University of Venda Discourses on Difference and Oppression

In this paper I gather and analyse local accounts of interpersonal relationships across racial difference. I go on to identify a number of discourses surrounding close black and white relations in contemporary South Africa. The work moves from social constructionist and discursive psychological positions. The common assumptions of these approaches has been that phenomena such as friendliness and sexual desire are constituted within language and accomplished in social relations (see Billig, 1996, 1997, 1998; Burman and Parker, 1993; Duncan, 1995; Durrheim, 1997; Edwards, 1996; Macnaghten, 1993; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Ratele, 2000; Stenner, 1993). This sits in contrast to the still dominant Cartesian approach taken by traditional psychologists who tend to search for these things within individuals, in their hearts or minds or bodies of subjects.

Discourse-oriented scholars on the other hand have been trying to show that the usual topics of the discipline of psychology which include social behaviour to emotions, childhood, motivations or memory, personality and learning, all could be more productively studied discursively. Underlying this work, then, is the argument that if language does not merely mirror reality but helps create it, then acquiring language involves, at the same time, acquiring psychological states. Learning a language is not merely aimed at possessing a system representing the outside world but, more than that, language enables each of us to participate in conversation and social life, to enter a rhetorical world of argument, justification, and criticism, what can and should be said and done as well as what not. In learning the words black family friend, for instance, one is not just learning to name a person but also re-producing a practice and an account; when a child learns that his or her family had black friend, that is, with this phrase she or he is being introduced to a set of psychosocial relations, which includes processes of exclusion and inclusion, and obviously how to think and talk about relationships. Social intercourse between individuals do not merely convey constructions of individuals identities and their relationships with others, but at once re-construct those identities and social relations; social order is being re-produced through discursive interaction.

The present study utilises several texts on interracial relations and racialised identities which include literature, biographies, and popular media. In that way, the study is further taking up the call for an integrated scholarship covering the widest possible reading and analyses of race and relationship discourses (Duncan, 1993, 1996; Stevens, 1997). In the main though, the study is based on primary empirical evidence. Between 1995 and 1999 I conducted a series of interviews with both black and white people within and outside relationships across race. Secondly, I acquired and got permission from students in the psychology of racism practical between 1997 and 1999 to analyse semi-autobiographical essays they wrote in that class. Some of the interviewees and students were involved in close interracial relations, either as friends, lovers, parents, children; others had never had such relationships. Owing to the epistemological frame there is no need nor use to privilege insider perspectives over outsiders as could be done (see Gaines & Ickes, 2000). In the simplest way, the argument is that discourses are never owned by individuals.

The interviews were conducted in Gauteng and Western Cape Provinces (see Ratele, 2000). The interviews, conducted in English, tape recorded and transcribed, were concerned with, among other things interracial relationships, as well as black and white identities.

The essays were written by third year psychology student as part of a practical offered by the psychology department at the University of the Western Cape. The class was made up of students who were classified as coloured and African or black under the laws of apartheid. The broad aims of the practical have been to expose students to discourses on racism; to sensitize them to the fact that as South Africans our lives and identities are intimately influenced by race; and to bring students to an understanding of race and racism and how it intersects with other discourses of difference, for example, sexuality, gender, class, culture, religion. The purpose of the semi-autobiographical essay was for each student to write a short piece focussing partly on his or her own life where racism intersected another societal fault-line such as sexuality, gender, or class.
 

Racing interactions and categorising accounts

There is another way to put the premises on which my attempts are laid: racial identity is a social identity. A social identity such as blackness is founded in, indeed doesn’t exist outside of, social and political relationships. If we were to try and grasp South African identities we would thus have to listen to how people talk about their personal, social and political relationships. Any serious desire to understand individuals’ lives in these contexts is almost compelled to look at their relational discursive behaviour. This is easy to understand in some contexts but not others. For example, friendliness is easily conceivable as a relational concept. Friend tends to suggest to a listener not one but two people. Similarly, the concept husband brings to mind a wife somewhere in the background, as great-father (bab’umkhulu) stands in relation to another father (baba and bab’omcane). In other respects this relational aspect of identities is overlooked. It might at times be less clear that the identities woman, child, and black, bisexual, Mosotho, coloured are established in social relations; established through language, maintained through social interaction.

A consequence of the last is that an individual does not enter into close relationship with a another person, and get out the other side, shall I say, as the same individual. We shape our relationships but they in turn re-form us; relationships have a transforming consequence on the identities of those involved. I think this is also not difficult to comprehend. By the same token it should not be difficult to understand that an African woman, let us say, will get involved in an intimate relationship with, say, a Chinese-Swedish woman, and remain an unshaken, all-African woman throughout all the moments of the relationship. Certain momentary discursive identity transformations are always happening to the two of them all the time. To a greater or lesser degree similar changes are brought about and happen to all of us in our identifications and of those we are involved with in a relationship. Thus some of the time the African and Chinese-Swedish women are just women, at another time they might be both woman and queer, and at still others, other things, lesbian daughter, workers, students, so on. Of course I am over-simplifying. My simple point is that the women, as all of us in relationships, are constantly, though at many times not consciously, engaged in (re)creating not only our relationships but ourselves. Take for an example this essay one could classify under the discourse of racial fetishism/voyeurism in which a female student told what is really a sparse, archetypal story of a relationship. (Note that I have decided against correcting the extracts from the students’ essays (expect in respect to incorrect spelling) or interviews and present them in original form; but I have included (sic) where I feel readers need reminding.)

When looking at cross-racial relationships it is critical that we question many of the assumptions that we bring with from the history of our country especially which presumed that identities are given with the physical body, that they are given for life, that they obvious to everyone to see that they are always and forever apprehensible. When we have posed to ourselves about these assumptions it becomes almost impossible not to appreciate the changing nature and regimes of truth about identities and relationships; it gets difficult not to be alter our strategy in approaching ‘mixed’ relationships.
 

Four discourses of racialised relations

Accounts of relationships across races can be delineated into four: keep to your own kind; differences are good; race is a political matter, and what, for lack of better terms, I have termed, Africanism/humanism discourse. Once again, it is crucial to emphasise that the classificatory scheme being proposed is not an end to itself, being useful only insofar as it enables us to identifying, acknowledge, and appreciate the fact of many fluid momentary identifications discourses as well as those regarding relationships that surround race. With the help of the scheme it is hoped we will perhaps come to an somewhat better understanding of cross-racial interpersonal relationships as heterogenous, and about more than race.

