ETD Collection

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/104


Please note: Digitised content is made available at the best possible quality range, taking into consideration file size and the condition of the original item. These restrictions may sometimes affect the quality of the final published item. For queries regarding content of ETD collection please contact IR specialists by email : IR specialists or Tel : 011 717 4652 / 1954

Follow the link below for important information about Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Library Guide about ETD

Browse

Filters

20191

Settings

Author: search.filters.author.Hein, Nathan J.PHas files: Yes

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    The making of Coloured Identity in Vereeniging: 1912 to early 2000s
    (2019) Hein, Nathan J.P
    The current literature on coloured identities focuses overwhelmingly on the port-city of Cape Town and what is today Western Cape. Consequently, the vast majority of what is known about coloured identity is based on the people and processes of identity making in what is today Western Cape and limited by the lack of understanding of the different sets of spatial and temporal settings and historical conditions, which made coloured identities that are distinction from those scholars have focused on in the Western Cape. This dissertation examines the processes of imagining and settling of coloured identity across the different spaces of Cape Stands, Top Location and Rust-ter-Vaal and changing times through the periods of the segregationist, apartheid and democratic eras. This dissertation shifts the focus to two semi-rural townships in Vereeniging and by doing so complicates the exiexisting literature and challenges existing popular discourse on coloured identity. Based on life history interviews, it analyses and explains the making of coloured identities through the lens of social and local history, and shows how everyday social and cultural experiences played a role in this process. The study demonstrates that, before the group areas removals in 1968, coloured identity in Cape Stands and Top Location, Vereeniging, was characterised by a relative ambiguity and which overlapped but never fully collapsed the demarcations of coloured and African identities. However, after the removals of Africans to Sharpeville in the 1940s and 1950s, followed by the removal of coloureds under the Group Areas Act to Rust-ter-Vaal in 1968, the boundaries of racial identity gradually strengthened, making ‘coloured’ the primary identity among Vereeniging’s coloured population. After 1994, democracy and the process of desegregation set the stage to reconfigure and remake colouredness. This post-apartheid colouredness in some ways reflected former Cape Stands identities, but in others was also laden with the legacies of apartheid and the identities formed in a context of racially-segregated resettlement. The study of Vereeniging raises questions about the nuanced and ambiguous processes of making identities and what this means for how people understand themselves and the relationships with other people, communities and the government within and beyond Vereeniging.