‘THE PRODUCT OF CIVILIZATION IN ITS MOST REPELLENT MANIFESTATION’: AMBIGUITIES IN THE RACIAL PERCEPTIONS OF THE APO (AFRICAN POLITICAL ORGANIZATION), 1909–23

Abstract

Historical writing on the coloured community of South Africa has tended to accept coloured identity as given and to portray it as fixed. The failure to take cognizance of the fluidity of coloured self-definition and the ambiguities inherent to the process has resulted in South African historiography presenting an over-simplified image of the phenomenon. The problem stems partly from an almost exclusive focus on coloured protest politics which has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance of coloureds to white supremacism and largely ignoring their accommodation with the South African racial system. Furthermore, little consideration has been given to the role that coloured people themselves have played in the making of their own identity or to the manner in which this process of self-definition shaped political consciousness. This is particularly true of analyses of the period following the inauguration of the Union of South Africa in 1910, a time when the legitimacy of coloured identity was not in any way questioned within the coloured community and when coloured protest politics was dominated by one body, the African Political Organization (APO).