4

The Hegemony of Race

Coloured Identity within the Radical Movement during the Mid-twentieth Century

This chapter uses two case studies to explore the ways in which the rise of the radical movement in Coloured politics influenced the expression of Coloured identity up until the early 1960s, when it was crushed by state repression. The first case study examines the Torch newspaper that appeared between 1946 and 1963. As the mouthpiece of the Non-European Unity Movement the Torch fell squarely within the Trotskyist tradition of the South African Left.¹ The second case study, drawn from the rival Communist Party faction, focuses on Alex La Guma’s novella A Walk in the Night, written in the early 1960s.² Both case studies will demonstrate that analysts have exaggerated the impact of left-wing ideology and politics in the promotion of nonracism before the 1960s. It will also be argued that they have underplayed the extent to which conventional perceptions and attitudes toward Coloured identity held sway among radicals.

Discourses of Race and Identity in the Torch Newspaper

The idea of uniting black people within a single organization, not merely seeking cooperation between racially distinct bodies, was introduced into Coloured protest politics by the National Liberation League, the first radical political organization to gain significant support within the Coloured community after its founding in 1935. This development represented a significant advance in nonracial thinking, even if it was mainly confined to radical activists and intellectuals.

After its incubation in the NLL, which was defunct by 1940, the idea of black political unity as a precondition for the overthrow of white rule became the cornerstone of the Non-European Unity Movement, a number of whose leaders had cut their political teeth in the NLL.³ The NEUM was set up as a federal body at its founding conference in Bloemfontein in December 1943 as part of a deliberate strategy to accommodate organizations and individuals from all sectors of society and to allow coordination of their activities without requiring that they surrender their separate identities. Besides building a united black political front, a core objective of the NEUM was to implement a policy of noncollaboration with white authorities, using the tactic of boycotting all racist institutions. The leadership positioned the NEUM as an organization for national liberation, with a set of minimum demands for full democratic rights outlined in the Ten Point Programme adopted at its inaugural conference. These transitional demands, it was theorized, would win the NEUM mass support within the black peasantry, urban proletariat, and petite bourgeoisie. Members of the white working class were not expected to play a progressive role in the early stages of the struggle, but it was believed they would, in time, realize that their fundamental interests lay with the rest of the working class as the movement grew in power and crises in the capitalist economy eroded their privileged status. When the struggle for national liberation had progressed to an appropriate stage, the radical demands of the working class would be asserted and provide the impetus for social revolution in South Africa.⁴

The NEUM’s main affiliates, in turn, consisted of two federal bodies. The Anti-CAD was almost entirely Coloured and based in the western Cape, whereas the All African Convention (AAC) was almost wholly African and drew support mainly from the eastern Cape. These two wings had an overlapping leadership, most notably in the persons of Goolam Gool, his sister, Jane, and her husband, Isaac Tabata. Despite concerted effort, the NEUM failed to draw in either the African National Congress or the South African Indian Congress (SAIC). In 1948, however, it managed to attract a breakaway faction from the Natal Indian Congress, the Anti-segregation Council, into the federation.⁵ These factions coexisted with varying degrees of unease within the federal structure of the Non-European Unity Movement for fifteen years until simmering tensions over differences in doctrine and strategy led to a split, largely along racial and regional lines, in 1958, each faction subsequently claiming to represent the NEUM. The AAC faction went on in 1961 to form a revolutionary wing, the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa, which organized in South Africa’s main urban centres as well as in some African reserves, most notably eastern Pondoland, before being suppressed by bannings and arrests in the latter half of the 1960s. The Anti-CAD wing, already largely inactive and isolated from the liberatory mainstream in the latter half of the 1950s because of an unwillingness to engage in mass campaigns, declined into dormancy in the face of state repression, particularly after the Sharpeville massacre. It has, however, managed to maintain a strident anti-imperialist and antiapartheid polemic in the Education Journal, which was kept alive by a handful of activists and still exists today.

The Non-European Unity Movement has built up a formidable reputation for its uncompromising stand on nonracism, and for decades, NEUM ideologues have been delivering incisive and scathing criticism of the racism evident in the assumptions, actions, and utterings of a wide range of individuals and organizations. Indeed, a puritanical insistence on the principle of nonracism has become one of the hallmarks of the NEUM’s discourse and political philosophy. Bill Nasson, for example, wrote that the NEUM had “an abiding commitment to non-racialism. This was not only a tactical imperative to overcome ‘enslaving’ ethnic divisions … but also a fierce and uncompromising rejection of the very construct of ‘race’ or ethnicity itself…. The traditional position of Unity Movement thinkers has always been that race or racialism is a ‘mere excrescence of capitalism,’ its existence the bondage of forms of false consciousness.”⁶ Writing in 2000, Crain Soudien echoed these sentiments: “The movement was fiercely nonracial and challenged at every opportunity the racial labelling of South Africans.”⁷ Even more recently, Shaun Viljoen asserted that “a key progenitor and proponent of the concept of ‘non-racialism’ was the Non-European Unity Movement…. The ideology of the NEUM was marked by a strong internationalism and a non-racialism which challenged the notion of ‘race.’”⁸

Scrutiny of the Torch and other NEUM documentation, however, indicates that nonracism had not always been a central tenet of the organization.⁹ Generalized assertions that the NEUM was nonracist in the sense of rejecting the validity of race as an analytical concept or a social reality are exaggerated and do not reflect the intricacies of its ideology and political strategy or the complexities of its history. At the very least, such assessments need to be modified to take into account an acknowledgment by NEUM ideologues of the salience of racial distinctions within South African society, the very considerable concessions the organization made to various forms of racial thinking, and its own lapses into racial thinking in unguarded moments during the earlier period of its existence.¹⁰ The NEUM’s attitude to race and Coloured identity was more complex—and more pragmatic—than a blanket denial of the significance of race, as suggested by commentators. In fact, its uncompromising stance on nonracism was a feature of its later history, apparent only toward the end of the Torch’s existence. Viewed from the broader perspective of the development of Coloured identity and notions of political correctness through the twentieth century, to expect otherwise would be anachronistic.

At the time of its founding and through the years in which the Torch was published, it was clear that forging black unity and implementing a policy of noncollaboration with the white establishment were the primary objectives of the NEUM and that promoting nonracism was not central to its agenda. This much should be evident from the name of the organization, which spotlighted its stress on black unity. The very use of the term Non-European made an explicit racial distinction—between white and black. It also implied the existence of racial and ethnic differences within the black population because in response to the tacit question of who the Non-Europeans were, both the NEUM and white supremacist South Africa would have replied that they were the African, Coloured, and Indian people taken collectively.

Indeed, one of the most prominent leaders within the NEUM dismissed as unrealistic and politically premature the idea that racial differences within the black population could be ignored. In his highly influential address “The Background of Segregation,” delivered to the first national Anti-CAD conference on 29 May 1943, Ben Kies, a founding member and key ideologue within the movement, called for the establishment of a united front of black political organizations and explained that

when we speak of a united front of ALL non-Europeans we do not mean lumping all non-Europeans holus-bolus together and fusing them all together in the belief that, since ALL are non-European oppressed, the African is a Coloured man, the Indian is an African, and a Coloured man is either Indian or African, whichever you please. Only those who are ignorant of both politics and history can believe in this nonsensical type of unity. When we speak of the unity … of all non-Europeans, we simply mean this: they are all ground down by the same oppression; they have all the same political aspirations, but yet they remain divided in their oppression. They should discard the divisions and prejudices and illusions which have been created and fostered by their rulers…. When they have thrown off the chains, then they can settle whatever national or racial differences they have, or think they have.¹¹

