Identity politics — the rise of coloured nationalism in Parliament

Fadiel Adams’ signature look used to be a T-shirt bearing the slogan: “The only good politician is a dead politician”.

These days, you can find him in a collared shirt and suit jacket addressing the National Assembly — but his rhetoric remains inflammatory.

Adams, the leader of the National Coloured Congress (NCC), is one of two NCC parliamentary representatives after the party won 37,422 votes in the May general elections on its first showing, just less than Al Jama-ah. It is already clear what the NCC aims to bring to Parliament: a relentless focus on the rights and hardships of coloured South Africans.

The NCC is not alone. In this seventh Parliament, coloured nationalism is finding its voice — amplified by MPs from the Patriotic Alliance (PA) and uMkhonto Wesizwe (MK) party too.

Coloured South Africans ‘uncomfortable stepchildren’?

“Are coloured people in South Africa persona non grata?”

This question, posed by Adams to the National Assembly on 3 September, is typical of the rhetorical framework in which Adams operates: one in which coloured people are repeatedly painted as discriminated against by both white and black political elites.

On that occasion, Adams’ beef was with the exclusion of coloured people from opportunities in Cape Town townships.

“As a coloured person in the City of Cape Town, I can’t work in a township,” he told Parliament.

“Khayelitsha doesn’t want me. Samora [Machel] doesn’t want me. But this House doesn’t talk about that. As a coloured person I can’t be schooled in the township along [with] my black brothers, but this House doesn’t talk about that.”

Adams aims to make sure the House does talk about that, and the NCC leader tirelessly uses his platform to ventilate what he sees as coloured-specific grievances. The ANC and the DA are equal targets and the hyperbole is spread thick.

In a particularly fiery contribution to the National Assembly’s Heritage Day debate, Adams termed coloured people the “uncomfortable stepchildren of South Africa”, with “no acknowledged history and no acknowledged land in this country”.

He declaimed: “The coloured people have faced a 400-year genocide since Van Riebeeck got off that boat, and in 1994 the ANC decided to extend it by another 30 years.”

Adams was ejected from the debate shortly afterwards, after calling an ANC MP “stupid” and accusing him of laughing at the plight of coloured people.

Patriotic Alliance gets in on the action

The Patriotic Alliance has played a decidedly inconsistent game when it comes to identity politics. Around eight years ago, the PA was intensely targeting the coloured vote in the Western Cape in particular, with a campaign similarly harnessing racial grievances — terming coloured South Africans “too black during apartheid and too white for the ANC”.

Since then, the party leadership appears to have settled on a more inclusive messaging, presumably to widen its vote share. The PA manifesto leading up to the 2024 elections acknowledged that the party was “born in the heart of the coloured community and its pain”, but proceeded to affirm multiracialism, insisting that South Africa has been “repressed” by identity politics.

The manifesto called for the abolition of race categories in an ideal country where “people are not treated first and foremost as black, white, Indian or coloured, but rather as South Africans”.

In reality, however, a number of the party’s MPs are — much like the NCC — advancing the narrative of coloured South Africans as being victims of systemic discrimination.

To give one example, the PA delegate in the National Council of Provinces, Bino Farmer, asked President Cyril Ramaphosa in September: “What is your Cabinet’s plan … with particular reference to coloureds not being seen as Africans and the challenges it creates for our coloured youth in seeking employment?”

Ramaphosa’s response is unlikely to have allayed Farmer’s concerns.

“We are all Africans, born and bred on this continent,” responded the President. “We are not focusing on one national group, we are focusing on all.”

The PA put a similar question to the minister of labour about a week later in the National Assembly, with MP Cleo Wilskut asking how the department “intends to ensure that coloured minority groups are not discriminated against for employment opportunities amidst the backdrop of focusing on African persons in particular”.

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

NCC and MK unlikely bedfellows

NCC leader Adams first came to the attention of the national media around 2018, when he fronted a more militant ethnonationalist group called Gatvol Capetonians — subsequently barred by the Electoral Commission from contesting the 2019 elections on the grounds that its name was too rude.

Adams was at that point a reliable producer of outrage bait, advocating for Western Cape secession as part of his apparent project to create a more muscular coloured political identity. He was also accused of racism, because a particular Adams talking point at that stage was that black people from the Eastern Cape were stealing jobs that should go to coloured Capetonians.

“Sixty-five-year-old [coloured] grandmothers are living in wendy houses while 25-year-old black youth from the Eastern Cape have been here for six months and get title deeds,” was a typical Adams line from the time.

Fast-forward six years, and Adams has rebranded his radical organisation into a somewhat more palatable, slightly more professional political party in the NCC. He has found unlikely comrades in another group accused of ethnic chauvinism: MK, which is often perceived as a Zulu nationalist group.

Both parties are members of Parliament’s “Progressive Caucus”, an affiliation in which Adams seems to take pride: he frequently begins his parliamentary utterances by greeting the caucus.

The two parties might seem on the face of it to have very little in common, but MK has at least one MP — Wesley Douglas, who terms himself a member of Khoisan royalty — who fishes in a similar rhetorical pond, advocating frequently for economic opportunities for coloured people in addition to black and Indian people.

More widely, however, what these parties exploit are very similar currents: anti-establishment populism and (to some degree legitimate) racial grievances. All over the world, such parties flourish in particular in conditions of high inequality, a high cost of living and low economic growth — with their rise fuelled by non-fact-checked social media and, in some cases, colluding legacy media outlets.

In South Africa, the only surprise is that it has taken 30 years since democracy for these identity splinter projects to gain a proper foothold in our body politic. But now that they’re here, don’t expect them to disappear any time soon. DM