/ 31 July 2008

Will BBI help coloured people ‘feel comfortable in their own skin’?

How do you measure suffering? And if you were to find that you have suffered the most, how do you get compensated for that?

This is a rather crude analysis of why the newly established Bruin Belange Inisiatief (BBI) — Coloured Interests’ Initiative — was brought into existence.

The 400 coloured people who gathered at Goudini Spa, previously an exclusive holiday hangout for whites, had one thing in common: they felt they were done in by the African National Congress government and that the pot of gold put aside for the rainbow nation is shared exclusively among their black countrymen. The fact that they were all coloured was arbitrary.

Because just as you have to admit that some coloured people have not had access to the fruits of liberation, you have to admit that some did.

I certainly did. With a mixture of supportive parents, commitment to hard work, good mentors and a little bit of luck, I have been able to use opportunities and find a place for myself in post-apartheid South Africa.

The proponents of the BBI would argue that I am one of the lucky ones. I have been able to rise above my circumstances (based on the assumption that my circumstances were particularly bad — I am, after all, coloured) and now feel the need to plough back into the community.

Anyway, to give something back to your community is a notion that is a mainstay of most coloured communities: through one’s work, through churches or community projects and organisations.

Now it is felt we have to do it under the banner of being coloured. We must mobilise around the fact that we, as a group, need to find a place for ourselves in South Africa and make our voices heard. A noble task, given that thousands of coloured people live in squalor in the Western Cape and that, at tertiary level, enrolments of coloured students are not as high as they should be in the province, given that more than half the population is made up of coloured people.

Step one for the new BBI is to help coloured people “feel comfortable in their own skin”, says Dr Danny Titus, president of the Afrikaanse Taal- en Kultuurvereniging (ATKV), which sponsored a large chunk of the BBI’s first conference at Goudini Spa.

I’m sure this derives from the old adage in coloured communities that “under apartheid we were not white enough and under the ANC government we are not black enough”.

Identity in the coloured communities has been debated to death. If you want to find a common defining feature among coloured people, what would it be? It can’t be religion, because both Islam and Christianity feature strongly in coloured communities. Language? Not really, given that significant groups of coloured people — especially those who climbed the corporate ladder — now speak only English, while others, like myself, still see Afrikaans as my home language.

Even the sense of community, which some argue coloured people see as paramount, can be contested, given that more affluent people have moved to former white suburbs and young people entering the job market will live where it is convenient. Few actively look to set up their homes in formerly coloured suburbs. And quite frankly, why should they?

Finally, the BBI is naive in saying that it is not going to allow itself to be used for political purposes. Former provincial police commissioner Lennit Max, then Independent Democrats MP and now Democratic Alliance MPL, gave the DA a head start when he lamented in Die Burger that coloured people are not allowed to board the “ANC gravy train” — never questioning the correctness of the existence of the gravy train in the first place.

With the coloured vote being the powerbroker in the Western Cape and the Northern Cape, this is powerful leverage. If a political party can convince these voters that the party believes coloured people have suffered the most in post-apartheid South Africa and will be compensated optimally, it is a deal that those who feel hard done by should want to consider. Because, used shrewdly, this power can help coloured people get their place in the new South Africa’s sun.