Coloured

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This article is about the term for an ethnic group used in Southern Africa. For other meanings, see Colored or colour.

In the South African, Namibian, and Zimbabwean context, the term Coloured (also known as Bruinmense, Kleurlinge or Bruin Afrikaners in Afrikaans) refers to a heterogeneous group of people of "mixed race," many of whom claim ancestry from Europe, Indonesia, South India, Ceylon, Madagascar, Mozambique, Mauritius, St. Helena, and from across southern Africa. Besides the extensive combining of these diverse heritages in the Western Cape--in which a distinctive Cape Coloured and affiliated Cape Malay culture developed--in other parts of southern Africa, their development has usually been the result of the meeting of two distinct groups. Thus, in KwaZulu-Natal, most coloureds come from British and Zulu stock, while Zimbabwean coloureds come from Shona or Ndebele mixing with British and Afrikaner settlers. Griqua, on the other hand, are descendants of Khoisan and Afrikaner trekboers. Despite these major differences, the fact that they draw parentage from more than one "naturalized" racial group means that they are "coloured" in the southern African context. This is not to say that they identify themselves as such--perhaps preferring to call themselves "black" or "Khoisan" or just "South African"--but the history of racial segregation and labelling has placed all such "mixed race" people in a certain relationship together by virtue of the fact that the imperial and apartheid governments categorized them as coloureds and because, for the most part, Africans, Indians, and Whites continue to view them through such a lens.

Extended Coloured family with roots in Cape Town, Kimberley & Pretoria

During the apartheid era, in order to keep divisions and maintain a race-focused society, the term Coloureds was used as one of the four main racial groups identified by law: Blacks, Whites, Coloureds and Indians. (All four terms were capitalised in apartheid era law.) Coloured people constitute a majority of the population in Western Cape and Northern Cape provinces. Most speak Afrikaans, while about ten percent of Coloureds speak English as their mother tongue, mostly in the Eastern Cape and Natal. However, virtually all Cape Town coloureds are bilingual, comfortably codeswitching between "Kaapse taal" (a creolized dialect of Afrikaans spoken mostly in the Cape Flats), "suiwer Afrikaans" (formal Afrikaans, as taught at school), and English.

[edit] The history of the idea of “Coloured” people

The Oxford Dictionary of South African English reveals that the word “Coloured” has been used since the 1840s to refer specifically to South Africans of mixed race, while the term Cape Coloureds came into use around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. During the 19th century the people of Griqualand, who would now be known as Coloured, were known by the Afrikaans term Baastards. An offshoot of the Cape Coloureds now make up a separate ethnic group in south-central Namibia, known as the Rehoboth Basters; they migrated to their current location in pre-German times. They have also subsequently migrated to the urban centres.

Children from Cape Town's "Cape Coloured" community.

The idea of “Coloured” people developed partly to describe the complex position of those who were neither white nor members of groups that spoke African languages. In part, the ethnic category reflects the destruction of distinct Khoisan political structures and the decline of spoken Khoikhoi language. During the 18th century in particular, Khoikhoi people in the southern parts of South Africa were squeezed between white settlement and Xhosa groups, with Khoikhoi numbers reduced by smallpox and the loss of the range they required to run cattle, the basis of the pre-settlement Khoikhoi economy.

Khoikhoi people in the 17th and 18th centuries were thus faced with the choice of either becoming Xhosa — giving up their cattle and starting at the bottom of the Xhosa social hierarchy, but assuring that their children would grow up as free people within Xhosa society — or living as the equivalent of serfs within the dominion of white settlers, but keeping their cattle. A third choice involved going deeper into the inland areas, a choice taken by the ancestors of some of the Griqua. A significant number of Khoikhoi people made each choice.

So while many Xhosa people thus also share Khoikhoi ancestry, the white power structure designated them as Xhosa along with any other Xhosa-speaking person. The Afrikaans-speaking and increasingly diverse groups of black people who lived on white farms and in cities, on the other hand, were the descendants of the Khoikhoi serfs, the African and Asian slaves brought to South Africa from elsewhere, and the white settlers — and they spoke Afrikaans. The “Coloured” identity then became a way for whites to describe this group concisely as both not white, and not the same as African groups like the Xhosa and later, the Zulu and other groups.