Broadly, the NEUM worked from the premise that members of the white establishment of South Africa, the “Herrenvolk,”¹² were the “lackeys” of international capitalism, especially British imperialism. Whereas blacks had been subjugated and dispossessed to form a pool of cheap labor, the white working class had been co-opted as a labor aristocracy and bribed with part of the proceeds of black exploitation to act as “overseers” and “managers” for international capitalist, especially British imperial, interests. Segregationist policies were seen as a variant on the highly successful divide-and-rule tactic used by British imperialism throughout the world. Besides compartmentalizing the South African population into white and black, international capital further tried to split the black population into African, Coloured, and Indian sections. Interracial divisions were fostered by a policy of giving one group preference over another and by propagating “vicious racial myths” to set off one against the other. In addition, each of the racial groups was further segmented by fomenting tribal, religious, and ethnic divisions. According to the NEUM, this racist ideology had permeated the whole of society and had been internalized by black people themselves.¹³ Kies graphically described the situation as one in which

the white minority looks upon the African as a “raw kaffir,” and such he has been to the majority of Coloureds and Indians. The white minority looks upon the Coloured as a “bastard Hottentot” and such he has been to most of the Africans and Indians. The white minority looks upon the Indian as a “bloody coolie,” and such he has been to most Africans and Coloureds. The African is told he is superior because he is “pure blooded”—and he has believed this. The Coloured man is told that he is superior because the “blood of the white man” flows in his veins—and he has believed this. The Indian has been told that he is superior because he belongs to a great nation with a mighty culture—and he has believed this … the slaves have taken over the segregationist ideology of their master.¹⁴

Hobbled by their racist outlook and the sectarian responses of a reformist leadership, the “oppressed” would thus never attain freedom without uniting politically to fight white supremacism and capitalist exploitation because their efforts were being “dissipated either in fruitless, isolated outbursts, or in meaningless argumentation over trifles, or in the harmless channel of appeals, resolutions and petitions.”¹⁵

This unequivocal acknowledgment of racial and ethnic differences within South African society and the pragmatic disposition in dealing with them by and large informed the NEUM’s attitude toward race in general and Coloured identity in particular until the early 1960s. That Kies clearly regarded such distinctions as ultimately superficial did not preclude him from recognizing their social reality and political salience. What was needed for the overthrow of white supremacism was not a sublimation of all racial distinctions but the political unity of black South Africans, whatever their underlying racial or ethnic identities. The point to note is that though the NEUM leadership was nonracist in outlook and recognized that “the real cleavage is one of class, not one of colour,”¹⁶ it was prepared to make a tactical concession to the existence of racial identities within the ranks of its constituency for the sake of achieving the all-important preliminary goal of national liberation. The key to understanding the movement’s pragmatism with regard to race is to appreciate that the NEUM did not see itself as a socialist party with a socialist program but as a movement for national liberation with a socialist leadership.

The NEUM operated in a world in which political correctness was not yet a major consideration and a society in which virtually every aspect of life had become racialized; as a result, there was inevitably a fair degree of unconscious racial thinking and an automatic acceptance of racial categories in day-to-day life within its ranks. There was also a general tolerance of inadvertent racial thought and expression within the organization, though any form of racist thinking was clearly not acceptable. For example, when Tabata, the most prominent leader and chief ideologue within the AAC, wrote that “a single political party cannot represent a whole community or race for the mere fact of belonging to the same race has nothing to do with a man’s political affiliations,”¹⁷ the logic of his argument appears to have been taken at face value; colleagues did not question his apparent acceptance of the construct of race. Similarly, when Wycliffe Tsotsi, in his 1950 presidential address to the AAC, proclaimed that “the African people look to the AAC for a lead,” it did not result in accusations that he was fostering racial division within the liberation movement.¹⁸

A purist nonracial stance was, however, already being taken during the early 1950s by a handful of ultra-Left Trotskyist intellectuals grouped within the Forum Club. Criticism that the NEUM’s “Non-Europeanism” was a form of “voluntary segregation” that favored the interests of capital and the racist state came from these remnants of FIOSA, which advocated a strictly nonracial strategy.¹⁹

The Torch, named after the Bolsheviks’ Iskra,²⁰ was a quarto-sized, weekly publication of eight pages and was more of a magazine in format and a political organ in content than a newspaper, as it has generally been described. Though by far the greater part of its readership was restricted to Cape Town and the western Cape, it did attract a significant readership in Johannesburg, and in its heyday, it was distributed as far afield as the eastern and northern Cape, Natal, South West Africa, and the protectorates.²¹

The Torch’s main fare consisted of local politics of interest to the NEUM. At various times, major areas of focus included protest against the Coloured Advisory Council (CAC), resistance to train apartheid, opposition to the city council’s segregated housing schemes on the Cape Flats, the fight against the removal of Coloureds from the voters’ roll, the boycott of the van Riebeeck festival, the implementation of the Group Areas Act, and state repression of left-wing political activity. The paper carried news from affiliates such as the Teachers’ League, the Cape African Teachers’ Association, the APO, and the Gleemoor Civic Association, as well as reports of protests, strikes, and social unrest. Because of the prominence of teachers in the NEUM, education and teacher politics were topics of particular interest in the paper’s reporting. The Torch also maintained a vociferous antisegregationist polemic. The paper never tired of hurling invective at “quislings” and highlighting the absurdities of South Africa’s racial system. It also pursued disputations with the ANC, the Communist Party, and the South African Indian Congress, among others, with a degree of gusto. There was some reportage of international developments in an anti-imperialist vein, particularly with regard to India, Indonesia, and China, but with surprisingly little comment on Africa. One feature of the newspaper was serialized articles on themes relevant to NEUM politics. A series could run for over two years—such as the 120 installments of “A History of Despotism,” which examined aspects of South African history from an NEUM perspective—or relatively short—such as the more typical eight-part series “Problems within the Liberation Movement.”²²

The first issue of the Torch, which appeared on 25 February 1946, pledged “full and uncompromising support to the movement for full democratic rights for all, irrespective of race, colour or creed”; further, the paper would “be used to enlighten, to fight discrimination in every form and to unite the oppressed and exploited people.” The editors rather disingenuously added that the Torch was “not tied directly or indirectly, to any political party” and that it was “neither the official or unofficial mouthpiece” for any political organization. In 1949, they repeated that the Torch “owes allegiance to no political sect or section of the oppressed,” and for much of the paper’s life, the staff tried to maintain the charade that it was independent of any political organization.²³ Careful not to create the impression that it supported any form of black chauvinism, the paper’s first editorial also made it clear that the Torch would not allow its columns “to be used to foster racial ill-feeling either against the Europeans or any section of the Non-Europeans.”²⁴ Besides wanting to keep the door open for the white working class to join the revolutionary movement, many believed that with racial tensions escalating in the society, there was a need to steer black people away from “race pogroms” and the possibility of a race war against whites.²⁵

Given the Marxism of the NEUM leadership, there was surprisingly little radical rhetoric or class analysis in the Torch. The paper tended to approach the liberation struggle as one between white and black and thus to present social and political issues in racial terms. No doubt, this was in large part due to its conscious strategy of promoting black unity for the achievement of national liberation, but it can also be ascribed to the pervasiveness of racial thinking in South African society that resulted in an unconsciously racial approach to matters generally. The Marxist underpinnings of the newspaper’s strategy did, however, surface from time to time and were usually presented in a simplified and racialized form intended to educate a readership unschooled in left-wing ideology. An excerpt from a Torch editorial explaining a basic Marxist insight furnishes a typical example: “What the Non-Europeans fail to understand is … that all the wealth of the country is produced by them. They are the workers on the mines, on the farms and in the factories. They create the wealth and the prosperity yet they do not enjoy the fruits of their labour. They create civilization for the whites yet they are not permitted to obtain the benefits of civilization.”²⁶

Like their moderate counterparts, the radicals responded to issues of race and Coloured identity in an ambiguous fashion, and the staff at the Torch was no exception. The columns reveal not one consistent outlook on matters of racial identity but a wide spectrum of perspectives and approaches. These responses ranged from an unconscious acceptance of race to a principled rejection of racial thinking, from confusion about notions of race and human difference to the tactical acknowledgment of racial identities to achieve broader political ends.

Viewed chronologically, the racial perceptions reflected in the newspaper passed through three recognizable phases. In the early years, until about the early 1950s, the discourse in the newpaper was decidedly racialized, with frequent lapses into inadvertent racial thinking. During that period, there was also a fair degree of inconsistency and confusion about the concept of race; one is left with the impression that the paper was grappling to find ways of dealing with a thorny issue in a rough-and-tumble milieu of political turmoil and rapid social change. In the second period, covering much of the 1950s, the paper was dominated by a more muted racial discourse that played down interblack racial distinctions with greater consistency and emphasized the cleavage between black and white as one of oppressed versus oppressor. The third period featured a politically correct approach to matters of race that was first evident in a tentative and inconsistent manner in the late 1950s but grew to a recognizable trend by the time the Torch ceased publication at the end of 1963.²⁷ Though these were identifiable phases in the development of a more self-conscious and consistent nonracism, the progression was by no means linear. They were distinct tendencies rather than categorical stages, for evidence of nonracial values can be found in the early years of the newspaper just as there were lapses into racial thinking in the later years.