Introducing the keep to your own kind discourse: The first type of discourse rejects relations across race. The argument is that these relations will lead to the dilution of the genes, contamination of blood, mixing (up) of races. The rejection stems from one basic assumption: there are essential races in nature which mark people, along which groups of individuals are divided, more or less the same as the mark and division of sex between male and females it would be said. The assumption of natural difference is both cause and effect of a belief in what could be called the truth of race. The essential differences between the races, as between the sexes, marks and makes the difference. The racial difference is crucial in respect of who should or should not mix with whom. People who believe in skin colour as naturally constitutive of personal, and most important, group identity, must, for that fact, take the racial group for granted. What may be at issue is only the number of racial or cultural groups in South Africa, but the reality and truth of these groups is obvious.

Introducing the differences are good discourse: This body of views is currently big in South Africa. It is big in the sense that it incorporates a number of strands. This is not surprising. Accounts which fall under this rubric are what, together, are becoming mainstream. Where one would have found most whites holding views from the first category during the height of apartheid up until the late 1980s, since the 1990s, especially since the latter half of that decade, the political centre is taken by ideas of races and cultures in South Africa living together in harmony and other such sentiments. These popular ideas were encapsulated beautifully and propagated enthusiastically by, amongst others, archbishop Desmond Tutu’s idea of ‘the rainbow people of God’ (see, e.g. Allen/Tutu, 1994) and the Cape Times newspaper concept of One City Many Cultures in 1999. Under this class of discourse, then, we will find a number of strands: racial voyeurism/fetishism, multiracialism or multiculturalism, colour-blindness. A person who represents relations from an integrationist stance will tend to say words to the effect that ‘whether mixed relationships are desirable or unwanted will be said to be up to individuals’; ‘people should do what they want’; there’s nothing wrong with interracial relationships. What these views have in common is one defining characteristic. Also, it is on this single characteristic that these views both coincides and contrasts with the first type of discourse in one important respect: Both discursive categories believe in natural race and essential differences between groups. But where the last group of discursive take the view that these natural differences imply that the races should not interact closely, integrationists take a different route. They are not against racial or cultural mixing.

Introducing the race is a political matter discourse: The third body of views is essentially what is known as an anti-racism; it could also be called non-racist. But since anti-racist representations is not a break with non-racism but an extension we will discuss them together. The two representations are brought together because they set themselves against racial domination and segregation. This is the first commonality. Yet in the inchoate democratic human rights orientated order everybody can claim to be against racism. This is where these discourses begin to stand apart from the last. Another feature distinguishing these viewpoints from the ‘own kind’ category of views above is that a critical anti-racism will tend to problematise racial groups. Anti-racist people do not believe in natural ‘races’. The discourse is therefore also a rejection, but of a different kind. Accounts reject the racism and prejudice of the previous discourse, opposing rendering judgment on individuals and their relationships on the basis of colour. They attack the truth of race discourse while recognising political and material effects of race, the currency of racism, and the consequences of historical relations people classified as blacks, natives, Africans against whites, westerners, Europeans.

Introducing African humanism: Where the last discourses speak against the iniquities of a racial ordered social and political system, African humanism, which will interchangeably be referred to as Africanism or humanism may or may not tackle racism as part of a framework of social and political relations. Accounts under this class are simply those which foreground African identity. This may be put forward as simply an affirmation of Africans, or putting African resistance at the centre of the South African, and/or racial, and/or colonial struggles. Those who espouse these views may thus depart from anti-racism project in pursuit of a locally culturally informed one, and not seldom one which speaks to roots, customs, tradition, and belongingness. That is, the complexly project may include a stance against race/cultural hierarchies but it tends to extend to what is taken to be shared values which are said to be opposed to Anglo-American, western, individualistic, liberal ones.

We will now engage the discourses introduced above at some length, citing examples and analysing the interview and essay extracts.

Two stories from the newspapers might further serve to to flesh out the discourse. The first story, written by Prega Govender and headed ‘Angry parents end "marriage made in heaven"’, appeared in the Sunday Times of June 13, 1999. Twenty-nine year old Loius de Beer had secretly married Loraine Ramsamy three weeks previously after a ten-month romance. Louis said getting married Loraine was the happiest day of his life. His world was said to have fallen apart when his parents said to him his new bride was not welcome in the family home. A heartbroken Louis told the journalist he still loved Loraine but had to divorce her after his family threatened to cut him off if he continued seeing her. Louis did not earn enough money to support himself and his wife and relied on his retired parents, Dries and Lettie de Beer. In fact, the parents accompanied and sat with Louis to the interview with the journalist. The father is said to have said Louis only told them about his marriage four days after he and Loraine secretly exchanged wedding vows at a marriage registry office. ‘Over my dead body will he be allowed to bring her into our house. He would also not be welcome in our family if he decided to live with her elsewhere.’

The parents said their son’s marriage to Loraine had split their close-knit family. ‘We come from a very conservative Afrikaner family,’ Dries is quoted as saying. ‘We are not racists, but at the same time we cannot ignore our strong Afrikaner values and traditions. Our customs differ tremendously from Loraine’s, and I can’t see how this marriage will work out.’ Dries told the journalist that one his sons who lived in Cape Town has close ties to the extra-parliamentary Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging, the white ultra-rightwing grouping. This son had threatened to stop visiting them if Louis brought his new wife to the family home. Dries said to the journalist, ‘I have four sons [besides Louis] and a daughter to think of, and I have to listen to them as well. At my age I cannot risk antagonising them just because of Louis.’

Another son with the same name as the father said he warned Louis to stay away from Loraine. ‘Warning bells began ringing when four days after meeting my brother last year she asked him to marry her. When I heard that they married without our knowledge I almost exploded. Family members were not given the chance to object to the marriage in court. It is not a question of ‘race’. My best friend is an Indian, but Loraine lied to us. Besides, she’s older than Louis,’ Dries jnr said. The paper reported that speaking in the presence of his brother, Dries jnr and his parents, Dries and Lettie, a subdued Louis said, ‘After my parents told me my marriage had upset them, I decided to ask for divorce. I cannot against my parents’ wishes. I am on their side.’ But a heartbroken Loraine is said to have vowed not to give up her Louis. She said, ‘Ours was a marriage made in heaven. I know that his family is forcing him to ask for a divorce but I will never give him up. Our dream has been to live together in marriage, but it seems we are still in apartheid times’.

