I am not your coloured

On the homogenizing and reactionary identity politics of colouredness in South Africa

This whole debacle with Tyla, a singer from South Africa breaking into the US and general western markets with a hit song, has centered the debate on race and identity and its exportability. Yes, Tyla calls herself coloured. Yes, in South Africa it is generally not considered a problem, in fact many people feel it is an identity of pride, and the many books coming out in recent years are testament to that. The latest, by Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel, titled Coloured: How classification became culture. I will try to approach this book and any others referenced here with sensitivity. This word, this marker of identity is used widely within my family, and seen unproblematically, and so it would be an injustice to them and all other people trying to maintain relational links to treat it with the vitriol that I want to. To me, the word, the idea, the way it is argued, are all racist and essentialist and reductionist, and so I never use it in reference to myself or others unless absolutely necessary or if there is an insistence. I will briefly talk about why, for me and my parents and other like minded folks, the word is imbued with racism and antiblackness especially.

In South Africa, the coloured question comes down to the fact of the making of difference under colonization. On the one hand, the divide and conquer tactic was deployed, making arbitrary lines between the many geographic and linguistic groups in the country. It was deployed by both the Dutch and the British, and then the white nationalists of apartheid. In addition to that though, the British were nothing if not bureaucratically mundane, and therefore desired more and more systems of categorization. A taxonomy of people if you will. To them phenotype made sense then, even though these markers of phenotype difference more often than not overlapped across groups.

This gave rise to the multitude of categories of coloured; some examples being coloured, coloured other, cape coloured, and cape malay. The danger is that these colonially invented categories become entrenched in the psyches of the people, and we see the entire spectrum of identity politics play out, from liberatory all the way to reactionary. The rise of movements like Gatvol Capetonian, now known as the Cape Coloured Congress, in recent years are a testament to that fact. But along with this comes the rise of claims by people who claim coloured identity that they are the only true indigenous peoples of the land, and therefore have both a claim to difference and superiority. We see this in the constant and racist parading of the indigenous peoples of southern Africa in the iconography these ethnonationalists use. They like to parade indigenous peoples as a means to undermine black folks broadly, and put them outside of the category of South African, attempting to always mark them as settler. It’s a trash argument that deserves no time, but because of its easy blanketing quality, like with afropessimism, it takes hold because it feeds the desire to be the most oppressed and the most important in struggle. This has led to deep, festering divisions between people who would otherwise be identified racially as black people, and it has indeed also led to violent reactions by small groups in Western Cape Townships as seen in recent years in areas like Mitchells Plain.

There are much deeper problems and inherent contradictions we need to address if we are going to engage the question of coloured identity seriously and honestly, and so far, very few who have been published successfully outside of academia have even attempted to engage the question seriously and honestly and with an intentionality. One of the glaring issues is the argument from culture, the one Dooms and Tuchel try to make. The problem is this one must be dismissed offhand and immediately, because it assumes there is a homogenous and unifying coloured culture that transcends place. Coloured is coloured is coloured, in this argument, and that is just an ugly reduction of entire swathes of people and their cultural practices. It also does not take into account that these cultural markers are forced through histories of spatial apartheid, forcing people from disparate identities to absolutely collapse any cultural markers and force assimilation into an essentialized grouping. 

Second, the category of coloured is one that came with minute and incremental shifts in resources from the colonial and apartheid government, instead of being forced into so called unskilled labour for example, coloured people were permitted to do semi skilled work or skilled work, earning better salaries. According to group areas act, this also accounted for better living conditions. This was done in order to finally and permanently create rifts between black and indigenous peoples of Southern Africa so that the British and then the Afrikaner nationalists would never have to deal with a unified force. For Biko this was one of the most abhorrent parts of apartheid, highlighting in his collection of writings that to be black is to acknowledge the oppression we have to deal with, and to confront it collectively and beyond the discrete and shifting racial markers. Because of these minor differences in resources for the racial groupings invented by the colonizers and the apartheid government, black people were forced into making the unthinkably violent choice of whether to try and pass as coloured, sometimes abandoning language and cultural practices in order to fall under this new rubric that might afford them better opportunities. Sometimes the categorization was simply just based on the whims of the government official and whatever mood he was in on the day. My family was everything from Cape Malay, to coloured other, and finally to coloured. What disturbs me about this point is the blanket acceptance of a naming that seeks to separate us from each other further and further, creating fissures deeper than we will ever be able to deal with, and that must be a concern for anyone who cares about the liberation of all the people of South Africa. All these categories, of course, are colonial in invention, but when it comes to making these distinctions that cause the type of factionalism that give rise to nationalisms and racisms and violence, then it must be part of our anticolonial practice to address this. 

And finally and most worryingly, antiblackness is not addressed in these so called coloured communities. Even though the foundation of coloured identity and culture is an absolute and overarching rejection of and disgust with blackness. It is not addressed in the books about colouredness. If we are to accept that coloured is a culture, then we must also accept that a  central and core part of the foundation of that culture has to be a rejection of and disgust with blackness. People might be up in arms reading this, but this is the reality. The family obsession with the white ancestor, the desire to lay claim to simultaneously a foreign brownness and in contradiction to that an indigeneity based often on fantasy, these are all markers of antiblackness. But it goes further and deeper than that. Will we ever speak honestly of the colourism in our families? Will we ever speak honestly about how the blackest children are othered and considered outsiders? Will we ever speak truthfully about the abject violence of the politics of hair texture in our families? No, because then we have to confront the inherent antiblackness. 

My father was an antiapartheid fighter, detained and imprisoned and served with banning orders. He was part of the UDF and many radical organizations on the local level. Even in front of my father, with all the knowledge of the sacrifices him and his comrades have made for the liberation of South Africans, I have heard people say the most racist things around him. And the assumption has always been that we would be cool with it because we are coloured mos. We need to have this conversation honestly and frankly if we are going to actually deal with the issues, because the antiblackness in our families have become normalized to the point where we cannot even differentiate it any longer, and it is simply just a part of the lexicon, the shared cultural heritage if the proponents of the coloured forward argument would have it their way. We are in real trouble of heading down a route of ethnonationalism that will be destructive to every facet of our lives, and lead down a road of violence that we cannot turn back. I have come to accept that what for me is an absolutely racist category, antiblack on every level, is also for many the only way in which they can conceive of community and family. I take that seriously, because there are people who genuinely believe in liberation, yet are also caught within what I consider a contradiction, and because of that I continue the work of writing about and talking to people about this issue.