Viewed thematically, at least four distinct discourses around issues of race can be discerned in the Torch. A pervasive approach to matters of race in the pages of the paper might be termed the tactical response, which coincided with the conscious political strategy of the NEUM in dealing with the problem of racial and ethnic divisions within the black population. This was the pragmatism advocated in Kies’s Background of Segregation, which rejected the “nonsensical type of unity” of simply lumping all black people together and pretending that racial differences did not exist.²⁸ Within the tactical response, the acknowledgment of racial distinctions was accompanied by a calculated intention of undermining the racist edifice of South African society. The Torch editors made it clear that “we do not deny that the people are divided” but affirmed that “it is one of our most urgent tasks to destroy the barriers erected by the Herrenvolk.”²⁹

When in tactical mode, the Torch made a distinction between “Europeans” and “Non-Europeans,” by which it meant the African, Coloured, and Indian people taken together. It self-consciously referred to each of the three racial groups as a “section” of the Non-European population.³⁰ Phrases such as “all sections of the Non-European oppressed—African, Coloured and Indian” and “European, Coloured, Indian, African—that is all South Africans” were common in the Torch.³¹ Most of the time, the articles did not specify racial identities, but they frequently did identify people or organizations as either white, Coloured, Indian, or African when their racial identities were salient. In particular, racial categories were specified when reporting incidents of racial discrimination or racially motivated violence. Typical examples include the articles headlined “Coloured Youths and Constable Attacked by White Hooligans” and “Attack on Pretoria Coloureds,” as well as reports of this sort: “Du Plessis, a European, was charged with assaulting a Coloured teacher, Eddie Baatjies.”³²

The Torch’s tactical discourse was racialized in other ways as well. At times, it might address the Coloured people directly on issues that affected them, such as when it asked “Will all Coloured people please note that …” or when it ran the headline “Boycott call to Coloured people” to draw attention to a TLSA resolution spurning all racially segregated institutions.³³ It also did not shy away from using racial terminology to attack racism or in polemical exchanges with opponents. On one occasion, sarcastically echoing cabinet minister Ben Schoeman’s usage of the word Hotnot to refer to Coloured people, a Torch editorial dubbed the CAC the “Hotnot Advisory Council”; another editorial on disagreements between two “quisling factions” appeared under the heading “‘Cape Boy’ Politics.”³⁴ Similarly, one of the articles denouncing the tercentenary celebrations was headlined “April Fool’s Day for ‘Hotnots’ and ‘Pankies.’”³⁵ And although the tone of the Torch was deadly serious, it occasionally allowed itself the luxury of using humor to attack racism, such as when it mocked prevailing attitudes toward interracial sex by quoting the following limerick:

There was a young woman from Starkey

Who had an affair with a darkey

The result of her sins

Was quadruplets not twins

One white, one black and two khaki.³⁶

In its Afrikaans articles, the paper’s use of the terms Afrikaan and its plural Afrikane to refer to Africans, in deliberate contrast to Afrikaner and Afrikaners, was one of the small but telling ways in which black claims to equality with whites was asserted. Besides, as the paper pointed out, the alternatives of Bantu and Naturel were derogatory.³⁷

Within its tactical framework, the Torch not only depicted the Coloured people as a separate “section” of the Non-European oppressed but at times even encouraged their solidarity as a group. An example is provided by the Torch editorial that pondered the tragedy of sixteen-year-old pupil Billy Repnaar. Repnaar committed suicide after being forced to attend a Coloured school as the only darker-skinned child among five siblings in a family that was trying to pass for white. Criticizing those Coloured people who tried to dissociate themselves from their background, the editorial proclaimed, “We are proud to state that the majority of Coloured people … scorn subterfuges of this brand. They are for one not accepting the badge of inferiority … they take pride in their colour and greater pride in those who remain with them to lead them towards freedom from oppression.”³⁸ In keeping with this sentiment, the Torch mockingly referred to those Coloured people who preferred to associate with whites as “Nearopeans” and as “European Non-Europeans.”³⁹ The appeal for solidarity among Coloureds was also apparent in articles with large, front-page headlines proclaiming a “Rallying Call to the Coloured People”⁴⁰ or the “Biggest Anti-CAD Conference Ever: Authentic Voice of Coloured People.”⁴¹

Moreover, the Torch sometimes treated the Coloured people as a group with a common history that had forged them into a distinct social entity. This attitude came through clearly in the TLSA’s “Manifesto to the Coloured People,” published in June 1953 as part of its rejection of the Commission of Enquiry into Coloured Education that had recently been appointed by the Cape Provincial Council. Described as “stirring” and quoted in full in the Torch, the manifesto started off by reviewing the history of the Coloured people: “The Cape Coloured People have always constituted a section of the oppressed majority of South Africa. Throughout the history of the country they have always been forced to hold an inferior and subservient position in the social system. For almost two hundred years many of their forebears were held in slavery and bondage and since then the laws and administration of the country have always been devised to maintain their subjection and oppression.”⁴²

When in tactical mode, neither the NEUM nor the Torch could be described as nonracial because their discourse was overtly racial and marked by an acceptance of the reality of racial distinctions within South African society. And, as mentioned earlier, the aim of this particular tactic—building black political unity—was a manifestly racial agenda. Yet the ultimate goal of the Torch was to undermine the racist system. In terms of the NEUM’s tactical approach, it was not so much the use of racial terminology or even racial thinking that mattered but rather its intent and effect. Thus, when the Torch accused others of being racist—it preferred the term racialistic—it was not because they acknowledged the idea of race or thought in racial terms but rather because they made negative judgments of people, discriminated on the basis of race, or in any way promoted racial sectarianism.⁴³ Thus, referring to people as African or Coloured was not in itself regarded as “racialistic,” but asking that intermarriage between Coloureds and Africans be banned, as the Federal Council of Coloured Churches did in March 1956, certainly was; so, too, was demanding that those few African pupils attending Coloured schools be removed or claiming that Malay youths were more prone to becoming “skollies” (thugs) than their Christian Coloured counterparts.⁴⁴

Intertwined with the tactical approach and shading into it was an unconsciously racial discourse with an a priori acceptance of the concept of race in which the conventional racial divisions of South African society were taken as given. For much of the time, the Torch blithely reported about Europeans, non-Europeans, whites, Coloureds, Africans, Indians, and Malays. It routinely used these terms and their Afrikaans equivalents and occasionally various racial epithets, such as “Bantu” for Africans, “Ampies” for poor or uncouth Afrikaners, “Negro” for African Americans, and “Yanks” for Americans (as in the headline “Yanks Arm Japs”).⁴⁵ All of these racial terms were used without explanation or qualification, as if their meanings were self-evident. And often, they were employed when there was no real need to make racial distinctions or when the distinction between “European” and “non-European,” for instance, would have sufficed. Although this racial terminology was accepted usage at the time (and to expect a more politically correct approach would be anachronistic), the very fact that it was used does indicate a considerable degree of unconscious racial thinking within the NEUM, contradicting unqualified assumptions that the organization was nonracial throughout its existence. Nevertheless, the Torch from time to time displayed an awarenes that the use of racial terms was problematic, such as when it criticized a new Afrikaans dictionary for using racist terminology, when it published an article by George Padmore on derogatory terms used for black people in Britain, and when it carried the caption “‘Native’ Education for Africans.”⁴⁶

In many instances, it was not clear whether particular examples of the use of racial terminology or concepts represented a tactical deployment of race or were lapses into racial forms of thinking.⁴⁷ Sometimes, however, the Torch’s slippage into inadvertent racial usage was clear-cut. Its story of “150 Coloured soldiers involved in a drunken brawl,” its reference to “each of our four racial groups,” and headlines such as “SA Coloured XV vs Bantu XV” or “African and Coloured Students Debate” are but a few of the myriad examples of lapses into unconscious racial reportage found in the pages of the Torch.⁴⁸ The paper’s nonpolitical reporting—its sports news, the occasional human interest story, and the community news it carried—displayed a very clear racial orientation in that it was almost entirely focused on the Coloured community, which indicates that the paper was written largely with a Coloured readership in mind. This bias, though far less evident in its political reporting, is nevertheless noticeable there as well. For instance, a Torch editorial writer was justifiably indignant that the latest salary scales for teachers pegged the salaries of Coloured teachers at four-fifths of what their white counterparts were paid. However, no mention was made of the fact that the remuneration of African teachers was set at three-fifths that of whites.⁴⁹ The Torch, in addition, regularly ran racially exclusive employment advertisements inviting applications from “Coloured” nurses, teachers, clerks, and housekeepers.⁵⁰

