Where Does the Rainbow Nation End?: Colouredness and Citizenship in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

IN THE EARLY 1990S, IN THAT FIRST HEADY POST-APARTHEID INCARNATION, with the demise of the racist state still new and optimism abounding, Archbishop Desmond Tutu offered his fellow South Africans a resonant symbol for their future. It was a symbol, however, that contained within it a signal challenge. With his customary hyperbole, the Archbishop anointed South Africans the "rainbow children of God." South Africa's moral leader had spoken, divined his people to be at once richly, splendidly different, composed of an array of hues and yet united as a spectacular force of nature. How the historic politics of difference that had divided apartheid society would be replaced with Tutu's visionary unity was neither clear nor programmatically laid out. His upbeat rhetoric, however, captured poetically the tenor and the hopefulness of the post-apartheid moment. In his inimitable way, Tutu's [End Page 175] theme of unity-within-racial-difference echoed the larger ambitions and strategies of identity politics, one of the key political trends of the 1980s and '90s; a mode of politics learned, in no small measure, from the anti-Establishment, minority, feminist, and youth cultural struggles of the 1960s.