DRAFT PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR DISTRIBUTE FURTHER Creolisation, Colonial Citizenship…hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/sites/all/files/Erasmus... · · 2010-05-04cultural creations

DRAFT PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR DISTRIBUTE FURTHER

Creolisation, Colonial Citizenship(s), and Degeneracy: A critique of selected histories of Sierra Leone and South Africa1

Zimitri Erasmus

…identity, at least as far as the Western peoples who made up the great majority of voyagers,

discoverers, and conquerors were concerned, constitutes itself implicitly at first (‘my root is

the strongest’) and then is explicitly exported as a value (‘a person’s worth is determined by

his root’). (Glissant, 1997: 17).

In this work I examine the nexus between creolisation, colonial citizenship(s)

and discourses of degeneration. I explore genealogical and bio-political

questions related to the colonial category ‘Creole’, its twentieth century

appropriation as ‘Krio’ in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and its mutation into

‘Coloured’ in South Africa by the middle of that century. Against common

conceptions of ‘Krio’ and ‘Coloured’ as ‘freak’ communities ‘confused about

their identities’, I locate these formations within theories of ‘creolisation’:

cultural creations actively produced amidst the catastrophe and

circumscriptions of, and in contestation to the violence and domination of

different colonial encounters. This frame renders these formations constitutive

of African, black, and global experiences in contexts of colonialism.

To these ends, I create a conversation between selected works of three key

thinkers. Edouard Glissant (1992; 1997), in postcolonial literary and cultural

theory, who theorises creolisation in the Caribbean. Jean-Loup Amselle

(1998), a critical anthropologist. He offers an anti-colonial conception of

culture in West Africa, as does Glissant for the Caribbean. And, Mahmood

Mamdani (1996; 1997) in political science and theory, who writes about British

colonial administrations’ categories and their relationship to differentiated

citizenship in Africa. This conversation reveals entanglements of culture and

structure at the site of cultural creations of the colonised outside the bounds of

customary law; the site of ‘non-native cultures’. This is not a new revelation

2


(see Stoler 1995; 2010). The novelty of this work is, rather, in the thinkers,

fields and contexts it brings together.

To illustrate the significance of these entanglements, I counterpose them with

three texts that, in my view, are blind to the presence of these complexities

both before and during British Indirect Rule in colonial Africa. The first is

Robert Shell’s Children of Bondage (1994). He offers a social history of

slavery at the Cape of Good Hope in the period 1652 to 1838. The second is

Akintola Wyse’s The Krio of Sierra Leone: an interpretive history (1991). The

third, a collection of essays, New Perspectives on the Sierra Leone Krio,

edited by Mac Dixon-Fyle and Gibril Cole (2006) in honour of Wyse’s work.

These cover nineteenth and twentieth century Sierra Leone. I examine these

authors’ use of the concept ‘creolisation’, the conceptions of ‘Creole’ as a

social category in Freetown, and the use of ‘creole’ as an objectifying

description of slaves born at the Cape. My meta-reading of these texts is

shaped by both Francophone (albeit limited to English translations) and

Anglophone scholarship. It is concerned with ways in which ideas and

practices of empire “loop back” (Hacking 1995) in these histories of Sierra

Leone and the Cape, more than with how they travelled between colony and

metropole (Stoler 1995). This reading does not adjudicate between cultural,

literary and political theory. Rather, it hopes to enable their embrace.

‘Ethnological thinking’

I argue first, that the selected authors’ conceptions of creolisation indirectly

surrender to the idea of degeneration: “a process of pathological change from

one condition to another in society and in the body” (Pick, 1989: 50).

Secondly, that the texts on Sierra Leone neglect the colonial history of the

politics behind the category ‘Creole’. I show the similarities in this history

behind the South African category of apartheid - ‘Coloured’. Finally, I suggest

that, depending on its use, the concept ‘creolisation’ – as opposed to the

category ‘Creole’ and the ideology of ‘creolism’ - has the capacity to pry open

3


possibilities more supple than the habitual postures of what Amselle calls

“ethnological thinking” (1998: 1). The idea of degeneration as deviation from a

‘normal type’ of being human (Pick, 1989: 50) is part of ‘ethnological thinking’:

“the continuity-breaking procedure that extracts, refines, and classifies with

the intention of isolating types, whether they be in the realm of politics,

economics, religion, ethnicity, or culture” (ibid.). This procedure deploys bio-

geo-cultural markers to construct difference, sameness and inequality. I show

how such constructions are reflected in the adjective ‘creole’ and in changing

meanings of ‘Creole’, the social category, making both a colonial category that

ultimately referred to a degenerate type behind colonialism’s imposition of

differentiated citizenship(s).

Typological thinking was central to British colonial administrations’

politicisation of indigeneity. Colonial jurisprudence imposed the categories of

population: ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ (Mamdani 1996). ‘Native’ referred to

subject ethnicities considered “ancestrally indigenous” (Brathwaite, 1971: xv),

‘tribal’, and governed by customary law. In their attempts to settle a meaning

of European-ness and of English-ness, these regimes shunted ‘non-natives’ in

and out of colonial notions of ‘native’ and ‘civilised’. Furthermore, typological

thinking was central to these administrations’ politicisation of ‘race’ through

the distinction between the ‘master’ and “subject races” (Mamdani 1996;

2001). The latter included ‘natives’ and ‘non-natives’. This racial distinction

separated settlers and their descendants, all of whom were assumed eligible

for full citizenship and governed by civil law, from ‘natives’ who were governed

by customary law. Each of these categories was separated from ‘non-natives’

considered ‘non-tribal’ and potential or partial citizens (Mamdani 1996). ‘Non-

natives’, considered ‘better types of native’ at particular moments in colonial

history (as shown later), were shunted in and out of citizenship and colonial

civil law at the behest of these administrations. ‘Natives’ remained, for the

most part, entirely outside these legal parameters which defined degrees of

closeness to being human. These categories were used - as Holston (2008)

puts it in his work on Brazil - to govern social difference in ways that

4


authorised and reproduced inequality and, I would add, inaugurated solid

notions of identification. The persistent (mis)use of ‘race’, indigeneity, and

ethnicity as foundations of belonging and entitlement2 – half a century after

colonial rule - illustrates the ‘looping back’ of these distinctions in

independent states in Africa, including Sierra Leone and, more recently,

independent South Africa.

I Why Freetown and the Cape?

The Sea is History. (Walcott, 1979).

In Citizen and Subject (1996), Mamdani writes against South African

exceptionalism. He locates the apartheid state within the British Colonial

Office’s strategy of Indirect Rule in Africa, and within its shift from a civilising

mission to governance by “law-and-order” (ibid.: 109). This shift corresponded

with a change in the social base of colonial power from educated African

elites to traditional chiefs (ibid.). The key feature of Indirect Rule, he argues,

was its deployment of customary law in the service of colonial power by

harnessing “institutional forms of control anchored in a historical and cultural

legitimacy” (1996: 76, 77). In parts of his work, Mamdani poses ‘the cultural’

against ‘the political’ (2001: 15, 20, 23; 1996, 33). Mostly, in my reading, he

writes about sites in which fluidity (culture) entangled with rigidity (structure) in

the making of history, politics and nation-states. His concern is primarily with

this entanglement at the site of colonial re-constructions of cultures of the

colonised governed within colonists’ conceptions of the bounds of customary

law - in other words ‘tribal native cultures’. My concern is with this

entanglement at the site of cultural creations of the colonised outside the

bounds of customary law. Freetown and the Cape are two such sites.

Creolising social and cultural formations are differentiated by, and acquire

their specificity from, their histories and the conditions of their formation. This

is evident from the eighteenth and nineteenth century histories of Freetown

5


and the Cape. Alongside the different conditions of their formation, colonial

bio-politics shaped the formation and representation of these communities in

very similar ways. Each emerged from slave histories. The ‘Krio’ in the

cauldron of the British anti-slavery movement of the late 1700s (Fyfe 1962;

Edwards vii, ix, xvii; Sanneh 1999; Dixon-Fyle & Cole 2006), and ‘Coloured’

communities in the cauldron of slavery at the Cape from the 1600s to the

early 1800s (Shell 1994; Keegan 1996; Hendricks 2001). In both cases, their

early histories involved transportation across seas.

