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Nothing highlights the peculiar contradictions within apartheid quite like the plight of those people classified "Coloured." The concept is a grab bag; there are no fewer than seven official subclassifications under the heading "Coloured." These include "Cape coloured," "Cape Malay," "Griqua," and "Other coloured" (a number of my colleagues and students at Grassy Park High were, I eventually discovered, "Other coloureds"). Even more than with the other race classifications, it can be argued that "Coloured" is a bureaucratic fiction, an administrative convenience, that there is no such "race." On the other hand, a certain amount of group identity is created simply by the fact of classification, particularly when the law mandates forced segregation, and in other ways treats one group differently from others. Furthermore, it must be said that "coloreds" did not simply spring into existence ex nihilo with the passage of the Population Registration Act. Though its edges might have been blurred, there

was clearly a large, Cape-based group of people with a cultural tradition distinct from those of their Xhosa, English, Afrikaner, and other neighbors. And while avoiding apartheid-serving notions of "ethnicity," this tradition merits some description here, for it was the heritage of the people of Grassy Park.

"Coloreds" are sometimes called "brown Afrikaners," and they do share some common ancestry and many traits with the people who enslaved their forebears. Nearly 90 percent of them speak Afrikaans as a first language; they are the only group in the world besides the Afrikaners themselves who do so. Many belong to the Dutch Reformed "daughter" church for "coloreds." At the same time, many "coloreds" repudiate all cultural connections with die boere . Once, when I said something about how expressive the Afrikaans language seemed to me, an Afrikaans-speaking student of mine denied it bitterly, saying, "Nee, meneer, dis 'n bobbejaan se taal" ("No, sir, it's a baboon's language"). I even met a few royalists on the Cape Flats, all of them older people, who expressed their rejection of Afrikanerdom by embracing its traditional enemy, hanging the Union Jack and photographs of the Queen on the walls of their homes. Though "colored" farm workers were often said to prefer Afrikaner employers, whose rough-and-tumble ways they understood, to the chillier English "gentleman farmers" of the Cape, few if any "coloreds" had ever shared the political views of most Afrikaners.

"Coloreds" are often compared to American blacks. It has been pointed out that, under the South African race classification laws, the majority of American blacks would be considered "colored." The two groups share a history of slavery, and the absolute deracination that slavery entails—a historical experience unlike that of most black South Africans, who were conquered and largely dispossessed of their lands, but were never actually bought and sold, with their languages lost, their societies atomized. I was frequently struck by similarities between the mannerisms of "coloreds" and those of American blacks, such as the way certain scapegrace "coloreds" called each other Gam, Afrikaans for "Ham," the biblical figure whose descendants were made "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and short for Gammat, a pejorative for "colored"—which reminded me of black Americans calling each other "nigger": neutralizing the hated epithet by expropriating it. Certainly, black Americans had long been a source of inspiration for "coloreds" in Cape Town. In the nineteenth century, a group of black American sailors off a visiting ship so impressed the locals with their singing, dancing, and banjo playing that attempts to

emulate them during the traditional two days of liberty at New Year's (a tradition that dated from slave days) soon turned into a vast annual parade and festival known as the Coon Carnival, in which the entire center of Cape Town was turned over to "coloreds" in top hats and satin minstrel outfits, playing guitars and saxophones, banjos and cellos, snare drums and tambourines in troupes calling themselves the Hollywood Palm Beach Serenaders, the Dahomey Minstrels, the Famous Richmond Gentlemen Coons, and the Spes Bona Nigger Minstrels.

But the Coon Carnival illustrates well the difficulty of describing "colored culture," for by 1980 the "coon" idea had been widely rejected by "coloreds" as an insulting stereotype, so that, although it was probably still the first thing many South Africans would think of if asked to come up with an example of "Cape colored culture," the Coon Carnival was actually in sharp decline, and would probably cease to exist altogether soon.

Do the leading writers, artists, and musicians classified "colored" represent "colored culture"? The most successful of them—Dollar Brand, Dennis Brutus, Alex La Guma—all seem to leave South Africa (as do their African counterparts—Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masakela, Nat Nakasa), and undoubtedly never refer to themselves as "colored," although their lives were largely determined by the "colored" experience. Do the "cultural organizations" found among "coloreds," such as the Eoan Group, a well-known Cape Town ballet, opera, and theater company, represent "colored culture," or merely a "white aspirant" aspect of black South Africa? The choral societies, the sports clubs, the "benefit societies" (private cooperatives intended to help members build homes, buy property, and so forth; these societies, like the funeral societies known as losies, were affected especially badly by Group Areas removals), the many and prominent churches, were all these not the warp and woof of a "culture"?

