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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'The Product of Civilization in its Most Repellent Manifestation': Ambiguities in the Racial Perceptions of the APO (African Political Organization), 1909-1923
Author:Adhikari, MohamedISNI
Year:1997
Periodical:The Journal of African History
Volume:38
Issue:2
Pages:283-300
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:Coloureds
ethnicity
History and Exploration
Ethnic and Race Relations
Politics and Government
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/182825
Abstract:Historians writing on the coloured community of South Africa have tended to minimize the role of coloured people in the making of their identity. They have portrayed coloured identity as something either imposed upon hapless people by racist whites or as the result of the State's divide and rule strategies. This article provides a more nuanced understanding of coloured identity by focusing on the role that coloured people played in the making of their own identity. Emphasis is placed on the ways in which the marginality and the intermediate status of this social group resulted in ambivalences in their political outlook. The article focuses on the African Political Organization, the first substantive coloured political association, founded in Cape Town in 1902, and which published its own newspaper, APO, from May 1909. It examines APO as the mouthpiece of the coloured elite, the campaigning against the draft South Africa Act, the progressive abandoning by the APO of its activism after Union in 1910, the APO's assimilationism and coloured separatism, the decline of the organization into a state of dormancy from the latter half of 1913, and the demise of the newspaper in 1923. Notes, ref., sum.
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