Freetown

Some of the early settlers3 of, or ‘returnees’ to, Freetown as ‘free’ persons,

were themselves transported as slaves from various parts of Africa to the New

World. Others were descendants of these slaves. These early settlers,

particularly already Christianised and educated former slaves who voluntarily

settled in Freetown and, later, their descendants, constituted the elite of

Freetown’s Krio community. They had some degree of ‘choice’ - in most

cases severely circumscribed in the aftermath of slavery - to settle or ‘return’

to Freetown. In contrast, Liberated Africans – the majority4 of the Freetown

population in the 1800s - were captured in transit to the New World (as

slaves) from other parts of Africa and forcibly settled in Freetown as ‘free’

persons under the auspices of the British anti-slavery movement. These

captives and, later, their descendants, constituted the lower stratum of the

Krio community. ‘Returnees’, forcibly settled ‘freed’ Africans, and their

descendants, considered ‘Westernised’, were referred to as ‘Creole’, in

colonial parlance (Spitzer 1974; Fyfe 1962; Peterson 1969; Porter 1963). This

marked their difference from residents considered ‘indigenous’ to the region

because of their presence prior to these settlements. With time, elites and

upwardly mobile Liberated Africans in these communities self-identified as

‘Creole’ in defense of their intermediate social status (Kandeh 1992; CO

267/698/7). ‘Creole’ africanised into ‘Krio’5 in the mid- to late twentieth

century.

6


Indirect Rule ushered in a shift from conceptions of ‘the Krio’ as Britain’s

“favourite and favoured Africans” (Spitzer, 1974: 41) to conceptions of them

as neither African nor European and as culturally degenerate (Fyfe, 1987:

415). By 1896 Britain, as part of its strategy of “territorial segregation”

(Mamdani, 1996: 6), proclaimed the interior of Sierra Leone a Protectorate,

while Freetown was considered a ‘Colony’. Although colonial administrators

disagreed on this matter, it seems this division relegated residents of the

Protectorate to the legal status of ‘aliens’, while Colony residents were,

legally, British subjects with British citizenship (CO 267/698/7). As part of its

“institutional segregation” (ibid.), the municipal government of twentieth

century Freetown, in the context of growing urbanisation, segregated migrants

from the Protectorate into ‘tribal’ residential areas in the city under the control

of their own headmen. The Tribal Administration (Freetown) Act of 1905 was

key to the inauguration of ethno-politics (Banton, 1957: 3-38; Kandeh 1992).

Thus, writes Fyfe “‘[w]hite was divided from black, Colony from Protectorate,

[officially assigned] tribe…from tribe, and chiefdom from chiefdom’ (1987:

416). This made early twentieth century Freetown, broadly speaking, a three

tiered society6. Migrants from and residents of the Protectorate were at the

bottom of this social hierarchy, the ‘Krio’ – in particular its elite – were

positioned ambiguously between these ‘natives’ and the colonial elite who

assumed the highest social and legal status. Early settlers’ history as agents

of Britain’s civilising mission (Spitzer, 1974: 44; Blyden, 2006: 94), tensions

between settlers and people already resident in the region, and the Krio elite’s

contempt toward these residents (CO 267/698/7), created two faces of the

coloniser: one, Krio, and the other, English.

The Cape and South Africa

In the case of the Cape, the early histories of ‘Coloured’ communities involved

both transportation as slaves from various parts of Africa and from the Indian

Ocean Islands, and birth into slavery (Shell 1994). In contrast to Freetown, the

Cape became a Dutch, and later British, settlement rather than a settlement

7


for former and ‘freed’ slaves. Some scholars (Keegan 1996; Reddy 2000;

Hendricks 2001) argue that ‘slave’, ‘Khoi’, and ‘free burgher’, while not yet

explicitly justified by racist ideology, constituted racialised legal status groups

from the inception of European settlement at the Cape. Whether or not one

agrees with this argument, it is clear that the stereotypical constructions of

these groups articulated with nineteenth century scientific discourse on ‘race’

to produce locally specific conceptions and hierarchies of racial difference. In

terms of the discourse of ‘miscegenation’, those born of predominantly extra-

marital sexual encounters between European men, and Khoikhoi and slave

women were considered of ‘mixed race’7 (Van den Berghe 1960). Slaves born

at the Cape and considered ‘acculturated’, were, in colonial parlance,

described as ‘creole’. By the late 1800s some slave communities at the Cape

referred to themselves as ‘coloured’ (Bickford-Smith, 1994: 289).

By the beginning of the twentieth century segregationists in South Africa

utilised scientific discourses on ‘race’ to formulate a bio-politics of racial

separation. This required the establishment of ‘native’ administration8. Indirect

Rule modified chief structures among African polities and institutionalised the

classification of ‘natives’ as one among many means of political domination

and social control and exclusion. Only two years prior to Freetown’s Tribal

Administration Act, the South African Native Commission (SANAC) of 1903

defined ‘native’ broadly as those “of Bantu origin” (Ashforth, 1988: 31). It

referred to ‘natives’ as a “race” (ibid.) divided into ‘tribes’. In the 1970s, this

formed the basis of apartheid’s Bantustan policy which relegated ‘natives’ to

fledgling ethno-nations assigned to geographically defined ‘independent

sates’. Significantly, Reddy notes that the 1903 SANAC included ‘half-castes’

and their descendants in the definition of ‘native’. But by recognising their

difference from ‘natives’, it left open the possibility for defining ‘coloured

people’ as a separate legal category in the apartheid era (2000: 90).

Apartheid was the paradigmatic example of Indirect Rule in colonial Africa

(Mamdani, 1996: 65). Its cornerstone, the Population Registration Act No. 30

8


of 1950, legally classified South Africans into three race categories: ‘White’,

‘Coloured’, and ‘Native’/’Bantu’. This Act defined ‘Coloured’ as a category of

“persons who are neither ‘natives’ nor whites”, in other words, a ‘subject race’

without ‘tribes’. Race classification consolidated the broadly three tiered racial

hierarchy of Cape society, and of South Africa generally. The elite among

people classified ‘Coloured’ did not represent, as did the ‘Krio’ elite in

Freetown, a second face of the coloniser. However, they were perceived by

fellow black people (both those classified ‘Native’ and those classified

‘Coloured’) as complicit with white dominance9.

These histories do not suggest homogeneity. Instead, they permit recognition

of significant similarities alongside differences. Both Freetown and the Cape

have early histories not only of loss, rupture, transportation, dislocation and

discontinuity, but also of cultural creation and contestation in contexts of

forced human and cultural heterogeneity and colonial dominance – histories

of creolisation. Indirect Rule’s politicisation of ‘race’ and indigeneity, and its

reduction of culture to ‘pure essence’, shaped the three tiered structures of

both these societies. In both contexts it institutionalised geographical and

legal boundaries along the lines of both ‘race’ and ‘culture’. Britain’s

conception of ‘the Krio’ as culturally degenerate, particularly as of the late

1800s, was cut of the same ideological cloth as white dominant conceptions

of ‘Coloured’ communities as racially degenerate. Both these communities

had fragile access to selected privileges that came with their partial

citizenship. Segments of elites in these communities mobilised against

‘Natives’ in their attempts to protect these privileges. These similarities point

to sites of entanglement between ‘non-native cultures’ and colonial structures

in the making of histories of creolisation.

9


II ‘Mestizo Logics’ and ‘Creolisation’

Colonialism’s ahistorical ‘ethnological thinking’ removed cultural creations

from their formative political processes emerging from people’s movements

and interactions (Amselle 1998), and reduced culture to a bounded singular,

self-contained type attached to particular geographical locations. For both

Amselle (1998) and Glissant (1997), this thinking is “one of the foundations of

European domination over the rest of the planet” (Amselle, 1998: 1).