Perhaps this is simply to indicate the obvious, that despite the political protestations that no such thing as a "colored" people existed, there did exist a full-blown network of organizations and relations among the people so classified.

"Coloreds" are often said to be "Westernized," compared to their African countrymen. And it is true that "coloreds" observe few if any of the traditions of preconquest South Africa, some of which survive more or less intact among Africans. "Coloreds" have no traditional headmen or hereditary chiefs, no traditional land tenure practices or marriage practices, such as bride price, and no strong traditions of witchcraft or animism. Many South African whites believe that be-

cause "coloreds" lead lives they consider "civilized," they deserve better treatment than Africans, who remain comparatively foreign. Other whites believe that "pure-blooded" Africans possess stronger personalities and more innate "dignity" than people of "mixed race"—a form of racism not unknown among Africans themselves.

The white South African obsession with "racial purity" has surely had its most devastating effect on "coloreds." Interracial unions were common in the early days of the Cape Colony. A popular saying has it that the Europeans arrived at the Cape on April 6, 1652, and "the color problem" was born nine months later. The first official interracial marriage was celebrated in 1658. In 1672, five hundred of the six hundred European colonists resident in the Cape were adult males; the genealogical results of such a population structure should be self-evident. Two distinguished early governors of the colony, Simon and Willem van der Stel (after whom Stellenbosch, the second town founded by Europeans and a major cultural center of Afrikanerdom, was named), would have been classified "colored" in modern-day South Africa. Before very long, however, the good Cape burghers, progenitors of the Afrikaners, developed an intense racial self-consciousness, and a phobia about the mixing of the races. This obsession became a first principle of modern Afrikanerdom. As Dr. Niklaas Diedrichs, the State President of South Africa in the 1970s, wrote, "One of the outstanding achievements of this volk is that in the midst of an overwhelming barbarism, it succeeded in remaining white." Genealogists whose research has indicated that the Afrikaner gene pool is composed of significant amounts of African blood have found their results attacked hysterically by defenders of the volk —while being greeted with mirth and appreciation by other South Africans.

Some of the National Party's most offensive post-1948 legislation was included under the 1950 amendment to the Immorality Act (scheduled for repeal at the time of writing), which forbade sexual relations across the color line. The purpose of this law was, as a Cape Town magistrate recently explained, "to prevent the mongrelization of the races." A member of the Johannesburg Coloured Management Committee gave this view of the law and its reasoning: "The so-called Coloured is the product of racial mixing as affirmed in the law that declares us Coloured. This self-same law, the White man's law, also declares that this sort of mixing is illegal and therefore abhorrent . . . the specific law outlawing the activity that created us is called the Immorality Act. This repugnant law makes us feel that we as Coloureds are immoral creations."

Many whites clearly shared this feeling. The existence of "col-

oreds" was often still attributed to "passing sailors" mixing with black women, rather than to local residents. Along with the belief that "coloreds" were "immoral creations" went a conviction widespread among whites that most "coloreds" were alcoholic, promiscuous, dependent, and violent. In the time I was in Cape Town, I lost count of the number of whites who, hearing where I worked, made sad or leering or contemptuous reference to one feature or another of this stereotype. A favorite pronouncement among white males: "There's not a girl over the age of thirteen in those colored townships who's still a virgin." The fact that a strikingly high proportion of the "colored" population is in South African prisons seemed to have escaped no white's notice. The historical burden of white attitudes was embedded in people's very names. Getting out from under images and ideas like these, fighting their internalization, was a dilemma faced in some ways by "coloreds" alone.

Which is not to say that "coloreds" had a more difficult time of it than other black South Africans. On the contrary, "coloreds" were not subject to influx control, as all Africans were; which meant that "coloreds" were not being constantly arrested under the pass laws and "endorsed out" to a bantustan. They could legally own property in "colored" areas of "white" South Africa. These, and numerous other incremental advantages, such as statutory preference over other blacks in certain areas of employment and the higher per capita allotment for education than Africans received, amounted to greater opportunities for advancement and a significantly more secure existence for many "coloreds" than was available to their African compatriots. The distance between Grassy Park and one of the barren, overcrowded, absolutely impoverished bantustans like Qwa Qwa simply could not be measured in kilometers.

