Physical Education and Physical Culture Networks

From the outset of colonial settlement by the Dutch East Indian Company in 1652 in the Cape Colony, settlers (slave owners, travellers, colonial officials and missionaries) displayed racist attitudes towards their colonised subjects. A phrase commonly used by these early European colonists was “As ignorant as a Hottentot and as cunning as a Bushman”. Many of these settlers shared the view of the eighteenth-century French traveller François Le Vaillant in the Cape Colony that “an enormous distance separates a European from a Hottentot”. This attitude was transformed into institutional racism by the 1820s through the classification of people descending from relations between indigenous and settler peoples as “bastard”. From the second half of the nineteenth century, colonial census recorders used the term coloured for everybody they did not classify as white. Reference was made to ‘natives’ when referring to an inclusive black grouping of people but terms such as ‘Cape boys’ or ‘mixed race people’ were used for broader classifications of ‘coloured’. Thus sport clubs that were self-identified as coloured in the twentieth century initially played in nineteenth-century competitions labelled ‘native’. The same is true of sportspersons classified as ‘native’ who participated in sport leagues that were self-identified as coloured or Malay. The expression coloured, as distinct from ‘native’, European, Indian and other socially created groupings of people, crystallised in the fabric of colonial society in the late nineteenth century. Over time, in the Afrikaans language, people became known as “bruin mense” (brown people) alongside terms such as “hotnot”, “mulat”, “mestico” and “castico”. These references distinguished a socially constructed group of people termed coloured from people termed African. The latter were also described by terms that have become offensive in twenty-first-century contexts, such as “kaffir”, “bantu” and “native”. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these terms increasingly became offensive to many South Africans and the indiscriminate use thereof has become punishable by law. In contrast to the negative stereotypical attitude colonial and post-colonial society displayed towards people categorised as African, those who were classified as coloured received ambivalent treatment. The latter had an intermediate status, reflective of their “bastard” status in the South African racial hierarchy. However, it is clear that there is no scientific basis for the use of the term coloured, and therefore this work refrains from using the term “coloured physical education” or “coloured physical culture” in the commonly used manner of “coloured education”, “coloured emotions”, “coloured habits” and “coloured religion” as they appeared in the apartheid lexicon. However, racist classifications affected (and still do affect) every aspect of South Africans’ lives, and it is in sport scholars’ and activists’ interests to use the term in such a manner to show that the notion of a South African coloured identity is indeed a myth.