THE ANGELLA JOHNSON INTERVIEW
PULEEZE, do not call Basil Douglas a “so- called coloured”. It pisses him off. Like the k-word does black folk. He is Coloured, with a capital C, and proud of it. Heck, he is even prepared to fight for the right to be called coloured.
The man who organised last week’s mass coloured stay-away protest, in which two people were killed during an orgy of violence, compares his identity crisis with that of the Maoris’ battle for self- determination in New Zealand and the Native Americans’ struggle to survive in the United States.
“We are the original people of this country, but the whites took away our land, our language and made slaves of us. Now this new government comes in and wants to call us black. We don’t want it, so they describe us as so-called coloureds. It’s ugly and insulting. A slander.”
Douglas, leader of the South Western Joint Civics Association (Sowejoca), is convinced “his people” are being discriminated against by a racist, black-dominated government. “Nationhood and oppression are the issues,” he says. There was a time when he thought being black was beautiful – during his political apprenticeship in the 1970s, when he sported a huge afro and admired the Black Panther political movement.
But times change. The former gang leader, turned boxer, teacher, political agitator (aligned to various parties) and now community leader, has acquired enough street smarts to tap into popular discontent and champion their cause. Using the fears and insecurities of coloured people about their role in the new South Africa, and his own, Douglas has cornered a niche market.
“We want our own identity . not to be just South Africans, but to belong to our own cultural group,” he says. “Being a coloured is an accepted name and we want to keep it – at least in the transformation period.”
The dispute over payment arrears for services in Gauteng’s impoverished coloured townships is providing a platform for this political agitator to air his demand for nationhood. And he is making the most of the media attention.
These days Douglas is so busy that our meeting had to sandwich a hastily convened press conference, at an Inkatha Freedom Party office in Johannesburg, called by Sowejoca – in other words Douglas – to condemn what it describes as the Eldorado Park massacre.With the sleeves of his cream Pierre Cardin shirt rolled up workmanlike, he handles the conference like a seasoned professional, watched over by a beaming Mangosuthu Buthelezi general election poster.
The handful of journalists in attendance are not his usual target audience, but he’s making valiant attempts to win us over. That’s until a young radio reporter decides to lob in some provocative questions about his responsibility for children being involved in the stayaway.
His bulky frame crammed behind a table, flanked by six other Sowejoca members, Douglas’s huge chest heaves in agitation. He begins to bristle and the mask of charm slides off his face. “This woman,” he mutters tersely to a lieutenant on his left, “I don’t want to get into an argument with her.” Later he tries to exact revenge. “Where are you from?” he asks, though it is clear from her accent she is South African.
She tells him this. “But you are white!” he counters snidely. “You must be from somewhere else.” The encounter reminds me that Douglas is a pan-Africanist. “I was just teasing her,” he insists afterwards. But I had whiffed an unpleasant odour of racism in the exchange.
Detractors say he is a troublemaker who causes division within communities. They claim his agenda is self-promotion and power. It has also been said he takes advantage of the very people he claims to serve and that his support lies largely with “wayward youth”- which might explain the blazing barricades, stonings and pot shots taken at police.
Here is a man seemingly able to reinvent himself to suit the situation; to move seamlessly from one viewpoint to another. Take his statement to me that President Nelson Mandela is responsible for the “economic ethnic cleansing” of coloureds. Some minutes later he declares: “We love Mandela.”
His arguments are sometimes equally contradictory: “Describing people as black or white is racist,” he says, yet he insists: “We accept coloured as a cultural definition.” He rejects mainstream politics; “However, if the people want me to stand for Parliament, I’ll consider it.”
Maybe Douglas is just a canny politician at heart. He clearly has a winning way with the community he once taught, and they respond by following him with almost blind devotion. He claims a constituency of 300000, including people from the Cape. “The people trust and have confidence in me. I’ve made peace between gangs in Westbury. Even husbands and wives call me in to mediate if they have a bad argument.”
This is the same man who is propagating incorrect information that four people (including a four-year-old and a seven- year-old) were killed during the stayaway, even though the police record shows that only two were killed.
Is public confidence in him misplaced? His statements seem at times to miss the link between power and responsibility. And his rhetoric appears to be racially divisive. Among them is the claim that coloureds suffer job discrimination at the hands of affirmative action because they are not “black enough”.
Ask him for concrete examples of where this occurs, and he can only reply: “People say the bosses are looking for someone with a black surname … this is racism in reverse.” It sounds apocryphal, the stuff of urban legend, but Douglas insists: “It’s government policy.”
He dismisses prominent coloureds (some of whom refer to themselves as black) in the government: Cheryl Carolus, Walter Sisulu and Trevor Manuel, to name just a few. “They represent their bank accounts and their wallets. They are doing nothing for their people.” The only apartheid ethnic group which escapes his criticism is the Indians; they don’t exist in his equation.
It is not the first time Douglas has mobilised residents around long-standing, legitimate grievances such as high rents. In 1994, he ignited the tinder created by poverty, unemployment and an acute housing shortage, with a similar stayaway. The death toll then was one, and 28 were injured.
Douglas has had a chequered political history. He says he resigned from the Pan Africanist Congress in 1993 because he wanted to focus on community issues. But at the time PAC general secretary Khoisan X claimed Douglas had been expelled from the organisation after allegedly assaulting a member of the Ennerdale branch.
When his expulsion became public, he linked up with Malcolm Lupton, founder of the National Liberation Front (NLF), a coloured leadership group which campaigned for a coloured homeland.
He says he severed his tie with the PAC because of personal differences with Khoisan X, and with the NLF because it was a racist organisation. Funny that, he left teaching because of personal differences with the principal.
Douglas, who describes himself as a born- again Christian, has been married for nearly 13 years and has two children, a boy aged 11 and girl aged seven. He was born in Noordsig, a mere spitting distance from Soweto, 36 years ago. His early life was one of abject poverty, scavenging food growing wild in nearby sewers.
The second of seven children, he was shunted between mother and grandmother after his parents divorced. At 14 he dropped out of school and joined the Non Beggars gang, soon rising to be its leader. He still has a faded tattoo (he tried to erase it when respectability set in) on his left arm with the word Boss encircled by a heart.
Encouraged by his mentor, the poet Don Mattera, he eventually went back to school and matriculated. Teacher training college followed, and he went on to teach history, geography and physical education in several coloured areas.
His political CV is similarly eclectic.”I don’t belong to any political party. We are in IFP premises because they are very kind people. They are our friends and have done many good things for coloured people. One day, if my head turns, I will study their political paper.”
Douglas is clearly a man who likes to keep his options open for whatever opportunity presents itself.