LENSES on CAPE IDENTITIES 2016 Edition
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Lenses on Cape Identities EXPLORING ROOTS IN SOUTH AFRICA Patric Tariq Mellet First Published by DIBANISA 2009 (2nd Edition 2010) Published & Revised Online 2016 www.camissapeople.wordpress.com [email protected] Publication © Patric Tariq Mellet Text © Patric Tariq Mellet Cover image by Michael Daries All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owners. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition included in this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Printed and bound by Kadimah Print ISBN: 978-0-620-49177-8non Cape Identities Exploring Roots in South Africa TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Who do you think you are? (4) 2. The Cape Heritage Lens: An answer in the heart of District Six (14) 3. The Ancestral Heritage Lens: Identity through the lens of the family tree (31) 4. A Historical Lens: Identity informed by loss of life, land, liberty and dignity (55) 5. Racism: Identity and the race and racism discourse (107) 6. The Life Experience Lens: From the ‘Cleaner’s Boy’ to ‘Freedom Fighter’ (120) 7. The Genetic Ancestry Lens: A scientific lens - Distant identity markers in DNA (221) 8. The Group Lens: National cultural groups - African, South African and what? (234) 9. Identity through Association; Heritage interface via relationships with partners (259) 10. Conclusion: Perspective for the future (271) Bibliography and Acknowledgements (275) Photographs (280) 1 WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? A popular international television series poses an interesting question when tacklinggenealogical roots. It does not approach its subject by asking - who we are, but rather asks - who do we think we are? There is often a huge difference between notions of attachments, influenced by all sorts of things, and what our actual attachments to past people, places and events may be. We also have a nonsensical and sometimes opportunistic tendency toward wanting to pin ourselves down to one single defining root when in fact, we have many. Very often this single defining root is presented as race or ethnicity. In this book, the 3rd revised edition first published in 2009, I use myself as subject of study by subjecting myself to some of the different lenses that can be used to explore identities. Zinto was a nickname that I had in exile. It was one of a number of names that I carried. The name Zinto was derived from a previous surname that I carried - de Goede. My mother had given me her ex-husband’s name, ‘de Goede’, rather than that of my father or her own maiden name and this was the name that I carried for forty years. Some of my comrades in the liberation movement thought that the name was funny and interpreted it as ‘Goetes’ – things. This degenerated further, into ‘Dinges’ and ‘daai Ding’ – ‘that thing’. And so I acquired a humourous Nguni language version or interpretation of my mother’s ex-husband’s name – Zinto. Thus was born just one the many identity tags which I carried through life; my naming is just one facet illustrating the plurality of identity. In the liberation movement I like many others also assumed a nom de guerre – Oscar, which was yet another label alongside Comrade Pat, the name by which most knew me. After 42 years I finally assumed my correct family name, Mellet, and ‘Zinto’ then lost a bit of its meaning. The name ‘de Goede’ vanished in a stroke of restoration by the Department of Home Affairs, which gave me back my real family name. Nobody uses Comrade Pat or Oscar anymore either. Another of my names by which many know me is Tariq, one of my three official forenames and the one which denotes my syncretic faith, merging elements of Islamic, Catholic, Buddhist and Afro-Indo animist spiritual streams. We all collect labels throughout our life and labels can be quite transient. The transient nature of the labels we carry is only matched by the transient nature of some of the identities associated with those labels. Identity discourse in South Africa, like so much of our national conversations, is unfortunately 4 LENSES ON CAPE IDENTITIES - EXPLORING ROOTS IN SOUTH AFRICA framed by the paradigm of race and ethnic identity. Identity is also thought of as something singular and that it lasts for all time. I always found it rather amusing when some people who were born into poverty and the working class, went on to become successful and wealthy, but then still carried on presenting themselves as working class to those in their new social circles. One sees politicians who claim to ‘bat for the working classes’ doing this all of the time. Their own working class identity had been shed long ago for a middle or upper class identity. Class mobility and identity change go hand in hand. Under Apartheid, identity was herded into a singular kraal and this was either an ethnic group or one of the four race-silos into which we all had to fit. Regardless of the monumental post- Apartheid change since 1994, our society continues to think of identity as something singular and as a race or ethnic association to which we are absolutely bound by forces beyond our control. If identity is so bound with ‘belonging’ and we wish to create South Africa as a home for all, we are challenged to find a way to move beyond this crippling framework. ‘Lenses on Cape Identities – Exploring roots in South Africa’, expands on an earlier set of papers which I penned, ‘Zinto – Navigating Cape Identities’. I continue to emphasise and argue that identity is not singular but plural. The plurality of identities is not compartmentalised but totally enmeshed and my assertion is that identity does not have to be framed by the social construct of the race-paradigm, nor by ethnicity. Identities are also not locked into old social formations of 500 years ago, 2000 years ago or in ones DNA roots of 30 000 to 80 000 years ago. Identities are moulded by many factors and most importantly by one’s own life experience, decisions and choices. If we are able to tackle identity issues and engage in discourse on identity in a different way, we may be able to overcome many of the fissures in our society that are based on legacies of the past and fallacies of the past. The book weaves a number of threads across the different chapters and emphasises that there are many ties that bind us as South Africans and as human beings. We can either remain prisoners of the negative aspects of our colonial and Apartheid past or truly break free to establish a nation that dreams together and pulls together. Migration, migrant identities, and notions of ‘true natives’ are also often used by some to differentiate and stake absolute claims of belonging or to label others as not belonging. But in truth all South Africans at some stage were migrants of one sort or another – whether San, Khoena, Nguni, Sotho, European, Camissa or ‘Coloured’, Indian or other Asians. Humanity migrated from East Africa to the south, north and west, and out of Africa to populate the world. Then over time people within Africa migrated continuously to different locations including South Africa to join up with the descendants of their common forebears. People from Europe, Asia and the Americas also migrated in modern history back to Africa. Some came willingly and others were forced. While our migratory roots and settlement histories do influence our outlooks and sense of belonging and this can be celebrated, we do need to be cautious of adopting chauvinistic frameworks for how we interact with others based on a selective understanding of heritage. This book consists of nine chapters and six of these discuss different lenses through which we LENSES ON CAPE IDENTITIES - EXPLORING ROOTS IN SOUTH AFRICA 5 can interrogate the question – who do you think you are? The six lenses used are by no means the only lenses that can be used to look at identities but afford us a good start to a different way of viewing this burning subject. One of the chapters also just briefly looks at an important over-arching consideration which often blinds us from seeing anything else – the pseudo-science of RACE and the RACISM it spawns. The six lenses are our collective heritage in the Cape, genealogy, our perspectives on history, our life experience, genetic ancestry, and national group identities. The opening and closing chapters poses some aspects of the debate on identity and perspectives for future discourse. It concludes with an exhortation to South Africans to think about, moving away from being locked into the paradigm of four race silos – the Apartheid legacy. If our nation in the making is to flourish we are urged to put the rigid race silos behind us and adopt a new approach to projecting our ancestral roots and sub-identities that acknowledges both our diversity and our bonds. Ultimately the aim of this book is to provoke more discussion on the issue of identity and to influence the discourse away from the race and ethnicity framework of discussion and debate, to look at the subject with different eyes.