You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (3 page)

The Population Registration Act was one of the most painful measures for coloureds. Each person had to carry an identity card declaring her or his race category. Entitlement to educational facilities, to residential areas, to employment, to association all followed. When the Population Registration rubrics were dictated, “Coloured” subcategories distinguished “Cape Coloured,” “Cape Malay” (Muslims), “Griqua,” and “other Coloured.”
¹⁹
These reflected potential fault lines to exploit in a policy of divide and rule. But the overarching categories “Coloured,” “European”(or “White”), “Bantu” (African), and “Asian” (or “Indian”) served as racial cyphers for juridical purposes. Members of the same families received different racial classifications. Assignments could be altered each year, unilaterally by officials or following appeal. In 1970, for example, the Ministry of Interior unilaterally reclassified seven persons from “Coloured” to “Bantu,”
and acted favorably on petitions in twenty-two cases to be changed from “White” to Coloured,” twenty-three from “Coloured” to “White,” and fourteen from “Bantu” to “Coloured.” Race Classification Boards reclassified one “White” to “Coloured,” four “Coloured” to “White,” and twenty-nine from “Bantu” to “Coloured.” The report does not specify where in South Africa these persons resided.
²⁰
From Wicomb's writing, readers will appreciate that consciousness of race and cultural status was sharply registered within the ranks of coloureds. Mrs. Shenton's ironic reference to the chauffeur's possible legal status as a “registered Coloured” bespeaks her uncertainty over the identity of the apparently white driver (4).

A case that drew great attention to the excruciating consequences of population registration was that of Sandra Laing. Laing was the daughter of poor but “respectable” whites, whose features did not conform to the Caucasian model. She was dismissed from her white school and reclassified “Coloured” by officials. On protest and following a court case, she was reclassified “White,” but never again settled into her privileged entitlements. She finally married an African.
²¹

These notes will have underscored the irony of Wicomb's title.
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
comes from a confident statement by Frieda's longstanding white boyfriend as she is about to go off to have an abortion in the white part of the city. Frieda Shenton, for her part, does not have a sense of direction, even though she ends up in the clinic and is able to deny that she is coloured in order to have the procedure. What is wonderful about this character is her unwillingness to follow in the tracks of others, her observance of the humanity of her own extended family and members of Namaqualand
society regardless of her mother's indoctrination and projection of them as dangerous, throwbacks to poor, uncultured antecedents. The important reconciliation that appears at the book's end reminds us most tellingly of a general point of the work—that rehearsed, constraining histories can be transcended, at least momentarily.

Marcia Wright

New York

December 1999

N
OTES

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 Removal: 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.

ARTHUR NORTJE

Don't travel beyond

Acton at noon in the intimate summer light of England

ARTHUR NORTJE

In writing the history of unfashionable families one is apt to fall into a tone of emphasis which is very far from being the tone of good society, where principles and beliefs are not only of an extremely moderate kind, but are always presupposed, no subjects being eligible but such as can be touched with a light and graceful irony.

GEORGE ELIOT
,
The Mill on the Floss

B
OWL LIKE HOLE

At first Mr Weedon came like any white man in a motor car, enquiring about sheep or goats or servants.

A vehicle swerving meteor-bright across the veld signalled a break in the school day as rows of children scuttled out to hide behind the corner, their fingers plugged into their nostrils with wonder and admiration. They examined the tracks of the car or craned their necks in turn to catch a glimpse of the visitor even though all white men looked exactly the same. Others exploited the break to find circuitous routes to the bank of squat ghanna bushes where they emptied their bowels and bladders. On such occasions they did not examine each other's genitals. They peered through the scant foliage to admire the shiny vehicle from a safe distance. They brushed against the bushes, competing to see, so that the shrivelled little leaf-balls twisted and showered into dust. From this vantage point they would sit, pants down, for the entire visit while the visitor conducted his business from the magnificence of his car.