Red socks and purple rain: the political uses of colour in late apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article explores the extent to which colour functions as an independent mode in a particular context and explores the culturally produced regularities in the uses of colour in this context. Drawing on a Hallidayan metafunctional view of text, we look at how colour instantiated systems of knowledge and belief (ideational function) and social relations and identities (interpersonal function) in South Africa during the last decade of the apartheid government. In this type of repressive socio-political context, colour was a less policed mode, and thus had different affordances to images and the verbal modes. We argue that colour can function as an independent mode under certain conditions, such as stringent press restrictions, where the use of colour in a range of media (clothing, flags, posters) can play a crucial role in communicating.