Coloured
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In the South African and Namibian context, the term Coloured (also known as Bruinmense, Kleurlinge or Bruine Afrikaners) refers to a rather heterogeneous group of people of mixed Khoisan, white European descent, Malay, Malagasy, Black (Bantu), and South Indian ancestry, especially in the Western Cape. Some people of exclusively Khoisan descent who maintain a European-rooted culture and identity (for instance, speaking Afrikaans as their primary language) might also identify as and be considered as Coloureds.
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 Coloureds speak Afrikaans, while about ten percent of Coloureds speak English as their mother tongue, mostly in the Eastern Cape and Natal. A significant number of the people who might be described by this category reject it; others embrace it but reject the description "mixed race".
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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.
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:
- Khoikhoi family lineage and racial features
- traditional association with the Afrikaans language and the Dutch Reformed Church
- a historically complicated and ambivalent relationship with the related ethnic group the 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.
Coloured people are spread across the country but the largest and perhaps most distinctive subgroup is that of the Griqua, numbering more than 300,000 individuals, with that of the Cape Coloureds (located in the Western Cape where there was strong influence from Malay slaves brought by Dutch colonists) being second largest, with an estimated population of 180,000. 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.
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. [1] 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.
Many Coloured people do not much like the term Coloured to describe their community, but it continues in use for lack of a satisfactory alternative. 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) have acquired a some popularity in recent years. Other so-called Coloured people refer to themselves as "black" in the terms of the Black Consciousness Movement, which extended black identity to so-called Coloured people and Asian people in South Africa.
However, the term Coloured is still widely used in South Africa, including by some organisations which opposed apartheid, e.g., the Congress of South African Trade Unions. 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.
Politics in the pre-apartheid and apartheid eras
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.[2] 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 constutional 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.
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 white-led New National Party and Democratic Alliance both campaign for the Coloured vote, with the DA wooing away some former NNP voters as the NNP collapsed in the 2004 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 has always been 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 been increasingly successful in winning Coloured votes, particularly among labour-affiliated and middle-class Coloured voters. However, voter apathy was high in historically Coloured areas in the 2004 election, suggesting that this electoral bloc remains up for grabs. [3]
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 is also used in Zimbabwe, where, unlike South Africa and Namibia, most people of mixed race have Bantu 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.
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 its usage is also not the norm. 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.
See also
- List of terms for multiraciality
- Culture of South Africa
- Griqua
- Basters
- Burghers
- Anglo-Indian
- Anglo-Burmese
- Melungeon
- Mestizo
External links
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