5

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Coloured Rejectionism during the Latter Phases of the Apartheid Era

This chapter will trace the trajectory of Coloured rejectionism, a development that started within a small section of the Coloured intelligentsia in the early 1960s and grew into a significant movement by the time it peaked at the end of the 1980s. It declined during the early 1990s, when the espousal of Coloured identity once again became acceptable in left-wing and “progressive” circles. Two in-depth case studies, supplemented by brief analyses of two complementary texts, will be used to document this tendency.

The Black Consciousness poetry of James Matthews, an internationally recognized Coloured writer from the Cape Flats, will form the basis of the first case study. Matthews’s poetry of the first half of the 1970s is emblematic of a new consciousness of defiance and black solidarity within particular sectors of the Coloured population.¹ In the Coloured community, Black Consciousness ideology, with its stress on black unity and self-determination, appealed especially to the better-educated, urbanized groups outside of the NEUM’s sphere of influence. It was particularly in the wake of the 1976 revolt that these ideas took root as a popular phenomenon within the Coloured community and were imbibed by an increasingly politicized student population. The second case study will focus on South, a newspaper published between 1987 and 1994. During the first half of its existence, South epitomized the populist nonracial approach to Coloured identity that characterized the extraparliamentary opposition of the 1980s. This movement, under the leadership of the United Democratic Front (UDF), initiated a substantial popularization of Coloured rejectionism and shifted the focus of the liberation movement away from the exclusivist and binary tendencies of Black Consciousness to a much more inclusive and strongly nonracial outlook. The history of the latter half of the newspaper’s life will be used to illustrate the initial stages in the breakdown of this trend.²

In addition, a critical review of two supplementary texts will fill chronological and thematic gaps in the unfolding story of Coloured rejectionism. The first text, the Educational Journal, takes up where the last chapter left off in the story of the emergence of a politically correct approach to race and Coloured identity in the NEUM. From the early 1960s, the Educational Journal embodied a new antiracist discourse that became characteristic of the Unity Movement and that was highly influential among left-wing, Coloured intellectuals and political activists until well into the 1980s.³ Early on, the Journal had been representative of moderate Coloured political opinion, but from 1944 onward, it became a mouthpiece of the Anti-CAD faction of the NEUM when the TLSA fell under the control of its minority radical wing.⁴ The second supplementary text, the western Cape community newspaper Grassroots, will be used to complement the analysis of South, which appeared late in the 1980s. Grassroots was launched in early 1980 and published for almost exactly ten years; it was especially influential during the first half of the decade and was integral to the regeneration of the antiapartheid movement in the western Cape.⁵

Debunking “Bruinmanskap”: The Educational Journal during the 1960s

As noted in the preceding chapter, a growing political correctness relating to race and Coloured identity became evident in the Torch from the late 1950s onwards. A similar process was observable in its sister publication, the Educational Journal, at the same time. There, as with the Torch, words and phrases with racial connotations, especially the term Coloured, were increasingly qualified through the use of quotation marks, italics, and appended wording; certain sensitive terms were preceded by qualifying phrases such as so-called, so classified, what is described as, and known as.⁶ Already in March 1958, there was an elaborate example in the Journal, in which the author wrote not of the “Coloured people,” as had been the custom, but of “the section of the oppressed people who have come to be known and classified as the Coloured people.”⁷ The Educational Journal clearly developed a more consistently nonracial approach somewhat earlier than the Torch, as a comparison of the 1958 issues of the two publications demonstrates. This was due partly to the Journal’s leisurely publishing schedule of just eight issues per annum. What is more, the Journal was under the editorial control of Ben Kies, whom many consider to have been the most accomplished intellectual in the Unity Movement.⁸ Also, because the Journal focused on educational issues and was written by experienced educators who saw themselves as political activists from a distinct intellectual tradition, the content of this periodical was much more carefully considered.

Although elements of the nonracial rhetoric characteristic of later NEUM writing appeared in the Torch during the early 1960s, sustained examples were not yet to be found in the paper by the time it folded. The first mature examples of such rhetoric were, however, already appearing in the Educational Journal, which would become the main voice of the Anti-CAD faction of the NEUM in its dormancy. In this respect, its April 1962 article entitled “Ons Bruinmense” (Our Brown People), written under the pseudonym I. M. Human, is something of a landmark, as it represents the first full-blown example of the nonracial rhetoric that came to be the hallmark of the NEUM from the early 1960s. The biting sarcasm, the scorning of “quislings,” and the implacable antiracist stance of this article is vintage NEUM—in its politically dormant phase, that is:

An examination of the techniques employed to establish the subspecies “Bruin-man” reveals … Piet Botha, I. D. du Plessis and company were given the job of creating the political Bruinman. His identity was founded on the Separate Representation of Voters Act which gave him a temporary bywoner [sharecropper] status until such time as he could “come into his own.” … To establish their “separateness” and eiesoortigheid [uniqueness], the “special” needs of the Bruinmense were “recognized,” and a benevolent Government, ever anxious to reward those who were prepared to accept inferiority, set aside “their own” Department of State to cater for their social needs…. Outa Tom and his handlangers [lackeys], at every secret session with foreman Botha, ask for bigger and better doses of apartheid in housing schemes, on the trains, in post offices, in employment, in prisons.⁹

By that time, the TLSA and the NEUM had abandoned the strategic approach of recognizing the reality of racial divisions within the society. This much is clear from the “Ons Bruinmense” article, which ended with the warning that any acceptance of Colouredness marks those thus classified under apartheid with the “badge of inferiority, of being less than human.” Coincidentally, in another article on the same page, the Educational Journal stated the opinion of the Teachers’ League and the NEUM on the nature of Coloured identity in its simplest and starkest form when it characterized Colouredness as “a concept legislatively and socially created, with intent” (to divide, rule, and exploit).¹⁰ The unequivocal rejection of Coloured identity by the Unity Movement in the early 1960s marked the start of Coloured rejectionism as a recognizable movement.

Through the early 1960s, the discourse of the Educational Journal became rapidly homogenized along the lines of that exhibited in the “Ons Bruinmense” article, as more and more of the content was written by a handful of like-minded TLSA stalwarts and less and less of it was drawn from the broader membership. That membership had already started dwindling in the late 1940s, and it contracted sharply during the late 1950s and early 1960s when its leadership started being banned. The more moderate members were alienated by the radical leadership that took control in the mid-1940s, and the less committed withdrew during the latter part of the 1950s for fear of retribution from the apartheid state; some younger members, dissatisfied with the inactivity of the leadership, also broke away in the early 1960s. By the end of 1963, the TLSA was effectively dormant, as its branch structure had atrophied and its last conference was held in June of that year. By that point, the uncompromising nonracism and ascerbic tone of the NEUM and TLSA were standard fare in the Journal.¹¹ For the rest of its existence, the Educational Journal held true to the principle it proclaimed in April 1965: “The TLSA has no colour bar in its constitution, practices no colour bar and does not classify people racially.”¹² On one occasion, however, a Journal editorial grudgingly conceded the stubborn persistence of the “myth of Colouredism.” Besides continuous reinforcement through apartheid propaganda and the expediencies of “collaborators,” Colouredism, it explained, insinuated itself subtly into people’s thinking because they had no option but “to live in a ‘Coloured’ location, to go to a ‘Coloured’ school, to obtain a teaching licence labelled ‘Coloured’”; as a consequence, “a good many honest people carelessly or unthinkingly refer to ‘our school’ or ‘our musical talent’ or ‘our doctors.’”¹³

