Indelible apartheid: intergenerational post-colonial narratives of colonial-born coloured females about hair, race and identity in South Africa

ABSTRACT

What do the narratives of five Cape Coloured women of three generations reveal about issues of race and identity in post-apartheid South Africa? This question is the essence of this study. Identity in apartheid South Africa was strictly and legislatively framed around race, defined by physical characteristics of skin colour and hair texture. Whiteness was the epitome with socio-economic privileges, which invariably created aspirations for this body or proximity to it among some Coloured South Africans in the pursuit of social-economic upliftment. But in a free, post-apartheid, and multi-racial South Africa, do the colonial constructions of identities still linger? Through a critical theoretical lens of postcolonial discourses about race and identity, this study explores intergenerational phenomenological expressions of five Coloured women between the ages of 48 and 104 born during South Africa’s colonial and apartheid eras. The aim was to explore if colonial narratives of hair still influence hair trends, self-presentation, race and identity. It seems racist ideologies of the past are generational, and still shape the perception of hair amongst this cohort of Coloured females.

KEYWORDS:

• Coloured
• hair
• postcolonial
• apartheid
• identity
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

The financial assistance of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, in collaboration with theSouth African Humanities Deans Association towards this research is hereby acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We engage race as superficial historical and socio-political categorisations to justify differences and denigration. We recognise the artificiality of the exclusiveness of racial categories that influences specious assumption that ‘race’ is then pure and mutually exclusive, which results in situating people within and in between a spectrum of racial categories. We use racial categories in this paper, not to reify these sociological constructs, but in line with the South African government demographical identifiers and to engage the social implications of the historical constructions of race and people.