Coloured Identity 101 (Part 1)

TLDR: It's complicated

Sometimes I fear that no one will ever understand my people and our history. This doesn’t necessarily come from the fact that our identity is complex - all identities are complex in their own way - but more so from the fact that people’s notion of race, identity, and especially blackness, is limited by their own cultural categories. I am a Coloured South African. Note the capital C. Recently on Tiktok, a particular North American content creator set out to explain Coloured identity to non-South Africans, but this explanation is cringeworthy and uninformed at best. Last week, while having coffee with a new friend, I realised that even our own people do not know much about our history and our culture, primarily because we were ashamed of it all for so long, and white people engaged in the erasure of any history that painted them in a negative light. It is only since the fall of Apartheid that we are able to negotiate our identity and the things that make us special, so exploring Coloured identity is actually a novel pursuit, particularly as our community now comes into the resources necessary to engage with this discourse at an academic level. So let’s try to unpack the surface level markers of Colouredness in Part 1 of a series on Coloured Identity.

The common misconception of Coloureds, particularly in the United States, is that Colouredness denotes mixed-race or bi-racial identity. I can see why this misconception exists. To anyone on the outside, it would appear that Coloured people occupy a liminal space between black and white, therefore they must be a combination of the two. Coloured people, however, have a broad range of ancestral origins, including indigenous South African Khoi, San, Nama and Bantu (Nguni), Indonesian and Indian slaves, European (Dutch, British, Irish, French, Portuguese, German) colonisers/settlers, West/East African and Caribbean captured slaves (usually captured in transit), and Malagasy slaves from Madagascar, among many other ethnic groups. This has led to the Coloured genome becoming the most diverse in the world. My own DNA profile has bits and pieces from all over the world, including Austronesia, North Africa and North America, and don’t even ask me how any of this made it to Cape Town. Colouredness, therefore, does not denote any specific ancestral origin, but applies more to the grouping together of a diverse range of people, histories, identities and languages over centuries, which is today expressed as a single cultural grouping. So when someone like Trevor Noah claims that he is Coloured, having a Xhosa mother and Swiss father, it feels strange, because he does not live the cultural life of a Coloured person, nor is he truly subjected to the very real and tangible impacts of being a Coloured person.

Despite our diverse origins, we certainly do share a Colouredness that I only really began to understand once I had left South Africa. I remember in primary school, when we had cultural days, and everyone would come in their cultural attire. I would ask my mum what our cultural dress was, and she would say that we do not have culture, and would send me to school in a Springboks top and call it a day. That we have no culture is a lie that Apartheid told us. We spent decades trying so hard to assimilate into whiteness because that was the only way to survive under such an oppressive system - but we were still evicted, massacred and disenfranchised because we weren’t white. As I have grown older (and with my degree in anthropology) I have grown to appreciate Colouredness expressed in various ways that we often do not notice.

The first instance of Coloured culture is in the languages we speak. In Cape Town, Coloured people generally speak English or Afrikaans as a first language, yet our English and Afrikaans is different to the standardised version people learn in school. Our Afrikaans is called Kaaps or Afrikaaps, and it has its own accent and word variations, and even its own intensifiers that standardised Afrikaans does not have. Afrikaans, of course, originated in the Coloured community - don’t let white people tell you otherwise. This is why Afrikaans is rich in loan words from English, Javanese, Arabic and the local Khoisan and Nguni languages. Even our English sounds different to standard British or South African English. A lot of the intensifiers from Kaaps have slipped into every day use in Coloured English. Coloured English, therefore, is inherently a hybridised version of the language, developed in proximity to Kaaps. A sentence like “You can nogal say that it’s darem lekker mos, ne?” is a perfectly acceptable sentence, despite the fact that nogal, darem, mos and ne are all intensifiers which simply hammer home the same point. As such, I find Coloured English and Kaaps to be a lot more expressive than the standardised versions because we play with emphasis. Yet in South Africa today, we downplay our accents and our dialects because it is regarded by the wider society as uncouth, uncultured and uneducated.