There are many things, some obvious and others not so obvious, which we could analyse in the story. I’d rather we limit us to the matters of love and identities and of course race. The family de Beer keep protesting that what they are doing has nothing to do with ‘race’ but rather is because of the between theirs and Loraine’s culture. What is at stake here? The father wants us to believe that they are not racist but the values and traditions between his Afrikaner family and the Indian Loraine are totally different and for that reason his family think their 29-nine year old son should not marry her. And while their reasons are not racist, a brother in Cape Town who has links with the neo-Nazi AWB is mentioned.

Contrary to their protest that they couldn’t be racist, then, the de Beer family go forth and indicate that marriage between one of their own and an Indian woman would not be tolerated by their son. What is unsaid is that they obviously tolerate (perhaps love is the word) their son who has ties with an organisation which is not known for its love and tolerance for black people; also, his opinions count a lot to them. The earlier denial of racism is, therefore, immediately contradicted. This son seems to have threatened to stop visiting the family if Louis brought Loraine to the family home.

This last denial of racism is not the only one. The younger Dries says the matter is not one of race because he has an Indian friend. The implication of course is that if one has an Indian friend and one is against a brother or sister marrying an Indian, a black, a white, one can’t be racist. It is the sort of reasoning one bumps into in social intercourse in conversations and struggles around colour and race. Things are not that simple. Having an Indian friend does not ‘qualify’ one as non-racist as much as two women sleeping together on the floor in a shack doesn’t define them are lesbians; if that were the case, there would be much more white female revolutionaries because they slept with liberation movement comrades; the same applies to the white boys who crossed the border — in both senses.

I must take a moments’ pause to note that although racist attitudes and actions are part of the bigger picture we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the focus is specifically on how as South Africans we view relationships. Rather than the bold script of blatant discrimination, what we have in mind are everyday social moments and interactions that throw up colour? For example, we are asking, how are people such as the de Beers, the interviews we meet later on, and surely many of us, relate to identities that turn around race? What do these things (come to) mean for and to us, these marks of identities? Are there other lived meanings they conceal? If so, what things do they replace and displace? What do they rendering unimportant? At the bottom, then, the pause is to note how colour and racialised identity are foregrounded, used, often quite crassly, to understand relationships and others.

So, why do the de Beer family keep on protesting that their objection to the marriage between the son Louis and the Indian woman Loraine is not about race? Did the journalist ask if they are not being racist? A question like that does not appear in the story and thus we might assume that the journalist did not ask it. But we have no way of ascertaining this. Notwithstanding the fact that we don’t know whether the de Beer’s were subtly accused of being the last of the remaining bloody racist in the world by the journalist, there must be something that points to the matter of race, something in the family’s reactions to the marriage that might be making them uncomfortable which they feel they should and do respond to. That thing is obviously Loraine’s colour/culture. These two, as we have indicated previously, get incorporated into the theories, ideologies, and discourses of race; culture is used as better, less offensive substitute for race.

But so what if they did not like Loraine because of here race. As we see later, in the new country it has become unacceptable to be blatantly racist. Race, and particularly manifest racism, has become uncomfortable. It is better to use differences other than that of race; for example, cultural values.

The second article, from the same paper, was headed, ‘Two donkeys and an ass: white farmer beats black worker for driving a cart that shows the road ahead’ (Ledwaba, 1998). The sum of it is that a forty-one-year-old farm worker and father of three Thomas Lebepe, on his way back on his donkeys-drawn cart to his workplace after visiting a friend, was punched and kicked by a white farmer who found objectionable the fact that one of the donkeys was ‘white and the other kaffir’ and that Lebepe had a sign on the cart which read ‘The new South Africa’. Before leaving Lebepe, the boer warns him that he must never see him using those two donkeys again, and to remove the sign. Lebepe said he does not understand why things like this are still happening in what is a new South Africa. ‘There is a new flag which shows us that we are one. I was assaulted for nothing. I will continue to use the donkeys. I don’t see anything wrong with that.’

Over and above the obvious aims of the story was a few innocent sounding lines like this one that struck me: ‘Lebepe is not expecting any trouble when a white farmer stops in the middle of the dirt road’. Rather than pursuing the overt racist behaviour of the farmer it is this line as well as the seemingly incredible connection the farmer seemed to have made from the sign on the back of the cart to Lebepe’s use of two donkeys of different colours. Moves like these which might get overlooked by the story writer and, likely, traditional psychology in placing racism inside individuals such as the farmer, reveal a number of interracial interpersonal assumptions of post-apartheid South Africans.

It then becomes clearer that the problems and solutions when man attacks man played out in the story is not to be searched for solely in individuals but more and more in the socio-political and cultural life that surrounds them and which they make a part of their identities (itself to be looked for outside the body or mind). The problems between the farmer and the farm worker, as are all problems and proffered solutions regarding race, are located in discursive structures, in relations between people, what has been called relational politics. Racial hate, as the fear of black, and like the envy for whiteness, is not obviously a property of individuals. These emotions which cluster around skins are not simply something whites or blacks will always do. Therefore, it not a natural that white man, even from the Northern Provinces will stop abruptly in the middle of the road and start beating a black individual, as it is not in one (black Thomas) Lebepe on his ‘mixed’ donkeys to submit to the beating or be a farm worker. Race itself, as how we as individuals act towards those we come to see as of a different group owing to their colour, are both to be searched for and are found primarily in social, political, and cultural life. It is not always within individuals where we will find the answer to why this person or that person holds that it is easier to love within the race, as it is not individuals where to look for the origins of the legitimacy or acceptability to get violent towards those who are different from us (and I shall not go into who is us here), as much as most of the influences that propel arguments about transcending ‘race’. Those who made attempts to move beyond race have be regarded as ‘fugitives’ as one author put it, as the children of mixed relationship and the relationship themselves were illegitimate. But, legitimacy is socio-political and legal construct. Thus, the problems and answers of cross-racial relations — what makes fugitives, who gives legitimacy, where does the desire to move beyond race arise, what, indeed, is a mixed relationship — lie for the most part outside any one persons. The source of feelings for or against mixing is to be looked for not inside the heads or bodies of individuals, but outside of any one of us. Again, then, race need to be seen as historically situated discourses, not properties of individuals.

