Contesting a ‘Cult(ure) of Respectability’: Anti-Colonial Resistance in the Western Cape, 1935-1950

Abstract

This article gives attention to two main traditions of anti-colonial resistance in the Western Cape in the period 1935 to 1950. In a comparison of the intellectual and political traditions of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) and the more conservative traditions against which this movement arose, I focus in particular on the place of culture in the developing anti-colonial resistance. Whereas for an older generation of activists and intellectuals the acquisition of the behavioural, social and cultural norms of a privileged Western culture served as an important route into socio-political ‘respectability’, a central preoccupation amongst a younger generation of activist-intellectuals in the NEUM was to subject these norms to a radical counter-cultural critique.