The second instance of Coloured culture is present in the food that we eat. I remember getting so upset comparing the food that I would eat for lunch and dinner with that of my Kiwi classmates. All I wanted was to eat “white people food” and I would nag my parents to adapt to the Kiwi cuisine lifestyle. But now, all I want to eat is the food that reminds me of home. The bobotie, tomato bredie, oxtail stew, lamb curry, milk tart (melktert) and chakalaka that made up our every day meals may not sound particularly Coloured, but they are as much a part of Coloured culture as our accents. This beautiful blend of influences has come to create a diverse flavour profile, rich in spices and textures, which characterises Coloured cuisine. The Cape Malay cookbook has become a cultural document containing a rich insight into the stomachs of our people. You know that every Coloured party is going to have mince samosas, mince pies, daltjies, and probably a mebos swan centrepiece that will undoubtedly disappear by the end of the night. You know that we all drink boeber on the 15th night of Ramadan, even if we are not Muslim. It’s these nuances that defines Colouredness beyond just our accents and where we might live.

Even more, look at how we prepare and eat our food and you’ll see Colouredness made manifest. The way my Ouma rolled balls of dough before flattening them into roti to accompany the most delicious curries. The way we suck at the marrow hiding in the bones of our stews. The way we crunch on the peppercorns in a plate of pickled fish, a curried fish best served cold. The way we all eat koeksisters on Sundays from an aunty down the road, and no one can explain why. The way we all gather around the braai or the potjie for hours on end, eagerly awaiting that mouthwatering fall-off-the-bone oxtail, while sharing stories, catching up, gossiping and laughing together. This is Colouredness. These are the sites of cultural encounter we often ignore or think are insignificant - but they are every bit a part of us as our DNA.

And finally for this part in the series, what defines Coloureds most is our sense of community. This one is a little bit harder to articulate, but perhaps I can offer an anecdote. I was living with white people in Auckland for a little while, and the thing that bothered me most about this living arrangement wasn’t the mess that they left behind, or the ongoing relationship dramas - it was the individualistic nature of my flatmates, through no fault of their own, made manifest in even something simple as opening a bag of chips and not offering some to anybody else in the room. This does not make them bad people - they are a product of Kiwi (and British and American) culture. If I had done that at home, you best believe I would have got a moerse klap from my mother. I think perhaps I wanted so desperately to lean into this white world that was actually hostile to someone who grew up in a communal culture. Then my Ouma died, which is a whole story unto itself, but her funeral was the site of cultural encounter that reminded me of my Colouredness, seeing hundreds of people gathered to celebrate this remarkable woman. Without even blinking an eye, the aunties were at our house bringing samosas and koeksisters, pots of food and flowers. We can pray and make du’a together, and whether someone is Muslim or Christian doesn’t matter because we are all the same in the end. I don’t even know how to explain this innate urge to come together as a community and look after each other, but that is Colouredness. Colouredness is not opening a bag of chips and eating it all by yourself; Colouredness is being willing to give the whole bag and more to your neighbour, whether related by blood or not.

In essence, our collective responsibility can be described as an embodiment of ubuntu. Ubuntu is an out-of-fashion term these days, but recently I have been enamoured by the philosophy and its decolonising potential. Ubuntu can simply be summarised as strength in unity, recognising that no man is an island, and that we have a responsibility to be compassionate, kind, and genuinely concerned with the needs of others. For many today, the idea of ubuntu is airy fairy, idealistic, and almost patronising. I would argue, however, that it explains a lot about us, whether we like it or not. As Coloureds, we have internalised this philosophy and it is made manifest in the way that we engage with one another, the way we come together, and the way we exist as family units even when we are not related by blood. We all look different, whether we have dark skin, light skin, curly hair, straight hair, brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes - we have no single defining Coloured look - but what connects us beyond our differences in appearance and religion is the essence of Colouredness that is the invisible string running through all of us, that, even for me on the other side of the world, compels us to come together as one.