Coloured people are examining their identity in a non- racial South Africa, writes Gaye Davis
RHODA Khadalie describes her ethnicity as “purely incidental”. Her grandfather, a Malawian, came to the Cape where he married her Cape Malay grandmother. Had they returned to his homeland, she too would have been a Malawian. As it was, they stayed, and under South Africa’s race laws, she was classified coloured — a label she has always resisted.
Yet when Khadalie, a University of the Western Cape academic, goes abroad, she is — much to her irritation — often assumed to be Indian. Her pique, she says, is not nearly as great as the embarrassment she feels on examining why she’s so ruffled by it in the first
Khadalie chaired one of the discussions at an Idasa conference last weekend, which aimed at taking the debate around coloured identity further than whether the word should take a capital or lower-case “C”, be inserted between inverted commas, be preceded by “so- called” or even be used at all.
Its theme was National Unity and the Politics of Diversity: the Case of the Western Cape. It took place in a region where the National Party still rules because it reaped the votes of people it once oppressed, and where coloured people’s racism, rather than any strategic or organisational failure on the part of the African National Congress, is often blamed for the movement’s defeat.
It came at a time marked by signs of an emergent coloured consciousness — manifested by the recent formation of the Kleurling Weerstandsbeweging (Coloured Liberation Movement) and the Forum for the Coloured People of South Africa, a pressure group to prevent coloured people’s marginalisation in the new order.
“A Coloured person,” says the Forum’s draft manifesto, deliberately employing the capital “C”, “is a South African citizen who chooses to identify him or herself as such, irrespective of appearance, descent, kith or kin, or faith.”
Western Cape MEC for local government Pieter Marais would agree (“If there’s not such a thing as a coloured person then what’s this conference all about?”), as would participants who declared themselves “brown and proud of it”. Others would just as sharply reject having a racial identity imposed on them.
Western Cape MEC for Health Ebrahim Rassool sees underlying these new formations not so much an empowering self-knowledge, but a “fearful assertiveness” rooted in fear of “the big unknown” — non-racialism and equality.
“Coloureds were oppressed under apartheid, but they were better placed in (its) hierarchy,” he said. “(Now they must) compete equally for scarce resources, without preferential treatment.
“Coloureds are not so much racist as they fear non- racialism … This is what confounds those, including coloured activists, who have fought all their lives for these values; that at the moment of victory, when the promised land is to be constructed, the wilderness is
The key to the “coloured question” lay in translating non-racialism, freedom and equality into socio-economic programmes which included the coloured community while balancing degrees of need with black people. But the ANC, “too confounded by the election result to think its way out of this”, had to “undergo its own transformations at organisational and strategic levels”, to bring coloured communities into the fold of the nation.
As delegates and speakers considered questions of race and ethnicity in a new democracy founded on the ideal of non-racialism — an ideal South Africans of all colours fought for — the key question to emerge was how to allow for interwoven, separate strands of diverse identities without warping the non-racial fabric and sparking friction and antagonism.
>From Canadian academics Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, arguing that, by opting for federalism and decentralisation, South Africa could pre-empt splits and ethnic mobilisation, came the warning that nation building in the exclusive image of the majority (‘Africanisation’) would “not only alienate minorities, but conjure up images of cultural totalitarianism”.
“The sobering fact of the 1990s,” said educationist Neville Alexander, “is that people at the grassroots have accepted the identities prescribed for them by ruling-class ideologies. We have rejected race as a construct, but the notion of it still persists.”
Unequal access to power and resources entrenched it. “In South Africa, race and class coincide. We can sweep away this racial nonsense if we talk of affirming the poor, rather than coloureds or blacks.”
The challenge in building a nation was to create a mainstream culture out of many contributing cultures: “We dream of a South Africa which is like the Great Gariep (formerly the Orange River) — the confluence of many different tributaries which originate in different catchment areas and which are constantly changing … by the formation of new tributaries and the backwash effects from the mainstream, which flows majestically into the great ocean of humanity.
“This is a more durable and a more indigenous nation than the evanescent rainbow nation — at the end of which, as we all know — there is no pot of gold after all.” The debate continues.