Until the 1980s, this nonracial outlook and the Coloured rejectionism that went with it was highly influential within those sectors of the Coloured elite with left-wing sympathies, especially in the western Cape. This rather restricted constituency had narrowed further through the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, as the influence of the NEUM waned and the strictures of the apartheid state limited its ability to function. Its ideas were, however, kept alive within a small elite of radical intellectuals, in a handful of schools where the TLSA retained influence, and within the small NEUM discussion groups, or “fellowships,” in which university students were prominent.¹⁴ The NEUM’s nonracial philosophy would nevertheless have a significant impact on the mass democratic movement that emerged in the western Cape in the early 1980s. First, many politicized Coloured people, including Black Consciousness supporters, were exposed to NEUM thinking and its critique of Black Consciousness in educational institutions and through its literature without necessarily becoming members of the organization or consciously supporting it. The Educational Journal, for example, scorned Black Consciousness as “nothing but racialism (with perhaps a dash of American dressing)—using the Panthers and Soledad Brothers to make the racialism more palatable.”¹⁵ For some, such as journalist and former Black Consciousness adherent Rashid Seria, this exposure prompted them to question both the morality and the political wisdom of countering white racism with black exclusivism.¹⁶ Journalist and UDF political activist Zubeida Jaffer spoke for many when, in an open letter to Richard Dudley and the New Unity Movement in 1992, she stated: “I have never been a member of the Unity Movement but I will always appreciate the guidance and information provided by your organization in the seventies…. Those of us in Cape Town who were nurtured by your organization, although often unknown to ourselves, would distort history if we did not acknowledge the role played by so many of our brave teachers when the times were much darker.”¹⁷ Second, defectors from the Unity Movement—Dullah Omar and Trevor Manuel being the most prominent examples—helped infuse these ideas into the UDF-dominated mass democratic movement of the 1980s. The influence of the NEUM was, by and large, restricted to the educated middle classes. The self-consciously working-class James Matthews, for example, claims that the Unity Movement had no influence on his thinking.¹⁸

From Manenberg to Soweto: The Black Consciousness Poetry of James Matthews

James Matthews was born on 25 May 1929 in a run-down tenement in the predominantly Coloured working-class neighborhood of Bo-Kaap, along the lower slopes of Signal Hill bordering Cape Town’s central business district. Matthews was forced to end his schooling at Trafalgar High School while in standard VIII [grade 10] to supplement the family income. He held a series of menial jobs, which included selling newspapers on street corners, running office errands, and working as a night telephone operator and clerk before pursuing a career as a reporter at the Golden City Post and the Muslim News during the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁹

Matthews felt an acute and personal sense of grievance at the injustices suffered by black South Africans, and in the latter half of the 1950s, his political awareness matured through incidental exposure to Communist Party teachings. He remembers that the impromptu “talks” that Wolfie Kodesh delivered to clusters of locals on street corners in his neighborhood while selling copies of New Age²⁰ were particularly influential in “crystallising … my political awareness.” Matthews, however, resisted joining the Communist Party or any other political organization because he felt the need, both as a writer and an independent thinker, to maintain a personal autonomy, free from the constraints that came with allegiances of that sort.²¹ He claims to have developed the ideas of black pride and solidarity expressed in his writing independently of the local Black Consciousness Movement and to have been influenced mainly by the philosophy of the Black Panthers in the United States and the ideas of negritude in the writings of Léopold Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Aimé Césaire.²² The closest he came to a direct political affiliation with any particular organization was serving on the executive committee of the Black Consciousness–inspired Union of Black Journalists that was formed in January 1973.²³

In the meanwhile, having published his first piece of fiction in the Sun newspaper at the age of seventeen, Matthews had made a name for himself as a short story writer, beginning in the mid-1950s. He confirms that he started writing less out of any ambition to become an author than as a form of catharsis, “just to get a lot of shit out of my head.”²⁴ His stories were published in a range of newspapers and magazines, including the Cape Times, Cape Argus, Drum, Hi-Note, Africa South, Transition, and New African, as well as in several anthologies of South African prose.²⁵ Two stories in particular—“Azikwelwa,” first published in 1958, and “The Park,” in 1962, both of which had strong antiapartheid and black solidarity themes—gained international recognition. It was particularly in Sweden, West Germany, and Holland that he gained a following.²⁶ In 1973, Matthews started his own publishing house, BLAC—the acronym standing for Black Literature, Art and Culture—which he used to publish his own work and that of other township artists.²⁷ Matthews’s writing career was stunted by the apartheid state’s refusal to grant him a passport, which not only cut him off from international contacts and a large part of his readership but also prevented him from taking up numerous opportunities to present his work overseas and to broaden his artistic experience. It was only through the intervention of the West German government in 1980 that he obtained a passport to allow him to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. The passport being valid for five years, he was able to travel abroad and returned to Germany in 1984 to receive the freedom of the towns of Nuremberg and Lehrte.²⁸

All of Matthews’s work, though not necessarily always overtly political, commented in one way or another on the experience of black people under apartheid. His stories described the squalor, degradation, and humiliation of the lives of those oppressed by apartheid but also testified to their anger, their defiance, and, above all, their humanity. Drawing on his own rich experience of Cape Town’s working-class life, including the male street-corner culture of drinking, gambling, smoking marijuana, and petty gangsterism (he was a member of the Cluster Buster gang),²⁹ Matthews’s writing mediated the harsh realities of life in the city’s townships and inner-city localities. And despite indulging in the decidedly middle-class pursuits of journalism and literary production, he remained fiercely loyal to his working-class roots. Recalling their first meeting in the mid-1950s, longtime friend and fellow author Richard Rive testified that Matthews looked “ostentatiously working class” and stated, “I realized immediately he saw in me everything he despised. I not only looked Coloured middle class, but I spoke Coloured middle class and behaved Coloured middle class.”³⁰ In 1988, Matthews, with characteristic self-effacement, dismissed himself as “just another ghetto writer.”³¹

When Matthews switched to poetry as his main form of artistic expression in the early 1970s,³² he found himself at the forefront of a new wave of black protest poetry that primarily addressed a black readership rather than a general audience or the white or Western conscience, as earlier protest poetry had tended to do.³³ Wally Serote acknowledged Matthews as its leading exponent—“At the head of this group was James Matthews, who set the standards of how we were going to deal with things around us”³⁴—and Mbulelo Mzamane was of the opinion that “Matthews was an influence on, and not influenced by, Black Consciousness.”³⁵ He is also generally recognized as the angriest of the Black Consciousness poets who wrote before the 1976 uprising, being described by Hein Willemse as a “despatcher of raging Black Consciousness poetry.”³⁶

The bulk of Matthews’s poetry of this genre is to be found in the aptly titled Cry Rage! which appeared in 1972 and also contained a collection of poems by Gladys Thomas, a long-standing friend. Other poems of similar complexion appeared in the 1974 anthology Black Voices Shout! which was edited by Matthews,³⁷ and a few more were published individually in newspapers and magazines.³⁸ In his Black Consciousness poetry, Matthews gave voice not only to the anger that many Coloured people felt but also to the embryonic feeling of solidarity with Africans that was to grow significantly after the Soweto revolt and the death of Steve Biko. Matthews was ahead of his time in these respects in that very few people, particularly within the Coloured community, were as outspoken as he was in Cry Rage! which, he claims, had the distinction of being the first volume of poetry to be banned by the National Party government.³⁹ It was only after the Soweto revolt that Black Consciousness sentiment flourished in the Coloured community and that the public expression of outrage became more common.

