is worth, a Miss Willemse – the first wife of F.W. de Klerk, former Minister of Internal Affairs and later State President. Her remarks were made during a referendum campaign speech to persuade white women to vote for the National Party’s 1983 policy reform that entailed the creation of a tricameral parliament to accommodate people classified as ‘Coloureds’ or ‘Indians’. Fifteen years later, she described her motivation for the speech as a plea for ‘the acceptance of the Coloureds who, for so many ears, had been marginalised, humiliated and excluded by an unjust system of racial classification’. By the end of the 1980s, and again during 1993 when these marks surfaced again De Klerk endured much public criticism. Her defence was that the version, transcribed from a secret tape recording, contradicted her intentions; that her intended ‘nuances were lost’ and that she ‘was struggling desperately to convince friend and foe that I intended the opposite.’[v]

In 1993, the office of the State President issued a statement in which Marike de Klerk declared that there existed ‘a warm and cordial co-operation between [myself] and the coloured community’; that as a consequence of ‘our close cultural bonds I – as an Afrikaans-speaking South African – have a special appreciation of the contribution by the Coloured community to South African society.’[vi] In a separate declaration, F.W. de Klerk, as the State President, indicated that his wife fought a titanic struggle against the negative and narrow-minded racism of the far right in white politics. From every platform she promotes the concept of reform and renewal.’ About her use of the nonperson’ notion, he said that she used this concept with respect to the Population Registration Act 30 of 1950 in which Coloureds are described in negative terms as nonblacks and non-white and therefore ‘in quotation marks and by definition non-person’. She had, according to the statement, ‘in no way reflected negative opinion, feeling or attitude towards coloureds as a population group. Anybody who so alleges is malicious and attaches an inaccurate interpretation to my wife’s comments.’[vii]

Even if one accepts that Mrs de Klerk’s sympathetic nuance was lost or that the excerpt was taken out of context – and I have no reason to doubt her sincerity – she presented to her intimate gathering – ‘among us and [our] small group’ – a reflection of deep-seated ideological opinions. Views that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, had gained social acceptability in South Africa, and views that still persist in our current discourses on South African identities and social differences. Especially her inelegant and awkward formulation, free from the subterfuge of Party Speak, points to how deeply apartheid patterns of thinking were entrenched in popular thought. Despite the vehement criticism levelled at De Klerk, particularly from the ranks of English language and leftist Afrikaans newspapers, she – clumsily – articulated views that were at the core of social relationships in South Africa.

However, De Klerk was no reflexive thinker. Her remarks were not idiosyncratic or original. These attitudes and views had been circulating for generations in the colonial public debate and broadly within Afrikaner nationalist circles. Her later discomfort may have had much to do with the embarrassment of having been caught out with unrefined racist views in the 1980s, at a time of apartheid euphemisms, or with the fact that she expressed views that were whispered behind closed doors in contemporary polite white society. Indeed, in the decades after 1948, the crude racism of the earlier formulators of apartheid was replaced with the emphasis on the lessening of ‘race conflict’, ‘selfdetermination’ and ‘separate development’.[viii]

In this chapter, it will be demonstrated that De Klerk presented ruling political and social ideas in her speech. The matters she raised – the Coloureds’ reluctance to be ‘an emerging nation’, their lack of cohesion, their somatic and phenotypic diversity, their Afrikaans-ness or their perceived attachment to the Dutch Reformed Protestant tradition and the interests of white dominance – formed the framework of separatism, paternalism and apartheid. I shall point to some connections between De Klerk’s remarks and the ideas of the architects of apartheid.

