Re-Inscribing Race Through Mixed-Race Myths

Danielle Bowler, Eyewitness News

We often turn on questions of ‘colouredness’ and consider their weight, form and effect at different moments in our contemporary democracy. In all of their phrasings, the questions that arise when attempting to make sense of mixed-raced identity include multiple key features that are variegated throughout South African history.

On Heritage & Silencing the Past

Danielle Bowler contemplates the complexities that come with taking the issue of heritage seriously. Eyewitness News

There is a line from an Arthur Nortje poem that incessantly gnaws at me. It brings to the surface many of the discontents that I have with Heritage Day and the sheer weight of all that we have inherited. In Dogsbody-halfbreed, Nortje writes: “he who belongs to nowhere is to nothing/deeply attached”.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough

by Eusebius McKaizer, New York Times

JOHANNESBURG – A few weeks ago, a British friend of mine served a sumptuous confession as a starter for dinner, “I only realized recently that you’re not actually black!” We had met several years back in the English midlands, where, judging by her remark, I had passed as black. But now that she has lived in South Africa for a few months, she is fluent in the local racial vocabulary: things are not quite black and white.

Let me explain. In South Africa I’m referred to as “colored,” a term that does not have the same derogatory denotation here as it does in the United States when it is hurled at black Americans. I am not black. I am of mixed racial heritage, as my parents are and their parents were.

Fanon’s 'Black Skin, White Masks' inspires paper on colouredness

by Anna-Karien Otto, Rhodes University

Politics Masters student, Danielle Bowler, wrote a paper exploring contested constructions of colouredness, after being incensed by a column written by Nomakula “Kuli” Roberts in a Sunday paper.

In a way, this was similar to what Frantz Fanon had referred to when he said he wrote Black Skin, White Masks after “the fire had cooled”.

Fidelity to me, myself and I: the dramatics of a self split and continually reconfigured

by Danielle Bowler

Fidelity to me, myself and I:

the dramatics of a self split and continually reconfigured

Prologue

“The short answer is yes”.

He said it. Quite flippantly. I had asked a question: “If I’m understanding you right, are you saying the existential crisis is indefinite, that coloured people will forever be doing Derridean “double duty” to multiple identities?” …“the short answer is yes”. With that I felt the cracks deepen, pieces break away. And he moved on to the next query. And I alone, heard the crack, louder than the splintering before it, I heard the interminable sound of parts of a soul break into, in two maybe.

To have nothing to lose

by Danielle Alyssa Bowler

In 2004, an article written by Zenzile Khoisan titled “Crime hits coloureds hardest-study” was published in the Cape Argus. It drew on Phil Leggett’s “research”, which claimed coloured people have a greater propensity for violent crime. The article engendered much discord, particularly over the acceptance or rejection of the term “coloured”. Gino Fransman, an academic from the University of the Western Cape, wrote a response in which he embraced the term, while questioning the homogenisation of the racial group, which triggered this response by (Chief) Joseph D. Little: 

If you truly want to take this matter of your identity seriously, as some of us have, then you will stop calling yourself a coloured. You will call yourself what our first nation indigenous ancestors called themselves: Khoi-Khoi (or Khoi-San). It simply means people or humankind. In order to be a true Zulu or Xhosa, you must have a language and a land… I have not found a coloured who speaks coloured and lives in colouredland (Fransman, 2005: 25, my emphasis)