In contrast to this ethno-technology which produces congealed identities,

Amselle, in his study of West Africa in the fifteenth through to the early

nineteenth century, proposes a conceptualisation of cultural formations in

terms of an “originary syncretism” (ibid.: x, 1), a “mestizo logic” (ibid.: 1), one

which reveals what he calls chains of historically interconnected social

formations and makes ‘mixture’ constitutive of African experiences. This logic

opposes ideas of original moments of purity and homogeneity from which

‘mixtures’ emerge. The interconnections are born of changing “asymmetrical

relation[s] of forces between different political structures” (ibid.: 27) that

connect, partner, absorb or dissolve depending on historical conditions, the

outcome being changing cultural formations and multiple belongings (ibid.: xi).

On this view, cultural and political identifications come into being historically

and in fluid relation to one and sometimes several Others.

Similarly, for Glissant (1992; 1997), creolisation negates the idea of discrete

and bounded cultural groupings. It emphasises processes of historical

connections across societies, with a specific focus on Martinique, and on

connections here born of violent encounters embedded in unequal relations.

These connections are riddled with power struggles and do not obliterate

social differences. Amselle’s view of cultures as “systems of transformations”

(1998: 43) is similar to Glissant’s concept of “Relation”. The violent collision of

cultures produces Relation: a changing whole, rather than a totalising

10


absolute, composed of shared knowledge “that cannot be split up into original

elements” (Glissant, 1997: 160). Relation10 is a whole constituted through

“repercussions of cultures, whether in symbiosis or in conflict” (Glissant, 1997:

131) as processes that urge people into community; a whole in which order is

fluid, disorder continuous, and outcomes unpredictable (ibid.: 133, 160, 161).

This conception of cultures, as risk-taking amidst change, provides a useful

alternative to preservationist notions of culture – colonial and ‘post’-colonial –

as a defense against risk (ibid.: 1). The politics11 embedded in Relation is anti-

essentialist and anti-racist (Britton, 2009: 5; Britton, 1999: 9) rather than

sectarian and post-racial, or apolitical. Both Amselle and Glissant allow one to

imagine a world of specificities in relation. Their relatedness create a whole in

which specificity is not renounced, annihilated, or reduced to the apparent

transparency experienced by another. As Glissant puts it, this network is an

aggregation of scattered things rather than a neatly linear filiation (ibid.: 55).

Each theorist is however concerned with specific contexts of cultural

formation. Amselle’s ‘mestizo logics’, illustrated with examples from the

fifteenth through the early nineteenth century, are about historical continuity

and transformation about which communities have some degree of choice

(1998: 56), within a broad and commonly understood value system. These

logics emerge from encounters arising from the largely chosen mobility of

people over time. They involve incorporations, adoptions, and ethnic and

related status conversions as well as religious conversions for the purposes of

integrating oneself and legitimising one’s presence in a region (Amselle

1998).

While these encounters occur in the context of power struggles, the regime of

power is not “founded on [the] racism and institutionalised violence” (Hall,

2003a: 31) which marks colonial encounters generally, and those which

concern Glissant, specifically. Creolisation refers specifically to processes of

cultural formation in contexts of colonialism (Hall, 2003a: 30, 33, 41). It differs

11


from ‘mestizo logics’ on several counts. Creolisation is distinguished by

violent discontinuity, brutal rupture with the past, and concerted efforts on the

part of colonisers to annihilate the values and civilisations of those dominated.

The dominated have no choice in these encounters. These culture conflicts

arise from forced transportation and deportation of people, not from

movement by choice or somewhat constrained choice. Socio-political and

cultural innovations are an integral part of ‘mestizo logics’. In contexts of

creolisation such innovations occur under conditions of “trauma …catastrophe

… dehumanisation [and] the loss of freedom” (Hall, 2003a: 35; Martin 2006).

These conditions are, for me, what distinguishes histories of creolisation -

marked by severely circumscribed agency - from histories of ‘hybridity’,

diaspora, and ‘mestizo logics’. This does not suggest that exchanges between

Europeans and Africans, in which Africans exercised agency, were limited to

colonial encounters. Contact between Europeans and Africans occurred

before the violence of colonialism. For example, Portuguese traders had

encountered West Africans as early as the late 1500s, and English traded

here since the early 1600s (Hair 1997; 1998). Nor does it suggest that the

conditions for diasporisation and mestizo logics always include organic

movement free of difficult choices. Instead, this distinction reveals significantly

different relationships to the past, to values learnt, and to the possibility and/or

hope of ‘return’ (Hall 2003a; Glissant 1981).

III ‘Creolisation’: its use in selected histories

[h]istory…[as] an account of events that happened to [slaves] rather than of events that

[slaves] made happen. (Suk, 2001:72).

Bolland (2006) and Scott (2009) note that the idea that creolising cultural

formations involve the agency of the subaltern, emerged in the Anglophone

12


Caribbean(s) of the late 1960s and early 1970s with the commencement of its

decolonisation from Britain, and later, in the anti-colonial struggles of the

Francophone Caribbean(s)12 of the 1980s. Scott (2009) traces this idea to two

sources: Brathwaite’s 1971 publication, The Development of Creole Society in

Jamiaca, 1770-1820, and a decade later, Glissant’s work on Martinique,

Caribbean Discourse. This conception of creolisation, in conjunction with my

exposition of the implications, for Sierra Leone and South Africa, of Indirect

Rule and its ethnological reasoning, frames my reading of Shell (1994), Wyse

(1991) and Dixon-Fyle and Cole (2006). Shell’s text is significant for its

conception of creolisation at the Cape before Indirect Rule. The texts on

Sierra Leone are significant for their neglect of the ethno-politicisation

embedded in colonial jurisprudence. All three texts reveal ways in which

ethnological reasoning ‘loops back’ in the production of historical knowledge.

Robert Shell’s Children of Bondage

In contrast to Brathwaite (1971), Brown (in Brathwaite, 2004), and Glissant

(1992; 1997), Shell (1994), in his history of slavery and ‘creole’ slaves at the

Cape, focuses on aspects of loss, and neglects the creative, productive and

resistant components of processes of creolisation. For Shell, creolisation

refers to cultural change for slave holders (1994: xl). For slaves’ descendants,

however, creolisation meant a “loss of memory of slaves’ origins [and]…a

corresponding loss of identity” (ibid.: 40) through “acculturation” (ibid.: 58). He

contrasts this loss first, to practices among settlers’ descendants’ of

celebrating their national ancestors, and second, to what he calls “clear

notions of identity, ethnicity [and] nationality” among imported slaves (ibid.:

60).

Shell’s (1994) conception of creolisation is embedded in a frame which

conceives of the relationship between masters and slaves not as mutually

constitutive but as a binary opposition in which only masters have agency.

This grid enables him to deny slaves’ descendants that which he readily

13


confers upon slave holders - the capacity to adapt. Furthermore, when he

differentiates between locally born slaves (which he describes as ‘creole’),

imported slaves and settlers’ descendants, he uses identity as a given rooted

in knowing one’s origins, and as a category of analysis with which to look at

the world (Cooper and Brubaker 2005).

Thus imported slaves and settlers’ descendants ‘have identity’ - a ‘good thing’

to have as it makes them a ‘real’ or ‘strong’ type. This possession is assumed

through Shell’s (1994) homogeneous idea of ‘the nation’ as based on

apparently known and geographically located biological and cultural

‘ancestry’, and as a primary sense of belonging. In contrast, ‘creole’ slaves

lack identity - a ‘bad thing’ as it makes them a ‘lacking’ type - apparently

because they have no memory of such ‘ancestral’ knowledge, and hence no

‘roots’ and no culture from which to assume ‘nationhood’. Through this move

he disconnects the historical experiences of rupture and domination that

connect locally born and imported slaves. In addition, with respect to

European settlers and their descendants, he imposes certainty and sameness

on the very different yet constitutive meanings of uncertain nationalisms which

defined these Europeans as ‘lacking’ in relation to their counterparts in the

metropoles (Stoler 1989; 1995).

