missing ingredients series

As a first-generation mixed-race woman and the offspring of an interracial marriage – having not grown up in a historically coloured community – many questions surrounding coloured identity alongside first-generation mixed heritage have proven haunting. At gatherings, I ascribed my condition of belonging with those who looked like me, i.e., coloured people. Instead, confusion has and continues to persist due, in part, to my sometimes more Afrocentric predisposition, embodied within my non-conventional ‘coloured’ appearance, exacerbating feelings of displacement and disconnection from those that I am often superficially grouped with. An added identity complication comes in the difference between the archives of the coloured community, in contrast to that of the first-generation mixed-race population. Where the coloured community’s history is long and contains a myriad of evolutions, mixed heritage is steeped in conditions of both hyper-presence (in their documented, protected, preserved and disseminated white history and legacy) and hyper-absence (through the oral histories and narrations of their black history and legacy) simultaneously. 

The film series Missing ingredents is an extract from my thesis body of work that is framed around the ideas of erasure, spatial-cleansing and whitewashing. Classification methods carried out by the apartheid government demarcated race definitions to ‘unidentifiable’ South Africans of mixed cultural heritagethrough humiliating standards and laws, one of which was the ‘pencil test.’4As a result of this test, combined with the vagueness of the Population Registration Act (PRA) of 1950 and Group Areas Act (GAA) of 1950, communities were split apart on the basis of those racial demarcations(De Bruyn 2007:422). In some cases, members of the same family were classified into different groups, and thus forced to live apart. 

The work investigates the long-term effects of the historical practice of race designations and spatial-cleansing on ideas of identity and belonging within the menage of coloured people and those of mixed heritage. The work seeks to disrupt how those static racial categories continue to play out, also taking into account how racial allocations such as ‘coloured’ remain narratives of indenture, used as an example of anti-blackness while looking into the intimate ideologies of home and diaspora.

Keywords/tags: spatial cleansing, erasure, whitewashing