2.
Frantz Fanon wrote in Les damnés de la terre, translated into English as The wretched of the earth, that the colonist often declared that he knew his native, ‘[f]or it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence.’[ix] It could be said that ‘the Coloured’ to whom De Klerk referred here was a discursive creation formed in social intercourse and established over more than three hundred years.[x] The Coloured was perceived as different, deficient, less than human and in need of guardianship. This is an attitude generations of ‘Coloured experts’ elevated to respectability. In South Africa, the Fanon equivalent was the white individual, the white government official, the white politician, the apartheid ideologue or the SABRA social scientist who had ‘known their Coloureds from childhood’.[xi] Adam Small traced the phenomenon of the Coloured expert back to slavery when slave owners had to appraise and ‘know’ their ‘subjects’.[xii] By extension, De Klerk became in her campaign speech the proverbial ‘Coloured expert’.

However, ‘knowing’ the other always has a dialectical counterpart, namely the revelation of the self. When De Klerk pronounced on the Coloured, she also simultaneously revealed herself. One of the key assumptions of apartheid was the ‘particular racial differences’ of South Africans. Some of the early architects of apartheid argued that, ‘the Boer nation, with their particular European race heritage and composition, […] that apparently adapted biologically in a peculiar manner to South Africa has also for this reason a special calling in this country.’[xiii] In the apartheid context ‘European appearance’ signalled more than biological pedigree; it also represented an index of assumed characteristics and self-imposed moral and religious responsibilities:

Armed with a strong constitution, a browning skin that protected us against the sunrays, adequate sweat glands for cooling in the warm climate, numerous offspring, and an insistent nature with most of the characteristics of the Northern Race, an abhorrence of miscegenation, a people rooted in this country through adaptation and traditions spanning over ten generations – and lo and behold (siedaar), the conditions for self-assertion, lo and behold, the basis for my faith in the Boer and his future in this country entrusted by our fathers as a precious pledge to us in building up a Christian white civilisation with guardianship over people of colour.[xiv]

When De Klerk’s heart bled because ‘not one of [the Coloureds] had the same facial features’ and compared them to herself and her audience (‘we all at least look European’) she spoke with this deeply rooted assumption of ‘European appearance’ of which one of the constitutents was ‘an abhorrence of miscegenation’. When she told the intimate company of her audience that the Coloureds – ‘all different types of people’ – had ‘no history of nationhood’ she accepted that one of the undisputed assumptions of human existence was membership of an apartheid-defined ‘nation’ (volk), and by implication, recognition of the codes of ‘race awareness’ and ‘race pride’. The frame of reference that De Klerk held up for ‘nationhood’, revealed classical apartheid thought, a direct consequence of Afrikaner nationalism: ‘nations [that] have been sorted out’, ‘the population register’, appearance (‘we all look European’), ‘binding power’, ‘Afrikaans’, ‘the [Dutch Reformed] Church’ and above all the ‘authority of the white [man]’. De Klerk (and her intimate audience) accepted unreservedly the fictions of apartheid and the intellectual framework defined by apartheid thought.

These views could be traced to the influence of German Romanticism, people’s nationalism (volksnasionalisme) and Kuyperian interpretations of Calvinism that developed linkages between culture and ‘nationhood’ (volkskap), that individuality could be expressed only within the context of group identity which was supported by the belief that ‘nations’ (volkere) and their cultures were destined. The nation was regarded as ‘a natural, pure and integrated unit’ with demonstrable ‘organic vision’.[xv]

For the architects of apartheid ‘race apartheid’ and the ‘creation’ of ‘separate nation communities’ (aparte volksgemeenskappe) were essential.[xvi] Fundamental to De Klerk’s tacit acceptance of ‘nationhood’ (volkskap) was that imagined community known as ‘the Afrikaners’ or the political discourse known as ‘Afrikaner nationalism’.[xvii] The South African history to which she referred was white mystification, established by both colonial and apartheid historiographers. How deeply these views were embedded could be deduced from a remark by an apartheid apologist when he employed Johann Herder’s early nineteenth-century romantic-nationalist concept of the ‘soul of the nation’ (volksiel = from the German Volksseele). The unidentified minister said among other things that despite their Western cultural heritage Coloureds had no ‘own nation soul’ (eie volksiel): that ‘mixing with the average Coloureds as an unique group was not permissible in terms of Scripture. Although they had adopted the culture of Westerners, it does not necessary follow that an own nation soul was born out of it’.[xviii] One of the intellectual formulators of apartheid, Prof. Dr. Geoffrey Cronje, former Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria stated ‘that the Coloureds for their own wellbeing (and obviously in the interests of the whites) must develop into a separate nation, according to their own potential, so that they can create an own nationhood’ (added emphasis).[xix] That these two opinions may appear to be contradictory is only in appearance. At base of both points of view is the belief that the Coloureds – or the ‘Natives’ or the ‘Indians’ – can merely be secondary participants in a predominantly white history and that their existence can be measured only in terms of apartheid definitions.

