Wait for the dawning of a brighter day: a coloured assimilation project in Cape Town (1902-1940)

• Grant number: 09/03824-9
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): August 01, 2009
• Effective date (End): August 31, 2011
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History
• Principal researcher: Omar Ribeiro Thomaz
• Grantee: Giovani Grillo de Salve
• Home Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project now presented pretend discuss, understand and present how the assimilation politics of the African Political (People's) Organization (the largest coloured political organization of South Africa during the first half of the 20th century) connected itself with the implement of practices of segregation de facto and de jure in the Western Cape province between 1902-1940 and how that politic was crucial for the establishment of political and social pratics share by a group of cultural, social, economics, politics and phenotypic characteristic highly heterogeneous. The research also pretend to do critical analysis of the expert historiography about the coloured community in South Africa because understand that in the largest part of this academic production the importance of the group as historical subjects, aware and active, as their motions to consolidate a South African nation, where minimized and marginalized.This research has as principal documentary sources the official documents of the African Political (People's) Organization (presidential addresses, pamphlets and the newspaper of the organization, published between 1909 and 1923); the personal and official documents of the second and most important president, Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman; various documents about the members of a coloured elite of Cape Town (letters, trip relations, diary); and the African and Africanist historiography production expert in questions relatives to the coloured group in South Africa in the begin of the 20th century. (AU)