Shell, moreover, conceptualises creolisation as an historical “moment” – 1760

to1769 – that marks the time “when more than 50 per cent of all slaves are

locally born” (1994: 47). This assumes creolisation can be measured by the

rate of reproduction of slaves in the colony during a particular period. He

refers to this moment as “the biological creolisation of the Cape slaves” (ibid.:

63) defined by the slave population’s capacity to reproduce itself because of

its favourable age and sex composition around 1770 (ibid.: 47, 48) and by

slave holders fathering their own slaves (ibid.: xl). Thus, he conceptualises

creolisation as a “steady, linear” (ibid.: 58) process occurring while the slave

trade fluctuated, rather than a messy, cyclical process as a consequence of

such trade.

14


For Shell (1994), creolisation refers primarily to the process of being born into

slavery, born as a slave. By contrasting this entry into slavery with being

captured and then enslaved, he uses this biological conception of creolisation

to suggest that the process of creolisation at the Cape entailed less rupture

than in the case of other slave societies. He writes: “Creolisation – considered

solely in comparison with the oceanic trade [which destroyed slave families] –

preserved slave family formation, and creole slaves increasingly stayed with

their own families as well as within their owners’ families” (ibid.: 104). This

suggestion of ‘less rupture’ is echoed when he later writes that ‘creole’ slaves

had not suffered the trauma of the journey of the middle passage (ibid.: 329).

This distinction allows him to sever this particular process of birth into slavery,

or biological reproduction of slaves, from its earlier history of transportation

and dislocation, from continued dislocations as a consequence of the

persistent slave trade at the time, and from the meaning of ‘being a slave’

irrespective of differences among slaves’ memory and knowledge of the

national, ethnic or cultural identities of their ancestors, of the physical

geography of their birth, and of the hierarchy of ‘house’ and ‘field’ slaves. It

suggests that slavery at the Cape was softer, less violent and possibly benign.

In Shell’s (1994) own language, it is precisely this earlier history of trauma that

results in a loss of memory, among slaves, of their ‘origins’ (ibid.: 40). In

contradictory fashion, he erases this traumatic history at one moment to argue

for their ‘lack of trauma’, while invoking it at another to argue for ‘creole’

slaves’ ‘lack of identity’. Shell (1994) slips between acculturation and

biological conceptions of creolisation.

15


Akintola Wyse’s The Krio of Sierra Leone: an interpretive history and

Mac Dixon-Fyle and Gibril Cole’s New Perspectives on the Sierra Leone Krio

The idea of creolisation as acculturation also surfaces in histories of ‘the Krio’

that emphasise these communities’ aspirations toward English-ness (see

Peterson 1969; Porter 1963; Spitzer 1974). To avoid repetition, I do not detail

examples from these texts. Instead, I focus on a parallel conceptual challenge

which emerges from more recent literature on ‘the Krio’: an emphasis on the

survival and authenticity of African cultural elements in ‘Krio’ cultural

formations.

In his history of ‘the Krio’, Wyse positions himself as “one of their own” (1991:

viii). He sets out to give “due prominence” (ibid.: 1) to what he calls “the

African dimensions of Krio life” (ibid.) by naming what he sees as the African

cultural content of Krio everyday practice. He cites the following, among

others, as examples of African cultural content: “…the talla dance of the

Maroons – which became the goombay of their Krio descendants;…a feast

ritual called bamchu among the settlers which was not unlike the Liberated

Africans’ awujoh..” (ibid.). For Wyse, Krio society was ‘not freak’ because its

“European veneer merely masked a basic African culture whose features

were no different from those of unacculturated Africans, e.g. a reverence for

elders, belief in a supreme being and the existence of a death cult and secret

societies. Nor was the society really ‘England in Africa’, because the large

mass of rural Krio did not follow an English life-style” (ibid. 8, 10, 11, my

emphasis). He suggests there is a defining essence to the Africanity of ‘the

Krio’ embedded in a mythical culture and heritage of “some distant past” (ibid.:

1) that “had always been there” (ibid.: 53): He writes: “even among these

‘Western’ Africans there were a few cultural survivals that recalled from some

distant past their African roots” (ibid.: 1, my emphasis). For Wyse “[a] saving

grace for the Krio was that even those who went away continued to maintain a

connection with their Freetown roots” (ibid.: 25).

16


Krio society is “unique” (ibid.: 1), for him, because of the cultural synthesis

between Westernised Africans and acculturated Liberated Africans, and

because of British patronage as atonement for the wrongs of slavery (ibid.: 1,

3). What he calls ‘Kriodom’ refers to where Westernisation met with tradition

(ibid.: 5). Its unique character, he argues, lies in ‘the Krio’s’ “intuitive ability to

effect a happy marriage between European and African cultures” (ibid.: 10;

my emphasis). His ultimate aim is to revive and preserve that which he claims

makes ‘the Krio’ a ‘group’ with cultural essence:

The people’s future depends on their not allowing their group to be destroyed. To do this they

must take a positive attitude to their history…They should…uphold and preserve all that is

good and fine in their culture. In that way, Kriodom can and will survive (ibid.: 125).

This text is written predominantly in praise of ‘the Krio’ and ‘Kriodom’ – a Krio

“ethos” (ibid.: 96). But, Wyse declares “the hallmarks of Kriodom” (ibid.: 117)

and “trait[s] of the mass psychology of the Krio” (ibid.: 92) to be self-criticism,

individualism, and disunity (ibid.: viii, 92, 117). He opposes these values to an

imagined unity among residents of the Protectorate which for him, is ultimately

based in blood ties. Commenting on politics in Sierra Leone in the 1930s and

40s, he writes that “blood ties and institutional connections” (ibid.: 95)

between modern educated Protectorate elites and traditional elites made it

easier for them to overcome divisions and to “present a common front” (ibid.)

giving them an edge over “Colony inhabitants for political leadership of the

country” (ibid.: 95).

Wyse gives scant attention to the broader discursive context that produced

the idea of ‘the Krio’, and shaped politics in Sierra Leone. He merely hints at

Britian’s role:

There was an undoubted cultural hiatus between the two peoples, and the Krio – convinced

that they were the possessors of a superior civilisation – assumed an unfortunate cultural

arrogance towards the people in the Protectorate...Th[is] rift was compounded by the imperial

17


presence…The administration...was a duality: the Colony and the Protectorate were separate

administrative units governed by different laws... (Wyse, 1991: 70, 71).

Instead, his work expands the colonial ethnological library in its presentation

of ‘Kriodom’ as a timeless African culture, the contents of which can be traced

to particular origins found predominantly in the Protectorate, making ‘the Krio’

an essentially African people (ibid.: 28). He notes that the “peculiarity” of ‘the

Krio’ as an “African race” lies in their “function…to bring together the various

tribes into one composite whole, to cement them and to render obsolete tribal

traits, peculiarities and idiosyncracies” (ibid.: 13). Here he represents ‘the Krio’

individual and group as the embodiment of all tribes which consequently

erases all things tribal. In the same breath, he calls on ‘the tribal’ to legitimate

Krio Africanity. When he writes about ‘Kriodom’ as “a phenomenon” he posits

the categorical attributes he assigns to ‘being Krio’ as foundational, there to

be valued and preserved, and laments its possible loss.

