I reject the racial construct ‘coloured’ and its stranglehold on people’s lives

With a hard rain falling, and a raging wind forcing trees on the roadside to wave madly at me, I entered Franschhoek, the town that prides and sells itself on its French Huguenot roots, looking for a store to buy some provisions. I was on my way to Greyton for the weekend.

I stopped in front of Heritage Square and walked into Woolworths. I bought what I needed and walked back to my car to continue my journey to the Overberg.  

The moniker, Heritage Square, spoke directly to the just-received answers to my own search into my heritage and ancestry. For as long as I can remember, I have been wondering, who am I? What am I? Who exactly are my ancestors?

Different groups of invaders have between them spread a convenient lie that the indigenous people disappeared without a trace. They might have left behind names like Keiskamma, their clicks in the isiXhosa language, rock paintings, biltong, and remnants of ancient fish traps along the coastline, but they were gone, having left the Earth without leaving any descendants.

This myth and distortion made it easier for the various political regimes that ruled over South Africa to legally create a new group of people in the country: the so-called coloured people.

According to this convenient narrative, this group was the result of sexual relations between indigenous women – females shipped in chains to the Cape as slaves – and non-indigenous men.

As is the case when the conquerors narrate history, not much is said about these sexual encounters: were they willing or through rape – the inevitable punishment that invaders have since time immemorial inflicted on the women of the conquered to humiliate them and their men and to prove that they were their new and superior masters?

As is the practice internationally, those who take land by force usually imprint their identity on it. In the case of South Africa, white settlers claimed that they had brought civilisation, even, as in the case of my forebears, if that so-called civilisation included deadly chicken pox, and also mirrored to the indigenous people that they were inferior – in fact, barely more than animals.

This caused self-rejection, even self-hatred, and stealthily encouraged a desire to be anything but who we were.

This condition was given extra teeth during apartheid when people like me were despised and mocked by segregation laws. My family and I were kicked out of our home in District 6 and cruelly dumped on the Cape Flats.

Read more: Coloureds are Africans: We are the indigenous people of South Africa

After the first two democratic presidencies, our condition was further exacerbated by an ANC-led government that relentlessly advanced a policy of Africanisation. 

Today, millions of people like me are not regarded as African and are daily on the receiving end of dehumanising discrimination, in racial classification legislation and practice.

I never dreamed that apartheid would rise over South Africa again. I had seen up close the evil that it brings. 

In post-apartheid South Africa, we should have bolted the door to keep out the divisions, racial tension and league table that ranked groups in terms of rights, privileges and freedom.

We did not.

When I made my way through childhood and suffered the indignity of forced removals, I learned that apartheid had created a hierarchy. In so-called coloured communities, it was considered an advantage to have a European surname, an alleged European ancestor, and light skin or straight hair instead of kroes (crinkly) hair.

Looking in from the outside, it might have appeared to other black groups that the “coloured” identity was one to be envied. But it was not. I should know; I’ve lived it. It was simply a piece of evil National Party propaganda of divide and rule suiting their self-preservation purposes.

These days, when I hear the refrain “it’s our time”, I cynically add, “Yes, to justify stealing the land of my forefathers and to punish us for what you believe, that coloureds had a better time under apartheid.”     

Yeah, right. I was born into a group with an almost predictable future. That future included pervasive poverty that assaulted human dignity, dropping out of school, degrading and poorly paid jobs such as being messenger boys, tea girls, domestic servants, and, of course, a stint in prison for various crimes.

In May, the month of my birth, I was given an exciting birthday present: a DNA test. My DNA would be scientifically and comprehensively probed and the result would tell me who I am, where I come from, and whether I, despite what the ANC government may believe and pontificate, am an African, as indigenous as fynbos.

As I carefully followed the instructions and took the swabs required, I informed the laboratory doing the test that it could send a courier service to collect the sealed specimens.

Then it was time to wait for the outcome which was due to be delivered in about six weeks. It was a long time to spend not thinking about what the DNA results would show. After about five weeks, my curiosity got the better of me and I sent off an email to inquire when I could expect my results.

The reply was that it would be in a matter of days. In the following days, I checked my email burning with nervous anticipation. Finally, the results were there waiting to be opened, read and digested. It was a big moment, one of the biggest and most important ones of my life.

I read the report slowly. Not wanting to miss anything. Wanting to take in every word.

According to my DNA results, the main root in my bloodline is grounded in the KhoeSan (another name for KhoiSan), which, according to the report, “is the oldest population worldwide and has ties in southern Africa for centuries. The KhoeSan population are made up of Khoekhoe populations who were agropastoralists and the San who were historically hunter-gatherers. These populations were the first to meet the Europeans as they arrived at the southern tip of South Africa in the 15th and 17th centuries”.

So, there it was. The indigenous people are in my DNA and probably in those of millions of people like me. The report also said that in my veins flowed contributions from East and West Africa, central Europe and Asia. However, the KhoeSan is the main contributor.

There was a surprise, one that literally took my breath away, in the report. 

According to the DNA result, my maternal bloodline showed that I have the same ancient female ancestor as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. So, if these iconic South Africans are African, what does that make me? An African, nothing less; an African indigenous to South Africa.

I was shocked because I have known an environment where apartheid was so successful in burning the word “coloured” into our identity that some who have taken on this definition would be happy to be anything other than black and African.

Some have also lauded their slave ancestry but kept quiet about possible African links. As a journalist, I have also heard people in Mitchells Plain calling Mandela the despicable K-word.

As I absorbed the DNA information, some thoughts came to me: there should be an application made to the Constitutional Court to define what an African is and to declare that the descendants of the indigenous people living in South Africa are indeed the first Africans that lived here. Without such a decision, the government will not change its position and we are doomed to be forever defined as “coloured”, exactly like the apartheid masters labelled us.

As the descendants of the first indigenous Africans who lived in South Africa, we, the so-called coloured people, should accept our African identity and strenuously resist the temptation to counter our country’s relentless Africanisation by retreating into “coloured” nationalism.

Such a withdrawal, understandable as it is, is divisive and ultimately a belated victory for apartheid-style group identity.

I long for a real and not a pseudo-united country where all people born here, or who are naturalised South Africans, are free, equal and not condemned to a life filled with the pain of exclusion and identity denial.

If we don’t do this, then apartheid, whether through its new post-1994 African converts or the initial white architects of this despicable system, has won.

And we, the descendants of the indigenous people, will continue to live in denial of who we really are, without a true identity, drifting aimlessly, not belonging anywhere and being excluded everywhere. Just go look at the Cape Flats. If you dare.

As I sit writing here in Greyton, my ancestral village Genadendal – the Moravian mission station where my KhoiSan forebears exchanged their nomadic lifestyle and chose Christianity and survival – lies just down the road. I now have it in black and white: as an African, I belong here as much as the Riviersonderend Mountains behind Genadendal, the Karoo, or the ancient Keiskamma River.

I reject the racial construct “coloured” and its stranglehold on people’s lives. Sadly, some have even embraced it enthusiastically as an identity marker.

We should see it for what it is: a stronghold of the apartheid heresy that has remained standing, defiantly. It should be abolished. DM