An extract from Off-Centre and Out of Focus: Growing up ‘coloured’ in apartheid South Africa, by Nadia Kamies. Published by Fourthwall Books and ESI Press.
When I turned 50, I returned to university as a Creative Writing Master’s candidate, intent on developing skills to share the stories of what it meant to live during apartheid. I had little idea of the journey I would be embarking on.
The theme of my thesis –travelling with my family as a way of broadening their perspectives in a post-apartheid society – seemed innocuous. However, the journey became one of self-discovery: questions around shame, identity and a sense of belonging surfaced continually in countries as diverse as Cuba, Greenland and Sweden.
While looking at posters of bull-fighters and flamenco dancers in a market in Madrid, I recalled a story my mother used to tell us children about having “Spanish blood”, a whimsical tale reinforced by the presence of a 60cm-tall flamenco doll and other Spanish knick-knacks in the display cabinet in the lounge, as well as the lace mantilla she wore on her head to church with my grandmother or on Eid.
I questioned her on my return from Spain but she dismissed it as a joke. I can hardly imagine what a struggle her life must have been with five children by the time she turned 50. She stayed at home to take care of us while my father worked two jobs.
Sometimes she’d joke that she was going to pack her bags and move to Spain to find a matador. Perhaps this fantasy gave her a way to cope with the drudgery of her daily life, but now I wonder if there was something more to this, perhaps an attempt to identify with something beyond the narrow confines of how she was seen in her own country.
The lives of my parents and grandparents were indelibly marked by segregation and apartheid. I lived more than half of my life under apartheid and still nurture the hopes and promises of 1994 when I cast my vote for the first time.
My children born at the dawn of the new democracy have been raised with opportunities and freedoms that their grandparents, and even I, would never have thought possible.
And yet they have reached adulthood in a time when student protests disrupt university campuses, police are called in to quell violent service-delivery protests, and incidences of racism make the news headlines on a regular basis.
The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the deep inequalities in health care, education and socio-economic status within a society where black people continue to live in apartheid-era townships that make social distancing impossible.
South Africa has been further affected by a variant strain of the virus, and we face an uncertain year or two ahead. This latest crisis has given us an opportunity to reflect on our colonial and apartheid past and how it continues to inform the present. If we ignore this opportunity to address this history another generation of children is doomed to fight against the equally pervasive pandemic of racism.
My desire to understand my own background and the experiences of living during apartheid labelled as “coloured”, led to the PhD in Historical and Heritage Studies on which this book is based. Much of what I have learnt over the past four years has been a revelation, since I had no academic history background except for the carefully controlled narrative I was taught in apartheid-era schools. In the nineteen-eighties, when significant new scholarship challenged the role that slavery played in the economy and culture of the Cape Colony, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Cape Town, with special permission from the government to study at a university reserved for “whites”.
All my grandparents are deceased and now my father too. My parents knew little about their parents and grandparents.
There were things you never spoke about, certainly not to children, and it would have been unlikely that their parents would have shared stories about their existence, being deemed both a sin according to the biblical interpretation, and a crime under apartheid legislation.
Like many of my parents’ generation, the stories are contained in black-and-white images, stuffed into albums, chocolate boxes and biscuit tins. In the absence of a recorded history, it is to these humble images that I turn my gaze in an attempt to make sense of questions of race, colour and identity, starting with these two photographs.
In the first photo, my mother, barely twenty years old, looks elegant and poised as she poses to photographically record the name-giving of her first-born, the mantilla draped over her head and shoulders.
I recognise the furniture in the photograph taken in 1962 in my parents’ bedroom, the ornaments and the flowers in the background that were meant to be seen and not touched by little hands.
Almost sixty years later, my mother’s dressing-table looks much the same, with candlesticks, fresh flowers and glass perfume bottles that little grandchildren should not touch.
The second photograph, taken by my father about ten years later on Eid, portrays us at our best – a typical photograph in our family album. We are formally dressed: my brothers in long pants and shirts with ties; I am wearing pantyhose and carry a handbag and gloves; my sister is in a dress knitted by my mother.
My outfit seems to mirror that of my mother’s in colour and style.
She is once again wearing her lace scarf. Clothes would have been bought or made especially for this day and a photograph on the steps of my grandparents’ house would have been mandatory before we left to visit my father’s side of the family. This is a recurring theme in our photographs – posed and proper, on special occasions. My father is seldom the subject of the picture as he is the one charged with recording us at our best.
What strikes me now, more than forty years later, is that my mother, with her lace mantilla pinned on the top of her head with a pearl-ended hat pin, looks neither coloured-Christian nor Malay-Muslim.
It’s as if she deliberately resists the categories dictated by apartheid legislation.
I wondered about this constant need to present us at our best.
Was there a subconscious sense of wrongdoing that we were constantly trying to make amends for, in the way we dressed and behaved?
Was the portrayal of respectability I detected in the photographs in our family album a way of challenging and resisting the dominant apartheid narrative that attempted to brand us as less-than? The act of dressing-up and sitting for photographs, I believe, was a deliberate performance that resisted the dehumanising legislation and narratives of racial subjugation.
Ordinary families attempted to interrogate the stereotypes assigned to them by taking their own positive images to counter the negative images in circulation, presenting an alternative narrative through their photographs.
Writings by American scholars demonstrate that photographs of “black” subjects were taken regularly to document their rise to respectability, offering proof of the material signs of their upward rise and creating a sense of self-worth.
Similar performances of resistance played out in the South African context through efforts at self-representation against the dominant narratives of “white” normative visuality.
They present unique opportunities for reflecting on the resistance to the classifications and imposed identities of apartheid’s racialised judgements, and the aspirant identities claimed by “coloured” subjects.
As a child I was vaguely aware that the Coon Carnival (the New Year street parade) my parents took us to watch in District Six each New Year, or the liederen that were sung by the Malay choirs and guests at weddings had something to do with a slave heritage.
This parade, mostly of men in minstrel costume and blackface performing a mix of jazz, ragtime and troubadour music has been celebrated since the nineteenth century when slaves were allowed off on the second day of the year for their own celebrations.
This is how “Cape Coloured” identity was most often represented, with a nod to South Africa’s slave history.
Out of Focus by Nadia Kamies is available at R395 at all bookstores.
Cape Times