On more than one occasion, the nonracial discourse or the strategic use of race was compromised or contradicted by a lapse into unconsciously racial usage on the same page or even in the same article. One illustration is provided by the very first issue of the Torch. In the column right next to the editorial that pledged the newspaper to the promotion of the nonracial ideal, an article mentioned with great pride that in a local production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “the carefully chosen cast is entirely Non-European.” Echoing the assimilationist sentiment of despised moderate Coloureds, the article expressed confidence that the play would discredit white racist notions that “the artistic abilities of the non-European is limited to the Coons, Zonk and Kaatjie Kekkelbek.”⁵¹ Given the nonracial values it had espoused on the very same page, the Torch should have condemned this play produced by whites for an entirely “Non-European”—presumably Coloured—cast. Similarly, an article entitled “Race and Heredity,” which reported on an eponymous lecture delivered to the New Era Fellowship by the prominent Coloured teacher and Unity Movement supporter Stella Jacobs, was confused and contradictory on the concept of race. Despite a strongly nonracial and egalitarian tone rejecting the drawing of any racial distinctions on the basis that “all human beings are descended from the same ancestor and belong to the same species,” the piece nevertheless repeated Jacobs’s claims that there “are three primary races namely, white, yellow-brown and black” and that the “Australian blacks are the purest race today.”⁵²

Part of the confusion over racial issues in the Torch’s reporting derived from its frequent efforts to combat racism using racial concepts and racial forms of thinking. For instance, one of the earlier Torch editorials in response to the xenophobic deliberations of parliamentarians over the “Anti-Indian Bill” laudably rejected the idea that there was such a thing as “white civilization” as well as the assumption that whites were the only creators of “civilization.” The editorial, however, lapsed into a racialized mode of thinking when it tried to refute these racist assumptions by claiming that Simon van der Stel, governor of the Cape from 1679 to 1699, was “one of the most outstanding Coloured men in the history of South Africa.”⁵³ Similarly, after making the commendable point that civilization “belongs neither to white or non-white people” and that it is “neither the product of any race or nation,” the authors in the very next breath assert that civilization has “its roots embedded firmly and indisputably in cultures and races and nations in all corners of the globe.”⁵⁴

In addition to the tactical approach and the unconsciously racial discourse that together dominated the content of the paper, there were occasions when the Torch switched into a nonracial mode of discourse or analysis. These instances were relatively few and far between and were confined to specific articles in which the writers tried to debunk the myth of race and educate the readership in nonracial ways of thinking. This approach was apparent, for instance, in the article headlined “Professor Explodes Myth of ‘European Race,’” which reported Meyer Fortes’s evidence in a court case that the idea of a “European race” had no scientific foundation at all.⁵⁵ A second example was provided by the article “Man and the Apes,” which stressed the common ancestry and African origins of humanity.⁵⁶ The overall message of this discourse, which revealed the underlying nonracial outlook of the NEUM leaders, was that the concept of race had no scientific validity and that racial thinking was morally indefensible because of the essential unity of humankind. Their position was succinctly stated in an article entitled “Racialism—Weapon of Exploitation,” which reported on Edgar Maurice’s delivery of the A. J. Abrahamse Memorial Lecture: “Race and colour attitudes were not part of the nature of man; they did not develop of their own accord, but were a deliberate man-made product used to serve the interests of the dominant ruling classes in societies in which domination and exploitation of peoples of colour were part of the economic patterns of these societies.”⁵⁷

The preeminent example of this nonracial discourse in the Torch was, however, found in the series of twenty-five articles entitled “Science and Race,” published weekly between May and October 1952.⁵⁸ This series was meant to educate readers in the basic tenets of nonracism and to debunk common racial myths. The opening article in this series stressed that all human beings “belong to one and the same species known as Homo sapiens” and that “the classification of people into ‘races’ is quite arbitrary”; it went on to make the important point that in any given “race,” although “the group of people forming it have common characteristics, the differences among the individual people are just as great as the differences between the ‘races’ themselves.”⁵⁹ Subsequent installments argued against various racial fallacies: that a superior race existed, that blacks were inferior to whites or all alike, that race determined character, that heredity occurred through blood mixing, that miscegenation led to degeneration, and so on.⁶⁰ The series examined issues of race with regard to Jews, Coloureds, Indians, culture, education, group areas, the child, and the individual, and in each case, it emphasized nonracial values and argued against popular myths, misconceptions, and abuses of racist ideas.⁶¹

The “Science and Race” series was significant not only because it confirmed the essentially nonracial outlook of the NEUM leadership but also because it provided a fairly systematic and detailed indication of the content of these ideas as well as of popular racist misconceptions it felt needed debunking. Inevitably, the series was also used to promote the NEUM’s political agenda, which often detracted from its efficacy—as demonstrated by the article on “The Coloured People and Race.” This article was disappointing in that it failed to address issues around race and Colouredness and instead did little more than denounce what it saw as a conspiracy by the Herrenvolk and the establishment press to sow division within the ranks of the Coloured people and to laud NEUM counter-strategies. The unintended subtext of this article—that the Coloured people formed an organic social entity—undermined the broader nonracial intentions of the series.⁶²

A fourth approach to issues of race and Coloured identity was detectable in the columns of the Torch beginning in the late 1950s. Starting from about 1957, terms such as Coloured, African, race, racial groups, Bantu, Kleurling, and Herrenvolk were, with increasing frequency, placed in quotation marks, italicized, or prefaced with so-called to distance the paper from their racist implications. The growing incidence of phrases such as “‘so-called’ races,” “persons described as Europeans,” and, of course, “‘so-called’ Coloured” signaled this new sensibility,⁶³ as did the coining of terms such as Bantuization and Colouredization. Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, a self-consciously nonracial tone progressively pervaded the journalism of the Torch, so that by mid-1962, the practice of qualifying racial terms by using quotation marks or “so-called” became fairly consistent.

The development of this politically correct approach needs, in the first instance, to be viewed against the backdrop of growing international intolerance of racism after World War II, which had left a legacy of revulsion against racism. The U.S. civil rights movement, the shift toward African independence, the strengthening voice of the nonaligned movement that was founded in 1955, and an intensified global condemnation of apartheid fed nonracial sympathies worldwide. These developments impinged on the consciousness of the NEUM, which, because of the significance it attached to imperialism and global capitalism, had a more broadly international outlook than rival liberation organizations prior to the 1960s. On the domestic front, the implementation of apartheid social engineering, which kicked into high gear only in the late 1950s, also contributed to this growing antiracist sentiment. As segregation was more rigidly enforced and as petty apartheid measures intruded in people’s daily lives, it became more and more probable that an antiracist counterthrust would assert itself among opposition groups. This was likely to occur as a gut reaction to apartheid, and it would also tend to raise the moral imperative and political salience of the principle of nonracism.

Although one would expect an antiracist position during this period of intensifying white chauvinism to have been a good strategy for gaining mass support among black people, a contrary dynamic was at play in the NEUM. As this political grouping became less active and politically more isolated through the latter half of the 1950s, pragmatic considerations that came with active political organization became less relevant, and the strategic approach to race was quietly abandoned. A more uncompromising and idealistic stance on most issues, including nonracism, became attractive, if for no other reason than for the NEUM to claim the moral high ground. Critics of the the organization have often accused it of using this principled stance as an excuse for remaining on the sidelines and thereby not exposing itself to either the hard work or the risks of mass mobilization.

It is clear that for the greater part of its existence, the Torch was not sufficiently self-conscious about its use of racial terminology and concepts for it to be described as nonracial. During the NEUM’s politically active phase, political correctness had not yet become a major consideration internationally, and the nonracial ideal was not sufficiently important to its political agenda for it to be overly concerned with such niceties. Not until the early 1960s did the Torch scrutinize with any consistency its vocabulary and the concepts it used with a view to sanitizing them or distancing itself from their racist connotations. In this respect, NEUM ideologues, together with a handful of ultra-Left Trotskyist critics before them, were the first to develop a rigorously nonracial perspective and to start viewing Coloured identity in a different light.