All of this is of course part of a discourse which is against racial mixing. The fundamental belief that underlies the accounts is that there are (a certain number of) races which exist in South Africa, as in the world. Races, for instance, may be defined on the basis of colour, other physical attributes, culture, or some other sort of difference. The number of race groups depends on how one defines race but the idea of race itself is held to be true, natural, God-given. People opposed to cross-colour interaction may thus hold that there are not just two, but various races in South Africa, such as the Cape Malay, the Griquas, Indians, Africans, Afrikaners, Jews, an so on. The crucial point is that difference between races as colours, culture, language, or some other defined line is supposed to be essential and unchanging, the races a priori and biologically different and standing in a specified order to one another. A black person who thinks black and whites should not intermarry as a white person who believes black and white children should not go to the same schools move from the assumption: there is a white race and there is the black race; one is then left to finding what this separation entails, in what order do the two race stand. It is partly why I have chosen looks at to go with the terms which reveal the stance against mixture rather that other terms which have been used in social scientific literature to describe people who hold these sorts of views; for instance, reactionary, rejectionist, prejudiced, racist. Another reason is that in a social and political environment where nobody wants to be seen as racist, and in circumstances where overt race hate can’t be enacted any longer such as the constitution of the country envisages, I suspect the terms which had fallen into disfavour such as rejectionism, reactionary, or prejudiced will come back over racist to describe people who exhibit (mostly in private) responses like this one below from one of the students:

The person who wants and wants other to keep to their kind is concerned with group consciousness and purity, with separation and blood. As the idea of racial mixing repels the racist the idea of blood purity is found appealing. The white rejectionist might believe in the superiority of his/her race group or the alienness of blackness culture; the black African individual who rejects whites and people of differing colours might believe Africans is for Africans and defining Africa on a very rigid and simplistic basis of colour, or the black race is supreme. As you might infer, these views are often flip sides of each other. The anti-black white man and racist woman are convinced of the inferiority of blacks, of black culture, of the deficiency of black experience. At his most generous, the racist white man thinks blacks and their culture are ‘different’, from himself, from whites in general and their culture. When, for instance, a family insists that their white son should divorce his Indian wife it is because they think that blacks are totally and irredeemably different from whites. The racism is revealed in the thinking that blacks — and not themselves, not whites — have alien customs and traditions. This differentness should then not be misrecognised as implying a kind of different but equality hypothesis. In other words, it is blacks and Africans who are different, not whites. To the racist blacks are pre-modern, where whites and what is theirs are modern. How will racist react when he or she sees a black and white being friendly with each other? Flowing from the above, the rejectionist representation will contain or cover experiences and feelings of anger, at least embarrassment, shame and hurt if a woman from one’s race group is thought or seen to be involved with a man from another group.

It may seem innocuous, commonplace, and even reasonable with some groups of black people (especially young ones) but it is none of these things. It is, in fact, just as reactionary. It is also, startlingly, conservative when it comes from people who are young and one would think are progressive (even iconoclastic) in other respect. It is a reactionary — though not always clearly racist even if it might be bordering racism, (the old term of racialistic seems to work better here), policing the borders of the race — response for one black individual to respond to another black individual by calling him or her ‘imulti’ because that black person interrelates with persons from other groups. The term is one of several that is used for this and other similar reasons. It is shortened form for ‘multiracial person’. The reference, however, is restricted to a black person who is thought to like mixing with whites:

It is often mistakenly assumed that a racist person could possibly not have sexual relations or entertain a friendship with one of the object group of his or her racism. This is no true, as the fact of being in a cross-racial relationship does not mean that one cannot be racist towards black people or capable of anti-white sentiment. People in mixed colour relationship can and do voice colour prejudice and sometimes express racism. We will read student PM views which, if not expressly racist, veer too close to the kinds of racist sexual objectification which white men thought about and enacted on the bodies of black women. The extract below is from another non-traditional black female student writing about her short-lived relationship with a white man. She is referring to the reception she received from her boyfriend’s sister when she went to have dinner at his house.

The kind of responses one finds under the difference are multiple and the discourse much broader, and perhaps more problematic, or at least needing more attention. For purposes of discussion we will divide it into a further three strands: (a) racial voyeurism/fetishism, (b) multiracialism or multiculturalism, and (c) colour-blindness. Rather than the next categories of relations, and surely not the last one, most interracial relationship are bound to fall within here. The main reason is this position is increasingly occupying the centre in the social and political reality of the rainbow nation, the One Nation of Many Cultures, which South Africa is being encouraged to be. But it is also due to the fact that the discourse incorporates more than one way of seeing relationships around race.

Let me introduce this engagement with two examples, one from the media and one from fiction. The first story many of you might recall with ease. The event comes from the 1970s. Some political analyst have said this decade was the height of repression in South Africa; June 1976 comes to mind. Two before then something scandalous for the regime happened. A South African diplomat to the United Nations, Melvyn Drummond, decided to quit the service to marry a black woman. This was big news. As can be expected, in line with the notion underlying this work that identities are established in and maintained through relationships, the newspapers sought his family’s opinion. The father, Gordon Drummond, would quoted in the press saying he had seen photographs of his son’s wife. He said he objected to the use of the word black to describe her. Gordon Drummond said the Trinidadian woman, Diana Ramrathan, had an olive complexion. ‘If you walked past her in Cape Town, you would think that she was a very pretty coloured girl’ (Cape Times, February 2, 1974).

On their own Drummond’s words are fascinating and can be fruitfully discursively analysed. But I want to go in another direction. If you think the early seventies are long gone and deservedly forgotten, that the country has changed anyhow, take a moment to consider the stories in the media that continue to underscore race, the everyday conversations one hears prefaced or marked with questions about the colour of the actors. In this way the past does not seem to want to go away, continuing to dog contemporary life and everyday social interactions. This past that does not pass is one of my central concerns here of course. It is as part of this larger historical South African story that we will read, or would have read, ‘nonfictional’ accounts such as that of the Drummonds in the Cape Times but also ‘fictional’ stories from around that highly repressive time like Andre Brink’s Kennis van die Aand, or Kafka’s Curse, Achmat Dangor’s novella set in the post-apartheid country of the entangled personal and family histories of the Khans and those they get to meet and know. In the novella, for instance, one finds a near mirror image of concerns around what Gordon Drummond speak of. Malik Khan, member of legislature, is thinking of her Muslim-born lover Amina Mandelstam, still married to wheelchair-bound Dr Arthur Mandelstam, Jewish engineer, and erstwhile therapist to his dead brother:

‘Amina’s like that. But denies that is a "white" trait.

