Audrey Brown
There are those among the coloured people who have always been uneasy with that label and, in the last year or so, their discomfort has grown. Complaints and accusations that they are not “black enough” do not sit easy with these people. Emerging as they do from the old townships of Kliptown, Sofiatown, Western Native Township, Alexandra and Lady Selbourne, blackness, Africanness, is under their skin, and stretches beyond the opportunism that apartheid forced on them.
This sense of identity survived unscathed after the destruction of these townships and continued into the new realities of featureless conglomerates like Eldorado Park, where the newly-separated, newly-created coloured people were moved after the destruction of their homes two or three decades ago.
The identity survived because black consciousness provided a home for people who, reeling under the double whammy of the Group Areas Act and the Population Registration Act, had to keep their bearings in the bland newness of their imposed name and imposed homes.
They practised the ideology on university campuses like the University of the Western Cape — “Bush” as it was known — and the various other tertiary education institutions they were herded into. But, most importantly, their sense of blackness survived because they maintained contact with relatives who did not make the “pencil test” — one of the perverse ways in which the bureaucrats of apartheid fashioned a coloured community. They ducked in under the wire — the grass, after all, was greener on the other side.
It was easy: Mthimkulu became Grootboom and Ndlovu was changed to Olifant and never mind the fact that you could not tell one from the other. Others, through family circumstance like divorce, adopted “white” names, accepted the housing on offer in Nancefield or Eldorado Park and carried on living — as Africans. There were those with non-African names due to historical circumstance. This made it easier to skip to the other side — accent notwithstanding. These were all creative strategies to survive in a world of scarce resources, bad schools and a lack of job opportunities for African people.
But their roots were well watered. Trips to Orlando or Dube or Mofolo were regular, and traffic flowed both ways. Customs like slaughtering a beast for the ancestors carried on and blanketed relatives with strong vernacular accents were as welcome as the township sophisticates. They were aware of the nascent prejudice among their new neighbours who embraced the term “coloured” by watering a different set of roots — those of the itinerant Scotsman or adventurous Englishman who bestowed on them a name four or five generations ago.
For those who claimed the label “coloured” for convenience or through circumstance, this was not a problem. After all, they were on the side of right, they led hip lives, they went to the legendary shebeens and knew people like Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba from way back. They moved easily among the politicos of the time and Steve Biko and others were their guiding lights.
They too went into exile, political and otherwise. They speak many languages. Tsotsitaal, Afrikaans, English, SeSotho, Zulu, Xhosa, whatever their family background was, flowed easily in uneasy situations. The neighbours, insecure in their skin, needed to put some clear blue water between themselves and those they left behind — and yet resembled — so reminders like the sound of the mother tongue were not welcome. The possibility of losing the scant privilege being “coloured” brought, was too frightening to think about.
They were looked down upon, these people who called themselves “coloured” without remembering. They were called “non-whites” by those who cruised the porous borderline between the African and coloured community, but there was the hope that they, too, would remember themselves. Especially the darker skinned ones with the kroes hair. Those with the lighter skin and straight hair and noses, well, they were welcome in the black consciousness fold.
This group of convenient coloureds emerged into the 1980s — educated to be teachers, insurance salesmen and bank clerks, and radicalised by the times. There were students, doctors and lawyers — not many — but enough to create a stratum of people who embraced the struggle for non-racialism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in keeping with their understanding of which side of the fence they were on. They joined the UDF and organised in an apathetic, disorganised community, they stayed away on June 16 and all the other commemoration days, they supported strikes and encouraged their aunts, cousins and neighbours to join unions. They did not experience teargas and bullets as a daily diet, it is true, but around them people died of poverty, disease and neglect.
They looked on as their community succumbed to the disease of all marginalised, dispossessed communities — high alcoholism rates, wife and child battery, teenage pregnancies, listlessness and apathy. They relied on the fact that the triumph of democracy would bring hope and redemption for these, their neighbours.
But the fact that this community — varied as it is — is despised as one of the most conservative and reactionary in the country, is worrying. Before now, those who stayed rooted and fought the good fight were comfortable in the knowledge and expectation that all those who were oppressed and denied would be uplifted. Now they are wondering whether the nascent doubts that seem to be emerging among black and white South Africans that individual rights might not count for much and that group rights is where it’s at — will see them, and their deluded neighbours, suffer the fate of an unimportant minority. These people are not afraid of affirmative action — yet. But they are wondering whether the time will come when they’ll have to change Grootboom back to Mthimkulu, just to be sure.