Problematizing Coloured Historiography

EFRON, LAURA

Workshop; Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism; 2014

This presentation is about coloured studies' historiography; it's an intend to make an analytical approach on the work done over the last 30 years by scholars on coloured identity.This paper is framed in a wider investigation for my M.A Thesis on Coloured identities in dispute. From my point of view, the history of this group has been displaced and colonized by a post-apartheid dominant version of history based on a dominant view over the struggle against apartheid. By studying the TLSA and reassessing the agency of some members of that community, my aim is to discuss that dominant version. The new TLSA leaders of the early 40s were the architects of the ideas of non-collaboration and non-racialism that would, later on, be adopted and transformed by the ANC in the struggle against apartheid and in the construction of the new South Africa. That is why I'm focusing my studies in the eve of the apartheid.Even though it could seem a marginal theme within South African historiography, replacing their agency should allow us to reconstruct a polyphonic narrative not only about the past but also about the present. But talking about the coloured community is not enough? more important is to discuss its representation as a political homogenous group. Within the coloured community there were different points of view about their present and hence its members had different reactions over it. By using the case of the TLSA, my general purpose is to make a thick description, in Geertz sense, so that we can decompose that wide representation over coloured community, so that we can reflect about the meanings of those representations nowadays.   The Teacher´s League of South Africa was created in 1913 by prominent members of the coloured community of the Cape Province. It had the support of the African People´s Organization, an exclusively coloured political organization, which allowed it to expand throughout the province and to increase its membership. The initial aim of the League was to bring coloured teachers together so that they could obtain measures that will improve the quality of education in this sector of the population. However, with the changes in the policies of the Union of South Africa and the increase of the racial measures, the League tended to become a space of awareness among various sectors of society dominated by the regime. Since then, it was intended to educate the public for the freedom of their minds.