"I am not white," she says angrily. "Look at me." Her nakedness is olive-brown, her face oval because of her sloe eyes"’ (Dangor, 1997: 94)

But there is an additional point being made: Gordon Drummond was speaking to the press in 1974, the interview with Thulani happens twenty years later; then black people were in the grip of a most repressive regime of whiteness and the Soweto uprisings hadn’t occurred, now Mandela was not just out of prison, but there was a democratically elected, black majority government:

One of the problems we might have is whether it is appropriate to discuss all these three discursive styles under this discourse. The answer is yes. But, one may ask, isn’t a person who is aroused by different coloured bodies fundamentally different from one who believes in a multiracial society, and another who says he or she does not see colour? True, it looks like these representations are different from each other. But they are not that far apart fundamentally. What these relationship stances have in common is their general understanding of race. Race is seen as a property of individuals, or groups of individuals, but which is accepted, appreciated, celebrated.

Take for example an individual’s response to an interracial relationship which goes something, ‘People should do what they want’. This view of stems from a tendency to assume not only individual choice but also the freedom of the individual to do so, and sometimes even, equality. Now this response has close connections with the ideas of multiracialism and colourblindess. True, the first, that people have a choice, can in practice be avoidant, disengaged, and a hands-off approach. But the last is equally a politically naive representations to the ‘problem of relationships across colour’ in South Africa. It is indeed turning a blind eye to how colour has come to shape our views of people and relationship. The crucial point that connects them is thus the idea of race, of bodies, of colour, that underlies each and all of them. All of them say something about colour. One says it’s none of our business as a society, it’s an individual choice. Another claims, let’s all come together and forget our racial differences. And the last intones, of course there’s colour but let’s be blind to it, it shouldn’t matter. The dividing line between these integrationist accounts — that is, that distinguish, for instance, persons who are aroused by differently coloured bodies, just between bodies, or like hanging out with others of different colours, or claim they do not see the colour of those they hang out with — from those representations of race as politics is, once again, the idea of racial categories.

(a) Racial voyeurism/fetishism refers to that response when a person reacts as if excited, and usually sexually, by watching two people of different colour together or attracted by the idea of being someone of his or her a different colour. Strictly speaking, voyeurism is one of the paraphilias involving non-consenting others. Voyeurism is that paraphilia where a person gets sexual satisfaction from observing an unclothed body or watching people engage in sexual activity, commonly known as peeping. The accepted definition of fetishism is a strong sexual attraction for inanimate objects such as clothing like shoes and underwear, or a what would usually not be regarded as erotic body part of a person, such as small feet, delicately shaped ears, or blonde hair. In our case it is skin colour which is a fetish. Strictly speaking a fetish is not a fetish unless the interest inanimate objects or body parts is often sexually arousing to the point of erection, needs the object or concentrates on the part of the partner during intercourse, and chooses sex partners on that basis; in short, degree and intensity of erotic focalisation. (Davidson and Neale, 1987; Sue, Sue, and Sue, 1990). Paraphilias are sexual disorders. The term replaced sexual deviation. Paraphilias are characterised by unusual, persistent, strong urges and fantasies. A clinical diagnosis is made if an individual is severely distressed by these urges or fantasies or has acted on them. Where a person is merely highly distressed by them but has not acted them out she or he would be diagnosed with a mild case of paraphilia. It is noteworthy that people with one type of paraphilic tendencies will show other sexually deviant behaviours. This is the context within which we should understand why one writer might label people with similar views or urges like those we are signalling as fetishistic — that is, fetishising skin colour, rendering blackness as something sexually attractive and, most important, inanimate object. Our definition of a racial voyeurism/fetishism derives from the definition of the sexual disorders above. I should also indicate that it has been said that the proliferation of sex, in mainstream and porn movies, the burgeoning porn industry, including sex shops, magazines, massage parlours, paperbacks, and the regular articles in popular magazines and the Sunday Times back page, all point to the voyeuristic tendency of late modernity.

It is important to note that we are not referring to a sexual disorder but to a behaviour or representation with not dissimilar features. Our voyeur is that person who will feel people of other races (and so racial mixing) are sexually exciting, or at least fashionable. It is not coincidence that this is a motif that continues to popular in porn, right behind buggery, and gang bang, and sequences of women with vibrators and licking each other. In a word, black bodies, or white ones titillate. Of course, observation is what produces arousal and gratification for the voyeur, who might masturbate while observing others of different races, either singly or as a couple. Often voyeuristic individuals enjoy reflecting later about the objects of their peeping feeling helpless and humiliated were they to know they were being seen naked, in the act of undressing, or engaged in sexual acts.

I also want to indicate why I chose to put MW’s text here. It might look like one white security officer wanted to bar a racially mixed group of men (but really the black men in the group) from entering a nudist beach, so what do you expect, it’s just like white people, they are racist, man, that’s it. Well, not exactly, that’s not it. The student’s views on white women’s bodies seems to have been shaped by one security man’s views about what (bodies) black people can and cannot see. Where the white person’s views on naked white bodies and black men’s eyes as opposed to white men’s might have been birthed or gotten shape has been dealt with by many scholars. In that sense the extract highlights not one but two racialised voyeuristic views, the views of two men, one the security man, if through the telling by MW, and the other the student himself, and how he comes to react to ‘white ladies’ nudity.

Racial voyeurism is nothing if not spectacle, then; it is a prurient fascination, sometimes hating oneself for being fascinated with body, colour, strangeness itself, and so the sexuality of whites or blacks. And the spectacle, Morrison wrote someplace, the spectacle is the narrative, and I would insert alongside the end of her line, the narrative of cross-colour relationships is spectacularised, ‘both monopolising appearance and social reality’ (Morrison, 1997).

Having spoken about integrationist voyeurism/fetishism in general I want to apply it to individuals, to ask what kind of person holds these views? how do they interact in social situations? The colour voyeur/fetishist is then that person who acts in a sexually excited manner when in a mixed company. S/he is attracted by thinking of being with another person of a different race. It should serve us well then to think of a voyeur in a mixed relationship by thinking of a what is a good match for some people. For example, if you are a man do you seek out females with big breasts, thin hips, and long legs? or, if you are a black woman do you like tall, well-fed men in BMWs, preferably businessmen, or those going up or already high in the corporate ladder? These outward signs of achievement, beauty, adventure are also important in themselves for the voyeur/ fetishist, with one significant change. What appears to move race voyeur in keeping ‘mixed’ company is not that this environment is perceived to be a ‘free’ zone, or some social or political motive like that; it is not because these social environments might be spaces characterised by a mutuality of liberatory interests or these people share fundamental views with him or her; and it is not because of the potential for cultural or personal growth. The desire to be in an environment where black people and white people hang out together is an end in itself for the colour. One of the interviews, Merle, was at pains to distinguish herself from this group when she said her relationship with her live-in partner was ‘not a racial experiment.’ The reason is people who react in this way might seem to ‘get off’ mixing with people of other races, whether socially, psychologically, or sexually; ‘to be seen’ in the currently hot/cool historical and political environment underlies their social identities and psychological selves.