The majority of people who came to be described as “Coloured”, then, shared three features that allowed some to describe them as an ethnic group in the anthropological sense:

1. Khoikhoi family lineage and racial features
2. traditional association with the Afrikaans language and the Dutch Reformed Church
3. a historically complicated and ambivalent relationship with the related ethnic group of Afrikaners

This did not apply to all people who Apartheid described as “Coloured”, however; for instance, so-called Cape Malays were at least partly of Asian descent and were often Muslims. In fact, the description came to apply to a number of groups, including Cape Malays, Cape Coloureds, Basters and Griqua; some also included the Namaqua into this group.

In the 1950s and 1960s, laws prohibiting interracial sex and marriage, the proclamation of separate residential areas, the provision of separate schooling and other apartheid laws attempted to make the so-called “Coloureds” appear to be far more of a unified identifiable ethnic group than they were in reality. Indeed, many sub-classifications were required in the law to include all those that the government categorised “Coloured”. The political function of this group was to define “Coloured” people as distinct from Indian and Black people, with both small privileges and large policies of discrimination being designed specifically for each group.

There are approximately 4.1 million Coloured people spread across the country but the largest are located in the Western Cape where roughly 2.5 million Cape Coloureds live.[1] Within that population are included the Cape Malays who are distinguishable primarily by their Islamic faith and Asian culinary influence. During the Dutch rule thousands of people were bought, tricked or kidnapped from various coastal regions around the Indian Ocean and brought to the Cape Colony to work as slaves, mostly originating in Java, southern India, Mozambique and Madagascar. The Asian influence had led to a slightly different language use and a strongly Muslim heritage among Cape Malays.

One of the more distinctive subgroups is that of the Griqua, numbering between 100,000 and 300,000, depending on how they are defined or define themselves.

The absurdity of the systems of racial classifications were vividly seen in the convoluted criteria the government attempted to use to distinguish so-called Coloured people from people classified as being “purely” of African or European descent. [2] The Apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria at the time that the Population Registration Act was implemented to determine who was Coloured. Minor officials would administer tests such as the so-called pencil test (testing the curliness of hair) to determine if someone should be categorised Coloured or Black, or Coloured or White. Different members of the same family found themselves in different race groups. Further tests determined membership of the various sub-racial groups of the Coloureds.

The most common language of South African Coloured people is Afrikaans, followed by English, though Cape Coloureds generally use a unique variation of the two in everyday speech.

Some Coloureds, especially of the middle-class, do not like the term "coloured," preferring alternative expressions like “so-called Coloureds” (Afrikaans sogenaamde Kleurlinge) and “brown people” (bruinmense) and “brown Afrikaners” (bruine Afrikaners) or “brown South Africans” (bruine Suid-Afrikaners). Others refer to themselves as “black” in the terms of the Black Consciousness Movement, which extended black identity to Coloureds and Asians in South Africa.

However, the term Coloured is still widely used in South Africa, including by some organisations which opposed apartheid, for example, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. It is also used amongst the great majority of working-class coloureds on the Cape Flats. In the United Kingdom problems have arisen when teachers have come from South Africa, some of whom define themselves as Coloured, and prefer this term to “mixed race”; some British people consider the term Coloured to be pejorative or, at least, out-moded. But some people who identify as Coloured reject the term “mixed race” on the grounds that it suggests that they are somehow the exception to a general rule of racial purity — an idea not borne out by genetics or history.

[edit] Politics in the pre-apartheid and apartheid eras

Zackie Achmat, founder of the Treatment Action Campaign, got his political start at 14, by burning down his school in order to persuade his fellow students in the Coloured community to join the Soweto uprising and school boycott.

Coloured people played an important role in the struggle against apartheid and its predecessor policies. The African Political Organisation, established in 1902, had an exclusively Coloured membership; its leader Abdullah Abdurahman rallied Coloured political efforts for many years.[3] Many Coloured people later joined the African National Congress and the United Democratic Front and whether in these organisations or others, many Coloured people were active in the fight against apartheid.

The political rights of Coloured people varied by location and over time. In the 19th century they theoretically had similar rights to Whites in the Cape Colony (though income and property qualifications affected them disproportionately) but had few or no political rights in the Transvaal Republic or the Orange Free State. There were Coloured members elected to Cape Town's municipal authority (including, for many years, Abdurahman). The establishment of the Union of South Africa gave them the franchise, though by 1930 they were restricted to electing White representatives, and there were frequent voting boycotts in protest. This may have helped the election of the National Party in 1948 with an apartheid programme aimed at stripping Coloured people of their remaining voting powers, and led to a constitutional crisis between the Government and the Supreme Court over entrenched clauses of the constitution. Coloured people largely lost their votes in the 1950s, with the last municipal votes being removed in 1972. Coloured people were subject to forced relocation; for instance, the multicultural Cape Town area of District Six was bulldozed and its inhabitants moved to racially-designated sections of the metropolitan area on the Cape Flats. Additionally, apartheid meant that Coloured people received an inferior education, albeit better than that provided to Black South Africans.