For the Afrikaners – ‘our beautiful white nation’[xx]0 – to be civil, cohesive and ‘white’, their whiteness had to be circumscribed. ‘White’ in this sense became a code for ‘superior intelligence and breeding’, perceived purity (‘European blood purity’), Christianity, ‘civilisation’ but mostly the lionised European phenotype.[xxi] These delimitations had to differentiate the Afrikaners from the greater number of heathens, the ‘pure uncivilised’: ‘the Bantus, the Kaffirs, the Africans, the natives, the aboriginals, the black people – whatever one chooses to call them […]’ whom the novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin described as ‘bold and virile and prolific’.[xxii] That line of division was the Coloured. Apparently Coloureds – the bastards and hybrids – being partly civilised not only merged native ‘non-civilisation’ and European ‘civilisation’, but also served as a buffer against the ‘indigenous native’ even though the ‘race quality of the Coloured’ (rassegehalte van die kleurling) was deficient. [xxiii] The Coloured according to a former secretary general of Native Affairs, Dr. W. W. M. Eiselen, was not like the ‘native’ temperamentally ‘disposed’ to physical labour but also ‘unreliable through lack of temperance in the use of liquor’.[xxiv] The unacceptable phenotype, somatic or social shortcomings that the Afrikaners suppressed in themselves could then exist, but then removed in the Coloured.[xxiv]

Marike de Klerk could only express what was supposed to be a positive step in National Party political thought – the political accommodation of the Coloured – in negative terms. Not to do it would equate the Afrikaner to the Coloured. And that could not be allowed, since this would presumably transgress the limits of whiteness. In this regard, De Klerk resonated a history of representation where the Coloured could merely be a shadow and a ‘mimic of whiteness’ and the Afrikaner.[xxvi] She used the same rhetorical conditionality that General J.B.M. Hertzog used in his oft-quoted Smithfield speech in 1925:
He [the Coloured] has originated and exists among us; knows no other civilisation but that of the white people, however much he is deficient in this; possesses a view of life, which is fundamentally that of the white people and not of the natives, and speaks the language of the whites as mother tongue [added emphasis].[xxvii]

For De Klerk there was no ambivalence regarding the Indians: that ‘small group, […] a splinter group of a nation somewhere in Africa (sic)’ and they needed ‘a bit of supervision’. With the Coloured, this was different. Shortly after having declared emphatically that Coloureds had ‘no binding power’ (added emphasis), she caught herself identifying cohesive characteristics, viz. ‘that they spoke Afrikaans, that they were members of the [Dutch Reformed] Church’. Earlier, for the average Afrikaners Afrikaans and membership of one of the traditional Afrikaans churches were characteristics of a rooted Christian National tradition. For De Klerk, merely mentioning these probably called to mind the Afrikaners for these characteristics were regarded as the cherished sources of their ‘binding power’. At that point in her speech, there was no essential difference between the Coloured and the (undeclared norm of the) Afrikaner. For De Klerk, if these characteristics were sources of the Afrikaner’s ‘binding power’ then it should have the same ‘cohesiveness’ elsewhere. But in fact, a rich variety of Protestant, Catholic, charismatic, Islamic and non-traditional religious denominations characterised the apartheid-defined community she had in mind.[xxviii]