(b) Multiracialism/multiculturalism revolves around two points. One of this is inclusion, another is difference. Multiracialism/multiculturalism revolves around a defined difference of race. Contrary to the separatism of those against race mixing though, this account of race relations does so with the aim of including others. Multiracialists and multiculturalists have as their object the inclusion of the different races or cultures under one harmonious society. Having recognised an essential racial differences multiracialism/culturalism want them to be observed, respected, celebrated.

One student, CJC, wrote that learning respect for diversity and treating each other might be the solution to overcome racism in South Africa. She said for society’s much younger generation to overcome racism, the different cultures should be taught and learn to enable them to relate to one another, and for ethnic groups to be seen, as equal. Her thinking seems to have been influenced, among other things, by an incident which referred to as standing ‘out like a sore thumb’ from the year she entered Cape Technikon.

(c) Colour-blindness is a discursive gesture that presumes an ‘eraced’ social and political context. But this presumption is also a turning a blind eye on the power hierarchies of white above black, and the historical material effects of racism. This next extract encapsulates this way of seeing (or not seeing) relationships.

Colour-blind people are increasing in South Africa and beginning to figure prominently within the integrationist kind of discourse. This orientation refuses to see colour as a prominent form of social axis, and racism as a special form of inequity. Colour-blind individuals assume a ‘raceless’ social-political and economic context. In the view of colour-blind people race must not matter in identification, in interaction, in all of life. Around colour-blind whites, for example, a black person who wants to be in their company but has learned to recognise both the silent and committed racial insult, the neglect and the exclusion, might start to belief he or she paranoid, making things up, seeing racists when there are none. The reason for this will be found in that colour-blind people are likely to deny racism except when it is overt and deliberate, such as where someone calls you a kaffir, or comes at you with a fork because you are sitting with a white woman or man. Colour-blind persons do not espouse or talk integration because they believe sleeping with a person of another ‘race’ is sleeping with another person period; adopting a black child if one is white adult has nothing to do with their colours; going to black parties or throwing parties where black people are invited is not even interesting to talk about, and hiring a black manager, all are definite signs of their commitment to a fair and just world but should not be spoken about our loud. This is a strange view of South African society generally, and racism specifically, where people still live separately and race-based employment practices, for example, are law. The biggest problem of colour blind individuals seems to a discussion or consciousness of any sort. Moving from a position that one used this sort of argument against racially discriminatory policies under apartheid, colour blind individuals, institutions, and political groups, also move against what they view as apartheid-like efforts of identify and reversing the historical effects of institutionalised racial power. When you hold this view you might ‘even go so far as to assert that raising racism as an issue can incite racial conflict’ and invite blacklash. By blacklash I refer of course to an increase in hostility to oppressed groups, especially black people, from whites. In the text I just referred to, Howitt ad Owusu-Bempah (1994), cite this colourblind view by Van den Berghe:

However if we were searching for roots for the local take we would need to go a little further to the late 1940s through the 50s and the struggle work exemplified by the African National Congress Youth Leaguers, and embodied in such documents as the Basic Policy Document, the Programme of Action, and the Freedom Charter. For instance one of the Basic Policy Document’s stated Goal of Political Action was ‘the removal of discriminatory laws and colour bars’. And referring to industry it again said, ‘the Congress Youth League aims at: the abolition of industrial colour bars and other discriminatory provisions, so that the workers of all nationalities should be able to do skilled work and so they should get full training and education in the skill and techniques of productions’. The Freedom Charter would maintain this anti-racist stance. Under the section ‘All national groups shall have equal rights’ it declares ‘The preaching and practice of national, race or colour discrimination and contempt shall be a punishable crime’ (Mandela, 1994).

What manner does such an overtly political account of race play out in interpersonal relations? I have said men or women who hold these views are likely to reject the idea that they are inherently different from black or white others because of their appearances, or their blood, or head-size, or biology, or cultures. I traced very briefly the anti-racism register in South Africa. I stressed that accounts under the discourse are better understood against both rejectionism/ racism and the integrationist outlook on South African life. Key to these accounts is how they set the speakers in opposition to racism. But even having made those few notes, it remains important to make the analytical separation between racism and race. The two are closely related but they certainly not the same thing. A person might think you are black or African but we cannot conclude they are racist. Also, it is important to do this seeing when one deals with one’s partner in an intimate relationship one is likely to deal with problems around ‘race’ (compounded by the terrible illusion that colour has everything to do with the way one acts or talks, that is one’s culture) rather than racism, which one faces when one interacts with the larger society. Hence, the discussion under this will be now on racism, now on race.

