The colonisation of the Cape really messed me up. I was raised in the ”Cape Malay” community, but could decide my identity more easily if my ancestors had not been shipped to Africa by the Dutch.
A complicating factor is that I don’t believe that I am purely descended from the Indonesians and Malaysians the Dutch colonisers imported as slaves. Thinking about heritage has got me looking closely at my fair-skinned (not white) paternal grandmother, her dark-skinned (not black) husband and my very South-East Asian-looking maternal grandparents.
But after travelling to Indonesia and Malaysia in search of my roots, I no longer see myself as ”coloured” — which will break my coloured friends’ hearts. ”Coloured” is a category they feel wrapped in, yet it sounds to me like an apartheid swear word.
I abhor the constructed coloured identity. And I don’t conform to the pseudo-cultural stereotype — I have all my front teeth and don’t belong to a Cape Malay choir.
The words we use to describe ourselves were not chosen by us, but by the white oppressors. ”Coloured” does not delve into the true identity of a whole spectrum of South Africans.
I am also uncomfortable with the ”Cape Malay” tag, which is just as much an apartheid creation.
My trips to Indonesia and Malaysia were dotted with encounters with people who looked as if they came straight from the daily life of the Cape Malay community. I heard Indo-Malay words I grew up with, like piesang (banana), tramakassie (thank you) and labarang (Eid), which made me feel connected.
I met a man with a very similar surname to mine, Kamaludien. My Arabic surname, Kamaldien, means ”perfect religion”. An Indonesian I encountered said now that South Africa’s borders were open, we should reconnect as a people.
I also sought and found physical connectedness by visiting the grave of the legendary Muslim leader, Sheikh Yusuf, in his Indonesian home town of Makassar. Sheikh Yusuf resisted the Dutch invasion and was deported to South Africa in 1694. He was buried on a hill in Cape Town in a small town called Macassar. Myth has it that his thumb was sent back to Indonesia, and that by the time it arrived, it had grown into a complete body.
Each year at Easter, Cape Malays set up tents in Macassar, sing choral songs around campfires and entrench their insular collective identity. How many of them know that the architects of apartheid ensured that Macassar remained intact to promote differentiation between Cape Malays and other people classified as coloured?
Bo-Kaap was reserved as the official Cape Malay quarter. And the Afrikaner academic Izak David du Plessis wrote books like The Cape Malays to create the stereotyped identity of a fun-loving, singing coon. Du Plessis formed the choral clubs, and in 1939 founded the Cape Malay Choir Board.
Tracking down the elements that comprise my identity will obviously require a lot more than trips to Malaysia and Indonesia. But exploring the Far Eastern connection has helped. It has pushed me to acknowledge that there is a lot more to me than being just a coloured of Indo-Malay origins.