Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community

Abstract

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. By Mohamed Adhikari. Ohio University Research in International Studies, Africa Series no. 83. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. Pp. vii, 252. $24.00 paper. Mohamed Adhikari's most recent book explores the historical formation of the most complex and contested of identity positions in South Africa. His focus is on the political and conscious nature of Coloured identity, with particular focus on the period between Union (1910) and the era of Apartheid rule beginning in 1948. His central theme is that ambiguity has provided a stabilizing mechanism by which Coloured identity is sustained across different periods of South African history. Adhikari is offering an important and convincing challenge to those who would destabilize Coloured identity because of its racially hybrid origins, reify it for strictly racialist reasons, or deconstruct it for its nonracial political potential. The challenge is to offer insight into the capacity of an inherently unstable category to collectively cohere at the level of conscious conviction and unconscious practice. Adhikari is less interested in the unconscious domain of habituated meaning, focusing, instead, on self-making and instrumental social action. Almost all of the case studies and bodies of literature he reviews are analyzed in terms of the creative responses of political activists, intellectuals, and artists to platforms and changes in official policy and administrative structure. Adhikari succeeds in offering one of the most accessible frameworks for organizing the history behind Coloured identity to date. He does so without reducing the complexity that is the sine qua non of this category. His narrative is organized around the primary goal of assimilation and the structural constraints of a specifically Western Cape climate of political liberalism. It is the constant movement in and around the Janus-faced policies of British liberals rhetorically offering universal human rights, but practicing spatial and economic segregationism, that most notably shapes the contours of Coloured identity. The contradictions inherent in Cape liberalism keep Coloureds politically and culturally marginal as a group, all the while offering economic reward for disciplined and self-governing practice. Coloured leaders and political activists therefore compel the community to aspire to the higher goals of education, temperance, and self-restraint. They also generally compel political ideology to work within the dominant paradigm. The vigilant but thwarted pursuit of respectability is explored through several political organizations-the African Political/People's Organization (1902-mid1940s), the Teachers' League of South Africa (1913-1940), and the NonEuropean Unity Movement (1943-1963), to name a few. …