In the opening poem of the Cry Rage! compilation, Matthews made it clear that

I am no minstrel

who sings of joy …

but the words I write

are of pain and of rage …

my heart drowned in bitterness

with the agony of what white man’s law has done.

He did not believe that what he wrote should be labeled poetry. According to Gareth Cornwell, Matthews preferred to call his poems “protest songs” because of his intention that they serve a consciousness-raising function and because the urgency of his message did not allow for indulgence in the luxury of “literaryness.”⁴⁰ Matthews himself has, on several occasions, referred to his poetry as “gatherings” or “expressions of feelings.”⁴¹

In line with Black Consciousness thinking, Matthews sought to transcend his personal identity—and his classification by the apartheid state—as Coloured by taking pride in his blackness. In a memorable section of verse, he affirmed this broader identity:

I am Black

my Blackness fills me to the brim

like a beaker of well-seasoned wine

that sends my senses reeling with pride

Pride in his blackness kindled within Matthews a sense of fellowship with Africans in the rest of South Africa:

Our pain has linked us

from Manenberg to Soweto

as well as with black people globally:

I share the pain of my black brother

and a mother in a Harlem ghetto

with that of a soul brother in Notting Hill

At times, Matthews pushed his identification with the suffering of Africans to the point of imagining that he personally experienced their oppression, as he did when writing about influx control measures that restricted their freedom of movement by confining them to poverty-stricken rural reserves and preventing them from seeking work outside of the strictly regulated and highly exploitative migrant labor system. Honing in on the system’s destruction of African family life and the personal distress it caused, he rhetorically asked of “the white man”:

can he feel my pain when his laws

tear my wife and child from my side

and I am forced to work a thousand miles away? …

is he with me in the loneliness

of my bed in the bachelor barracks⁴²

In Matthews’s Black Consciousness poetry, there is a clear-cut opposition between black and white—pitting oppressors against the oppressed and persecutors against the dispossessed. He continually contrasted black poverty, suffering, and rightlessness with white opulence, hypocrisy, and lack of compassion, at one point describing South Africa as

… my fair land a’dying of the stench

of valleys of plenty

Although he mainly focused on antiapartheid themes, such as the human toll of influx control, forced removals, immorality legislation, police brutality, deaths in detention, and the iniquitous effects of “sad, sick segregation,” Matthews also wrote of colonial dispossession and economic exploitation:

the fields that were ours

our cattle can no longer graze

and like the cattle we are herded

to starve on barren soil

we die in the earth’s depth

to fill his coffer with gold

his lust for shiny pebbles

outweighs his concern for our lives⁴³

Matthews lashed out at whites in general, at one point crying out in anguish:

White South Africa

you are mutilating my soul

And he made no apology for his heavy-handed excoriation of white South Africa, stating in the introduction to Cry Rage! that it was his intention to “show contempt for white man’s two-faced morality.” He thus had little compunction in cursing them:

Goddam them!

They know what they’ve done

passing judgments of the sort that

the word of the white man

has the value of dirt

or dismissing whites with contempt:

… and white man

should you die

i won’t even

laugh or cry …

to waste on

you as much

as a sigh

He even threatened whites with violent revenge:

rage as sharp as a blade

to cut and slash

and spill blood

for only blood can appease

the blood spilled

over three hundred years⁴⁴

Some of Matthews’s strongest invective was reserved for liberal whites, whom he readily lumped together with the broader racist establishment. In one angry outburst, he wrote:

… the hypocrisy of your pious double-talk

of sharing my pain and plight sickens me

white man

get lost and go screw yourself

you have long-gone lost your soul⁴⁵

It needs to be pointed out that in these instances, Matthews’s anger, was directed at those liberal whites who wanted the best of both worlds—dissociating themselves from apartheid yet continuing to benefit from it—for he did salute that tiny minority of whites who were prepared to make personal sacrifices in their stand against apartheid. He thus paid homage to the Reverend Bernard Wrankmore:

that priest upon the hill

who fasted for freedom

and to the University of Cape Town students who were beaten by police when they protested against apartheid education on the steps of the St. Georges Cathedral in the center of Cape Town in 1972.⁴⁶

In accordance with Black Consciousness principles, Matthews wrote scathingly not only of black opportunists and collaborators who sought to profit from apartheid but also of black people mimicking white behavior—and by implication, especially Coloured people’s association with whiteness—which he saw as a betrayal of their black heritage:

white syphilization

taints blacks

makes them

carbon copies …

the women

faces smeared

skin bleached

hair straightened

wake up

black fools!

In the same vein, he decried what he regarded as subservient behavior on the part of black people. On the one occasion he used the term Coloured in a normative sense in his poetry, Matthews upbraided participants in the coon carnival:

Coloured folks garish in coon garb

Sing and dance in the hot sun

Their faces smeared a fool’s mask

Happy New Year, my baas, a drunken shout

To whites who applaud and approve

Their annual act of debasement

This represents a significant about-face for Matthews, who had been a coorganizer of the prominent coon troupe, the Ragtime Millionaires, during the 1960s.⁴⁷

Because of his stress on black unity, Matthews made explicit racial distinctions between black people in only three instances in this poetry.⁴⁸ However, he freely made such distinctions indirectly, through the use of place-names or by mentioning the different forms of oppression apartheid visited on different sectors of the black population. References to the people of Illinge, Dimbaza, Sada, and Limehill or to suffering inflicted by the pass laws signaled that he was writing about Africans,⁴⁹ whereas mentions of Manenberg, Heideveld, Lavistown, and Group Areas removals were signifiers for the Coloured community. On the second of the two occasions in which he used the term Coloured, it was with reference to the race classification system, and he put the word in capitals to indicate that it was not his wording but official terminology.⁵⁰

Although Black Consciousness strongly tended toward a Manichean view of South African society, it nevertheless recognized the existence of racial and ethnic differences within the black population, most notably through its definition of the black community as consisting of Africans, Coloureds, and Indians. A 1970 SASO Newsletter editorial explaining the movement’s stance cautioned: “By all means be proud of your Indian heritage or your African culture but make sure that in looking around for somebody to kick at, you choose the fellow who is sitting on your neck. He may not be as easily accessible as your black brother but he is the source of your discomfort.”⁵¹

Being a member of a minority group generally characterized as occupying an intermediate status in the South African racial hierarchy and in which racial characteristics were an important determinant of status, Matthews was sensitive to these differences. Although at no point in his poetry did he try to explain or deconstruct his own identity as Coloured or even make explicit reference to it, Matthews nevertheless regarded himself as Coloured throughout his life, and his adherence to Black Consciousness did not cause him to reject this identification.⁵²