Although the new South African state organs have set themselves the goal of dealing hard and effectively with racism, the problem of how to tackle race will rage on for a long time, I suspect. Questions around colour consciousness must needs go on, both in public life and in private intimate moments. It is because ‘race’ continues to affect all kinds of human relationships, as it has done for at least four centuries in this country, and even longer elsewhere. Indeed it is axiomatic that racial prejudice has been a fact of South African life. Race defines both relations between whites and blacks, besides defining individual white and black identities, European, and African. There is a great deal of research by local and international scholars which, as it is to be expected, has repeatedly found high levels of anti-black prejudice, ethnocentrism, and racist orientation among white South African samples, including white children. But we shall not go into the research nor the terms, expect one: racism. The reason is that it sits directly opposite the heading to this section. Yet the other terms also have a more rather than less relationships, to anti-racism. Therefore, that we have chosen to only give a definition of racism doesn’t make our task easier. Additionally, like many concepts in social science racism is quite difficult to define. So, rather than grappling with exactly what s racism, it is better to offer the directions in which it lies. One of the things to note is that we are in te era of new racism; there is an identifiable old way of talking about race and being racist, a newer ways of doing race and being racist; yet the new way are informed by the traditional view of ‘race’. This view leads to another set of representations, underlying, suggested, and covered under rejectionism — representations of blacks as naturally defective, naturally less intelligent, naturally barbaric, naturally pathological, with big genitals, sexually licentious, cruel, treacherous, lazy, corrupt, revengeful, dirty, evil; opposed to this is the honest and self evident truth that whites being te chosen people, are naturally superior in every way. Newer representations would include words like differences, culture, ethnicity, development, disadvantagement but which on their own do not define racism. Racism keeps up with the times; as the performance of ‘race’ changes; as the representation of blacks alters, people became more sophisticated; as society become less tolerant of racist behaviour perhaps. In trying to deconstruct such talk some scholars are now speaking of subtle racism, a racism without race, an anti-essentialist racism. It is through understanding this complexity of racism and race discourse that Norman Duncan (1993) comes to lists some of the features of racism in his work on the subject; his is to bring together a number of characterisation from writers on racism, and particularly those writers who have come to see racism as an ideology, as a set of interrelated discursive practices. Racism, he says, is a notion linked to the belief in ‘races or whatever other term ‘race’ is given; the ideology by which a dominant ‘race’ oppresses one or more other ‘race’ groups and which is transmitted through talk and text; a social rather than an individual problem but with effects on material, socio-political and psychological well-being of its targets; generates opposing ideologies, one of which is anti-racism.

But what are anti-racist relational practices and discourses? The shortest route to recognise anti-racism is to go in the opposite direction from the lists provided by Norman Duncan in his work no discourses of racism. Doing that we would see anti-racism as ideological practices which challenges the idea of ‘race’, or whatever code is used, as well as challenging the belief in the given superiority of one group of people over others; anti-racists challenge racist behaviour, all kinds of behaviour; anti-racism focusses not solely on psychological productions but much more on institutions, community-wide, and society-wide problems; anti-racism cannot escape the fact that it will generate some kind of backlash, new forms of racist discourse, as the sentiment by Thatcher attests.

The extract from the interview with Sam is certainly not of the keep to your own kind or difference is good varieties, but does it simply restrict itself to the politics of race? Is this what is referred to when we talk about anti-racist relationships?

It appears that in trying to confront racism by organising around colour the black students would get caught between a rock and a hard place, the wire and the wall, devil on one side and the deep blue eyes on the other. They were playing, whether they liked it or not, in the very game they didn’t want to be part of when they broke away from the white students. However, though their position might seem to be necessary when faced with racism, it is not always productive. Indeed, at many places, though for entirely different reasons, this position on blackness was effectively not at odds with apartheid state policies. More importantly the necessity is tied to a historical location, a particular era in South African politics. The policies of the government of that time had already covered the ground on which SASO would walk. The apartheid government has declared around 1950 that a person could not be both black and white simultaneously. But one person may ask, how can a person be not black and white at the same time? Not that unthinkable. For a start, a child is both black and white really, as one is French-Columbian, Russian-Senegalese, if one black parent and one white parent. But if one is not ‘fixated’ on skin colour one begins to realise, as Biko could not but see the dilemma, the are black looking people who have what Baraka called unwhite hallucinations, what are called in South African street language, imulti, coconut, and so on, who are referred to many times as simply, white. But a number of writers such as Gates, Gilroy, Guillaumin, West, Wiliams, have thought through this apparent tension. Being black, they have observed in their different ways, does not exist in itself.

When Sam joins the biological arguments with cultural arguments of identity he lands himself inside the apartheid complex and the difficulty that dogged SASO. In effect the interviewee is saying African culture needs skin colour, to be African one needs a certain look. Does it really? (Compare that to what Ditaba says below.) In fact the question can be sensed in Sam’s discomfort with his own definition. A sense that there are other things that come into it, keeps him open.

Now Jamie appears to have a better sense of this fact, taking a much more critical view in her own definition of African. Nevertheless, the paradoxes in the language remain.

These kind of people are the very people the official history in our country taught create problems. They were the problem people, punished or ostracised for daring to live as normal as they wished. They became heroes for what are ordinary things. The received psychology that came with that history said these people, ‘mixed’ couples, were wrong. For their own good, it said. Because their children would have a confused identity. They would belong nowhere. And they would have the added problem of low self-esteem.

The more or less obvious sources of this discourse are Pan-Africanism, founded by ‘Africans in the diaspora in 1907 and locally politically associated with the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania and Pan Africanist Student Organisation; Negritude propounded eloquently by Cesaire and Fanon; African Nationalism in this country and elsewhere on the continent which is associated with the ruling party, and the black consciousness movement with its roots in the US and taken up by SASO, Black People’s Convention and other affiliated organs led by people such as Biko. Accounts of social and political relationships under here foreground Africa. The aim is to affirm being African (see Omotoso, 1994). The discourse centralises, one version or another of, African identity. Examples of this are many. There are no prizes for guessing from which position Mandela was speaking when said, ‘African people in South Africa were oppressed as a group with a particular colour (and) the goal of all our struggles is Africanism’ (Mandela, 1994, p. 19 & 20; see also Tambo, 1994). ‘The call for Africa’s renewal — for an African renaissance...’ made by then deputy president Mbeki (1998) is another unmistakable instancing of the discourse.

What shape does what we have called African humanism or Africanism take in inter-personal life? Are African identities written primarily by the fact of colour, or are there other things which inform this project? Put differently, is it possible to have Africanness deracialised, such as in the question, what makes one thing, this practice, and not that other thing or practice, unAfrican? what makes this realtionship African and not that one? What makes her African or not him if not skin colour?

It is to some of these questions that Fanon (1967) in his critique of nationalism was calling attention. He noted that African bourgeoisie usually come to power in the name of a narrow nationalism and representing a race and this was likely to make them incapable ‘of triumphantly putting into practice a programme with even a minimum humanist content’ (p. 131). This signal to humanism in crucial and should be kept in mind when we turn to personal live and relationships more explicitly. The questions I have just posed, to begin with, are neither new or radical. In one guise or another they have occupied African and other intellectuals on the continent and in the diaspora for a while. On the local front, for example, the Youth Leaguers of the ANC grappled with some of these around 1948. Among other things, they would get to distinguish between what they saw as two streams of African nationalism. The one stream of Africanism was that which the Youth Leaguers shied from and which turned around Marcus Garvey’s revolutionary chant, African for the Africans. The other stream is one in which they saw themselves. This is the moderate Africanism which they professed. ‘We of the Youth League’ their leaders would write, ‘take account of the concrete situation of South Africa, and realise that the different racial groups have come to stay. But we insist that a condition for inter-racial peace and progress is the abandonment of white domination, and such a change in the basic structure of South African society that those relations which breed exploitation and human misery will disappear’ (Mandela, 1994, p.25).

