A creolising South Africa? Mixing, hybridity, and creolisation: (re)imagining the South African experience

The present state of South Africa's society is the outcome of protracted processes of contacts and mixing, in the course of which people coming from different cultural areas blended and produced an original culture. More than three centuries of racism and apartheid have bequeathed representations in which South Africa is construed as an addition of different people, each with its own culture and language. Such representations do not take into account the interactions between them that produced what is today a mix that is impossible to disentangle. This article attempts to look at theories of métissage and creolisation that have been devised to analyse societies in South America and the West Indies and check whether they could contribute to producing a better understanding of the history of South Africa. Édouard Glissant's theories of métissage and creolisation, because they stress processes and relations, because they consider that creolisation is a continuous process, could be relevant to South Africa. However, the example of Brazil shows that re‐imagining the past does not suffice to pacify memories of violence and segregation; it remains ineffective if it is not accompanied by economic and social policies aiming at redressing the inequalities inherited from this very past.