In his strongly autobiographical novel, The Party Is Over, described by Hein Willemse as “reality disguised as fiction,” the central character, David Patterson, struggles with the frustrations of being a Coloured writer and the expectations placed on black artists.⁵³ At one point, Patterson declares, “I can’t really be classified as a Black African writer.” When asked, “Why not?” he replies, “‘Let me put it this way: I don’t come from a tribal background, neither do I speak an indigenous language. I’m not white, but I am not African either.’ David fell silent. It would be a waste of time to explain to these misguided people that he sometimes felt that the Coloureds had become the new lost tribe of Israel.”⁵⁴ An earlier draft of this section, published in the mid-1980s, has Patterson explaining in addition: “I can’t truthfully say that my soul is one with that of Africa. There is a gulf between me and the [African] … Culturally my outlook is most certainly European…. Racially, it’s the African who pushes me aside, labelling me as Ama-Bushman.”⁵⁵ Interviewed in 1999, Matthews clearly stated, “I have no problem being Coloured, but it is not an issue, unless its taken in a bantustan approach…. We shouldn’t be treated differently.”⁵⁶ For Matthews, there was no real inconsistency in embracing Black Consciousness yet regarding himself as Coloured. In a 1998 newspaper article in which he reflected on the nature of Coloured identity as well as the history and aspirations of this community, he explained: “For those who have absorbed the policy of Black Consciousness, the acceptance of being coloured and black is not as contradictory as it might appear, because being black does not mean rejecting being coloured. Being black is part of their political stance—a stance they still feel necessary now—and does not exclude them from their place in coloured ranks.”⁵⁷

The significance of Matthews’s Black Consciousness poetry is that it heralded a growing acceptance of ideas of black solidarity within the Coloured community during the latter part of the 1970s and helped coax this tendency on its way. It was also a harbinger of the popular fury of the post-Soweto era that periodically boiled over into mass protests and rioting. Though the number of committed Black Consciousness activists in the Coloured community remained small, the impact of the ideology, on the youth in particular, was considerable.⁵⁸ Much of the political turmoil in Coloured townships and educational institutions during the second half of the 1970s was informed by Black Consciousness thinking, albeit often in inchoate, rudimentary ways. For many Coloured people, especially among the younger, newly politicized cohorts that provided the main impetus to the protest movement, exposure to Black Consciousness philosophy—even at the simplest level of sloganeering that “Black is beautiful”—entailed raising questions about Coloured identity, about its significance and legitimacy, and about the implications of espousing it. Although Black Consciousness tended toward a binary view of South African society, it nevertheless encouraged the interrogation of received notions of Coloured identity.

For most people at that time, as the example of Matthews demonstrates, embracing Black Consciousness did not necessarily entail the rejection of Coloured identity. For the majority, Colouredness was still too solid a social reality to be dismissed as merely a white, ruling-class invention, though its use as a means of dividing the black population was clearly recognized. Accepting the tenets of Black Consciousness did, however, mean consciously displacing Colouredness from its pedestal as their sole or primary social identity and according it a secondary status, if only in the arena of politics or for symbolic reasons. For many politicized Coloured people, most notably those who were to become active in the mass democratic movement of the 1980s, this was a step toward the complete rejection of Coloured identity.

It is ironic that just when one would have expected Matthews’s most wrathful and anguished outburst—during and immediately after the 1976 revolt, when the anger of black South Africans reached unprecedented heights—the poet’s next offering consisted of a collection of pensive, introspective poems. The incongrously titled Pass Me a Meatball, Jones was written during his detention in solitary confinement in Victor Verster Prison in Paarl between September and December 1976.⁵⁹ In this somber collection, there is no explicit social commentary and no ranting against the system but rather an intensely personal evocation of the loneliness, fear, and despair that Matthews experienced during his imprisonment. His next volume of poetry, No Time for Dreams, marked a return to social and political commentary. His “raging” had, however, subsided considerably, and the emphasis on black solidarity was supplanted by a nonracial outlook more accommodating of progressive whites. This more mellow and considered stance shines through most clearly in the final poem of this collection, in which Matthews proclaims:

Freedom is not the colour of my

black skin …

freedom coloured by blackness is

a dream

There is no time for dreams …

the blood that will bring

about freedom

is an offering from the bodies

of the many freedom fighters

believers in the togetherness of people

and not the colour of their skin⁶⁰

By the early 1980s, Matthews had moved beyond Black Consciousness thinking and embraced a more inclusive approach that, among other things, recognized the valuable role that progressive whites could play in the struggle for freedom. This later writing reflected the liberation movement’s swing away from the binarism of Black Consciousness after the movement had been crushed by a spate of bannings and arrests in the aftermath of the Soweto revolt, toward the nonracial democratic ethos of the 1980s. Matthews was influenced by this reorientation, and served on the first editorial board of Grassroots, which was emblematic of this new outlook.⁶¹

“We Don’t Fit the Ethnic Stereotypes”: Irony and Ambiguity in Grassroots and South

Although the Soweto revolt resulted in the crushing of the Black Consciousness movement by the apartheid state, it also marked the revival of ANC influence in the internal opposition to apartheid. The collapse of white supremacist regimes on South Africa’s borders allowed the exiled wing of the ANC, reinvigorated by several thousand youthful exiles as a result of the Soweto uprising, to establish regular contact with supporters inside the country and to mount an armed resistance campaign from the latter half of the 1970s onward. The burgeoning black trade union movement as well as proliferating youth and community organizations of the post-Soweto era generally identified with the banned ANC. Many former Black Consciousness adherents turned their backs on black exclusivism and embraced the nonracial position of the ANC enshrined in the Freedom Charter it adopted in 1955. Escalating protests and growing grass-roots organization culminated in the August 1983 formation of the United Democratic Front, an umbrella body with which more than six hundred political and community organizations were affiliated, to coordinate this resistance. From its inception, the UDF associated itself with the inclusive, nonracial stance of the ANC.

The revival of the ANC-aligned resistance movement spawned a wide range of alternative newspapers, newsletters, and other media projects,⁶² of which Grassroots, starting in 1980, and South, published from 1987 onward, were the most important examples in the western Cape. In Ineke van Kessel’s judgment, Grassroots was “a pioneering effort to forge a new genre of local community newspapers,”⁶³ and as its name was meant to convey, it was very much part of the political strategy envisioned in the Freedom Charter of building communitybased organizations to oppose apartheid. Grassroots was the product of a new generation of energetic, young, and generally well-educated political activists who regarded themselves as Marxist. And though they were predominantly Coloured and Indian, they eschewed any ethnic or racial affiliation in accordance with Marxist principles. Grassroots editors sought to go beyond simply raising political awareness or articulating the views and interests of the working classes; they also wanted to mobilize the working classes against apartheid and capitalist oppression. Grassroots staffers saw themselves not as journalists but as media activists, their credo summed up in the acronym POEM, which stood for Popularize, Organize, Educate, and Mobilize.⁶⁴

In the first half of the 1980s, Grassroots was a dynamic project that made a significant contribution to the liberation struggle in the western Cape. In this earlier phase, the paper was integral in creating a community of activists and extending the network of youth, community, and social service organizations that underpinned the democratic movement. In addition to some political reporting, Grassroots focused mainly on community issues such as everyday struggles involving rent, housing, the cost of living, labor, and health. Its strategy was to mobilize people around workaday issues of immediate concern to them rather than to focus on “high politics.” It strove to achieve attainable goals through community action and thereby to raise the consciousness of people politically and induct them into the broader struggle for democracy and a socialist future. Grassroots thus tirelessly promoted the message that it was only through collective action that the “racist capitalist system” that oppressed them could be combated and people’s lives improved. Grassroots activists did indeed help to mobilize people around a number of local issues, and they could claim a few victories, albeit small ones.⁶⁵ Given these intentions, Grassroots from the outset adopted an unequivocally antiracist approach in its reporting, stressing the overriding importance of unity and “people power.”