Underlying her slip of tongue was the ambivalence of the Afrikaner towards the Coloured: ‘They spoke the same language as we do and are members of the same church but they are not us’. Hence the differences had to be clearly defined. How fundamental these differences were and how deficient the Coloured’s (inferior and childish) emotional life was – even within a shared religious tradition – were expressed elsewhere by a letter writer in a newspaper polemic on D.J. Opperman’s poem ‘Kersliedjie’ (‘Christmas Carol’): ‘The Coloured’s attitude towards God is definitely not ours. […] Their funerals are also more tragic, because it is as if they cannot comprehend the afterlife fully like we do and hence the loss is greater. Their sense of religion they only know through the small things they see and understand around them’ (added emphasis).[xxix]

This ambivalence also applied to another shared cultural feature, namely the Afrikaans language, which with Afrikaner nationalist appropriation became the
‘language of the Afrikaner’. J.H. Rademeyer in one of the first Afrikaans dialect studies found that ‘these Coloureds [referring to the Griquas and the Basters of Rehoboth] all speak a type of corrupted Afrikaans’ and he found that ‘the Coloured language of our country has always served one purpose: to amuse!’[xxx] It is relevant to indicate that Rademeyer earlier in his argument defined his sample group as ‘pitiable creatures’, thereby linking the ‘corrupted’, deviant language with the deficient Coloureds.[xxxi]

In the development of ‘Standard Afrikaans’ or literally ‘Generally Civilised Afrikaans’ (Algemeen-Beskaafde Afrikaans) other varieties of Afrikaans were often declared lower order forms, deviating from the white standard (‘civilised’) norm.

For the Coloured to exist, he had to be defined in terms of his dependence on the ‘white man’ / ‘the European’, but particularly in terms of his deficiency, his regression, his sinfulness.[xxxii] It could not be otherwise in this framework, because ‘[e]conomically and culturally they represent a lower stratum of European civilization’.[xxxiii] The perceived malformation of the Coloured was apparently innate. This was how D.J. McDonald in his Stellenbosch M.A. thesis (the field of study was not indicated) Die Familie-lewe van die Kleurling (‘The family life of the Coloured’) argued this view: The Coloured was ‘born in shame and in shame he continued his life and this to his own detriment and destruction’.[xxxiv] How unchangeable this malformation was, was probably proven by ‘the poverty and dismal family conditions not exclusively determined by external material shortcomings but by an inner moral corruption and rot that lay at its root’ (added emphasis).[xxxv] In McDonald’s mind this inherent malformation was due to the ‘lack of a national and tribal consciousness’ (volks- en stambewussyn) that manifested itself in ‘frightful forms’ particularly ‘in the sexual area’.

With this history of inherent malformation, ‘the lack of a national and tribal consciousness’ and their low ranking on the European scale of civilisation, De Klerk’s Coloureds became a ‘negative group’. In the apartheid definition of the Population Act that she quoted, human beings could only exist in ‘national and tribal contexts’. In drawing on such a long history of negative imaging she could arrive at the ringing conclusion that the Coloured was a ‘non-person’, ‘leftovers’ and ‘the rest’. Even if De Klerk uttered these observations somewhat critically her reference to ‘non-person’ or ‘non-human’ evoked a number of historical associations. One of these was to the nineteenth century Western European civilisation discourse where ‘non-human’ presented an extreme point on the civilisation continuum: at the one extreme ‘human being’ (civilised) on the other ‘non-human’ (non-civilised). A ‘non-human’ or the not-yet-fully-human being could only develop or progress through appropriate training like christening to evolve into a ‘human being’.[xxxvi] This point of view would have found resonance with some white South African opinion-makers, especially those influenced by Social Darwinism. A race-obsessed Millin let one of her characters express the idea of not-yet-fully human being as follows: ‘[some] Europeans […] could hardly regard these brown and black folk as quite human.’[xxxvii] Allan Boesak in one of the strongest criticisms of the Afrikaans equivalent of Coloured, namely kleurling, stated that the word was connected to ‘non-person’ and apartheid dominance:
[This word kleurling] is something that white people have imposed on me […] that in their eyes, I was always a nothing: a non-person, someone they don’t need to respect […] If I allow my identity to depend on their judgement it not only implies that they may decide my future, my being and my person […] but that I [also] put my future and person in their hands.[xxxviii]

