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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 bettereducated , 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 131 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. 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 132 / The Emperor’s New Clothes You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. [3...

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