Book review: In Our Own Skins: A Political History of the Coloured People

In Our Own Skins: A Political History of the Coloured People
Richard van der Ross
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2015
ISBN: 9781868426676

The author of this book, the indefatigable Richard van der Ross, shows no sign of stopping. A man of many parts, but primarily an educationist, he received a doctorate in the philosophy of education from the University of Cape Town in 1952, the year in which I was born. An elderly historical sage of sorts, he is also very much the product of his milieu. As another from that environment, Franklin Sonn, puts it in his foreword to this volume, Richard van der Ross is a wholly admirable non-racialist, yet at the same time identifies strongly with the South African community designated in both past and present as the “Coloured” people. He is also, incidentally, deliciously Anglophone, kicking off In our own skins with rosy references to the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough, and to Winston Churchill.

Predictably, Van der Ross has no truck with historical theorists and sociological analysts who bang on about “othered”, or “invented”, or “fictive”, or “constructed” ethnic identities; pre-empting his critics in his own foreword, he asserts that he has “no reply” to those who would argue “that the book should not have been written at all, because there are no Coloured people”. In other words, such critical commentators can go and lump it. While agreeing that “individually or in groups, we represent all kinds” (8), Richard van der Ross is unwavering in his standpoint, which might be summarised as: Coloured people are what they are because they are Coloured people.

He is also dismissive of the feather-brained and backward-looking idiocies of the post-apartheid historical period through which this country is passing, in which some people set themselves up as San, Khoi or Khoisan. “This, I believe, is wrong,” he concludes.

His stress is on what he sees as a matter-of-fact picture – the exceptional racial heterogeneity of this community of around five million, composed of strains of everything from Dutch and British to Filipino and Xhosa, which combine to make it a “distinct anthropological” group (22).

That said, and while the opening part of this volume briefly charts the history of the early formation and identity of this tangled South African population, the author’s organising theme is, of course, its politics. Here, Van der Ross’s treatment is good, conventional political history. It tells a complicated story with commendable clarity. It is well written. It is about real and recognisable people, with contradictions, achievements and failures. It strives to be even-handed. There is a keen sense of change and development, and of historical ambiguity – as In our own skins concludes of the “unfinished business” of the present, “after more than a hundred years, we have had our rights as citizens returned to us. On paper.” And, throughout, there is a nice balance between particular detail, such as JBM Hertzog and his “Coloured problem” solution in the 1920s, and the general cultural argument about separatist accommodation or assimilation as “the fate of the Coloured people” (173).

At the same time, the approach taken is not without its shortcomings. In places, it tends to dart about both thematically and chronologically. Apart from a striking number of photographs, the text is also interspersed with a succession of snapshots, a series of historical scenes through documents. While some of these are crisp (and nauseating) like a racial classification table, others are either needlessly lengthy, such as 34 pages of excerpts from the APO newspaper, 1909–1923, or otherwise lumpy, like the Nationalist government’s 1973 Theron Commission into “The Progress of the Coloured Population Group since 1960” and its mostly pie-in-the-sky recommendations. For anyone who cares to remember that episode of the early 1970s, there was something which rose without trace. So, to get the most out of Van der Ross’s story, readers would be advised to pay close attention in order to follow its slightly zigzag structure.

That structure, as well as the contents and tone, reflect – as the author readily admits – a personal intellectual viewpoint rather than anything methodologically fancy. And it is a wide view, as the book covers a lot of ground. Starting with the pre-colonial political orders of the San and the Khoi, Van der Ross’s panorama takes in the achievement of some representation on municipal councils and parliamentary enfranchisement under the multi-racial 1853 Constitution of the British Cape Colony. Moving on into the early 20th century, the volume tackles the fortunes of the conservative petitioning politics of Abdullah Abdurahman and the APO, and the spurning by the Nationalists of the Coloured constituency in the inter-war years. That attitude had enduring and constipated consequences, for when small movements did come, as in the Tricameral Parliament of the 1980s, it was all a damp squib, “too little, too late” (43).

The book takes full account of the pressure-cooker anti-segregationist and anti-apartheid politics of the 1940s and beyond, characterised by a deep division between a principled radical leadership which rejected any sort of co-operation with the government as traitorous collaboration with the ruling class or Herrenvolk, and moderate pragmatists who broke bread with the rulers in the hope of securing amelioration and reform. Although Van der Ross does not find the non-collaborationist camp attractive, pointing to its failure to mobilise a mass following, his judgement is not unfair, as he take pains to emphasise that his work is not saying that it was “without effect, but rather that the anticipated revolution did not materialise” (123).

The author ends with the present, with a contemplative nod towards the future and what it might bring. On that score, like all sensible historical writers, Richard van der Ross reminds us that only time will tell.

No review should conclude without touching on another of this book’s merits. Acutely aware that people do not live by politics alone, the author of In our own skins introduces us to strong yet unspectacular individuals characterised by stamina, resilience, decency, fortitude and endurance. He reminds us of the immense store set by education, and of the marked influence of the professional classes and the intelligentsia. And we are reminded of the wide and deep reach of religious faith, nurtured in “their churches and mosques” (191). Coming at the end of the book, that, in a way, almost takes us back to its beginning.

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