If differentiation and the creation of ‘race consciousness’ and ‘race pride’ were strategies ‘to stabilise and ensure the separate continued existence and identity of our major racial groups’, then guardianship was the self-imposed (Christian) duty of the Afrikaner nationalist.[xxxix] The civilising and christening task of the classical colonial tradition also entailed paternalistic guardianship for Afrikaner whiteness.[lx] McDonald stated this duty as follows:
The prevailing conditions of this generation [of Coloureds] who are living among the whites render the duties and obligations of the white man as guardian of the deprived and less civilised people so much more serious. The white man first has a sacred duty to fulfil towards the Coloureds themselves to assist in placing and elevating them to a higher living standard.[xli]

Later, Dönges, as Minister of Internal Affairs, would defend the policy of influx control as a step to defend the Coloured against undesired influences: ‘Today, the Coloured needs protection; protection against the influx of the natives, against bad influences and firebrands among themselves, protection against himself, for instance against alcohol abuse and miscegenation and other social ills.’[xlii] G.J. Gerwel in Literatuur en Apartheid indicated how, in the older Afrikaans literature, such protection and the ‘good-natured paternalism of the master’ often presupposed the ‘childishness’ of their subjects:
Characteristic of this way of life was a childlike inability to make ethical distinctions and hence a short-sighted carelessness, the abuse of liquor and merry-making, loose and loud cathectic lives, extremely large and poorly nurtured families, rough women abuse, naïve incomprehension of the contents of mimicked religious customs, and a general banality in almost all areas of life.[xliii]

In the year, 1983, in which Gerwel’s study was published, De Klerk proved how abiding paternalism was in South Africa when, she with reference to the ‘Indians’, referred to their ‘supervision’ preferably under the ‘authority of the white [man]’.[xliv]

3.
In conclusion: the construct of the Coloured as a unique but ambivalent, lesser, regressive, and needy creature had a long history in South Africa. This imaging had such an enduring presence that it was manifested in De Klerk’s mediated form in the 1980s. Only aspects that appeared directly and in reference to the quoted text have been discussed here. Therefore abiding stereotypes such as inter alia the ‘characteristic humour of the Coloured’ have been excluded from this discussion. Marike de Klerk described her speech as paving the way for the political inclusion of ‘Coloureds who have been marginalised, humiliated and excluded for so many years by an unjust system of racial classification.’ However, in spite of her sympathetic intentions, she could not escape the long history of what Breyten Breytenbach in his well-known ‘Blik van buite’ (‘View from the outside’) speech referred to as die vuilpraat van die ander (the badmouthing of others), because as has been demonstrated her ideas were not idiosyncratic but bore the palimpsest of a history of colonial and apartheid thought.[xlv]

