Shame and respectability : a narrative inquiry into Cape Town’s ‘coloured’ families through photographs, cultural practices and oral histories (c. 1950 to 2016)

Abstract

This study investigates the notion of ‘colouredness’ in South Africa by thinking through representation and attendant ideas of shame and respectability. The family photograph offers a lens through which we may view what it meant to live through apartheid, occupying an intermediate space in terms of race, colour, language, religion and social and cultural status, and how these impact on a sense of belonging in a post-apartheid South Africa, in particular, Cape Town. As such, the study responds to a need to understand what it means to be part of this diverse group of South Africans who continue to occupy peripheral spaces in the larger South African landscape and is an attempt to provide insight into the long reach of an oppressive past. The issue of representation and history is central to the research and the thesis suggests that the very act of dressing up – performance – and sitting for photographs was a site of resistance against the way ‘coloured’ people were portrayed through the continuum of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Family photographs serve as memory aids and help us to access stories, revealing a way of life that disturbs the conventional representation that oppression dictated (Hirsch, 1999). The question of self-representation, cultural and social practices is understood to be deeply political and has particular meaning in a contemporary South Africa that still bears the scars of a past where ‘black’ bodies were legislated as being less than human. As a creative writer, I frame my research in terms of narrative in order to better understand how the stories are structured, who produces them, and how they are consumed. Narrative research focuses on the lives of individuals as told through their own stories, giving them the opportunity to define who they are and where they come from. The stories of those who have been marginalised or oppressed bear witness to a life under apartheid. I acknowledge the difficulty of being an objective researcher while examining these photographs, stories, and memories which I filter through the lens which I am using. This is therefore, in part, an auto-ethnographic study; my own attempt to find meaning for what it means to be named and understood as ‘coloured’ in a democratic South Africa. Shame is a principal source of identity for minorities, and the idea of respectability is a historically important mode of structuring unequal social relations in the African and ‘coloured’ worlds (Kaufman, 1996; Ross, 2015). The desire to prove respectability, I argue, is central to the experience of ‘colouredness’, tightly bound to a legacy of slavery and the ‘civilising’ mission of the church and Christian National Education. This study therefore starts with an examination of the genealogy of ‘coloured’ and examines the lived experiences of ordinary people against a background of dehumanising legislation and narratives of subjugation. The thesis re-presents the lives of ‘coloured’ people by offering a platform for the expression of multiple narratives through which the past may be acknowledged and legitimised, leading to the dismantling of racial identities. I hope that it may serve both a cathartic and a restorative function and ultimately contribute to further dialogue which will assist in the healing and integration of our society so that we may transcend race and view each other as human.