Dixon-Fyle and Cole (2006) published an anthology in memory of Wyse. It

assembles work, specifically on ‘the Krio’, by four generations of scholars

concerned with the history and culture of Sierra Leone. In the main13 the

chapters cover various ethnic origins in the historical emergence of Krio

communities and aspects of Krio language. Following Wyse’s (1991)

example, this text is primarily concerned with the ethnic and ancestral, as

opposed to the historical-political, status of ‘the Krio’ in relation to other

communities in colonial Sierra Leone. This is clear from some key questions

that frame the text: “Who are the ‘returnees’, and what do we know of their

ethnic provenance?...how indigenously African is this assemblage of

individuals...drawn from many cultural backgrounds...? Is Krio society...only

[a] contrived demographic myth, a self-serving effort by the culturally alienated

and estranged to claim African paternity?” (Dixon-Fyle and Cole, 2006: 1). In

other words, is their Africanity mythical or ‘real’? Significantly, similar

questions are commonly asked of people historically classified ‘Coloured’ in

South Africa (Erasmus 2001; Besten 2009).

18


It is important to recognise the worthy intention of both this and Wyse’s

original text to return to the surface traces of African voices in Krio cultural

formations submerged by colonial domination. However, this should not deter

from critical examination of the ways in which this assertion of an African

presence is achieved. The above questions reflect ethnological reasoning.

Indigeneity implies a singular, primordial cultural purity, certainty and

authenticity which is always already there and so never open to question; a

yardstick against which the authenticity and ‘realness’ of cultures constituted

through colonial domination are questioned and measured. Parallel to Shell’s

(1994) idea of creolisation as biological preservation of slave families at the

Cape, these scholars of ‘the Krio’ conceptualise creolisation as cultural

preservation.

IV A critical engagement

In sharp contrast to these uses of the concept, Bolland – who draws on

Brathwaite and Glissant – notes that “[t]he concept of creolisation is important

because it avoids both the view that enslaved Africans were stripped of their

cultures and acculturated into a European culture, and the view that evidence

of …African heritage…lies only in ‘retentions’ or ‘survivals’” (2006: 1). He

reminds us of the often repeated argument that “cultural change was not a

one-way process in which colonised people passively absorbed the culture of

the dominant Europeans” (ibid.). And, he adds, that “the study of African

influences should not be limited to the search for African retentions as if they

are items under glass cases in a museum” (ibid.). On the contrary, he argues,

the evidence of African influences in creole cultural formations lies in the

active creation of new cultural forms. Furthermore, ‘creolisation’ avoids the

view that cultures of the colonisers were wholesale transplantations of

European society in the colonies, rather than “homespun creations” (Stoler,

1989: 137) in which European artefacts and discourses were given new

meanings in the context of the colonial order of things, and of the agency of

19


the colonised. This re-construction of cultures of the colonisers was among

the catalysts for rising tensions, divisions and conflicts “in the colonising

nations themselves” (Glissant, cited in Britton 1999: 12).

Bolland distinguishes between two conceptions of creolisation: one, dualistic -

premised on a blending of colonial and African elements conceived of as

binary opposites; the other, dialectic - attending to tensions and antagonisms

inherent and, I would add, almost always unresolved, in the relationship

between these elements. For him, this perspective reveals changes in the

nature of these imagined opposites that result from “dialogue[s] of power and

resistance in which shifting similarities and differences, assimilations and

syncretisms, are continually renegotiated” (2006: 6). This dynamic, “open

ended and multi-directional” (ibid.) view of always contested cultural change,

emphasizes the process of creolisation more than the ‘product’ of creole

culture or ‘identity’. Such a non-finite, non-linear conception of cultural

formation is central to Glissant’s work. Brathwaite’s neologisms for this

dynamism are “tidalectics” 14 and “seametrics”15 (Brown 2007).

Bolland further distinguishes between “analytic and ideological usages of the

concepts creolisation and creole societies” (2006: 2) and advocates an

awareness of the problem that emerges when these different uses overlap

(ibid.). Ideological uses of the concepts differentiate one social group from

another with certain power effects. In sum, Glissant and Bolland’s ‘dialectics’,

and Brathwaite’s ‘tidalectics’ of creolistation facilitate critical engagement with

the theses of creolisation outlined above.

The acculturation, biological, and cultural preservationist theses rely on a

dualistic conception of creolisation which emphasises ethnic and ancestral

origins. These theses write out of history and politics the worlds that slaves

and former slaves made. These worlds demanded changes in masters’ and

slaves’ ways of seeing and being in the world. These worlds insisted upon

slaves yielding to the hegemony of the dominant, while simultaneously

20


resisting it and/or bending it to their own purpose, thereby reconstituting the

parameters of colonial encounters. It is in their anti-history and anti-politics

that these theses echo ‘ethnological reasoning’: the reasoning of the world

that made slaves.

The acculturation thesis colludes with the idea that the colonisers’ “root is the

strongest” (Glissant, 1997: 17) and the most valued. It presents creolisation

as a remedial move for a pathological lack of ‘identity’, culture, and

nationhood. For the cultural preservationist thesis ‘the African root is the

strongest’. This thesis deifies and freezes the past. It paralyses our

imagination – the key to freeing us from habitual postures of thought locked

into linearity, predictability and typology as the only productive logics. It

presents creolisation as a remedial move for the pathology of cultural

corruption. By invoking ‘pathology’, both these theses collude with the

discourse of degeneration. Thus, they re-inscribe colonial meanings of both

the category ‘Creole’ and the description ‘creole’: ‘fallen’ Europeans;

‘acculturated natives’; ‘acclimatised’ slaves.

V ‘Creole’: memories of the concept

…a concept is nothing other than a word in its sites. (Hacking, 2002:17).

The term ‘creole’ most commonly refers to vernacular forms of language

created in colonies through the fusion and (re)arrangement of elements of

colonists’ and colonised peoples’ languages (Hall, 2003a: 28). Writing about

the formation of the criollo elite in seventeenth century Spanish America,

Pagden notes that “language was held to be the most perfect reflection of a

man’s innate abilities” (1987, 88). This meant that “its structure, like the mind

of its user, was believed to be conditioned by the nature of the climate [or

cultural environment and geographical place] in which the speaker had been

born” (ibid). For Glissant, this translates into language as a ‘root’ that

21


determines a person’s worth (1997). Generally vernacular forms carried less

value and authority than the languages of the metropoles. Hence their

conception as “reduced language” that has “nativised itself” (Hall and Alleyne

cited in Brathwaite 1971 xv) and hence the terminology ‘kitchen-Dutch’ to

refer to Afrikaans, and ‘kitchen-English’16.

‘Creole’ as a linguistic referent expanded to include particular segments of

colonial populations. In French, the meaning of ‘creole’ drew on ideas of

descent: it referred to natives of Louisiana who were of French, Native

American and African descent (Hair, 1998: 112; see Thompson’s use of

“Creole of color”, 2009: 14, 15). One could think of this as simply biological.

However, as early as the 1700s, and from the perspective of the metropole,

this category referred to Europeans born, and settled in the colonies, and

consequently considered to have ‘gone native’, and ‘fallen from European

grace’. Thus, for the metropole, ‘Creole’ had a political meaning which

differentiated between ‘language’ and ‘reduced language’ and, between those

undoubtedly eligible and those less eligible for claims to European-ness. From

the perspective of ‘non-native’, partly privileged, urban social strata in some

colonial contexts, ‘Creole’ became a self-identification which signified both an

assertion of local power against the metropole – as in the case of ‘the Krio’

elite in Freetown, and an imagined ‘higher level of civilisation’ than people

considered indigenous to the colonies (see Muzondidya 2009 for this use of

‘Coloured’ in Southern Africa).

The term ‘creole’ can be traced to the Spanish word criollo which in South

America referred to Spanish Americans born in the colonies as opposed to

Spaniards born in Spain and resident in America (Hair, 1998: 112). As early

as 1770, peninsular Spaniards accused criollos of being “half-breeds” or

“mestizos” (Pagden, 1987: 68). This accusation may have implied a proto-

racialised meaning to this suggested inferiority; a meaning which, while not

yet secured in nineteenth century biological conceptions of ‘race’, was

embedded in the classed conceptions of ‘the nation’ and citizenship defined

22


by both place and lineage or descent (Stoler 1995). While ‘creole’ signified

degeneracy, “[i]t was never historically, and is not today, fully fixed racially”

(Hall, 2003a: 29, 30). By the eighteenth century the term ‘creole’ applied to

slaves. This is when plantation documents distinguished between African

slaves imported to the colonies, and ‘creole’ slaves born in the colonies and

considered ‘acclimatised’ and ‘acculturated’ to local colonial conditions (ibid.).