NOTES
i. J. Rabie, Ons, die afgod, Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1958, 145. All translations from the original are mine.
ii. D. Roodt, ‘Wie sal ons bondgenote wees?’, in: Afrikaner, 12 May 2007, 3
iii. In this context baasskap could also be translated as ‘supremacy’ or ‘dominance’.
iv. E. Wessels, ‘Marike de Klerk in volsinne aangehaal’ in: Vrye Weekblad, 24 February 1989. See also A. Getz, “Startling claims about coloureds by Minster’s wife”, in: Sunday Express, 30 October 1983.
v. M. Maartens, Marike. ’n Reis deur somer en winter. Vanderbijlpark: Carpe Diem Boeke 1998, p. 96.
vi. D. Cruywagen, Marike ‘hurt by unjust accusations’, in: The Argus: 11 March 1993.
vii. Ibid.
viii. See also S. Dubow, Illicit Union. Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press 1995, 276.
ix. F. Fanon, The wretched of the earth, (transl. Constance Farrington) Harmondsworth: Penguin 1967 [1961], 28.
x. The concept of ‘Coloured’, like Afrikaner (in its usage before c.1850), hotnot (Hottentot), bruinmens (brown person) kleurling (coloured) or bruin mens (brown person) takes its place next to those terms originating from colonially structured societies to define the offspring born from sexual relationships between colonists/settlers and indigenous people. For example, in South America, the rest of Africa, Europe or Asia common concepts such as mestis, mestizo and mulato/mulatto were used. This abundance of terminology gives an indication of the sometimes Social Darwinist inspired efforts to describe these people and their degrees of ‘admixture’: bastard, cafuzo, catalo, eurafrican, eurasian, eurindian, fustee/fustie, griffe, griffo, guacho, halfblood, halfcaste, hybrid, cross, quadroon, quateroon, quinteroon, ladino, marabou, mestee, mestis, mestiso/mestisa, mixed race, mulatto, octoroon, sacatra zebrule, terseroon, zambo …
xi. The South African Buro for Racial Affairs was established in 1948, and from the outset ‘it attended energetically and efficiently to the various intricate issues relating to racial affairs […] SABRA laid down a clear, defined policy and stated its viewpoint very clearly’, according to T. E. Dönges, a National Party cabinet member and later State President-designate (Dönges, T.E., ‘Openingsrede.’ In: Die Kleurling in die Suid-Afrikaanse samelewing. Referate gelewer op die sesde jaarvergadering van die Suid-Afrikaanse Buro vir Rasse-Aangeleenthede (SABRA). S.l.: s.n. 1955, 1).
xii.G. J. Gerwel, Literatuur en Apartheid. Kasselsvlei: Kampen-uitgewers 1983, 77.
xiii. G. Cronjé,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag – Die blywende oplossing van Suid-Afrika se Rassevraagstuk. Johannesburg: Publicité Handelsreklamediens 1945, 31.
xiv. G. Eloff quoted in Cronje,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag, 32
xv. See Dubow, Illicit Union. Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa, 261–2.
xvi. Cronjé,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag, 168.
xvii. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London/New York: Verso 1983.
xviii. A. Small, Die eerste steen? Cape Town: H.A.U.M. 1961, 38. In response to this, Small articulated an insight similar to that of Anderson who years later would formulate the theory of an ‘imagined community’: ‘The establishment of Afrikanerhood […] is no born-from an-own-nation-soul matter. […] The Afrikaner’s “identity” is not an original pure natural given, but a consciousness cultivated gradually through historical circumstance’ […] ‘the ‘culture of the Afrikaner’ are […] borrowings appropriated over time’ (Small, Die eerste steen, 40).
xix.Cronjé,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag, 38, 140 ff.
xx. H.R. Abercrombie, Afrika se gevaar. Die Kleurlingprobleem. Cape Town: Die Burger-boekhandel 1938, 18.
xxi. Compare Cronjé,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag, 11. See also G. Cronjé, W. Nicol and E.P. Groenewald, Regverdige Rasse-apartheid (Stellenbosch: Christen-studenteverenigingmaatskappy 1947), for a justification of apartheid on Biblical grounds. Regarding this form of Christianity, Small wrote: ‘He who wants to be a boss can be no Christian, and he who wishes to be a Christian can be no boss. Likewise, he who wishes to be a slave can be no Christian, because Christianity contains the ideal of the highest freedom and the highest responsibility’ (Small, Die eerste steen, 19).
