Individuals who are historically mixed were designated their own racial classification – coloured – as formalised during apartheid legislation. Toward the end of apartheid, there emerged a new wave of first-generation mixedrace children whose parents often defied the Immorality and Mixed Marriages Acts of 1949 and engaged in interracial relationships. Whilst these relationships have been made to conveniently serve South Africa's ‘rainbow nation’1 rhetoric, their production of putatively ‘post-racial’ children have illuminated colour-blind spots in South Africa's race conversations, where most mixed-race adults, 26 years after apartheid, do not possess the language to make sense of the intersectional and politically unidentified nature of their identities (Julius 2019). This can be primarily attributed to the prevailing discourse surrounding nation and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa, where citizenship to large sections of the population is understood on the basis of skin colour (Rhoodie & Niebenberg 1994:44).

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Image Title:  Harper Family Photo 

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The Major design Project (MDP) is framed around the ideas of erasure, spatial-cleansing2 and whitewashing3 . Classification methods carried out by the apartheid government demarcated race definitions to ‘unidentifiable’ South Africans of mixed cultural heritage through humiliating standards and laws, one of which was the ‘pencil test.’4 As a result of this test, combined with the vagueness of the Population Registration Act (PRA) of 1950 and Group Areas Act (GAA) of 1950, communities were split apart on the basis of those racial demarcations (De Bruyn 2007:422). In some cases, members of the same family were classified into different groups, and thus forced to live apart. As a first-generation mixed-race woman and the offspring of an interracial marriage – having not grown up in a historically coloured community – many questions surrounding coloured identity alongside first-generation mixed heritage have proven haunting. At gatherings, I ascribed my condition of belonging with those who looked like me, i.e., coloured people. Instead, confusion has and continues to persist due, in part, to my sometimes more Afrocentric5 predisposition, embodied within my non-conventional ‘coloured’ appearance, exacerbating feelings of displacement and disconnection from those that I am often superficially grouped with. An added identity complication comes in the difference between the archives of the coloured community, in contrast to that of the first-generation mixed-race population. Where the coloured community’s history is long and contains a myriad of evolutions, mixed heritage is steeped in conditions of both hyper-presence (in their documented, protected, preserved and disseminated white history and legacy) and hyper-absence (through the oral histories and narrations of their black history and legacy) simultaneously.

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Footnotes:

1 A term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe post-apartheid South Africa, after South Africa's first fully democratic election of 1994.

2 In apartheid South Africa, this referred to the state enforced removal, displacement, and dispossession of inhabitants (mainly coloured & black) from their original settlement to a different location settlement on the basis of rebuilding the area for incoming white inhabitants. In post-apartheid South Africa, it refers to gentrification projects that favours higher economic classes.

3 The deliberate attempt to conceal unpleasant or incriminating facts about (someone or something).

4 This test was used to determine racial identity in South Africa during the apartheid era, distinguishing whites from coloureds and blacks.

5 Regarding African or black culture as pre-eminent.

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                             Image Title:  Portrait of  my Grandmother                        Image Title:  Portrait of my Grandfather

 

The work investigates the long-term effects of the historical practice of race designations and spatial-cleansing on ideas of identity and belonging within the menage of coloured people and those of mixed heritage. The work seeks to disrupt how those static racial categories continue to play out, also taking into account how racial allocations such as ‘coloured’ remain narratives of indenture, used as an example of anti-blackness.

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Image Title : 7 Steps of old District Six

https://www.saha.org.za/news/2010/February/district_six_recalling_the_forced_removals.htm

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District Six in Cape Town is one of the most well know sites in South Africa where spatial-cleansing took place. It was demolished under the GAA, leaving over 60,000 of its residents – 94% coloured, 6% black/indian – forcefully removed by the apartheid regime in the 1970s. Deemed a slum, fit only for clearance, the area was portrayed as crime-ridden and dangerous; claiming it as vice den, full of ‘immoral’ activities like gambling, drinking, and prostitution. By 1982, the majority of its residents had been relocated to the Cape Flats township complex, roughly 25 kilometres away. The Cape Flats became one of the ‘dumping grounds’ of apartheid. Though these were the official reasons, most residents believed that the government spatially cleansed the land because of its proximity to the city centre, Table Mountain, and the harbour, i.e., spaces of economic capacity and possibility (District Six 2020).

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Image Title:  Removed

 Demolition in progress, District Six, Cape Town, circa 1974-1975. Taken during the final stage of removal of 6 000 families from District Six, for relocation to the Cape Flats and Atlantis, in terms of the Group Areas Act.

UCT Libraries' Special Collections archives

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Communities such as District Six embodies the consequence that space has over people’s opportunities and prospects through the territorial politics of apartheid. Here, the logic of boundaries, segregation and distance was an effective instrument in the control, subjugation and exploitation of people (Coetzer 2008:145) to uphold apartheid’s philosophy that interracial interaction bred conflict, necessitating the separation of the races (District Six 2020).

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Image Title:  Image of a home in the Cape Flats 

https://socialdocumentary.net/

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The project proposes A Last Supper; a family reunion that explores and critically reconsiders the intimate home setting of a racially obscure family. A supper is used as a conceptual device that draws out the micro-scale of the invisible, harsh constructs of macro-segregation in the post-apartheid city of Cape Town. The project introduces Table Mountain, both geographically and conceptually, as the ‘supper’ table that orchestrates a collective relationality between different ‘members’ coming to that table, where some serve and some are served. The Cape Flats is conceptualized as the ‘kitchen’, a space of making and a space in service, where the sourcing of missing ingredients is found. Missing Ingredients are the conversations, tools, ideologies and spatial developments brought to this table of past selectivity. A sit-down with the ‘family’ reveals the social currency and hierarchy of different members of this mixed household, bringing forth black narratives, social exclusions, segregation, and whitewashing.

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Image Title: Family Supper of Harper family

 

My family photo album becomes a tool used to collage a recipe of blurry moments that are not clearly remembered, and the ‘missing’ members are present as ghostly figures, not fully erased but evidently absent from the original supper. A collection of photographs and corresponding performances are coded through script from narratives collected in conversation with various family members. Artifacts are used as props in the film and photographic archive, which may include clothing, household objects and other family heirlooms. Film is used to reflect past livelihood, while collage and photomontages map and piece together fragmented narratives of history.

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   Image Title:  Image of a archived kitchen utilities at District Six Museum

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Abstract References:

 

Coetzer, N. 2008. Exploring ‘place-making,’ city squares & other places: Cape Town’s pre-apartheid spatial politics. South African Journal of Art History 23(1): 145. [O]. Available: https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/28213 Accessed 24 April 2021.

 

District Six. 2020. [O]. Available: https://amp.en.shops-com.in/1465152/1/district-six.html Accessed 24 April 2021.

 

de Bruyn, P. 2008. Frommer's South Africa. Internet Archive, pp.422. [O]. Available: https://archive.org/details/frommerssouthafr00pipp/page/422/mode/2up Accessed 22 March 2021.

 

Julius, Z. 2019. Proclamation 73. [O]. Available: http://www.zarajulius.com/proclamation-73- Accessed 29 March 2021.

 

Luthuli, A.J. 1962. Let My People Go. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, pp.134

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