The Midfielder's Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa. Grant Farred. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Pp. 178.

In the aftermath of the recent local elections in South Africa, Hugh Nevill in the Mail & Guardian (7.12.2000) quoted various sources to say how "the DA's [the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition to the ANC] supporters-mainly whites and coloureds-turned out in large numbers, but that many black ANC supporters stayed home [….] the voting seemed to confirm Mbeki's statement that the country was one of two nations-one black and one white." The race/class chasm crystallized by the elections shows the relevancy and timeliness of Grant Farred's book on the position of the coloured community in South Africa. Coloureds are spoken of as white when they vote white, and their own racial history-their colouredness-is silenced. Farred's discussion of the dynamics of this silencing should be of interest to researchers and students of South African literature, culture and society, and in particular, cultural / postcolonial theory.

In three chapters on literature and three chapters on sports, The Midfielder's Moment deals with the coloured community in apartheid (from around 1960) and post-apartheid South Africa. Following an introductory chapter on the problematics of South African colouredness, chapter one ("Writing in a Twilight Zone") deals with the short story writer and novelist Richard Rive. Rive wrote about race, but did not establish in his writing a distinct coloured identity for himself because of his belief that blackness included coloureds (Farred generally conflates the writers and their texts in his literary analyses). As Farred writes, Rive's "belief in nonracialism…inhibited his capacity to name himself-and his racial identity-accurately (52)."

Chapter two ("The Poetics of Partial Affiliation") deals with the poet Arthur Nortje. Nortje wrote about being coloured and the paradox of being neither African nor European, while simultaneously having ties to both worlds. In Farred's reading, Nortje's was more a biological than a constructionist understanding of colouredness. He wrote "about how the miscegenated past articulates itself through (and sometimes despite the denial of) the coloured body (65)." Nortje was neither debilitated nor silenced by his 'shameful origins,' but wrote about those origins in an attempt to construct a place, a belonging, for the coloured community in South Africa.

The third chapter ("Searching for Colouredness") discusses the poet Jennifer Davids, who does not write about colouredness. Her "originality resides not in her refusal to be representative of a particular racial experience, but in her ability to do so elliptically (87)." Indeed, David's intentional neglect of the coloured voice "serves only to draw attention to its absence (98)." Farred's conclusions serve convincingly in his problematization of colouredness in South African writing. The three writers demonstrate different ways of dealing with their colouredness: Rive sought to transcend the term coloured, Davids to erase it, while Nortje painfully examined it as a 'racial interregnum (17)."

The second half of the book moves into the politics of sports in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. This intersection is where sports and race issues meet in Farred's use of the term 'midfielder.' Farred writes, "in football, midfielders represent the links between defence and attack, much as the coloured community constitutes the physical connection between black and white communities….Midfielders, like all footballers, have only a moment to make up their minds, and the fate of a contest depends on their decisions (19)." Presumably, the midfielder analogy does not imply that coloureds have had much of a choice, as in reality only a few could have had the possibility of 'passing' (as in passing for black or white, thereby deciding the 'race-game').

In chapter four ("'Theatre of Dreams': Mimicry and Difference in Cape Flats Township Football"), Farred presents the fascinating international team affiliations of blacks and coloureds in Cape Town townships. Farred found blacks to be exhibiting postcolonialist or Africanist leanings in their support of Brazil or Soweto football teams while coloureds largely supported English clubs. "The very names of English clubs carried with them, in those early days [of forced removals] when 'community' was spoken of in the past tense […] the possibility of cultural and political survival (119)." Here, as in the rest of the sports section, one cannot help wondering if this is also how the women 'survived'? Unfortunately however, a discussion of gender issues is absent from the volume.

Chapter five ("The Nation in White") deals with cricket, where, again, Farred observes that the coloured and apartheid history of the sport is being erased. The South African team remains (with one or two exceptions) a wholly white one, and thus participates in a "trek into the postapartheid future emblazoned with the symbols of the apartheid past (146)." The team's coloured player, Paul Adams, is "being asked to make history bereft of basic resources such as cultural memory or the ideological traditions of his embattled community," in the name of that South African spirit of reconciliation that Farred criticizes because it mutes coloured history (149).

Chapter six ("McCarthyism, Township Style") uses footballer Benni McCarthy as an example of the appropriation of a sports hero in nation-building rhetoric. McCarthy's "colouredness has to be, in the same rhetorical maneuver, acknowledged and denied: It has to be implicitly recognized so that, through him, his community can be incorporated into the nation. It has to remain, however, an unspoken-and unspeakable-identity because to publicly emphasize it would be to remind the nation of his racial difference, of his liminal blackness and of the marginal, conflicted relationship the coloured community has to the postapartheid state (158)."

As evidenced by Farred's strong language in the above passage, the book presents a passionate critique of reconciliation rhetoric in contemporary South Africa. In its current form, reconciliation erases the coloured past and deprives the community of its cultural memory. "The new South Africa is no less politically expedient than the old, appropriating, reinscribing, eliding, or exaggerating racial sameness or difference as is ideologically useful (23)." Farred is outspoken in his criticism of the ANC government in this respect: he knows who his heroes are, and where they come from, and he does not like the way they are being tackled when they are off the field.

Ann Langwadt
University of Copenhagen