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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2011
The politics of coloured people in twentieth-century South Africa have generally been characterised as marginal from mainstream South African events. Correspondingly, attempts to initiate political developments along cultural or ethnic lines - emphasising Mama or Griqua identity, for example - have been noted primarily for their divisive and factional composition. Such writings focus on overt political action. They highlight either leaders’ involvement with, or opposition to, state structures; or the internal, often petty and frustrated conflicts between leaders, but fail to explain the marginalisation of coloured politics. But this emphasis on ‘the political’ removes from our gaze other, more productive avenues for understanding the identity of mixed-race people in South Africa. Political activity, for the Griqua, cannot be evaluated except through the lens of Christianity. Since religion promises to fulfil people's ambitions through redemption in the afterlife, Griqua-Christian ideas about overt political quests and active campaigning against discrimination - on either an individual or societal level - tended to be deemed unnecessary. As it was God who ultimately meted out punishments or rewards, Griqua people's energies were better used worshipping him. Nonetheless, these same Griqua people lived in the profane world in which - at least during the apartheid era - they were officially classified as ‘coloured’. Their struggles, based primarily on the need for official ethnic recognition as Griqua, were, in effect, political struggles. This partly Griqua, partly coloured identity enabled them considerable political flexibility and produced the complex social patterns explored below. A further distinction underpinning the Griqua-coloured ambiguity was that between inkommers (newcomers) and boorlings (people born to Griqua-town).
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17 Griqua People's Organisation Constitution, 1981 (Unpublished Document 1, n.d.).
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19 Although the Griqua were officially recognised as a subcategory of the broader Coloured population, in effect the Apartheid Government paid little attention to internal divisions within this category.
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23 The people of Griquatown refer to people born locally as boorlings whereas the correct Afrikaans term is in boorlings.
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25 A family named Fortuin was centrally involved in the creation of a Griqua polity during the nineteenth century. During the 1830s, Willem Fortuin was a deacon in the church in Griqua-town, his son was a catechist and school teacher at Hardcastle, a Griqua outpost, and his daughter a teacher in Griquatown. The family was seen to be a ‘blessing’ both to the mission and to the surrounding area, although a dispute over remuneration was finally to separate Jan Fortuin from the LMS: Wilson, K., Godfather to the Griquas (Unpublished Manuscript n.d.) 105, 137Google Scholar; Legassick, M.C., ‘The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries: The Politics of a Frontier Zone’ (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, UCLA 1969) 416, 612Google Scholar. Eddie Fortuin, who married a woman whose surname was Fortune (the English version of Fortuin) may well be a descendant of this historic family despite not having grown up in Griquatown.
26 Ross, ‘Griqua Government’; Adam Kok's Griqua.
27 Strathern's work in the Essex village, Elmdom, UK, demonstrates a similar sense of belonging for ‘indigenous’ families who remained at the centre of village life. These families, faced with the highly mobile residence patterns of newcomers to the village and of their own children, referred to themselves as ‘real Elmdoners’ who had been bom there and were ‘of the village’ rather than simply resident in Elmdom (1981): Strathern, M., After Nature: English Kinship in the late Twentieth Century (Cambridge 1992)Google Scholar.
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29 Despite an attempt to survey members of the upper socio-economic classes, Morse and Peele overlooked the elite nature of coloured politics because they were concerned with politics only in terms of black and white oppositions. Coloured people, according to them, could be either a ‘coloured bourgeoisie’ or adopt a ‘black power stance’. As Lewis points out, in the 1930s, there were coloured leaders whose demands were made neither in terms of an affiliation to black resistance politics, nor assimilation into white political and economic structures, but rather in terms of segregation from both: Lewis, , Between the Wire and the Wall;Google Scholar see Edgar, R. and Saunders, C., ‘A.A.S. le Fleur and the Griqua Trek of 1917: Segregation, Self-help, and Ethnic Identity’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 15/2 (1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Le Fleur, for example, ‘attempted to revive the dream of an independent Criqua homeland, under the unifying symbols of a Griqua identity’ ( Lewis, , Between the Wire and the Wall, 153)Google Scholar.
30 The Griefcuja VolksKerk van SuidAfrika, founded in 1959, was never strong in Griquatown where most people belonged to the NGSK (see the Criekwa VolksKerk van Suid Afrika, Constitution of laws and regulations). Kanyiles then committed himself to the African Indepen-dent Orthodox Church in Kimberley where he was elected Bishop in 1972.
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32 The new name was chosen after the NGSK united with the NGK in Afrika on the 14 April 1994 (Ligdraer/Ligstraal 57/6 (17 June 1996) 1, 4).
33 The 1995 and 1998 surveys suggest that the membership of the VGK appeared to have settled at about 40% of Phillipsville's population.
34 See Legassick who argues that the native agents, whose objective was evangelisation, also played political roles and sometimes expressly combined these political and religious functions: Legassick, M., ‘The Northern Frontier to 1820: The emergence of the Griqua People’ in: Elphick, R. and Giliomee, H. eds, The Shaping of South African Society 1652-1820 (Cape Town 1979) 269Google Scholar.
35 After 1994 the Secondary School could no longer maintain its racial exclusion policy and keep non-white children from attending school in Griquatown. Once school attendance become racially mixed, the white students left and started to attend a private school in Douglas (70 kilometres away).
36 He had, in 1998, been contracted to oversee the construction of 188 houses in Griquatown as part of the Government's RDP Program. He was responsible for the hiring of builders, plumbers, carpenters and casual labourers to work on this project and these activities kept him busy.
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