By the middle of the 1980s, however, the Grassroots project had become marginalized, and in the latter half of the decade, it was increasingly irrelevant to the liberation struggle. First, intensified state repression after the declaration of a state of emergency in July 1985 disrupted the production and distribution of the paper. Staff members were forced into hiding, several were detained, and the newspaper’s offices were raided by security police and gutted by fire in October 1985. The following year, Grassroots organizer Veliswa Mhlawuli was seriously injured in a failed assassination attempt.⁶⁶ Second, the collapse of community organizations and the inability of Grassroots organizers to operate openly meant, in the words of Ineke van Kessel, that “Grassroots operated in a vacuum. Cut off from its community links, the newspaper became the tool of a limited and mainly introverted circle of militants.”⁶⁷ This new reality was reflected in its content, which shifted focus from community organization to straightforward political reporting as a mouthpiece of the UDF.⁶⁸

By the mid-1980s, the antiapartheid struggle in the western Cape had expanded to the point at which community newspapers such as Grassroots and its offshoot, Saamstaan,⁶⁹ were of limited value. Its slow publishing cycle of five weeks,⁷⁰ as well as the restricted volume of news it could carry, made Grassroots unsuitable for the populist political agenda that now dominated the liberation movement in the western Cape. The focus of community newspapers was too narrow and their penetration too limited to service these needs. Media and political activists increasingly believed it would take a mass-circulation political newspaper to provide the democratic movement with an effective channel of communication with its wide, informal following as well as one through which it could promote its vision of an alternative society. Such a paper could also be used to counter the biased and watered-down reporting of “struggle news” by the establishment press,⁷¹ which either openly supported the National Party government or practiced a high degree of self-censorship by complying with state curbs on the media and reporting only antiapartheid news that was safe enough to avoid retribution from the state.⁷² Media activists, moreover, hoped that a left-wing commercial newspaper, if run as a successful business, would free them from dependence on donor funding and generate capital to underwrite other antiapartheid projects.⁷³ These were some of the main considerations behind the establishment of South, an independent weekly newspaper launched in the western Cape in March 1987 by a group of media activists who had been instrumental in setting up and running the Grassroots project.

South was born of one of the most troubled times in South African history. The apartheid state had entered its most turbulent phase in the latter half of the 1980s. From late 1984, popular revolt and mass insurrection in black townships greeted the imposition of the tricameral parliamentary system on South Africa. As the crisis deepened and organized resistance escalated, the National Party government responded with brutal repression. From July 1985, successive states of emergency were proclaimed annually to clamp down on the extraparliamentary opposition. The emergency regulations armed the government with a number of authoritarian measures to block the free flow of information on politically sensitive issues and to muzzle dissenting voices, making the latter half of the 1980s the bleakest years in the annals of press freedom in South Africa.⁷⁴

South was the first left-wing newspaper to be published in the western Cape in twenty-five years,⁷⁵ after papers such as the Guardian and Torch had been snuffed out in the repression of the early 1960s. After a decade and a half of calm, the revolt of 1976 and the widespread civil disturbances of the 1980s created what appeared to be a viable niche for a left-wing political newspaper in the media market of the western Cape. As the populist campaign of the United Democratic Front gathered momentum in the mid-1980s, media activists felt that the western Cape generated enough antiapartheid news to justify a regional newspaper. And as the number of community and youth organizations mushroomed in black residential areas in the region, so did the demand for news about unrest and for radical political commentary. A glaring absence of news from black townships and rural areas appeared to be another weakness of the mainstream media that could be exploited.⁷⁶

Although the deteriorating political climate created the opportunity to publish an independent radical newspaper in the western Cape, it was the frustration of the handful of black journalists who worked for the white-owned, mass-circulation newspapers in the region who provided the impetus for the establishment of South. Black journalists in the western Cape had to contend with an alienating work environment, in that the newspapers for which they worked reflected the concerns of the ruling white minority and their media strategies were seen to be supportive of the status quo.⁷⁷ The initiative for establishing South came from two such media activists—Rashid Seria, who became the first editor of South, and Moegsien Williams, who succeeded him in November 1988.⁷⁸ Seria, who had been mulling over the idea of establishing a left-wing commercial newspaper since the late 1970s, conducted a feasibility study with the help of Williams toward the end of 1985, after his release from an eighty-day spell in detention.⁷⁹ They used the results of this study to consult with key political leaders and progressive journalists about the possibility of starting a mass-circulation weekly. Encouraged by positive responses to their proposal as well as the success of the recently launched New Nation and Weekly Mail, Seria enlisted the aid of Allan Boesak to secure funding to the value of R450,000 (US$150,000–225,000) for the project from the Interchurch Organization for Development Co-operation (ICCO), a nongovernmental organization sponsored by Dutch Protestant churches.⁸⁰ The appearance of the first issue of South on 19 March 1987 is a milestone in the history of dissenting journalism in the western Cape.

The main objective of South, in the words of its founders, was “to articulate the needs and aspirations of the oppressed and exploited in the Cape and in so doing serve the interests of the working class people.”⁸¹ There was thus no question of South identifying itself as a Coloured newspaper or following a narrowly racial agenda. Its more immediate political aims were to provide the extraparliamentary protest movement, particularly the United Democratic Front, with a voice and to keep the public informed of news and information the apartheid government wanted to suppress. Furthermore, it sought to challenge the monopolistic control of the media by the government and a few large corporations.⁸² The newspaper thus concentrated on news relating broadly to extraparliamentary politics and the injustices of apartheid in the western Cape. It seldom reported news from outside of the western Cape, and it carried virtually no international coverage. The paper did not attempt to provide conventional news coverage, except for some social, community, and sports news. Yet despite its noble intention of serving the working class, South was largely bought by the politicized sector of the Coloured middle class as well as by Left and liberal white sympathizers who wanted to keep abreast of struggle news in the western Cape.