In 1983, the Constitution was reformed to allow the Coloured and Asian minorities a limited participation in separate and subordinate Houses in a tricameral Parliament, a development which enjoyed limited support. The theory was that the Coloured minority could be allowed limited rights, but the Black majority were to become citizens of independent homelands. These separate arrangements were removed by the negotiations which took place from 1990 to provide all South Africans with the vote.

[edit] Post-apartheid Politics

During the 1994 all-race elections, many Coloured people voted for the white National Party, which had formerly oppressed them; and the National Party recast itself as the New National Party partly to woo non-White voters. This political alliance, often befuddling to outsiders, has sometimes been explained in terms of the common Afrikaans language of White and Coloured NNP members, opposition to affirmative action programs that might give preference to non-Coloured Black people, or old privileges (e.g., municipal jobs) that Coloured people feared giving up under African National Congress leadership.

Since then, coloured identity politics has continued to be important in the Western Cape, particularly for opposition parties which see the Western Cape, in particular, as a place where they might gain ground against the dominant ANC. The Democratic Alliance wooed away some former NNP voters as the NNP collapsed in the 2004 elections, winning considerable coloured support; this support played a role in the DA's victory in the 2006 Cape Town municipal elections. Patricia de Lille, leader of the Independent Democrats, does not use the label "Coloured" to describe herself but would be recognised as a so-called Coloured person by many; the ID party has also sought the Coloured vote and gained significant ground in the municipal and local elections in 2006, particularly in districts with heavily Coloured constituencies in the Western Cape. The firebrand Peter Marais (formerly a provincial leader of the New National Party) has also sought to portray his New Labour Party as the political voice for Coloured people.

The ambitions of the opposition parties aside, however, there is also substantial Coloured support for and membership in the African National Congress before, during and after the apartheid era: Ebrahim Rasool (now Western Cape premier), Dipuo Peters, Beatrice Marshoff, Manne Dipico, and Allan Hendrickse have been noteworthy Coloured politicians affiliated with the ANC, and the ANC is now the strongest political force in the Western Cape. The ANC has had some success in winning Coloured votes, particularly among labour-affiliated and middle-class Coloured voters, but there is also distrust of the ANC, reflected in the comment ‘not white enough under apartheid, and not black enough under the ANC’. [4] Voter apathy was high in historically Coloured areas in the 2004 election. [5]

[edit] Southern Africa

The term "Coloured" is also used to describe persons of mixed race in Namibia, to refer to those of part Khoisan, part white descent. The Basters of Namibia constitute a separate ethnic group that are sometimes considered a sub-group of the Coloured population of that country. Under South African rule, the policies and laws of apartheid were extended to what was then called South West Africa, and the treatment of Namibian Coloureds was comparable to that of South African Coloureds.

The term "Coloured" or "Goffal" is also used in Zimbabwe, where, unlike South Africa and Namibia, most people of mixed race have African and European ancestry, being descended from the offspring of European men and Shona and Ndebele women; under white minority rule in the then Rhodesia, Coloureds had more privileges than black Africans, including full voting rights, but still faced serious discrimination. In Swaziland, the term Eurafrican is used.

[edit] Other usage

The American English term (spelt as colored) had a related, but different meaning and was primarily used to refer to African Americans. The use of term in this way is now considered archaic and offensive in most contexts; nonetheless it remains part of the title of the NAACP, a prominent African-American organisation, and has been employed by some members of the African-American community as a legitimate ethnic/racial label when intentionally self-chosen and used in a respectful manner. "People of color" is currently used more frequently than "colored", but in the American usage, the phrase refers more generally to all people who do not describe themselves as "white", including people of Asian, Native American, Latin American and African descent. In a British context "coloured" has also been used to refer to black people, although this is now regarded as an old-fashioned and somewhat offensive usage.

[edit] See also

• List of terms for multiraciality
• Colored
• Goffal
• One drop theory
• Pencil test, Passing (racial identity)
• Culture of South Africa
• Griqua
• Basters
• Burghers
• Anglo-Indian
• Anglo-Burmese
• Melungeon
• Mestizo
• Métis people (Canada)

[edit] External links

• 2001 Digital Census Atlas