xxii. S.G. Millin, The South Africans. London: Constable 1926, 217, 213. As regards indigenous ‘purity’, refer to one of Millin’s characters in God’s Stepchildren: ‘It was the tradition among the school boys, as it was among their fathers […] that one preferred a real straightforward black man to a half-caste. Whatever else the black man might be, he was, at least pure’ (S.G. Millin, God’s Stepchildren. Johannesburg: Ad Donker 1986 [1924], 247).
xxiii. Cronjé,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag, 146–9.
xxiv. W.W.M. Eiselen, ‘Die Kleurling en die Naturel’, in: Die Kleurling in die Suid-Afrikaanse samelewing. Referate gelewer op die sesde jaarvergadering van die Suid-Afrikaanse Buro vir Rasse-Aangeleenthede (SABRA). S.l.: s.n. 1955, 122.
xxv. Robert Young pointed out that disgust is not a value free reaction: ‘Disgust always bears the imprint of desire’ and among racist thinkers such as Gobineau ‘we find an ambivalent driving desire at the heart of racialism: a compulsive libidinal attraction disavowed by an equal insistence on repulsion’ (R.J.C. Young, Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture and race. London: Routledge 1995, 149.
xxvi. Compare Millin when the narrator in God’s Stepchildren said the following about a character’s imitation: ‘she had, as most half-caste children have, a capacity for imitation. She copied the manners and habits – even the gestures and intonations – of [the white mistress]’ (added emphasis). Millin, God’s Stepchildren, 83.
xxvii. Quoted in D. P. Botha, Die opkoms van ons derde stand. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1960, 101.
xxviii. See A. J. Venter, Coloured. A Profile of Two Million South Africans. Cape Town/Pretoria: Human & Rousseau, 1974, 381–96.
xxix. Quoted in A.M. Jordaan, Mites rondom Afrikaans, unpublished D.Litt. dissertation, University of Pretoria 2004, 297.
xxx. J.H. Rademeyer, Kleurling-Afrikaans. Die taal van die Griekwas en die Rehoboth-Basters. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger 1938, 5, 11–2.
xxxi. Ibid, 10.
xxxii. See D.J. McDonald, Die Familie-lewe van die Kleurling: met ’n noukeurige ondersoek na die Stellenbosche Kleurling Familie, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Stellenbosch 1933, 97.
xxxiii. E.H. Brookes quoted in Venter, Coloured. A Profile of Two Million South Africans, 3.
xxxiv. McDonald, Die Familie-lewe van die Kleurling, 98, 94, 96.
xxxv. Also compare Millin, The South Africans, p. 195: ‘The coloured man is the fruit of the vice, the folly, the thoughtlessness of the white man. […] The association was devoid of lyricism. No Hottentot girl ever preened herself before her white lord, declaiming: “I am black, but comely”’.
xxxvi.  A. Mbembe, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing,’ in: Public Culture 14 (2002), 249.
xxxvii. Millin, God’s Stepchildren, 295.
xxxviii. See Gerwel, Literatuur en Apartheid, 182.
xxxix. Dönges, ‘Openingsrede’, 4.
xl. G. Cronjé, Voogdyskap en Apartheid, Pretoria: Van Schaik, 1948, 15–7.
xli. McDonald, Die Familie-lewe van die Kleurling, 131.
xlii. Dönges, ‘Openingsrede’, 5. Also see Eiselen ‘As guardians of the Coloureds we have to bear in mind that influx and continuous residence of natives in the Western Province could very easily lead to moral decline and economic impoverishment of the Coloured community’ (added emphasis; Eiselen, ‘Die Kleurling en die Naturel’, 124).
xliii. Gerwel, Literatuur en Apartheid, 173, 200.
xliv. For the apartheid proponent Cronjé the ‘only real final and abiding solution’ for the ‘Asian question of Africa’ was ‘total repatriation’ to India. See G. Cronjé, Afrika sonder die Asiaat – Die blywende oplossing van Suid-Afrika se Asiatevraagstuk. Johannesburg: Publicité Handelsreklamediens 1946, 205.
xlv. B.B. Lasarus, [ps. B. Breytenbach], ’n Seisoen in die paradys, Johannesburg: Perskor 1976, 127.

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