Identitarian mythologies

The turn to right wing coloured ethnonationalism

While the turn to ethnonationalism is nothing new in the South African context, and while it has many iterations across variously invented and reinvented identity markers, this piece is not about the expanse of it. It is about the turn to a right wing coloured ethnonationalism we see at play throughout coloured communities throughout the country. The emergence of people like Gayton McKenzie, campaigning on racist and xenophobic platforms, relies on the fear mongering that posits colouredness as a permanent in-betweenness, something any of us who grew up in these communities are extremely familiar with. So while this is a problem across the country, and seemingly across the world, I am focused here on the specific emergence of a very particular insistence on a right wing and racist turn toward an ethnonationalist politic that seeks to create coloured identity as an exceptional and therefor singular issue in the South African context, which it simply is not. With the publishing of books centered on this kind of regressive identitarian logic becoming more and more regular in the postapartheid, we have to confront these questions with serious attention and patience. There are issues that affect communities in different and disparate ways, and that needs to be addressed, and while I have no issue with people identifying as they do for whatever reasons they do, it is simultaneously important for me to question the assumed status quo that lends itself to racist depictions of other black folks.

A while back I wrote a piece on my substack about colouredness and identity especially as it relates to the idea of coloured identity in South Africa. While the DA garnered support in the recent election largely within the language of pro-privatization and pro-capitalism, something I would argue is centered on antiblackness and antipoor sentiments and positing black folk as inherently incapable of leading, they nevertheless managed to claim the votes of hundreds of thousands of black folks. That is how white supremacy works. It is consumptive and cannibalistic, like the capitalism at its foundation. Of course I worry about that, but I also worry about the growing, burgeoning sentiment of coloured exceptionalism in a place like the Western Cape, where someone like Fadiel Adams of the National Coloured Congress, formerly Cape Coloured Congress (Cape Coloured of course a famously invented racist category of the colonial and apartheid administrations of South Africa to distinguish the various iterations of imagined coloured identity from each other and from other black folks) can say that black South Africans have no claim to land in the Western Cape and that Xhosa people only began to arrive in the Western Cape in the 1900s . In his own words, “The first Xhosa person came here in the 1900s. We’ve been here for 40 000 years.” It is a ridiculous claim, beyond factually incorrect and simply a figment of the swart gevaar (black danger) and empty land myth imagination. 

This type of nationalism, this violent and ugly co-opting of the language of working class struggle, is of course rooted in the type of antiblackness birthed by white supremacist culture. But it takes that logic to a different extreme in the case of the Western Cape, birthing a mythical indigeneity of every person designated coloured, more indigenous and belonging to the land in more ancient ways than other black folks in the country. I say mythical because to arrive at this conclusion of nationalism and absolute indigeneity, you have to ignore centuries of travel and migration, centuries of colonialism and enslavement, and 5 decades of formalized and legislated apartheid. You have to collapse history completely in order to fabricate a mirage of delusional exceptionalism. 

While I worry about the ubiquitous antiblack assumption that black leadership is automatically and inherently incapable of guiding our country, I also worry here about the lasting legacies of the white supremacist notions of the invention and ranking of racial groups in South Africa. Black at the bottom, the various coloured populations (cape malay, cape coloured, coloured, coloured other, etc) up next, then Asians of vague particulartities up next, each of these categories receiving only incrementally better resourcing than the one below them on the ranking scale of white supremacy, thus ensuring an absolute and lasting distinction and animosity among each subgroup. White, of course, at the top of this pile, where white is constituted first by epidermis, the pink and red hues of a people still becoming accustomed to a life beyond the virtues of racism and conquest, where white is constituted as superior and without failure, where white jesus is first, but white money does not come far after him, and white superiority is an absolute and permanent certainty.

These incremental shifts in resourcing, as well as the segregationist spatial arrangement along these invented racial lines created lasting, as in to this day, separations of peoples along physical barriers as well as ideological ones. The coloured nationalism and the antiblack racism of the Western Cape is nothing new in the political sphere there, with the majority of voting since the end of apartheid almost always going the way of a white run party like the New National Party, the Democratic Party, or the Democratic Alliance. And even with the population demographic growing in its number of black citizens of the province, with Khayelitsha being home to an estimated 2.4 million people out of the Western Cape’s 7.4 million people the majority of whom would be designated black, the province still skews unevenly towards the DA. There are layers of historical reasons for this, some mentioned above which I would argue are at the root of the issue. But there are of course the consequences of those root causes, a long brewing animosity and this feeling of - in the middle of white and black - that you will hear a lot of people mention, a long history of so called coloured people feeling on the outside of political organizing, and of course the deep histories of manufactured by apartheid gang violence and poverty crises. On this last issue especially, I do not think Fadiel Adams of the National Coloured Congress actually has bad intentions at heart, I am choosing to believe that his intention is the upliftment of the communities he grew up in and the ones surrounding him. That is especially made clear to me in parts of his interview on hilaal tv from 27 November 2023, where he speaks with a kind of authentic urgency that so many of us feel. What he gets wrong is he collapses the entire history of the country, falling prey to the bias of only seeing his recent past, ignoring the working class struggle of the masses of the country to focus solely on the reactionary identitarian position that garners him his fear based support. We also cannot simply accept his one or two good lines during an interview and ignore the weight of violence incited by his Gatvol Capetonian movement in Mitchell’s Plain in 2018, violence which is explicitly antiblack in its foundation, with Adams insisting that the people settling on the lands in the Western Cape come from the Eastern Cape, and that the land belongs to coloured people not black people. 

We have a serious fight against the lasting legacies of capitalism, colonialism, apartheid, and its overarching architecture of white supremacy. But what will not get us anywhere is a fear based ethnonationalist politic that centers myths of race and indigeneity and decenters any hope of collective action, organizing, and solidarity. The insistence on this pessimism, reminiscent of another pessimism gaining popularity in some academic circles, is a destructive trope that foregrounds only hopelessness and manages to garner support and momentum on the basis of the manufacture of endless tropes of fear and disdain and suspicion. We have to organize, as the masses of the people who are struggling for liberation from the forces of capital at the helm of our country, because our liberation is tied to one another.