The Notion of ‘Gam’

During the Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the biblical story of the Curse of Ham was used to legitimize the enslavement and subjugation of African people. In South Africa, the term ‘Ham’ is rendered in Afrikaans as ‘gam’ and was used by the colonial (1652–1910) and apartheid (1948–1994) regimes to classify and control people considered to be without religion, including enslaved people brought to present- day South Africa as well as indigenous and coloured South Africans. In the post-apartheid context, however, coloured-identifying people have reclaimed the term to acknowledge the religious and political persecution of themselves and their ancestors. This paper traces the genealogy of the concept of ‘gam’ in South Africa to explore the conditions under which the biblical narrative of the Curse of Ham was domesticated and contested. I argue that the changing meaning and application of both the story and the concept cannot be explained solely by the shifting power relations between ‘master’ and ‘slave’ or ‘religious’ and ‘irreligious’. Instead, by employing discourse analysis of a corpus of sacred, primary, and secondary texts, I show that both the ‘religious’ and ‘irreligious’ participated in the indigenization of the story of the Curse of Ham and the production of an indigenous concept of ‘gam’ to defend or contest the racial dynamics of religion at the time.