(p 190). For the majority of enslaved Africans and African Americans prior to the mid-nineteenth century, creolisation did not happen away from the plantation system but within it, writes Trouillot. This creation was possible because slaves found fertile ground in the interstices of the system, in the latitude provided by the inherent contradictions between the system and specific plantations. On some plantations, Trouillot shows, slaves were allowed to grow their own food and, at times, to sell portions of what they harvested. This practice was instituted by owners to enhance their own profits, since they did not have to pay for the slaves’ food. Eventually, however, these practices, which at first emerged because they provided concrete advantages to particular owners, went against the logic of the plantation system. Time used on the provision grounds was also slave-controlled time to a large extent. It was time to ‘create culture’ knowingly or unknowingly ... Time indeed to develop modes of thought and codes of behavior that were to survive plantation slavery itself (p 203). Trouillot writes about social time and social space seized within the system and turned against it; about the ability to stretch margins and circumvent borderlines which lay at the heart of African American cultural practices in the New World.
If slavery and the creolisation it produced were crucial to early modernity they were also central to the formation of diasporic communities. The articulation of race to space and motion is an integral part of even recent Marxist-inflected readings of early modern forms of racial identity-making. Some of these readings focus on the intercultural and transnational formations of the Atlantic world (Gilroy 1993; Linebaugh & Rediker 2000). This Atlantic world is peopled by workers: sailors, pirates, commoners, prostitutes, strikers, insurrectionists. Here, the sea is not a frontier one crosses, it is a shifting space between fixed places which it connects. This is a geography of worldliness, which could be opposed to the geographies of particularism and nationalism.
It is worth noting here how relatively few theorists have explored these geographies, although the work of John Thompson (1992), Veit Erlmann (1991) and Rob Nixon (1994) has been important in this regard. One critique of these readings is that South Africa, or the Cape at least, in fact looked to the Indian Ocean, as Robert Shell (1994) and Patrick Harries (2000) have suggested and which my own work with Françoise Vergès and Abdoumaliq Simone (2004) has explored.2 Given its tri-centric location between the Indian and Atlantic worlds as well as the land mass of the African interior, further readings of this space from an outer-national vantage point is likely to reinforce a creolité hypothesis.
Trouillot and others provide a reading of creolisation firmly located within paradigms of violence and mobility, spatiality and circulation, and it must also be on such terms, though with its own historical specificities, that any use of the notion in South Africa could be made.
South Africa can be characterised as a country born out of processes of mobility, the boundaries of which have constantly been reinvented over time, through war, dislocation and dispossession (the Mfecane, European colonialism, the Great Trek and labour migrancy, for instance). A multiplicity of forms of subjugation has emerged as a result of this, not all of which are class based. Here we might refer to the Mfecane as a series of violent encounters leading to lines of exchange and fusion; or to the mutual borrowings in the realm of domesticity between ‘servant’ and ‘mistress’ (of which Judith Coullie, in her book The Closest of Strangers (2004, p 2) remarks ‘…notwithstanding this utter separateness (and even somehow enabled by it), it was common for women to experience long-term mutual dependencies … the relationship was indeed the very closest, though the strict limits of intimacy … were rarely breached’)3; or to long-distance lines of connection in the mines between workers from South Africa and those who come from elsewhere on the continent and beyond, a transcontinental mixing which shaped worker identities and ideologies in South Africa in ways that have yet to be written about, although Harries (1994) and Coplan (1994) have begun this work, if still within circumscribed geographical limits.
Deborah Posel (2001) has pointed in her work to the vagaries of racial definition on which the apartheid state relied – a ‘common sense’ approach to who belonged to which race, based firmly within the materialities of everyday life. Rather than strict legal definitions, apartheid enforcers relied on such measures as the infamous pencil test, the idea that someone’s race was to be decided according to ‘what was generally accepted’ [as white or black or coloured] or ‘the environment and dress of the person concerned’ (pp 102-5). These ‘common sense’ definitions were then fixed and bureaucratised by the state. They were also definitions which, once the apartheid straitjacket was broken, appear to have remained internalised. Yet how people actually thought about themselves, and the interstitial manoeuvres they were able to make within this ‘common sense’ bureaucracy of race, remain to be researched in a properly microscopic way.
There is, perhaps, a further point to be made here, and that is in relation to the work of cultural theory itself. While social scientists seek a view of the social ‘whole’ and thus often repeat the apartheid metanarrative or prism of race in their interpretation of the social, cultural theory finds itself freer to ask questions left unasked, to inhabit zones, even of the past, that refute the master trope and give life to interstitial narratives that speak to the whole in defamiliarising ways.
Any deployment of aspects of the work on creolité coming from scholars such as Trouillot, Gilroy, and Linebaugh and Rediker would need to involve readings hardly yet undertaken of South Africa’s relationship to other spaces, aiming to open South Africa’s readings of itself to new boundaries. As I have emphasised above, in general the resources of such a hypothesis can only be put to work if the term is given a particular inflection, and that is its violence. Indeed, given a properly historical reading, both in South Africa and elsewhere, creolisation carries with it a particularly vivid sense (compared to, say, notions of hybridity and syncretism) of the cruelty that processes of mixing have involved.
While we have, to date, undertaken few readings of the intimacies, across race and class, that have long characterised a deeply segregated society – that is, the often unexpected points of intersection and practical knowledge of the other wrought from a common, though often mutually coercive and confrontational experience – we might equally remark, using the South African case as a powerful moment in a wider global history of race, that intimacy does not necessarily exclude violation. Intimacy is not always a happy process. On the contrary, it may often be another name for tyranny. This all being said, my own intellectual preoccupation is less with the term ‘creolisation’ than with a way of thinking, a method of reading, the possibility of a different cartography.
Regional variations
In the light of the available historical and ethnographic material it might be argued that such a method of reading relies on the history of the Cape. Although this may be so, such an approach can be usefully applied to other regions of the country. Consider, for example, the density of the circulation of workers through urban sites of production in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Southern, Central and Eastern Africa over centuries. Consider, too, the transnational cultures of the mines, of which we still know so little. Do we believe that there was no cross-cultural interaction; that South Africans took nothing from other African migrant workers in inventing an urban vernacular culture they now claim as their own? Or that the Indian presence in Natal had no influence on ways of being black, or white? As for the political culture of the Bantustans, it surely cannot be unearthed without mapping the imitations by local potentates of their white masters’ culture of power. Conversely, the practices of apartheid tyrants cannot be grasped without paying attention to the various ways in which they subtly mimicked, in selective ways, their victims, while at the same time denying their common humanity.
More substantial, though, is the evidence already gathered, by historians in particular, about the flexibility of racial boundaries on the Witwatersrand in the years directly preceding apartheid. Jon Hyslop (1995), in his work on white working-class women and the invention of apartheid, shows how the newfound independence of the Afrikaner female working class on the Rand threatened patriarchal relations in white society, and how Nationalist government hysteria about ‘mixed marriages’ played an important role in re-establishing gender hierarchies. In urban slums Afrikaans-speaking poor whites were frequently not demonstrating the instinctive aversion, socially or sexually, to racial mixing proclaimed