That the Torch exhibited an ambiguous approach to race and Coloured identity prior to the early 1960s should not come as any great surprise. Without the etiquette of political correctness as a guide and with the prevalence of racial thinking at that time, there was bound to be varied usage of racial terminology and a degree of conceptual confusion. Moreover, in a newspaper turned out under the pressures of production deadlines, financial stringency, state harassment, polemical exchanges with opponents, political campaigning, and the vagaries of being dependent on part-time, amateur staff, one would expect close scrutiny to uncover inconsistencies. There was not necessarily a contradiction between the Torch’s nonracial discourse and the tactical concession to the social reality of race if one accepts that the goal of achieving black political unity took priority over the principle of nonracism. There are, however, clear contradictions between the nonracial and tactical approaches, on the one hand, and the unconsciously racial discourse, on the other. These contradictions were largely resolved in the early 1960s when the NEUM became much more self-conscious of its discourse around issues of race.

The Torch entered a long period of decline, a trend that was observable from as early as 1953 and that broadly reflected the fortunes of the Non-European Unity Movement. The NEUM had never attracted a mass following, and its organ had a small circulation that shrank as the movement became progressively less active from the late 1940s onward because of its refusal to mount or participate in mass campaigns or to confront the state directly. The organization was rent by ideological infighting through the 1950s and was especially vulnerable to state intimidation because a large proportion of its members were drawn from the teaching profession. Direct repression of the NEUM leadership started in the mid-1950s, with the dismissal of Kies and van Schoor from their teaching posts in February 1956 and a banning order being placed on Tabata the following month.⁶⁴ This deterioration was greatly exacerbated after the Sharpeville shootings, as the state cracked down hard on the extraparliamentary opposition.

As the paper went into decline through the 1950s, its tone became shriller and more denunciatory. Its content grew less diversified and more propagandistic, with less and less hard news and more and more condemnations of apartheid and Western imperialism. Its reporting also became repetitious, rhetorical, and jaded. The temporary closure of the paper when it was banned for five months during the state of emergency from the beginning of April to the end of August 1960 was disastrous, for it lost readers, revenue, and a significant part of its distribution network. Although publication of the Torch resumed in early September 1960, its parent company was under severe financial strain. By September 1962, the paper was in such dire straits that it published a front-page appeal for donations to avoid being scaled down to four pages. The climate of fear in left-wing circles in the early 1960s and the risks of bannings and detention made publication and distribution hazardous. It was the spate of banning orders served in the early 1960s on NEUM leaders—many of whom were involved in the running of the Torch, including its long-serving editor, Joyce Meissenheimer, and her replacement, Joan Kay—that finally crippled the newspaper.⁶⁵ The last issue appeared on 4 December 1963.

The Torch was the most important and representative of the serial publications produced within the Trotskyist tradition of left-wing politics in the Coloured community. Because there was no periodical within the rival Communist Party tradition that similarly shed light on Coloured identity, I have instead chosen to use Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night as the second case study for this chapter. La Guma was a dedicated Community Party activist and had lived in the Coloured working-class area of District Six for nearly three decades. He wrote that novel with the intention of providing an authentic portrayal of life in “the District.” That work is thus eminently suited to our present purposes.

Race, Identity, and Realism in Alex La Guma’s

A Walk in the Night and Other Stories

A Walk in the Night opens with the protagonist, a young Coloured man named Michael Adonis, alighting from a trackless tram on the bustling streets of District Six late one afternoon. Adonis is nursing a “pustule of rage and humiliation deep down within him” because earlier that day, he had been fired from his menial factory job for talking back to the white foreman. He goes to a local diner, where he meets his friend, Willieboy, a man who survives by hustling on the streets of District Six. He also meets up with Foxy and his gang, who are looking for an accomplice for a burglary they have planned for that night. After his meal, Michael makes his way to a nearby pub. En route, he is cornered by two white policemen, who search his pockets for dagga (marijuana) and accuse him of having stolen the money he has on him. Although outwardly compliant, Michael is furious at this racially motivated harassment. At the pub, he gets drunk on cheap wine before returning to his tenement. In the passageway, he meets fellow tenant Uncle Doughty, an elderly, alcoholic Irishman, who invites him to his room for a drink. With the liquor further fueling his rage, Michael takes out his frustration at being humiliated by whites on Uncle Doughty. He lashes out at the decrepit old man with a wine bottle, killing him. Michael escapes from the scene of the crime undetected, but Willieboy, who comes looking for Michael to borrow money, stumbles across the corpse of Doughty. Panic-stricken, he flees but is spotted by tenement dwellers and is blamed for Doughty’s death. That night, Willieboy is hunted down by Constable Raalt, a sadistic white policeman, who shoots him in cold blood. Willieboy subsequently dies in the back of the police van. Later that night, Michael, after walking the streets of District Six, decides to join Foxy and his gang. His descent into crime has begun.

A Walk in the Night was first published in 1962 in Ibadan, Nigeria. La Guma started writing the novella during 1959 and had completed it by the time he was detained in April 1960 under the state of emergency declared following the Sharpeville shootings. He had little option but to publish overseas, for after being banned under the Suppression of Communism Act in July 1961, nothing he said or wrote could be published in South Africa. A Walk in the Night was La Guma’s first substantive piece of fiction, and it won him immediate recognition as an exciting new author. In 1967, the novella, or “long story,” as he preferred to call it,⁶⁶ was republished together with a selection of six short stories as A Walk in the Night and Other Stories. These works have a common theme in that they all deal with aspects of Coloured working-class life. Four of the short stories, as well as A Walk in the Night, are set in District Six during the late 1950s and early 1960s.⁶⁷

Alex La Guma was born in District Six on 20 February 1925. He grew up in a highly politicized household because his father, James La Guma, was a lifelong political activist and a pioneering figure in the liberation movement. At the time of Alex’s birth, Jimmy La Guma was general secretary of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union. A few months after his son was born, Jimmy joined the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) and was elected to the party’s Central Committee the following year. During the latter half of the 1920s, he served as organizing secretary of the Western Cape Branch of the ANC and played a leading role in the creation of the fledgling black trade union movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Jimmy was, in addition, a founding member of the National Liberation League in the mid-1930s. He was serving on the Communist Party’s Central Committee at the time of the party’s banning in 1950 and was president of the South African Coloured People’s Organization (SACPO) from 1957 to 1959. Jimmy died two years later.⁶⁸

In 1928, he and his wife, Wilhelmina, whom he had married in 1923, set up home at 1 Roger Street, District Six, where Alex lived for the better part of three decades before moving to the middle-class Coloured suburb of Garlandale on the Cape Flats. Alex attended Trafalgar High School in District Six. He left school in 1942 to help support the family while his father was on wartime service with the Cape Corps in east and north Africa. He was nevertheless able to matriculate in 1945 by attending night classes at the Cape Town Technical College. La Guma found employment first as a factory worker and then as a clerk and bookkeeper. As early as 1946, he was initiated into active politics when he was fired for his part in organizing a strike among fellow workers at the Metal Box factory in Maitland. In 1947, he joined the Young Communist League, and the following year, he became a member of the CPSA. Alex La Guma rose to national prominence in the antiapartheid movement in the latter half of the 1950s after becoming a founding member of the South African Coloured People’s Organization and serving on its executive committee. In 1956, he started working as a reporter for New Age, the unofficial mouthpiece of the banned Communist Party. In December of that year, La Guma was among the 156 members of the Congress Alliance who were charged with treason; in May 1958, he was the target of an assassination attempt. After his acquittal in the Treason Trial in 1960, Alex was banned under the Suppression of Communism Act in July 1961 and placed under twenty-four-hour house arrest in 1963. Subjected to continuous harassment by the security police, he left South Africa on an exit permit with his family in 1966. Both his political activism and his experience of growing up in District Six were essential ingredients in La Guma’s writing of A Walk in the Night. ⁶⁹

The novella was written at a time when District Six had a reputation as a crime-ridden slum; life in the area had not yet gained the aura of romanticism that surrounds it today. It was only later, from the late 1960s onward with the mass removal of over thirty thousand inhabitants under the Group Areas Act and the demolition of the houses they had occupied, that District Six became an international symbol of the brutality of apartheid. Writing a decade before the Group Areas removals, there was no question that La Guma would romanticize life in District Six nor that he would succumb to the “we were poor but happy then” syndrome that afflicts so much of the more recent writing about the area.⁷⁰ Instead, he revealed District Six for what it was—a ripe slum. At one point in the novel, he characterized it as a “whirlpool world of poverty, petty crime and violence.”⁷¹ This, of course, is not to say that he did not write with sensitivity and compassion about its people or to suggest that District Six was not a vibrant community.