‘Creole’ referred to “[t]he essential distinction …between those from cultures

imported from elsewhere and those rooted or grounded in the vernacular local

space” (ibid.).

In similar vein to Pagden (1987), Stoler illustrates that in the Dutch East Indies

of the mid-nineteenth century “for the European-born, the Indies [as place and

climate in its broader meaning] was transformative of cultural essence, social

disposition, and personhood itself” (1995, 104). For many Europeans in the

colonies ‘creole’ primarily meant being judged by the degree to which they

were “full-blooded” (ibid.: 32, 102, 103) and/or ‘cultivated Europeans’ of

middle-class standing (ibid.) Similarly, for descendants of slaves and former

slaves in Freetown and at the Cape, ‘creole’ meant being judged by several

shifting measures. Before the mid-nineteenth century descendants of slaves

and former slaves in Freetown were judged by the degree to which they were

‘cultivated English people’. From the mid-nineteenth century they were judged

by their lack of ‘ancestral indigeneity’. At the Cape slaves and descendants of

slaves were judged by the ‘purity of their blood’, their linguistic and cultural

cultivation, and their indigeneity. These ‘properties’ were measured against

both European-ness in the metropole and ‘native-ness’ in the colony.

These uses of the term combine bio-geo-cultural meanings that link descent

or birth to place, each of which is assigned a value in relation to the metropole

and, in some moments, in relation to the colonised space as imagined before

colonisation. In its most common popular, and in some sociological usages,

‘creole’ refers to people considered ‘culturally mixed’ because they were born

in the colony either of settlers or slaves, and because they settled in the

23


colony from elsewhere, or were imported there as slaves. This usage is often

silent about the degeneracy that ‘mixture’ implied at particular historical

moments; and about how those considered to embody ‘mixture’ were

conceived as the ‘enemy within’ (Foucault 1976).

In sum, beneath ‘mixture’, the history of the term ‘creole’ is thick with

interrelated and travelling meanings: settlers and slaves born in the colonies,

of multiple descent or lineages, with particular cultural competencies for the

colony, and/or with cultural deficiencies in relation to the metropole. Thus

historically the meaning of ‘creole’, in its application to settlers, slaves and

former slaves, is made in relation to the metropole as the ‘ideal type’: ‘fallen’

European settlers; ‘acclimatised’ slaves; ‘acculturated’ natives. This history

shows how the economy of value embedded in its linguistic use transferred to

its use as referent to ‘populations’: a person’s worth is determined by his/her

national, cultural, and/or biological ‘root’ and/or ‘rootlessness’. ‘Creole’ as a

designation has repeatedly been through the discursive washing machine. It

was bleached by those for whom the dividend of whiteness was significant

(see Thompson 2009). It was dyed by those who, in the ‘looking’,

genealogical, and social regimes of ‘race’, could not recreate themselves as

‘white’. It was and is dyed by those who attempt either to reclaim Africanity, or

to imbue ‘mixed-ness’ with coherence.

This history indicates the changing use of ‘creole’ as a category signifying

what Hacking refers to as “kinds of people” (1995) and what Stoler more

specifically identifies as a type of European (2010, 27), a type of slave, a type

of settler, a type of native - a distinct but shifting human kind (Stoler, 1995: 4)

in the colonial imagination. Stoler argues that these changing meanings make

sense when we locate them in an understanding of degeneracy “not [as] a

‘European’ disorder [a la Pick] or a specifically colonial one, but a ‘mobile’

discourse of empire that designated eligibility for citizenship, class

membership, and gendered assignments to [‘race’]” (1995, 32). She argues

that these changing meanings point to ways in which nationalist discourse in

24


the colonial metropoles nourished ideas of contamination and degeneracy

that shaped the conferral of citizenship through a discourse of “cultural

contagion” rather than “biological taint” (Stoler ,1995: 52). The examples of

Sierra Leone and South Africa in this work show that nationalist discourses on

the part of colonists and settlers’ descendants here, drew on both these

discourses, sometimes simultaneously.

In their echoes across the metropole and colonies ideas of degeneracy were

shaped by the intersection of sex, hereditarian-, ethnological-, and race-

thinking. In this matrix, processes of cultural formation and differentiation as a

result of creolisation were deployed by colonial powers to institute political and

social differentiation through the denial or conferral of citizenship. Holston’s

ideas about the history of citizenship(s) in Brazil come alive in these particular

colonial contexts. He writes: “[c]itizenships do not directly create most of the

differences they use. Rather, they are foundational means by which …states

recognise and manage some differences as systematically salient by

legitimating or equalising them for various purposes…In legalising such

differences, it consolidates their inequalities and perpetuates them in other

forms throughout society” (2008: 7). The acculturation and preservationist

theses of creolisation neglect the significance of this colonial politics behind

the category ‘Creole’. This politics shaped the shifting historical and political

status of ‘Krio’ and ‘Coloured’ communities between non-citizens and partial

or momentary citizens in relation to other colonial ‘populations’ in their midst.

25


VI ‘Creole’: ‘degenerate type’ behind partial citizen

European... nationalist discourses were predicated on exclusionary cultural principles that did more than divide the middle class from the poor. They marked out those whose claims to property rights, citizenship, and public relief were worthy of recognition and whose were not. (Stoler, 1995: 8).

The tighter articulation of creolisation with particular forms of differentiated

citizenship enforced by Indirect Rule, distinguishes creolisation in British

colonial Africa from similar processes in the Caribbean, where subjects were

either French or British citizens, even if second-class ones, and in the case of

the former remain citizens of France. This does not make creolisation a

territorial matter. Such an interpretation would be counter to Glissant’s

conception of the process. Instead, it illustrates differentiated processes of

creolisation as a consequence of historically specific discursive matrices

shaped by specific geo-politics, social dynamics and social structures17.

In nineteenth and most of twentieth century Sierra Leone and South Africa,

ideas of indigeneity were superimposed on ideas of degeneracy in the

respective administrations’ constructions of eligibility for degrees of

citizenship. The particular politicisation of indigeneity by colonial

administrations - in Sierra Leone, at the Cape, and in South Africa as a whole

- separated processes of creolisation from ‘the indigenous’. In these contexts,

both historically and today, indigeneity signifies residents imagined as ‘original

people’. In contrast to parts of the Caribbean, where creolisation is sometimes

seen as a process of ‘indigenisation’ (Brathwaite 1971; Hall 2003a), the

categories ‘Creole’ in Sierra Leone, and ‘Coloured’ in South Africa, signify ‘un-

original people’, non-indigenous people. These ideas, in conjunction with

class and gender, gave the paradigmatic type of citizenship – one that

governs social differences by legalising them in ways that legitimate and

reproduce inequality (Holston 2008: 4), and its opposite, non-citizenship - its

colonial character in the contexts of Sierra Leone and South Africa.

26


Indigeneity was called on to lend weight to unequal and racialised citizenship.

The legal and administrative categories of Indirect Rule wrote difference into

African social formations as an unbridgeable divide geographically, culturally,

politically, economically.