South fiercely proclaimed itself to be “the independent voice of the people of the Cape” and asserted that it was “free from vested interests and financial manipulation from any quarter.”⁸³ It also asserted a nonsectarian political stance, claiming that “we will not be dictated to by any political party or organization.”⁸⁴ Despite these pronouncements, however, South was, in effect, the mouthpiece of the United Democratic Front in the western Cape and thus firmly within the camp of the ANC. This should come as no surprise, as the newspaper was founded by UDF activists and its political philosophy was informed by the values of the Freedom Charter. Williams made it clear that he was under no illusions that “the raison d’etre of South was to promote the ANC in the western Cape.”⁸⁵ South was, however, less partisan than one might have expected, because the staff saw its role as fostering unity within the broader antiapartheid movement and avoided a formal relationship with the UDF. Editors also jealously guarded the paper’s editorial automy.⁸⁶

From its fifth issue onward, South adopted the motto “You have the right to know” to signal its intention of challenging curbs on press freedom by reporting antiapartheid news that the mainstream newspapers did not dare publish.⁸⁷ Printing news that the National Party government was intent on suppressing called for courage and a caliber of brinkmanship that would continually test the limits of government tolerance for the propagation of dissident views. The editors at South walked a tightrope in deciding the limits to which they could push censorship laws without having the paper banned. Despite the paper’s determination to break with the compliant reporting of institutionalized journalism, Seria readily admits that South, like other newspapers, exercised a degree of self-censorship.⁸⁸ The survival of the newspaper depended on a judicious evaluation of all political reporting, as the greatest threat it faced during the 1980s was proscription by the apartheid state.⁸⁹

The government’s main strategy in persecuting the alternative press was for Stoffel Botha,⁹⁰ the minister of home affairs and communication, to use his powers under the emergency regulations to attack these newspapers.⁹¹ Several issues of South were banned in 1987, and in May 1988, the paper was served with an order banning its publication for three months. Williams estimates that as many as twenty-four court actions were brought against South by the state during the 1980s and that in early 1989, it simultaneously faced seven lawsuits under the emergency regulations. State harassment of this sort was extremely damaging to the newspaper, as it took up much of management’s time, entailed costly litigation, and added greatly to the insecurity of the staff.⁹² Ensnaring the paper in a web of legal regulations and wearing it down in a courtroom war of attrition seemed to be the conscious strategy of Stoffel Botha, a lawyer by training.⁹³ The paper was also under continuous surveillance from security police, and its journalists were regular targets for harassment and intimidation by shadowy operators within the state’s security aparatus.⁹⁴

Being severely undercapitalized, South operated on a shoestring budget, its resources stretched to the limit. Its premises were inadequate, its equipment was rudimentary, and the entire project was chronically short-staffed. High expectations among an intensely politicized staff regarding progressive employment practices and the quality of the newspaper they wanted to produce, on the one hand, and the pressures of getting the paper out on time every week as well as financial stringency, on the other, made for an extremely volatile working environment, especially during the first two years of its existence. There was often a great deal of tension between colleagues, and long, acrimonious meetings were regularly held to thrash out differences.⁹⁵ Despite these tensions and stresses, one of the paper’s great strengths was its ability to draw on a team of people who were committed to the antiapartheid struggle and who were prepared to make sacrifices for the paper. Intent on implementing the egalitarian values that informed the antiapartheid struggle, management ran South along scrupulously nonracial and democratic lines, eliminating as far as possible the usual hierarchies of the workplace. There was a deliberate attempt on the part of all involved to banish any recognition of race. One concession to racial thinking, however, was the preference given to the training and employment of promising African journalists.⁹⁶

With justification, South criticized the weak-kneed reporting of the mainstream press as tantamount to praising the emperor’s new clothes.⁹⁷ Yet the paper was itself guilty of praising the naked emperor’s garb in its treatment of Coloured identity. South adopted the left-wing orthodoxy of the 1980s of not only rejecting Coloured identity but also treating it as if it did not really exist except as a fiction created by white supremacists to divide and rule the black majority. In reaction to the overt racism of the apartheid order, the democratic movement in the western Cape embraced an ever more dogmatic nonracism and refused to recognize the reality of racial identities and ethnic exclusivisms in South African society. In terms of these values, any recognition of Coloured identity was condemned as reactionary and racist. Investing the concept of Colouredness with the conspiratorial intent of the divide-and-rule tactics of white supremacism and refusing to acknowledge its existence became a common political and polemical counter to apartheid ideology in left-wing circles in the 1980s. From its inception, this had been the stance of Grassroots, one of the pioneers of Coloured rejectionism as a popular movement.

Given Grassroots’s meticulously nonracial line, only a handful of references to race appeared in the entire run of the paper. It instead simply made reference to people, residents, communities, workers, trade unionists, students, and so forth. The paper’s staffers shut their eyes to the racial divisions in South African society, even refusing to use terms such as white or black and glossing over distinctions between Coloured and African people.⁹⁸ Rather, they focused on the opposition between “bosses” and “workers” or wrote of “oppressors” and “oppressed,” both sets of terms in effect functioning as substitutes for black and white. As was fashionable among left-wing activists at the time, Grassroots often referred to “the People” or “the Community” as if they represented a readily identifiable and homogeneous group. Where greater specificity was needed, individuals were usually identified in terms of their place of residence and communities in terms of geographic location. Because of the highly segregated nature of South African society, this served as a proxy for racial identification, allowing readers to work out from these and other clues the racial identities of particular people. Thus, reports about the “community of Schotsche Kloof” or “Lotus River” were obviously about Coloured people; similarly, references to the “residents of Mbekweni” or the squatter camps of “KTC, Nyanga Bush, Modderdam and Crossroads” pertained to African people. In the few instances in which Grassroots resorted to racial terminology, it was necessitated by the need to make sense of one or another apartheid-induced situation.⁹⁹ Thus, there was little option but to use racial terms in an article condemning the government for raising the salaries of Coloured but not African nurses and another providing advice on how to negotiate the apartheid bureaucracy to obtain state pensions. In both instances, the paper resorted to the use of quotation marks to indicate its aversion to racial terminology.¹⁰⁰

At no point did Grassroots confront issues of race or Coloured identity, even at the level of explaining how race was used to divide and rule black people or the workers of South Africa. Its viewpoint, summed up in a letter to the editor stating that “the people only know about the Human race, not about ‘Coloureds, Indians, Whites and Blacks,’”¹⁰¹ was taken for granted, and there appears to have been an assumption that by cultivating a working-class consciousness, racial identities would melt away. The closest the paper came to tackling these issues was in a cartoon strip published in the latter part of 1984 and early 1985 that depicted the ideal the paper wanted to help bring to fruition. In the opening sequence, Mrs. Williams, a factory worker from Manenberg, welcomes the Tricameral Parliament on the grounds that “we coloureds are getting the vote at last.”¹⁰² It is not long, however, before a UDF activist canvassing the neighborhood convinces her that to vote for tricameralism would be to vote for “more suffering, more hardships, more oppression for our people.”¹⁰³ Later, she buys a copy of Grassroots and learns about the Freedom Charter and how the capitalist system exploits workers. Interaction with her fellow workers, including an African man who holds a menial job but is highly knowledgeable about the freedom struggle, as well as a series of unpleasant encounters with her rude and exploitative employer reinforce her awareness of her status as a worker. Her nascent workingclass consciousness causes Mrs. Williams to respond to a scolding from her boss with the thought, “One day, Mr. Measly, we’ll make the laws. One day, we’ll control the factories and your days of rudeness and bossing will be over.”¹⁰⁴