Of course, the distance between Qwa Qwa and the more established sections of Soweto was not much more vast. And for sheer deprivation the living conditions of many "coloreds" rivaled those of any other sector of black South Africa. There were an estimated 150,000 "colored" squatters on the Cape Flats in 1980, most of them living in tin and cardboard shanties among the dunes, without roads or laws or sanitation. On Cape farms, "colored" workers were notoriously underpaid and underfed. Kwashiorkor (malnutrition), rickets, tuberculosis, and severe gastroenteritis were all widespread, and the "colored" infant mortality rate nationally was nine times that of white infants. (Life expectancy was actually lower for "coloreds" than for Africans.) Again, this sort of stark misery seemed far away from

Grassy Park. Even within Grassy Park, however, a great range of socioeconomic status was obvious at a glance. Between someone like Soraya, contemplating a honeymoon in Europe, and the toothless illiterate janitor who cleaned my classroom after school, there yawned a gulf of privilege almost as deep and wide as that which separated most whites from most blacks.

The legal and political status of "coloreds" was in as much doubt and flux as everything else. It was an irony of history that much of the most notorious apartheid legislation introduced after 1948 was actually directed at "coloreds." The 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the 1950 amendment to the Immorality Act were certainly so, for sex and marriage had long been forbidden between whites and Africans. The Group Areas Act also hit "coloreds" hardest (along with Indians). Many Africans suffered from Group Areas, of course, but most Africans had always been forced to live outside the "white" towns. The Population Registration Act had its most destructive impact on mixed-race families and communities. And it was the limited "colored" franchise in the Cape that the Nationalists attacked and sought to abolish in the 1950s—finally succeeding in 1956, after a battle which was still recalled with an abiding bitterness in Grassy Park in 1980. The international disapprobation of apartheid has often seemed to focus on these "grand apartheid" laws as if they were the main body of institutionalized racism in South Africa, but the truth is that they merely consolidated and extended a great deal of existing legislation. The limited "Native" franchise in the Cape had been abolished, for instance, in 1936. But if the targeting of a minority group like the "coloreds" for a whole new barrage of legal discrimination was really intended, as one Nationalist member put it in Parliament, "to make our colour sense clear before the world," it seemed to succeed.

The provision for "coloreds" in the apartheid master plan was never clear. The centerpiece of apartheid planning was always the bantustan scheme, the ultimate denationalization of all Africans by assignment to one of the ten "homelands." As Dr. C. P. Mulder, then Minister of Cooperation and Development, put it in a 1978 address to the House of Assembly: "If our policy is taken to its logical conclusion as far as the Black people are concerned, there will be not one Black man with South African citizenship." But government policy toward "coloreds" and Indians has had nothing like this ruthless logic. In the early 1970s, the government unveiled a plan to build an entire "colored" city, to be called Atlantis, thirty miles north of Cape Town. This

instant metropolis would have its own industrial base and a population of between 800,000 and one million by the turn of the century. It was a preposterous scheme, and by 1980, with construction grinding to a halt, Atlantis was clearly going to thrive only as an example of Nationalist pipe-dreaming about the great unsolved "problem" of the "coloreds." A number of elected "colored" councils were established to represent "colored" opinion to the government, but all of these had been rejected, discredited, and forced to resign by their constituencies. In March 1980, the government announced the formation of an appointed body of representatives, to be called the Coloured People's Council, but popular "colored" reaction was so disdainful—the body was immediately dubbed the Coloured Puppets Council—that the names of the appointees were never made public, and this idea was also quietly abandoned.

There was a long-standing debate within the ranks of the government about whether to devise "homelands" for "coloreds" and Indians or to grant these groups some form of limited parliamentary representation. I often heard bitter jokes made about the idea of a "colored homeland." "What did they imagine District Six was?" "Who they going to dream up for our tribal chiefs?" The Atlantis project was widely regarded as a failed attempt by Pretoria to create the nucleus of such a "state," and a vast new "colored" housing development called Mitchell's Plain, located far out on the Cape Flats, was sometimes referred to around Grassy Park as "the homeland," even though most of it was still under construction. "We will be forced to move to our very own bantustan soon," a fellow teacher once said to me about his family's pending move to Mitchell's Plain. (The government's blueprint called for 250,000 "coloreds" to be living out at Mitchell's Plain by 1982.) The intensity of this debate within the government grew throughout the 1970s, and was a key factor in a major faction split in 1982. The aforementioned Dr. Mulder, who today leads the breakaway Conservative Party, continues to advocate the creation of "colored" and Indian "homelands." But the verligte, or "enlightened," wing of the Nationalists led by P. W. Botha has prevailed.

