Providing Local Color? “Cape Coloureds” and Cape Town's Identity From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Near Present

Cities and regions will certainly have multiple meanings for individual inhabitants, multiple senses of place generated through experience and consequent emotional attachments. But in the modern world, many will also have had what Jim Dyos – referring specifically to cities -- called their ‘individual characteristics’ (he hesitated to call them personalities) carefully packaged and advertised. And a major strategy that their official tourist experts and private entrepreneurs employ is to suggest that a particular destination will be ‘out of the ordinary’, perhaps ‘unique’, from a visitor’s perspective. This suggests that such place sellers will create some unifying myth about modern places however objectively complex they have become
This paper focuses on one enduring element in the construction of Cape Town’s mythic identity from the late nineteenth century onwards, ‘Cape Coloureds’. Port cities are pre-eminently places of cultural exchange. They are also often places that have produced considerable ‘racial’ intermingling, cohabitation, marriage and thereby, supposedly, biological ‘hybridity’. Creolisation perhaps most acceptably describes both processes. Cape Town certainly witnessed creolisation of both kinds. The emergence of the term Coloured as both a self-description and categorisation by others has been explored in considerable historiographical depth. The intention here is to see how representations of Coloured Capetonians became part of what would now be called the city’s ‘destination branding’, and to explore change and continuity in such representations. To this end it draws on the insights of Gareth Stedman Jones into changing depictions of London’s ‘cockneys’, the comparative historical insights of Stephen Ward into ‘place-selling’, and John Urry’s theory of the ‘tourist gaze’.