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Periodical article | Leiden University 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, Mohamed |
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. |