For example because of their early histories of creolisation, descendants of

Krio and Cape slave communities were legally defined - by colonial powers in

the former, and the apartheid state, in the latter case - as ‘non-native’,

because they were considered not to be ‘ancestrally indigenous’. This was

despite their birth in Freetown and the Cape respectively. The articulation of

discourses of degeneracy and indigeneity shaped the changing citizenship

status of ‘the Krio’ in Sierra Leone. The geo-political-legal division between

Freetown as ‘the Colony’, and its hinterland as ‘the Protectorate’, later proved

significant for understanding tensions between the Krio minority – considered

westernised and ‘Creole’– and those Africans perceived to be the ‘ancestrally

indigenous’ majority. Under the Sierra Leone Interpretation Ordinance,

‘Creole’ communities were regarded as ‘non-native’ and under the British

Nationality Act were citizens of Britain and its Colonies. In contrast, people of

the Protectorate were regarded as ‘natives’. This distinction effectively meant

that peoples of the Protectorate were subject to tribal authority and customary

law while the Krio enjoyed access, fragile as it later turned out to be, to British

citizenship and civil law. On the eve of independence this distinction proved to

be significant when a common Sierra Leonian citizenship was up for

discussion. The Krio had to renounce their British citizenship (DO 35/10313). Hendricks (2001) shows that the history of the category ‘Coloured’ is

embedded in racialised conceptions of the intersection of race, class and

gender in the seventeenth and eighteenth century slave economy at the

Cape. The context of these intersections included a skewed sex ratio

administered along racial lines in the interests of the colonial government and

its maintenance of the colonists’ sense of their own superiority. Administration

occurred mainly through the uterine descent rule and prohibition of slave

27


marriages. Hendricks shows how “circumscribed, gender-specific”, extra-

marital sexual encounters across status group boundaries were “permitted,

and even encouraged, as long as it did not destabilise colonial interests”

(2001, 32). This practice began to change toward the end of the nineteenth

century with the discovery of mining and subsequent increased urbanisation

which brought the Other in closer proximity to colonialists of all classes, for

whom whiteness and white power were slowly consolidating as common

identifications. Perceived threats to these identifications brought firmer

closures to racial boundaries and less tolerance of ‘interracial’ sex (Hendriks

2001). In the case of the Cape, the discourse of ‘miscegenation’ positioned

those born of these extra-marital encounters higher up in the racial hierarchy,

in relation to ‘natives’, because of their imagined biological and cultural

approximation to Europeanness, and yet lower down (in relation to both

‘natives’ and Europeans) because of their association with ‘racial impurity’.

As noted earlier, by the beginning of the twentieth century, South Africa had

established a Native Affairs Commission which enabled colonial rule through

the modification of chief structures. In similar vein to Freetown’s Tribal

Administration Act (1905), people considered ‘ancestrally indigenous’ to South

Africa, were classified as ‘natives’. Educated or ‘detribalised natives’

presented a challenge to this broad definition because their education

enabled them to cross the cultural boundary between ‘Native’ and ‘European’

and confront ruling powers in terms of their own discourse (Ashforth, 1990:

34). Those considered ‘coloured’ and of ‘mixed race’ posed a different

challenge. Their perceived greater capacity for civilisation and lighter skin

rendered them different from ‘natives’ while their perceived lack of ‘pure blood’

rendered them symbolic of ‘race degeneration’, the ultimate threat to white

supremacy (Reddy, 2000: 88 -90). Following the principles of Indirect Rule,

apartheid’s Population Registration Act (1950) differentiated the population

into ‘Whites’ as full citizens, ‘Coloureds’ as partial citizens, and ‘Africans’ as

‘tribal’ subjects (Mamdani 1996).

28


In sum, the ambiguous political positioning of both ‘Krio’ and ‘Coloured’

communities as neither full citizens (British or South African, respectively), nor

‘tribal’ subjects, cannot be divorced from colonial constructions of these

communities as neither ‘purely’ European/British nor ‘purely’ African. Thus, I

argue that ‘Creole’ as a colonial category and ‘creole’ as a descriptive term,

became the ‘degenerate type’ behind Indirect Rule’s legal category, ‘non-

native’, which essentially meant ‘partial citizen’.

The categories ‘Creole’ in Freetown, and ‘Coloured’ at the Cape and in South

Africa generally, were at once central to colonialisms’ bio-politics - its politics

of sex, racialised citizenship, and indigeneity - and a product of the “tensions

of empire” that produced “populations that fell within…contradictory colonial

locations [and] were subject to a frequently shifting set of criteria that allowed

them privilege at certain historical moments and pointedly excluded them at

others” (Stoler, 2010: 40). These categories were significant before

independence because they shaped degrees of access to citizenship rights,

and remain so after independence, because they shape struggles about

belonging and identification (CO 267/698/7; Kandeh 1992; Besten 2009).

They reveal two faces of the “elastic and expansive” (Pick, 1989: 48) idea of

degeneration: ‘acculturation’ and ‘miscegenation’. These categories of

‘population’ were central to the production of ethnological knowledge for the

purposes of colonial domination. ‘Creole’ in Freetown, and ‘Coloured’ at the

Cape, became working colonial categories of ‘mixture’ sandwiched between

two ‘pure’ categories, ‘European’ and ‘native’. These usages of the categories

differentiated social groups in order to sustain colonial power; differentiations

which, in turn, were used by ‘non-native’ elites in their own mobilisations for

local power, and against the metropole.

Acculturation and cultural preservationist arguments sometimes note such

uses of these categories. However, they neglect ways in which colonial

administrations shaped relationships between ‘the Krio’, residents from the

Protectorate, and English colonists in Freetown on the one hand, and, on the

29


other, between people classified ‘Coloured’, ‘Bantu’ and later ‘African’, and

Dutch and British colonists at the Cape. This omission lends these theses of

creolisation to a “looping back” (Hacking 1995) of meanings from the colonial

library. Their collusion with discourses of degeneration surrenders to colonial

meanings of ‘Creole’ and ‘Coloured’ and inhibits a conception of these

categories as central to colonial bio-politics. The acculturation thesis

surrenders through its use of ‘Creole’ as a type defined by ‘lack’. The cultural

preservationist thesis does so through its use of ‘Creole’ as a fixed type with

traceable African ‘roots’ and ‘origins’: ‘Krio’.

VII ‘Creole’, ‘Creoleness’ and ‘Creolisation’

It is precisely this conception of ‘creole’ as a category and creoleness – a

grasp at a particular way of being - that Glissant writes against. For Glissant

creolisation is the opposite: neither a way of being nor a model. Instead, it is a

method concerned with processes by which identifications are continuously

transformed and extended into new possibilities of seeing Self and Other with

no intention toward universalising any particular possibility. Creoleness, on

the other hand, moves away from continuous invention, away from an

openness to possibilities emerging from uncertainty. ‘Creolisation’ is

“exemplified by its processes…not by the ‘contents’ on which these operate”

(1997: 89). It refers to that which accounts for such processes: conquest,

dislocation, rupture and invention that opens onto cultural diversity. On the

contrary, for Glissant, “the principles of creoleness regress toward negritudes”

(ibid.), in other words, they regress toward ethnological thinking.

As a critical analytical concept and method, creolisation foregrounds the

historical and political processes and relations of power that demand – in the

colonial imagination – a demarcation between those born in the colony but

considered not originally from it, and those considered ‘found’ or already

present in a region at the time of its colonisation – the ‘aboriginal’ and the

30


‘ancestrally indigenous’. I have illustrated colonial administrations’ deployment

of creolisation to construct citizenships derived from ‘race’ and ancestral

indigeneity, and ways in which these ideas ‘loop back’ in the selected histories

of the Cape and Freetown.

In sum, the value of Glissant’s work lies in his distinction between on the one

hand, ‘Creole’ as a social category and ‘creole’ as an objectifying descriptive

term, and on the other, ‘creolisation’ as an analytical concept. ‘Creole’ and

‘creole’ defy his theorisation of creolisation as a dynamic process. These

categories imply a group of people whose cultural and/or biological ‘essence’

is ‘creole’ – ‘mixed’, ‘impure’, ‘degenerate’, ‘inauthentic’ – and who will remain

forever defined by this essence. The risk is that the state of ‘being creole’ can

be used not only to define a ‘population’, but to isolate and classify with similar

consequences as colonial and apartheid classifications: the administration of

social difference for the purposes of authorising inequality, entitlement, and

belonging.