A tri-parliamentary constitutional plan was first announced by the government in 1977. Then still ill-defined, it was rejected by even conservative "colored" and Indian groups, for it completely excluded the African majority. P. W. Botha's response was unintentionally eloquent. He said that "even if the Coloureds and Indians do not accept the new constitution, the government will go ahead and imple-

ment it until they do accept it." In 1983, a referendum on the plan was finally held among white voters, who approved it, and elections for segregated "colored" and Indian chambers of Parliament were held in August 1984. These elections were widely boycotted, but just as Botha, who is now State President, promised it would be, the new plan was instituted anyway. The "junior chambers" of the new parliament have jurisdiction over only what the government determines are their "own affairs," which do not include national policy, foreign policy, or any other area that could conceivably also concern white South Africans, who effectively retain all power. Africans continue to have no representation, although there is talk of yet another chamber of Parliament being created to represent those "urban blacks" for whom no "homeland" can be found.

The government's primary motive for granting "coloreds" and Indians limited parliamentary status, over the objections of the vast majorities of those very groups, was, according to one view, military. The South African armed forces were suffering from a manpower shortage. Industry was being hurt by the ever-increasing amounts of time white draftees were being required to serve in the military, and the shortage was expected to worsen. Military leaders, who were often said to be ahead of the country's politicians in their strategic thinking, and who were believed to have a great influence over P. W. Botha (who served for many years as Minister of Defense before becoming Prime Minister), had reportedly concluded that the only solution to the manpower problem was the introduction of conscription of "coloreds" and Indians. This could hardly be done while these groups enjoyed no political rights; hence the tri-cameral parliament. P. W. Botha and his military advisers often talked about the mobilization of a "total strategy" to counter what they called "the total onslaught" being mounted against the South African system. Clearly, that long-range strategy involved winning "coloreds" and Indians over to the side of the white minority, as it strove to defend its hegemony against the African majority. (At the time of writing, conscription of "coloreds" and Indians has not been introduced.)

It was this situation, as much as their racial and cultural background, that caused "coloreds" to be seen as "the people in-between." For many years, there had been speculation about whether "coloreds" would ultimately throw in their lot with the Africans or with the whites. By 1980 that speculation had abated, for most "coloreds" had been profoundly alienated by their treatment under apartheid, and the time had clearly passed for political alliances with whites. The

Black Consciousness movement, with its emphasis on the unity of Africans, "coloreds," and Indians, had been instrumental in the development of a "black" self-image among an entire generation of "coloreds." The turning point in that process was the 1976 uprising, when thousands of "colored" students took to the streets in solidarity with the students of Soweto, and many lost their lives.

But "colored" political protest had a lengthy tradition, dating back to the founding of the predominantly "colored" African People's Organization in Cape Town in 1902. Early protests focused on discrimination in education. The creation of the Coloured Affairs Department spawned the Anti-C.A.D. movement, which merged with the predominantly African All-African Convention in 1943 to form the Non-European Unity Movement. The Unity Movement was a Marxist, but anti-Soviet, organization that stressed the need for unity among Africans, "coloreds," and Indians, rejected white leadership, and in other ways presaged later movements like the Pan-Africanist Congress and Black Consciousness. The Unity Movement commanded the attention of many "colored" intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, while the South African Communist Party exercised a strong, if indirect influence over "colored" workers through certain trade unions before its suppression in 1950. "Coloreds" were active in the Congress Movement through the Coloured People's Organization and the South African Congress of Trade Unions, and there are today many "colored" members of the exiled liberation movements. I often heard reverential mention on the Cape Flats of local "coloreds" who had left the country for military training, men like Reginald September, a major figure in the ANC, or James April, a captured ANC guerrilla sentenced to fifteen years, or Basil February, who was killed in a ferocious battle with the Rhodesian Army while attempting to reenter South Africa.

Of course, support for black liberation was not unanimous among "coloreds." There were those who professed indifference, either convinced that the government was too strong to be swayed, or believing "coloreds" to be in a no-win situation, as well as a few who believed that a black government might not necessarily prove better for them than the white government. Yet these were nearly all older people. Younger "coloreds" called themselves "black," and even the most conservative "colored" opinion to be heard in public was vehemently anti-government.