But now that one form of white domination has being more or less successfully negotiated, has been more or less overcome in certain spheres of South African life, although exploitation and misery remain in others, we need to revisit these distinctions, to respond anew to the questions. Yet, even back then, the distinction between radical and moderate Africanism did not address the question to everyday life, of how individuals would conduct their daily affairs, would respond to other blacks or whites in individual interaction, as other than political animals.

Ditaba was given a ten year jail sentence at a tender age of sixteen. He was sent to the Island and served with ‘people like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Mlambo, Makwetu, Steve Tshwete from whom (he) got endless inspiration’. The inspiration being referred to is one to complete two degrees while in prison. He came out to lead for a short period one of the liberation organisations which had just been unbanned, the one which espoused an Africanism which the Youth Leaguers were against. Ditaba has had many firsts. He is a leading citizen in many respects. It is to his account of Africanism that we relate the last concern, the question how individual black people were to understand and practice their everyday lives and respond to other blacks or whites as individuals and not as explicitly as political beings:

In the interview, the former university principal and ex-national director-general of education asks the novelist to reflect on his ‘descriptions in Down Second Avenue [volume one of Mphahlele’s autobiography]...whether there are important things that have been omitted, if it is authentic.’ Mphahlele responds: I am very much attracted to humanistic existence, where people treat each other as human beings and not simply as instruments or tools; where people become committed to one another as human beings without declaring the commitment; if one of their kind is in difficulties the others immediately rise to the occasion and do something about.

Either white/or non-racist

One last stop I want to make; it is in respect of some of the ways some of us are often seduced into talking race. I have actually been arguing that rather than talking about race as either a moment of silence or loud, hurled abusive words, or one of difficulty and oppression at one point but ease and freedom at some other point, fraught with utter and complete misunderstanding at one place versus one moulded and characterised by endless understanding in another, what Chabani Manganyi’s once referred to as ‘mutual knowledge’, a world drawn in bold colours and writ large during this moment, but seeming to slip our attention as subscript, to be spoken about, seen again, and heard of during the next conflictual moment, here, on this side, taken to mean or getting used for segregation, while there, on that other side, refashioned and directed at solidarity, difference here togetherness there, abjection versus celebration, problem of the native or solution of the problem, division unity, hate love, it is perhaps more helpful to approach the matter as one of a shape-shifting discursive reality, a series of epistemic moments that do not exist naturally, that have been deployed historically and repudiated over and over but keep changing, vanishing, coming back, contracting, enlarging, and all the time shaping the material reality of those caught in its ever changing recalcitrance. This in fact is what rhetorical analyses of race, racial relations, and racism been saying when they point to the ideological effects of race and its attendants being upheld by local and flexible strategies (Durrheim and Dixon, 1998).

I have also coupled the idea above with a quiet suggestion that it is perhaps better to avoid approaching matters as if, for instance, black individual who befriends or has sexual congress with white individual is, if I am permitted, sleeping with the enemy. Of course this kind of thinking emanates from a presupposition where all white people are the racist enemies of the people, and all black people are the same, love each other dearly, and never racially prejudiced. This does not seem to be correct. Contrary to local, naturalised, popularised, hegemonic notions of race, I hope I have, by indicating the various discourses of interracial relations, shown that everyday, personal and, even overtly political South African views of identity and interpersonal relationships across skin colour or ‘population group’ are and have never been simple nor straightforward. Several of reasons for the complexity, some of which apply to all close relationships, others confined interracial interactions, should have become evident. In any event, in pretty much the same way practices and discourses about every kind of relationship between people, including any social relation between racially or otherwise similar individuals, interracial intimacies cannot but be complex, changeable, layered. The way we talk about our relationships can, has to be, and usually, is less unequivocal than we might want it to be. Although, as social beings, we tend to play along certain unwritten scripts within relationships, there usually are emergent, original, and ambiguous parts to social relationships. Various facts are responsible for this complexity of relationships, including, for example, historical, predispositional, learning, and interactional ones (Ickes & Duck, 2000). In addition, it also has to be kept in mind also that things, as the saying goes, change. Views change. In the process people change or are changed. What people have to say about social reality, about their own and others’ relationships, and about their identities (perhaps people themselves, in fact), may change from one day to the next, from context to context, from relation to relation. All of these make individuals’ talk and thoughts on relationships untidy, inconstant, and fickle.

How people speak and think of relationships runs over artificial borders, spills over categories, and slips under divides such the ones being proposed. Seeing then that attempts to categorise how people view ‘mixed’ relations are efforts in trying to fix what keeps moving, what I am trying to do is likely to be troublesome. Efforts like this are further plagued by the fact that they either leave out very many ‘factors’; or, where one tries to err on the side of comprehensiveness, they lead to a scheme too unwieldy to be useful, mentioning discourse after discourse after discourse.

What we have said above, really, is there is no one kind of relationship as there is no single identity for all people, for all black people, for woman, for disabled people, for masculinity. If relationships are not the same, so are cross-race relationships, and so are constructions of relationship across race. Another point that we have made is that even in a single relationship the substance changes, the discourse shifts, the way we relate to one another as a couple transform over time and context; both transform us as a couple and individuals. The point of all this might be that I have gone against my own advise in posited several categories of close relationships around race. I shall be the first one to admit that the scheme of discourses does not pretend to be exhaustive. Like many propositions of this type I have tended to simplify complex phenomena. The typology of views is perhaps impressionistic, reductionist. But the aim is worth the risk, I want to believe: I‘m pointing to the multifaceted, layered, and variegated character of the relationships and identities; their complexity, shape-shifting form, and that they have to be understood as spatially and temporally located; that is, where is the relationship taking place, Kakamas, Klerksdorp or Katlehong, Cape Town or Calphurnia, and when in 1950, 1977, or 1999.
 
 

Conclusion

Despite attempts by social scientists to categorise, classify, theorise, predict relationships (and identities), they can be easily misunderstood, are very unpredictable, and even uncategorisable. For example SLP told us about a relationship she had with a white man. In her words, she had ‘never thought of having a white boyfriend’. She admitted that this derived from racial stereotypes she held. ‘I saw a white person as different from black just because of the skin colour (sic)’.