La Guma aimed to provide a faithful representation of working-class life in District Six as the setting for the novel. A Walk in the Night was inspired by a short paragraph that he had seen in a newspaper about a young “hooligan” who had been shot by police and later died in the back of their van. Wondering how and why this could have happened sparked his imagination and led La Guma to create his story based on “what I had thought life in District Six was really like.” He confirmed that “most of the description of action or places in District Six is based upon actual characters and events.”⁷² His journalist’s eye for detail and the insights gained from having grown up there gave La Guma’s writing in A Walk in the Night a hard-edged realism and an incisiveness not attained in his subsequent work. And given the political messages he wanted to convey about the harshness of Coloured working-class existence and the inhumanity of apartheid, there was little place for sentimentality in his evocation of life in District Six. Contrary to latter-day romanticizers who idealize the spirit of District Six as a way of castigating the National Party government for having destroyed a vibrant community, La Guma wanted to show District Six in all its squalor as a means of condemning apartheid oppression.

Anyone familiar with “the District” of the 1960s will recognize the accuracy with which La Guma describes the crumbling tenements, the smell of decay that hung over the place, and the struggle of daily life for the majority of its inhabitants. Throughout the novel, he deftly details the wretched privation of the place. In a typical passage, he describes the landscape of District Six beyond the “artificial glare” of Hanover Street as consisting of

stretches of damp, battered houses with their broken-ribs of frontrailings; cracked walls and high tenements that rose like the left-overs of a bombed area in the twilight; vacant lots and weed-grown patches where houses had once stood; and deep doorways resembling the entrances to deserted castles. There were children playing in the street, darting among the overflowing dustbins and shooting at each other with wooden guns. In some of the doorways people sat or stood, murmuring idly in the fast-fading light like wasted ghosts in a plagueridden city.⁷³

His style of writing has, with some justification, been described as “revolutionary romanticism,” but A Walk in the Night comes closest to La Guma’s characterization of his own style as “socialist realism.”⁷⁴

Although Lewis Nkosi’s judgment that “La Guma has written nothing since the appearance of A Walk in the Night which compels a fresh evaluation of his work” cannot be justified,⁷⁵ it is clear that the vividness and the gritty realism with which he portrayed Coloured working-class life in the novella was not matched in his subsequent novels. The literary merits of La Guma’s various works are obviously open to debate, but there is little doubt that A Walk in the Night was his most convincing portrayal of social reality. The reasons for this are twofold.

First, having lived in District Six for much of his life, he was intimately familiar with life there and had a deep reservoir of personal experience on which he could draw in writing the novel. That he was writing about a community and a locality in which he had grown up accounts for the powerful sense of place in A Walk in the Night. The characters have an authenticity and the scenes a vividness not present in his later fictional writing. And a Threefold Cord and The Stone Country, both set in Cape Town and written while he was still living in the city, display La Guma’s keen powers of observation but do not have the social perceptiveness and the depth of insight of A Walk in the Night, which draws on decades of lived experience. His later novels, In the Fog of the Season’s End and The Time of the Butcherbird, written in exile and set in Cape Town and the Karoo, respectively, bear evidence of La Guma’s separation from South Africa.⁷⁶ Whatever their literary merits, these works lack the intimacy and finely grained depictions of a particular social setting that mark A Walk in the Night.

Second, the progressive intrusion of a political agenda in La Guma’s novels detracts from the realism of his writing. There is a fairly clear-cut progression in each succeeding novel: South Africa is increasingly depicted as a society polarized between black and white, with blacks becoming more and more militant and united in the struggle against apartheid. In the process, the complexities and the nuances of racial identity in South African society are blunted. Although the oppression of apartheid is ever present in A Walk in the Night and La Guma’s political values pervade the novel, it is different from the works that follow in one important respect. In this novel, the depiction of the social reality of interblack racial prejudice takes precedence over the author’s political conviction of the need to promote black unity and nonracism through his writing. In A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, racial exclusivity within the Coloured community is clearly evident, and although the author’s private condemnation of such attitudes may be read as part of the subtext, the integrity of the characters is retained in this respect. Thus, for example, Michael Adonis, for whom La Guma clearly has much sympathy, is shown to harbor racial prejudice toward Africans, as was likely true of many residents in the District in real life.⁷⁷ By the time La Guma wrote his next novel, And a Threefold Cord, the political imperative of depicting racial harmony and solidarity between Coloured and African squatters took precedence over the likelihood of there being some degree of racial tension between them.

Scholarly appraisals of A Walk in the Night have tended to cast the work, especially the racial dynamic it depicts, in somewhat simplistic terms. On the whole, the novel has been interpreted as a parable about black and white in apartheid South Africa—hence, Abdul JanMohamed’s characterization of La Guma’s fiction as depicting a Manichean world. As he asserts, “The life and fiction of Alex La Guma perfectly illustrate the predicament of non-whites in South Africa and the effects of apartheid on their lives…. Due to the racial basis of the South African social organization, his political and social experience can be considered generic to the extent that all non-whites are treated as interchangeable objects by the Afrikaner.”⁷⁸ Kathleen Balutansky, in her exploration of multiple “dialectical oppositions” at play in the novel, endorses JanMohamed’s view.⁷⁹ Cecil Abrahams also interprets the novel in terms of the unambiguous racial oppositions that apartheid is assumed to have spawned. Although Abrahams had himself grown up within the Coloured community and is presumably aware of the racial complexities underlying Coloured identity, he nevertheless chooses to construe the novel in racially dichotomous terms.⁸⁰ A more nuanced understanding of the social context informs the analyses of John Coetzee and Michael Wade, yet they do not explore issues of racial identity in the novel, for the theme is not directly relevant to their respective arguments.⁸¹ Nahem Yousaf’s sensitive analysis of the dialectic between writing and resistance in La Guma’s novels similarly neglects the theme of Coloured identity in A Walk in the Night.⁸² Balasubrian Chandramohan, by contrast, recognizes the “emphasis that La Guma placed on the ethnic specificity of the Coloureds” and notes the “neglect of ethnicity and community origins” in scholarly analyses of La Guma’s work.⁸³ But having presented this significant insight, Chandramohan proceeds to dismiss the salience of racial and ethnic identity in La Guma’s writing by emphasizing the extent to which it transcends ethnicity by “substituting racial divisions with class divisions” and portraying a situation in which “a community of poor people [is] oppressed by another community of privileged people.”⁸⁴

The Manichean oppositions of white and black, privilege and poverty, oppression and domination that critics have read into the social relations depicted in A Walk in the Night apply only in a limited sense. These stark contrasts are relevant only to specific situations in this volume, such as the encounters between white policemen and Coloured people and in “The Lemon Orchard,” the short story about a Coloured teacher in a small town who is about to be flogged in a lemon orchard by a group of white vigilantes for having charged local white notables with assault.⁸⁵ Beyond these limited instances, in which La Guma tries to convey the racial arrogance of the white ruling class and Coloured resentment at this treatment, the writing in this volume is predicated on a much more sophisticated analysis of social relations and on a more complex perception of racial identity in South African society than critics have hitherto conceded.