This fantasy was, of course, nowhere close to the social reality of a South Africa rent by racial tension and ethnic exclusivism, of which the antipathy between Coloureds and Africans was not the least significant. Grassroots itself was, with some justification, viewed as a Coloured paper in the African townships. Not only did Coloured activists continue to predominate in the running of the publication but there was a clear Coloured bias in its reporting. Despite initiatives to make the paper more representative, such as printing more news from African townships, hiring African organizers, and publishing a few articles in Xhosa, Grassroots was never able to shake off its image as a Coloured paper. Van Kessel points to the irony that in the late 1980s, when the paper was run by an introverted group of militants and had lost touch with its constituency, it came to be seen as an African paper by many Coloured people who were unable to identify with its radicalism.¹⁰⁵ An even more delicious irony that testifies to the pervasiveness of racial identities and the hegemony of racist values was that Grassroots occasionally carried advertisements for hair straightener and skin-lightening treatments.¹⁰⁶

Like Grassroots, South adopted a nonracial stance and avoided references to racial and ethnic identities whenever feasible. Having to meet a much more demanding production schedule and having to report hard news, South was significantly more flexible in its attitude to race, making many more direct and indirect references to it. The paper nevertheless remained true to a core objective of promoting the establishment of “a non-racial democracy in a unitary South Africa.”¹⁰⁷ South thus studiously avoided using the word Coloured throughout the 1980s. References to Coloured people were usually either subsumed under the generic term black or included in some wider categorization such as “the people,” “the community,” or “the oppressed.” Racial identities were, however, usually obvious from the context of the discussion. When the word Coloured was used, it was typically employed to highlight the unjust and arbitrary racial distinctions imposed by apartheid laws or to expose the racist thinking of the dominant white minority. The word was usually placed in quotation marks or prefaced with so-called to signify its superficiality and to distance the paper from the values implicit in its use. Sensitivity to the label “Coloured” within the democratic movement in the western Cape was further demonstrated by South’s practice of not placing other racial labels, such as “white,” “Indian,” and “African,” in quotation marks.¹⁰⁸

The only time South addressed the issue of Coloured identity in the 1980s—and then only obliquely—was in an article entitled “Quisling or Realist?” based on an interview with Richard van der Ross when the freedom of Cape Town was about to be conferred on him. Van der Ross, who represented moderate, middle-class political opinion within the Coloured community, made it clear that he embraced Coloured identity fully but did not support any form of segregation or differential treatment, such as wanting “a university of coloured people for coloured people.” In a barb directed at the politically correct Left, he asserted: “I have no hangups about being called coloured. Don’t put the word coloured in inverted commas. As for those who speak of so-called coloured people, I’ve never understood what that means.”¹⁰⁹

Despite its avowed objective of promoting nonracism, South nevertheless consciously targeted the Coloured working class. This contradiction did not escape those associated with the paper. The matter was thoroughly debated, and despite some misgivings, the paper retained an underlying racial focus. The targeting of a Coloured readership was justified on several counts. First, it made business sense because this was a market segment in which the founders of South had extensive experience and one that did not have a dedicated newspaper after the demise of the Cape Herald in 1986.¹¹⁰ Indeed, Derek Carelse, art director at South between 1987 and 1988, claimed that the paper deliberately copied the look of the Cape Herald.¹¹¹ Second, writing for a working-class African readership posed insurmountable problems of language, skills, and resources. Also, South did not wish to go into competition with New Nation and City Press, which were being distributed in Cape Town. Importantly, there was a recognition that the Coloured working classes tended to be racially exclusive and politically reactionary. The editors of South thus adopted the spreading of the message of nonracism to the Coloured working classes as part of their mission. With this went the hope that South would help to secure political support for the UDF and later the ANC within this constituency.¹¹²

Seria and Williams were greatly encouraged in this regard by the perception that deep-rooted exclusivist tendencies within the Coloured community were at long last breaking down in the 1980s. Widespread social unrest in both urban and rural areas of the western Cape from the mid-1980s onward convinced them that the Coloured community was shedding its insularity and was prepared to make common cause with Africans against apartheid. Williams saw “the community pushing out people” such as Ashley Kriel, Ashley Forbes, and other youths from Coloured townships, who joined Umkhonto we Sizwe as conclusive evidence of a sea change within the Coloured community.¹¹³ Thus, although some saw the antiracist position of denying the existence of Coloured identity as little more than a knee-jerk reaction to apartheid, to South editors, promoting this fiction was a pragmatic strategy necessary to the building of a nonracial society.¹¹⁴ The contradiction between maintaining a nonracial facade and targeting a Coloured readership was reflected in ambiguities over Coloured identity in the content of the paper. Most notably, although its political reporting was nonracial, South’s reporting on sports, social, religious, and human interest stories focused almost exclusively on the Coloured community.¹¹⁵ This was emphasized by the disproportionate attention paid to Mitchell’s Plain, a sprawling, almost exclusively working-class set of Coloured housing estates of over 400,000 people.

There was much optimism at the time that South was indeed helping to foster a nonracial ethos in the western Cape. Williams’s favorite metaphor then was to liken South to the footbridge spanning the railway line separating the Coloured housing estate of Manenberg from the African township of Nyanga. In the light of the subsequent resurgence of Coloured exclusivity and growing tensions between Coloureds and Africans, Williams admits to having been naive in thinking that ingrained racial antipathies could so easily be overcome. He feels that it would have been much more productive to have faced up to the ugly reality of racism within the Coloured community than to have swept it under the carpet as South—and the democratic movement as a whole—had done in the 1980s.¹¹⁶

On 2 February 1990, F. W. de Klerk’s epochal opening address to parliament launched South Africa on a four-year transition to democratic rule. The state of emergency was lifted, outlawed political organizations were unbanned, political prisoners were freed, and a wide range of political parties and organizations entered into negotiations to chart the transition to representative government. Despite continuing social unrest and political turmoil, it was clear that circumstances had changed fundamentally. The management of South realized that if the newspaper was to survive, it would have to change with the times and reposition itself in the media market. South needed to change from being an organ of struggle, dependent on donor money and justifying its existence on moral and political grounds, to a commercially viable concern. As the prospects for democracy improved, it became obvious that South could no longer be driven mainly by an antiapartheid agenda, nor could it for long escape the realities of the market-place. It was also evident that political change would make donor money increasingly difficult to procure, as funding shifted from financing political activism to redressing the legacy of apartheid.¹¹⁷

From its inception, South had been unable to sustain a circulation that would make it commercially viable. Its management finally conceded that there was no real market for a left-wing political newspaper in the western Cape and decided to transform it into a publication with popular appeal. South thus embarked on a series of changes designed to make it commercially viable, culminating in the launching of a revamped newspaper on 27 February 1992 under the slogan “News for New Times” to signal its fresh outlook.¹¹⁸ South now tried to marry serious political reporting with racier sex and crime stories in an attempt both to satisfy its traditional readership and to appeal to Coloured working-class readers. Stories on drug abuse in schools, gang warfare, the lifestyles of gang leaders, family murders, child rape, sexual harassment in the workplace, and breast implants now jostled for space with the usual fare about worker militancy, apartheid exploitation, and popular protest. The relaunch, however, was not a great success. These changes did little to improve the commercial viability of the newspaper, and the financial position of South became ever more precarious.¹¹⁹ The new format lost South many of its traditional readers but failed to attract significant working-class customers. Ongoing problems of inferior-quality production, poor marketing and distribution, and potential advertisers’ perceptions that South was “too radical” continued to plague the paper.¹²⁰

