'Either I'm nobody or I'm a nation': Writing and the Fruits of Uncertainty

Abstract

Nobody who was born and brought up in South Africa, as I was, can have escaped the question of identity. And anybody who observes what is happening there now will have observed a people struggling to forge for themselves a new sense of identity on a national scale, with a new system of government and all the trappings of a new flag, new anthem and a rash of new names, so that, for example, the industrial powerhouse of the region, the Transvaal, has become the province of Gauteng; a change which prompted one newspaper correspondent to propose that the next province to be renamed might be called 'Doubteng', summing up the uncertain feelings of some about the changes which have overtaken them since the multiracial elections of April I994. Can there have been a society in the history of the world so conscious of how people are defined, so eager to define them, or, in the end, so uncertain about its own definitions? Where else might you have heard, as the assembled members of the white minority Parliament did hear just over a decade ago, a government minister solemnly inform colleagues that in the previous twelve months, 518 people formerly classified as 'Coloured' became 'white', two 'whites' became 'Chinese', one 'white' became 'Indian', eighty-nine 'Africans' became 'Coloured', and five 'Coloureds' became 'African'?1 What, one may ask, are 'Coloureds'? According to Proclamation 46 of 1959, 'Coloureds' were divided into Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian, Chinese, 'other Asiatic', and 'other Coloured'. But this was thought too vague, and so a new set of definitions was set in motion, adopting ideas of 'appearance' and 'acceptability'. The trouble with these ideas was that they led to a white being defined as a person who a. In appearance obviously is a white person and who is not generally accepted as a Coloured person; or b. Is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously not a white person.2