Having grown up in District Six and espousing a Coloured identity himself, La Guma was very much aware of the nuances and ambiguities that permeated that identity. Although he does not explain these intricacies to the reader or explore them in any systematic way in the book, A Walk in the Night is nevertheless played out against this complex backdrop. To readers who have not had firsthand experience of the subtleties of race relations in South Africa, the work may well appear to be a story of stark contrasts about the racial dichotomies of apartheid South Africa. Presumably, this would account for the way in which JanMohamed, Balutansky and others have interpretated the novel in Manichean terms. The intricacies of the private politics of race and identity prevalent within the Coloured community are, however, clearly evident in this work. In the context of the novel, as in the reality of inner-city life in Cape Town, there can be no talk of “all nonwhites” sharing an overarching, primary social identity, having a common social experience, or being treated as “interchangeable objects” under the apartheid system, as JanMohamed would have it. Nor can any credence be given to the idea that class solidarity superseded racial identity in the consciousness of most working-class Coloured people or the characters portrayed in A Walk in the Night, as Chandramohan asserts.⁸⁶

The book was written at the time of La Guma’s immersion in grassroots political activism, and he was deeply concerned with the problem of Coloured exclusivism and the implications this would have for the building of a multiracial resistance movement to oppose apartheid.⁸⁷ This is evident from the meanings vested in the title of the book. La Guma intended the name A Walk in the Night to resonate with readers on several levels. Most obviously, the novel derived its name from the main protagonists, Michael and Willieboy, embarking on several walks through the streets of District Six during that fateful evening, with each walk driving the plot forward and taking them to their respective destinies. At a more abstract level, La Guma depicts his characters as having little control over their lives. The story focuses on the underclass of District Six—the unemployed, petty thieves, gangsters, and outcasts, what La Guma at one point refers to as “the mould that accumulated on the fringes of the underworld beyond Castle Bridge.”⁸⁸ Buffeted by a racially oppressive system, these people had few choices open to them and little prospect of improving their lives. Unable to shape their own destiny in any meaningful way, they react to events and try to roll with the punches that life throws at them. They might, in the words of Balutansky, be seen to be “walking the night of Apartheid.”⁸⁹ La Guma also chose his title to symbolize the political conservatism and racial exclusivity of the Coloured community. In an interview with Cecil Abrahams in Havana in 1981, he explained: “One of the reasons I called the book A Walk in the Night was that in my mind the coloured community was still discovering themselves in relation to the general struggle against racism in South Africa. They were walking, enduring, and in this way they were experiencing this walking in the night until such time as they found themselves and were prepared to be citizens of a society to which they wanted to make a contribution.”⁹⁰

As explained earlier, Coloureds’ marginality and intermediate position in the society resulted in ambiguities and unresolved contradictions within Coloured identity and presented these people with a series of dilemmas and paradoxes in their day-to-day living. The most conspicuous ambiguity at the political level was the contradiction between adopting nonracism in principle but accepting racial divisions in practice. La Guma was no exception. He clearly abhorred racism and devoted his life to the struggle for an egalitarian society. And as is well known, he suffered a considerable degree of persecution for the vigor with which he pursued this ideal.⁹¹ Although this is never made explicit in A Walk in the Night, there can be little doubt that La Guma identified himself as Coloured and accepted Coloured identity as given. For example, he appealed to people’s identity as Coloured to mobilize resistance to apartheid and had no qualms about being an officer of an organization, SACPO, that explicitly identified itself as Coloured. In his own life, La Guma manifested the contradiction of professing nonracial values in principle but having to come to grips with the reality of Coloured identity. This conundrum is also integral to A Walk in the Night, for in that work, the author who regards himself as Coloured ponders the very problem of overcoming Coloured exclusivism.

In his journalistic writing, La Guma’s frequent use of words such as we, our, and us when writing about Coloured people indicated his personal identification as Coloured. At times, he even appeared to take pride in his Colouredness. Writing in 1955 about the upcoming Congress of the People, at which the Freedom Charter was to be adopted, he pronounced,“I look forward to attending it and hope that the example set by many other coloured people who are attending will be an inspiration to their people to come closer to the struggle for democracy in South Africa.”⁹² There were also occasions when he invoked the tripartite racial hierarchy of South African society while, ironically, espousing nonracial, egalitarian sentiments. For instance, reflecting on the political consequences of the declaration of a state of emergency in his New Age column,⁹³ Up My Alley, he declared, “We, who stand for a free, equal society of all South Africans, Black, White and Brown, have gained enormously in fellowship, in confidence and in allies.”⁹⁴ Although he took Coloured identity for granted and accepted his membership of that social category as a matter of fact, he did not regard Colouredness as an inherent quality or in any way relevant to determining human worth: that much is evident from one of his very first Up My Alley columns: “The census declares that we [the Coloured people] are almost one and a quarter million. But if you identify people, not by names and the colour of their skin, but by hardship and joy, pleasure and suffering, cherished hopes and broken dreams, the grinding monotony of toil without gain … then you will have to give up counting. People are like identical books with only different dust jackets. The title and the text are the same.”⁹⁵ Here, as elsewhere, there is the ambiguity of La Guma identifying himself as Coloured while at the same time dismissing Coloured identity as irrelevant.

However, he recognized that there was a high degree of race consciousness within the Coloured community at large and was particularly perturbed by Coloured antipathy toward Africans. This concern is present as an undercurrent in A Walk in the Night, but it comes to the fore strongly in the “The Gladiators,” one of the short stories included in the volume. That piece tells the story of Kenny, a race-conscious Coloured boxer who was proud of his fair skin and Caucasian features. Epitomizing the intermediate status of Coloured people and their desire to assimilate into the dominant society, Kenny is, in the words of the narrator, “sorry he wasn’t white and glad he wasn’t black.”⁹⁶ Kenny’s racial arrogance leads him to underestimate his opponent because the man is African, and he is beaten to a pulp for this indiscretion.⁹⁷

Politically, La Guma adhered to the multiracial strategy of the Congress Alliance, which replicated the racial and ethnic divisions of South African society in its political structures. On the surface, it might appear that he had embraced a pragmatic attitude toward race, but on closer scrutiny, it is clear that he did not consciously distance himself from Coloured identity, nor did he use it simply as an instrument for mobilizing people to further his political cause. In both his journalistic and fictional writing at that time, there was an ambivalence about racial identity and an uncomplicated acceptance of Coloured identity as given, indicating that La Guma had not yet fully come to terms with these contradictions for himself.

In one sense, it is not surprising that La Guma espoused a Coloured identity because he wrote before the rejection of that identity had become widespread. By the early 1960s, as demonstrated earlier, only a handful of intellectuals, among them those within the fold of the NEUM and FIOSA in particular, had questioned the validity of Coloured identity. The popular mind-set of the time, even within politically progressive circles, generally accepted the racial divisions of South African society as an immutable fact of life. La Guma, for instance, appears not to have questioned this racial segmentation of the Congress Movement in any way. He was a founding member of SACPO, served on its executive committee, and worked as a full-time organizer for the body between 1954 and 1956. He only gave up this position when he was forced to find employment because his wife, Blanche, a midwife, had to stop working while pregnant with their first child.⁹⁸

Yet viewed in another light, it is quite extraordinary for La Guma to have accepted Coloured identity so uncritically. He was, after all, a committed socialist. For him, the primacy of the class struggle ought to have been gospel and the “false consciousness” of racial and ethnic identities obvious. Given that his life was dedicated to the eradication of a system of racial oppression and that he suffered severe persecution at the hands of the apartheid state, this particular blindness seems doubly surprising. What is more, by the early 1960s, the idea of rejecting Coloured identity was not an entirely novel one within the Coloured intelligentsia, of which La Guma was undeniably part. Nonracial thinking among Coloured radicals can be traced as far back as at least the mid-1940s, with the establishment of the Anti-CAD and the NEUM.⁹⁹ With Congress Alliance and Unity Movement ideologues in the western Cape engaged in a running polemic about the nature of black oppression in South Africa and the most appropriate strategy for overthrowing the state through much of the 1950s,¹⁰⁰ it is difficult to imagine La Guma was not exposed to the idea that Coloured identity was an artificial construction of the ruling classes, used to enslave black people and to divide and rule them. Though he was deeply troubled by Coloured racial exclusivity, the thought of rejecting Coloured identity appears not to have occurred to him at that stage.

Of all his novels, it is in A Walk in the Night that racial attitudes prevalent within the Coloured community are at their clearest. La Guma recognized that in the Coloured community, there was generally a high degree of sensitivity to racial features, especially skin color and hair texture. Even though racial traits were of little consequence to La Guma personally, he was nevertheless sensitive to them because he had been socialized into a community in which fine gradations of skin color and other racial characteristics were significant determinants of status.