Political changes of the early 1990s also affected South adversely. As the incidence of local unrest died down and public attention shifted to the drama of negotiation for a national political settlement, the newspaper started losing much of its relevance to its traditional readership. Interest shifted from the western Cape to the violence on the Witwatersrand and in Natal. South’s regional focus was a liability at a time when the key questions of the day related to national issues such as whether a third force was operating to destabilize the society and whether the political center would be able to hold against extremists of both the Right and the Left in the quest for a political compromise. Newspapers such as the Weekly Mail and the Sunday Times became more attractive weekend reading for South’s primary constituency. Also, as the emergency regulations were lifted and the more tolerant atmosphere of de Klerk’s presidency took hold, the establishment press started encroaching on the terrain of the alternative newspapers, rendering the political reporting of papers such as South less distinctive.¹²¹ As early as July 1991, Gabu Tugwana, the editor of New Nation, complained that “the mainstream newspapers have moved more like opportunists … our market has been sort of eaten.”¹²²

Very importantly, with the lifting of media curbs and with liberation organizations able to operate freely, South’s role as the voice of the democratic movement was greatly diminished. Its intimate relationship with the western Cape UDF was broken when the unbanning of the ANC changed the nature of extraparliamentary opposition politics virtually overnight. Hopes in early 1990 that South would some-how “ride the wave of the ANC” did not materialize.¹²³ On the contrary, the relationship between South and the democratic movement, according to Rehana Rossouw, a media activist and South reporter, soured rapidly once free political activity was allowed, and South started asking awkward questions about inefficiencies and possible corruption within its ranks. The rapidity with which South became sidelined is demonstrated by the ANC “forgetting” to invite representatives from the paper to its press conference the day before the Groote Schuur talks of 1 May 1990. The reality was that South, with its limited reach, had become expendable to the democratic movement that now pursued national and even international agendas.

As the political climate changed in the early 1990s and it became more acceptable to use racial terms and ethnic labels in public discourse, there was a noticeable shift in South’s reporting. From mid-1991, it started shedding the politically correct pretense that racial identity did not exist and began confronting issues of Coloured exclusivism, particularly racism toward Africans. The practice of putting the word Coloured in quotation marks was dropped, and racial identities and labels were much more commonly used in its reporting. The initial hesitancy in resorting to the use of racial terminology within the mass democratic movement as a whole during the early 1990s was reflected in the opening lines of a letter to the editor analyzing the poor reception of the ANC within the Coloured community, even among those who had been enthusiastic supporters of the UDF: “I apologize for the frequent use of certain terminology in this letter. However, to clear certain matters, this is unavoidable.”¹²⁴ By September of that year, South had become sufficiently adventurous to refer to the earliest Coloured recruits to the National Party as “Hotnats”—a play on the racial slur Hotnot.¹²⁵ The paper avoided gratuitous use of racial and ethnic labels, though, and remained true to its objective of fostering a nonracial democratic ethos in the society.

Already in June 1991, South noted the unseemly haste with which “so many coloured people are prepared to forgive the Nats their trespasses.”¹²⁶ Issues of Coloureds’ racial exclusivity, their antipathy toward Africans and the ANC, and their preference for associating with whites, including those parties and leaders who had been directly responsible for their oppression, were particularly topical in the run-up to the 1994 elections and the postmortem on the failure of the ANC to win the Western Cape provincial election.¹²⁷ The reality of racial tensions in the region was brought home forcefully to the paper when South staffers themselves fell victim to African hostility toward Coloured people. In August 1993, angry protesters from the Pan Africanist Student Organization turned on South journalists covering a march to demand the release of suspects arrested for the St. James Church massacre. When photographer Yunus Mohamed was felled by a brick that hit him in the groin, a protester was heard to shout, “One settler down!” and reporter Ayesha Ismael was sworn at and taunted with being a “coloured settler.”¹²⁸

Although South steadfastly maintained a nonracist stance throughout its existence, it could not avoid being seen by many as a Coloured newspaper. A double irony is that even though it claimed to be nonracial and to address the working class as a whole, South not only was perceived to be a Coloured newspaper by this same working class but also actively targeted the Coloured component of the working class. South made no real attempt to reach the African working class and was virtually unknown to African readers, except for a circumscribed circle of activists and intellectuals. The assertion by a South editorial that “we don’t fit the ethnic stereotypes. We’re not a coloured newspaper—nor white nor black nor anything else”¹²⁹ confirmed the editors’ sensitivity in this regard. It is no coincidence that this denial came precisely at a time when South was focusing even more narrowly on the Coloured community as a result of a restructuring to make the paper commercially viable.

Because of continuing losses, financial mismanagement, and the failure of a number of urgent measures to stave off closure, South went into liquidation at the end of 1994.¹³⁰ Its demise was essentially due to a combination of being in no position to compete directly with the establishment press and being unable to find a niche large enough to sustain the paper. However, although it was a commercial failure, South could lay claim to considerable journalistic and political successes.¹³¹ Both South and Grassroots were very much products of the antiapartheid struggle, and it is not entirely surprising that they did not survive the apartheid era.

Moegsien Williams refers to South as having been “schizophrenic.”¹³² Indeed, the paper was engaged in a continuous juggling act to balance the demands of the marketplace with those of the political arena, of trying to square the reality of its middle-class readership with the unrequited desire to attract working-class patronage, and of attempting to reconcile a studied nonracism with its targeting of a Coloured readership. South management greatly underestimated the degree to which working-class Coloured people actively disagreed with the radical politics of the UDF and of South itself. As one of its columnists, Sylvia Vollenhoven, put it, “The politics of a relatively calm Mitchell’s Plain is not the politics of a burning Spine Road.”¹³³ Although the Coloured working classes were aggrieved at being victims of apartheid, they did not necessarily subscribe to the radical politics of the UDF, nor did they embrace the democratic movement’s nonracial egalitarianism. This much is evident from the majority of workingclass Coloured voters heeding the National Party’s racist appeal and flocking to its banner in the April 1994 elections.

This chapter has demonstrated that although Coloured rejectionism had grown into a significant movement by the time it climaxed at the end of the 1980s, it was never a broadly based, popular current taken up by the mass of the Coloured people. Rather, it was generally confined to a highly vocal and politicized minority active within the antiapartheid movement. Furthermore, although Coloured rejectionism sprang from such worthy motives as wanting to banish racist thinking, expose racial myths, and foster unity in the face of the divisions imposed by apartheid, it was generally not a credo held with deep conviction, in the sense that most of its proponents actually believed that Coloured identity did not exist or have any social relevance, even though this may have been proclaimed with gusto from political platforms or forcibly asserted in countless heated arguments over race, identity, and strategies for ending apartheid.¹³⁴ To most of those who renounced their identity as Coloured, this renunciation was, in the first place, a refusal to countenance apartheid thinking, and to many others, it was also a recognition that such a renunciation was a necessary step in the creation of a truly nonracial society. Contemplating the charade of nonracism and Coloured rejectionism in the democratic movement during the 1980s, Vollenhoven commented, “I heard so much talk of nonracialism and saw so little evidence…. Through it all there has always been a part of me that felt like the child in the crowd who saw no new clothes, only a fat, foolish, naked emperor.”¹³⁵