Creolisation, on the other hand, enables one to note, as I have shown in this

comparative work, differentiations in this process, as well as similarities. It

brings attention to the historical specificity as well as the broader discursive

matrices of the emergence of such cultural formations. This approach

counters ethnological reasoning. It urges, as I have shown here, critical

analysis of essentialist uses of the categories ‘Creole’, ‘Krio’, and ‘Coloured’18.

It nourishes ways of knowing that refuse the certainties of ethnology – on the

one hand, of origin(s), and, on the other, of their lack.

Creolisation is an open, continuous process riddled with uncertainty and

unpredictability. Its emphasis on unpredictability does not, however, imply

passive acceptance of ‘what is’. Instead, the politics of creolisation invites a

wider politics of Relation: global civility premised on constantly re-negotiated

relational (co)-existence(s) with Others. Considering my location of

creolisation as specific to colonial encounters, I am, at this point, in

31


disagreement with the idea that ‘the world is creolising’. I do, however, read

Glissant as suggesting that the world might be a better place if its inhabitants

were to consider themselves in Relation.

‘Relation’ does not presuppose harmony, equality, Sameness, or the absence

of power. It does, however, offer a way of thinking and forms of action that

increase the possibilities of eliminating oppression, inequality and abuses of

power. ‘Relation’ points to possibilities for new modes of solidarity and political

action against injustice - modes other than familiar ethno-technologies. It

implicitly suggests a relational conception of citizenship: one that contests

social inequality and lives with difference, rather than manages social

difference in ways that re-inscribe inequality. This approach draws on

humanism(s) that refuse to flatten lived human experiences with the violence

of declarations of Sameness.

32

DRAFT PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR DISTRIBUTE FURTHER 1 An earlier version of this work was presented at the Conference on Creolising Societies, 5-6 May, University of the Witwatersrand. The research toward it was funded by the National Research Foundation’s Thuthuka Programme, the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Research Committee and the Mott Foundation. Its completion was enabled by the UCT-Harvard Mandela-Mellon Fellowships Fund administered by the Centre for Higher Education, UCT and the Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. This writing was enabled by the support of UCT’s Deputy Vice Chancellor (DVC) of Research, DVC of Transformation, Dean of Humanities, and Head of the Sociology Department who kindly approved my extended sabbatical. Mirah Langer, Marina Magloire, Emily Owens and Holger Drössler provided excellent research assistance. Special thanks are due to Brenda Cooper, Denis Constant-Martin, Dominique Malaquais and Shamil Jeppie for their comments on and insightful conversations about earlier drafts of this work. Finally, my gratitude extends to the Du Bois Institute for a space and atmosphere in which I could create an intellectual sanctuary. 2 See Mamdani (1997) on Rwanda, Kandeh (1992) on Sierra Leone, and Besten (2009) on reclamations of ‘indigeneity’ among a minority of people historically classified ‘Coloured’ in South Africa. 3 Having failed, in 1787, to settle poor black people from England, the British Sierra Leone Company embarked on a second attempt, in 1792, when Freetown was established. It settled about 1 100 Nova Scotians, 500 fugitive slaves from Jamaica, and about 1 000 former slaves from Barbados (Dixon-Fyle & Cole, 2006: 8). During the 1800s and into the 1900s further settlements of former slaves from the New World occurred as part of the ‘back to Africa’ movement (Blyden 2006; Sanneh 1999). These sets of people are referred to as ‘Settlers’ in the historical literature. 4 About 50 000 captives, according to Sengova (2006: 169, 170), and 84 000, according to Wyse (1991), were forcibly settled from about 1808-1864. These were captives from slave ships that never made it to the New World (Spencer-Walters, 2006: 228). These captives were, at first, referred to as ‘Liberated Africans’, and later incorporated into the category ‘Creole’. 5 Fyfe notes that the spelling ‘Krio’ is owed to Thomas Decker who advocated the language of Freetown residents. From the 1950s, linguists adopted the term. In the late 1970s Akintola Wyse started its use as referent to ‘a people’ (2006 26). Wyse borrowed this usage from Fyle and Jones’s derivation of the word from the Yoruba Akiriyo – “those who habitually go about paying visits after a church service” – which appeared in their 1980 publication of A Krio-English Dictionary (Fyfe, 2006: 27). 6 Kandeh (1992) reveals that social divisions in Sierra Leone were far more complex and intimately connected to class formation. He notes how the players in this ethno-politics shifted after independence to struggles between on the one hand, people who identified as Mende, and on the other, those who identified as Temne. 7 The term ‘coloured’ continues to be equated with ‘mixed race’. For me, it refers to those South Africans loosely bound together for historical reasons such as slavery and a combination of oppressive and preferential treatment during apartheid. It is, in my view, neither a common ethnic identity, nor reference to common biological genealogy. Instead, these are creolised cultural formations from which emerge particular, yet multiple, black and African experiences. The emphatic meaning of ‘black’ here being, as Mercer (2009) aptly puts it, subjects and collectivities formed in conditions of “relative unfreedom”. 8 Native Administration was already present as early as 1865 in the form of the Native Law No 28, and principles for exemptions from this law (references) 9 An example of such complicity was this elite’s acceptance of token representation in apartheid South Africa’s tricameral parliament in the 1980s. 10 Britton’s interpretation of Glissant’s extension of the notion of Relation beyond Martinique to the world as whole is as follows: while Relation does not presuppose harmony and equality, it does, however, increase the chances of eliminating oppression and inequality. She proceeds to cite Glissant’s example, namely, that global media enable “everyone” to hear about local conflicts (2009:5). Herman and Chomsky (2002) would disagree. They point to ways in which mass media shape what ‘everyone’ hears in attempts on the part of power brokers to “manufacture consent” (ibid.). On the question of political action against oppression and inequality, Britton - by pointing to Glissant’s arguments for new modes of resistance, and his

33

illumination of conditions that constrain resistance - does, however, convincingly argue against criticisms that, particularly his later work, excludes political action (2009). 11 The limitation of this politics is that it privileges cultural over economic oppression (Britton 2009: 10, 11). 12 In 1946, the latter parts of the Caribbean were declared departments of France subject to its official policy of cultural assimilation, and remain so today making them, in a formal political sense, not yet decolonised (Britton, 1999: 1). 13 The chapters by Blyden and Spencer-Walters are in some ways an exception. 14 I am indebted to Daniel Yon for alerting me to Brathwaite’s concepts. Like Derek Walcott, Brathwaite works with the sea as metaphor in his attempts to make sense of Caribbean history, everyday life, and aesthetic expression, in their global context. ‘Tidalectics’ emphasises the tides of history; history as living movement, change, recuperation and reformulation (Brown 2004). 15 From his ‘seametrics’ I coin the term ‘sea-maginaries’ to invoke the impossibility of measuring creolisation as a process. 16 See De Graff (2003; 2005) for the politics of conceptions of ‘creole’ languages. 17 These ideas emerged in discussion at the Conference on Creolising Societies (see endnote 1). 18 My hope is that this work clarifies the erroneous conflation of, on the one hand, my attempt to find a conceptual frame for understanding historical conditions for the emergence of ‘coloured’ identities (note the plural), with an assertion of ‘coloured’ as ‘a creole identity’, on the other (Ruiters, 2009: 126). My project is not to convince people who identify as ‘coloured’ to identify as ‘creole’ instead. On the contrary, it is to work against any form of ethno-politics. KINDLY NOTE, I AM CURRENTLY REVIEWING MY CRITIQUE OF SHELL (1994) IN LIGHT OF A COLLEAGUE’S COMMENTS. Thank you, Zimitri

Documents

DRAFT PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR DISTRIBUTE FURTHER Creolisation, Colonial Citizenship…hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/sites/all/files/Erasmus... · · 2010-05-04cultural creations