Presumably because he recognized that these racial markers would have mattered to the characters he was writing about in A Walk in the Night, La Guma paid particular attention to shades of skin color and to hair texture in the book. One of the first things he notes in providing a physical description of Michael Adonis was that “he had dark, curly hair, slightly brittle but not quite kinky, and a complexion the colour of warm leather.” Similarly, he introduces the other main character by noting that “Willieboy was young and dark and wore his kinky hair brushed into a point above his forehead.” The skin colors of characters are variously described as “brown,” “yellowish,” “oliveskinned,” “hammered-copper,” “off-white or like coffee,” “the colour of worn leather,” “tan-coloured,” “brown sandstone,” “blue-black,” and “like polish [sic] teak. Not exactly like teak because he’s lighter.” Hair is characterized as “coarse,” “wiry,” “stringy,” or, most often, “kinky.” He also notes that Kenny the boxer’s nose is “a little flat from being hit on it a lot, almost like a black boy’s nose.” Moreover, disparaging racial epithets such as “Moor” for Indians; “hotnot” and “bushman” for Coloureds; “kaffir” and “tsotsi” for Africans; “boer” for Afrikaners; as well as “play-white,” “pore-white [sic],” and “whitey” are scattered across the pages of the book, just as they would have peppered the conversations of the people he was writing about.¹⁰¹

La Guma goes beyond simply evoking the sensitivity of Coloured people and South Africans in general to racial traits. On several occasions, he invests his characters with racist sentiments and a sense of Coloured exclusivity that one might commonly have expected to encounter in the community he was writing about. For example, Adonis is greatly offended by his supervisor’s referring to him as “black,” thereby lumping him with Africans. “Called me a cheeky black bastard. Me, I’m not black. Anyway I said he was a no-good pore white.” Similarly, Willieboy remonstrates with a brothel keeper that Americans and foreigners “have no right to mess with our girls.” The internalization of the racist values of the dominant society by Coloured people is again depicted by Adonis’s regarding himself as “brown,” by his stating that “the negroes isn’t like us,” and by the way in which he attempts to justify his killing of Uncle Doughty to himself, “Well, he didn’t have no right living here with us coloureds.” Moreover, that Uncle Doughty, a white man, is made to utter the nonracial sentiments with which La Guma himself identified belies any idea that A Walk in the Night depicts a Manichean world. When Adonis challenges Doughty—“You old white bastard, you got nothing to worry about”—the elderly man replies, “What’s my white got to do with it? Here I am, in shit street, and does my white help?”¹⁰²

Although it takes fully eighty pages before La Guma identifies any of his main characters explicitly as Coloured, he signals their racial identity at the outset in a variety of ways. In case the location of the story and the physical description of Adonis and Willieboy leave any uncertainty about their being Coloured, he removes all doubt by giving his protagonist a surname almost exclusively found within the Coloured community. The name Adonis, like many others peculiar to the Coloured community, is a legacy of a servile past. Surnames corresponding with months of the year or with mythical Greek and Roman figures, such as Adonis, Appollis, and Cupido, are common within the Coloured community. Slaves were often given demeaning names as part of a process of dehumanization that helped to reinforce the master’s control. Thus, a slave might be named after the month in which he or she was acquired or born or named after a Greek or Roman figure who exhibited a particular trait with which the slave was associated. The name Adonis—a youth of particular beauty and beloved of Aphrodite in Greek mythology—was usually bestowed in ironic fashion on a slave the master considered to be particularly ugly.¹⁰³ Similarly, La Guma signifies the social status of other characters by using names such as Willieboy, Sockies, Foxy, Flippy, Banjo, Gogs, Chips, Choker, and Chinaboy, which are typical of the nicknames assigned within the Coloured, urban working class.¹⁰⁴

La Guma’s use of colloquial language also signals that he is writing about the Coloured community. In this respect, he was faced with a problem: the people he was writing about would normally speak Cape Vernacular Afrikaans or kombuis Afrikaans, popularly stereotyped as a peculiarly Coloured manner of speaking the language. To have rendered his characters’ speech in colloquial Afrikaans would, however, have made much of it incomprehensible to a large part of his intended readership. La Guma instead paraphrased their speech in the colloquial English that was distinctive to inner-city Cape Town, also stigmatized as a Coloured, working-class variant of the language. Thus, instead of speaking vernacular Afrikaans with a sprinkling of English words as their real-life counterparts would have done, the characters of A Walk in the Night are made to speak colloquial English strewn with Afrikaans words and phrases.

Some examples of the Afrikaans colloquialisms La Guma uses are: hoit/het pally (hello friend), oubaas (jail), lighties (youngsters), stop (small parcel of dagga), juba/burg/joker/rooker (man, fellow), laan (big shot), squashie (weakling), goose (young woman), endjie (cigarette butt), metchie (match), ching/chink/start (money), and beece (bioscope). Where he uses these colloquial Afrikaans words and phrases, La Guma either translates them for the reader by having the characters repeat them in English or expects their meanings to be deduced from the context. His liberal use of discourse fillers such as mos, ja, jong, and ou does much to make the conversation sound natural, as does the frequent occurrence of swear words such as bogger (bugger), “sonofobitch/sonsobitches,” blerry (bloody), “bastard,” and “eff/effing,” a milder form of “fuck.”¹⁰⁵

La Guma also puts a number of colloquial English words and phrases generally associated with working-class, Coloured speakers of the language in the mouths of his characters. Some examples are: “law” (policeman), “make finish” (finish), “nervous like” (nervously), “braggy like” (boastfully), “pull up” (beat up), “because why” (because), “don’t I say” (is that not so), “I’m just like this to him” (I said to him), “I reckon to him” (I said to him), “how goes it with you?” (how are you?), and “on the book” (on credit). In addition, he often imitates what is typecast as the Coloured working-class pronunciation of English words, as with: “gwan/garn” (go on, get lost), “fif” (fifth), “or’er” (order), “execkly” (exactly), “faktry” (factory), “reshun” (ration), “caffies” (cafés), “theff” (theft), and “awright” (all right). It is certainly no coincidence that in “A Matter of Taste,” a short story about two Coloured workers who share their humble billy-can of coffee with a white drifter, La Guma has the white derelict saying “coffee” whereas the Coloured characters pronounce it “cawfee.” Similarly, whereas John Abrahams, a Coloured character in A Walk in the Night, utters the words “law and or’er” and “execkly,” Constable Raalt, who judging by his surname is Afrikaans-speaking, enunciates them as “law and order” and “exactly.”¹⁰⁶

It is clear that A Walk in the Night goes beyond the simple racial oppositions that a superficial understanding of racial identity in apartheid South Africa might suggest. Far from reflecting a Manichean world of white versus black in South African society, the novel operates in a more fluid milieu of complex social relations and multifaceted social identities in the specific urban setting of District Six. Because the author is intimately familiar with the private and public politics of Coloured identity, which he himself espouses, the novel reflects much of the complexity and irony of racial attitudes within the Coloured community as well as within the broader South African society. Adonis’s denial that he is black and Doughty’s dismissal of his own whiteness as inconsequential should be sufficient to dispel any thought that A Walk in the Night is played out in a Manichean world in which all black people are interchangeable entities under the apartheid system.

The case studies presented in this chapter contest existing scholarly understandings of the influence of Marxist ideology on Coloured identity. They belie any easy assumption that the radical movement in Coloured protest politics during the middle decades of white rule was nonracial in the sense that it rejected the salience of racial identity or of Colouredness in South African society and politics. The first case study demonstrates conclusively that neither the Torch nor the NEUM took an uncompromising stand on the principle of nonracism prior to the early 1960s. The study argues that though the NEUM’s leadership had always had a nonracial outlook, the principle of nonracism was not always central to the group’s political agenda. The NEUM’s emphasis on nonracism evolved over a period of two decades, and it was only from the early 1960s onward that a nonracial discourse emerged as a consistent, self-conscious mode of expression within the Unity Movement. The second case study attests to the hegemony of racial modes of thought by probing the ambiguities in the personal and social identities of Alex La Guma. Despite being a committed socialist and antiapartheid campaigner, he nevertheless operated within the conventional boundaries of the South African racial system in certain aspects of his thinking.

This chapter has shown that the influence of the radical movement on Coloured identity was relatively superficial. By the early 1960s, nonracial thinking in relation to Coloured identity was still confined to a tiny intelligentsia, an elite within the Coloured elite. It was only to start spreading, slowly at first, in the latter half of the 1970s, with the revival of the antiapartheid movement in which nonracial, democratic values were to become paramount. The next chapter assesses the impact of this trend on expressions of Coloured identity.