The two books were first published by US university presses and this would seem to indicate that race matters as much for American scholars as for South Africans. In both countries, even today, society remains racially segregated, and race continues to be the most commonly used device for population classifications and even individual identities.

Mohamed Adhikari is a Cape historian and the aim of his book, which is based on his UCT doctoral thesis, is to challenge the view that coloured identity has undergone a process of continuous transformation. His more nuanced representation of ‘the nature of Coloured identity’ is not necessarily true, especially as it relies on text more than on real people to show that ‘Coloured identity’ has remained stable. But which coloured identity is he referring to?

The author explores the long history of ‘Coloured identity’ from a constructivist perspective to provide a study that differs from the old ‘essentialist’ and ‘instrumentalist’ approaches he criticises. But it is not apparent that he achieves this because all three approaches are partially true and overlap, and also because working with the same stable Cape Town population (that, though drawn from the rest of the world, is nevertheless disconnected enough to create this peculiar racial system of exclusion from rather than belonging to the rest of society) leads us to the same conclusion: confusion. The title borrows the oft repeated Cape lament that “under white rule we were not white enough” (some were and there are government records to that effect), and “under ANC rule we are not black enough” (some do gain from BEE and ANC largesse), an anti-historical prejudice if there ever was one.

His working definition of ‘Coloured’ is, he admits, the tautological ‘people who regard themselves as Coloured’ but he does not, like a sociologist or anthropologist would, show when, how and why people regard themselves or are regarded by others as such. We know that the same people may also be Italian, Indian or Sotho depending on the circumstances. And as for Coloured people not being African, well, only in Cape Town.

No one has one fixed identity. Despite the subtitle, the book in fact confirms that there are many ways of being Coloured and that there may even be more than one Coloured (racial) identity. This after all was what even the infamous Population Registration Act could not escape. Readers who are not from the Cape will probably see that everything he says about Coloured identity applies to others as well. All social identities are fluid and flexible and situational and confusing, as well as relatively unstable in form - except when fixed in print and archived.

Many people still tend to think of Coloured identity in apartheid terms either a) as a residual nonentity in which the National Party bureaucracy dumped all people they could not classify as black or white, or b) as the second class in the hierarchy of socio-economic class and pigment derived privilege. Thus instead of Colouredness representing /All/ (which, like all human categories, it does), the negative influence of apartheid has created a category of person that is seen as /None of the above/. As the Cape opens up to the rest of the world, all this is changing and Coloured visitors to Europe or America have discovered that there are numerous other ways of defining people.

MacDonald as a political scientist does not dwell so much on the history but analyses race in the post-apartheid transition. He also does not focus on one group but on the whole of South Africa; his book thus complements Adhikari’s very well. We all expected that apartheid’s ‘racist republic’ (as Radio Zambia used to call it) would be replaced by a united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist (and yes socialist!) South Africa, didn’t we? Well may be the democracy part has been adequately sorted out but the rest is proving very difficult to make. MacDonald shows how the ideology of non-racialism has failed to replace the colonial legacy of race identity and racial solidarities. He notes that this has only profited the black elites as the poor have been left out. We should remember, however, that the black elite’s struggle in 1912 was not for BEE, many were doing very well and just wanted to hold onto the rights they already had as British subjects. Having lost that struggle, they were dispossessed and disenfranchised and declared non-citizens. It is not the ideology of non-racialism, or even the attainment of full citizenship that can correct the colonial crime of racism, therefore, and this is where both the Cape Town critique of BEE discussed in Adhikari’s book and MacDonald’s view that the economy has been /multiracialized/ but not /deracialized/ reveal the crux of the matter. Has the New South Africa, like the old regime, not left the black poor behind? What is the non-racial solution to that racist puzzle? Both books champion the right of people to define themselves but evidently that is not good enough if you are poor and powerless. <ends>