On Being Coloured

One of the more shocking things about South Africa is the freedom with which people use the term ‘coloured’.

I have found myself even using it. But this word has new meaning here. As an American, when you first hear it, your mouth goes metallic with the hatred and the racism behind the word.

Coloured. If you’re American, you picture black. You picture slavery. Jim Crow. The KKK. The term feels old and southern, but the dirty and uneducated disease that breeds prejudice and intolerance is as modern as it is ancient. If you’re a black American, I am sure the word brings a weight I can’t imagine, a suffocating pressure that is painful. Debilitating. In the states, if I heard the word cross the lips of another, it would bring nothing but anger. Justified rage.

South Africa is a country that has seen racism. They know, intimately, what hatred can do. If you do not know the history, read up on it. If you think racism is something the world has contended with and abolished when Lincoln freed the slaves, I implore you to explain apartheid. For those of you who don’t know – apartheid was a whites-only government that strangled South Africans for decades, run by the descendants of Dutch and British colonizers. Today, they are the Afrikaaners.

During apartheid, the government classified people based on their race. There was white, and there was black, yet they were forced to contend with the concept that, perhaps, you were neither. 

Over the years as a colony, an important trading port on the route from Europe to Asia, South Africa saw a massive influx of people of many different races, and thus, many different colors. Javanese, Indonesians and other South East Asians formed a substantial community in the port city of Cape Town, and are now referred to as Cape Malays. Many are surprised to learn they constitute a large portion of the population here, and have for quite some time. 

An even larger segment of the colored population is actually descendent from the native people of South-West Africa (an area that stretches from Cape Town up into Namibia, across into Botswana and around the southern coastline). This is the most often ignored heritage of coloreds, and, perhaps, the most poignant example of erasing a culture I have ever seen. The "Bushmen", as they were (insultingly) called by the white settlers, are one of the oldest civilizations on earth, and consisted of small bands of traditional hunter-gatherers. The bushman subgroup contains quite an interesting array of diverse groups, though the largest two, and the most often cited are the Khoi (Khoe, Khoekhoe, Khoikhoi) and the San (often referred to as the Khoisan as a whole). 

Also check this cool documentary: 

The Khoisan and other bushmen groups are also the root of the incredible and unique linguistic traits in Southern Africa - specifically, they spoke "click-languages". Unfortunately, during cultural "assimilation" (destruction), the white settlers of the continent ridiculed this language as a primitive and stupid thing - and annihilated it completely by forcing all groups to adopt Afrikaans. There are handfuls, if no native speakers left of many of these interesting dialects. Xhosa and Zulu, on the other hand, which survived apartheid quite well, adopted their clicks from being in close proximity to the bushman languages before the white conquest of Africa. 

Because the whites who designed apartheid were neither the brightest nor the most culturally aware people, they lumped this ethnic group in with any person who was mixed white and black or had any other ethnic background that gave their skin a darker complexion. 

Apartheid looked at these people and decided that since their color was not as dark as the Africans, but not as light as Europeans, they were to be the middle ground. The coloureds.  The inbetweeners. Not as hated as black Africans, but not anywhere near equals to whites. They suffered injustice under apartheid, and in the reform they often see themselves as unprotected.

But the term coloured, as silly and incomplete as it is, stuck. Today, it is owned by many, and used conversationally to describe a person, same as the words black or white. I was uncomfortable at first. The word is unfamiliar to me, taboo in a sense, a term I would never indulge in any context – but here it has become something new. My South African is coloured, and calls himself as such with ease, often pride. I asked him if he knew how horrible that word was to Americans.

Of course he knew, but it didn’t mean anything to South Africa. So, now it doesn’t mean anything to me. I will use it as South Africans do, with all of the pride and belonging that follows.

This post is simply to explain to Americans not to be alarmed. You need the context. 

-Rh