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SA’s coloured people crushed between ethnonationalism and African nationalism

Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
2 May 2024
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In an era of competing nationalisms, South Africa’s coloured people don’t readily fit into easily identifiable cultures of Europe and Africa, which places them outside immediate concerns of poverty, inequality, crime, violence and unemployment.

There is a certain inevitability about the increase in minority politics based on race in post-apartheid South Africa. Most of the people who held political and economic control and privilege, a minority who fought tooth and nail over decades to shore up all of that, were never going to be pleased about giving up power and privilege.

One minority group, people classified as coloured by the apartheid regime, a classification retained by the post-apartheid regime, feels especially aggrieved. Whatever we may think about race, it means very little when people identified as a particular race feel aggrieved or “left behind”. This is where the coloured people find themselves.

In general, coloured people, people of Indian descent and a minority within the minority of white people were active in various permutations of “collaboration and democracy” during the apartheid era. To the extent that they constituted a bloc, most sit, today, within the ANC and Democratic Alliance.

Some have held on to their religious or cultural traditions, with more conservative elements finding a home in the Minority Front, the Freedom Front Plus or the Patriotic Front. There was always a strong Indian presence across the broad liberation movement represented by the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress, the Azanian People’s Organisation and the United Democratic Front. These are simplified observations, but they are no less accurate. 

Return to race-based minority politics


All of this notwithstanding, the coloured people have almost always found themselves in a liminal space. (Here is a good introduction to pre-democracy coloured politics.) Of course, some joined the ANC after 1912, but they always held on to the hope of a better life after apartheid to the extent that they idealised and romanticised hope and anticipation. It has all come crashing down, it seems, and marks a turn to race-based minority politics.

Today, not without justification (the evidence certainly shows a decline in the overall prosperity of coloured people), the community feels excluded. As they navigate the wild waters of democracy they feel threatened and stuck between the rocks of African nationalism, represented by the ANC, and the dragons of the ethnonationalism embodied by the Economic Freedom Fighters.

These competing nationalisms have made it clear that “Africa is for Africans” and that coloured people are not African. These issues have been brewing (see here, here, here and here) and have given birth to a race-based minority politics, the highest tentpole being the inscrutable Gayton McKenzie and the relatively unknown Fadiel Adams of the National Coloured Congress (NCC). 

Adams sets himself apart from McKenzie (for now) and insists that the coloured community today has no way out, as it were, and seems locked in a cycle of poverty, unemployment and crime which is part of purposeful marginalisation by the nationalists. (The liberals would probably blame it all on “the market”.)

The ANC and EFF share a belief with the DA, notionally representative of the white community, that “pigment” does not matter. The former two speak about the primacy of Africanness (having already excluded those they describe as non-Africans) and the latter believes that race does not matter. In other words, you can join or support the ANC and EFF (just don’t mention non-Africans), or the DA (just don’t mention pigment). 

Race, pigment and Africanness are nought for the comfort of coloureds 


It would be funny if it were not so tragic: the statement of the liberal politician Natasha Mazzone of the DA, who conveniently claimed that her father, who was of a darker pigment, did not enjoy white privilege when he arrived in South Africa from Europe (Italy). It would appear that in some cases, “pigment” matters.

The old racists are simply using new ways to conceal what they mean; this includes statements about avoiding the politics of pigment and not seeing race in a country wracked by centuries of racial hierarchies, and then a switch was flicked (on 27 April 1994) and there was, suddenly, no racism — only “cultures” under threat. These are not tangential matters.

There is a clear global pattern that influences national politics, unless, of course, you suffer from change blindness, with notions of uniqueness or exceptionalism, or imagine that South Africans are isolated from the world. Nonetheless, at the global level, from whence we inherit so many trends and traditions, there are increased concerns and discussions about “civilisations” in confrontation or conflict. It all received great impetus when the old Soviet Union collapsed and “the West” sought new demons to fight…

Racial bigotry and hierarchies are, again, cast in the language of “culture”; again, because it sits deep in the imagination of European liberal thought. This is evident in the earliest of European thinking. The Scottish philosopher and historian beloved by liberals, David Hume, believed “the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites”, not because of race, mind you, but because of culture (habits, customs, etc).

John Stuart Mill, also a darling of liberals (he was, of course, one of Britain’s pre-eminent liberal philosophers, and a colonial administrator), was described as a “cultural chauvinist”, and he proclaimed that his views were not racist, but that colonised people in Asia and Africa were simply inferior because of their (indigenous) cultures, characters and laws. (See Anthony Bogues, John Stuart Mill and ‘The Negro Question’, published in Andrew Valls’ collection Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy; Martin Barker, The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe, and Jennifer Pitts, A Turn To Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France.) 

Anyway, today, racism is now masked behind talk of “civilisational clashes and conflicts” strengthened by Washington’s “war on terror”, and where non-Western or non-European cultures or civilisations are considered as lesser entities and a danger to the complacent hegemony of “the West”.

South Africa’s coloured people don’t readily fit into easily identifiable cultures and, according to Adams of the NCC, are simply ignored or irrelevant and not worthy of consideration. It remains to be seen how long Adams will keep his place and avoid the seduction of the Patriotic Alliance, which, for now, seems to have “the numbers”.

Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real 


Again, some context and definitional matters are important. The coloured people discussed here are those people to whom the government gave the identity of “coloured” because they are not pure Africans and “mixed”.

There are strong beliefs that race is a “social construct” and a “biological lie”. Even those of us who prefer class analysis, and don’t particularly care for race-based politics, should probably not dismiss the way racism and notions of racial or religious exclusivity and exceptionalism have inspired some of the worst violence over centuries, notably the past 100 years, when at least 120 million were killed for having the “wrong” beliefs and value systems.

The coloured people in South Africa do not have the privilege of claiming new settlements abroad, based on myths, lies or biblical injunctions that are untested and unproven, of claiming ethnicity exception to get access to privilege or even indigeneity.

I am sure that there is a scientific basis that supports claims that coloured people are, for the most part, indigenous. I personally am rather pleased at being “mixed” and it’s a great pity that I will not be around 500 years from now (if we have not destroyed the planet) to shove a finger in the eye of racial or ethnic purists — and when we’re all, well, coloured.

Anyway, a search for purity based on genealogy can be a terrible waste of time, and retrogressive. Unless it is driven by intellectual curiosity or simply as family record-keeping, and to the extent that it includes a search for purity, it can be destabilising and dangerous.

The point is that the nationalists and ethnonationalists who dominate democratic South Africa have the power and influence to state who is and who is not indigenous and place them on a sliding scale of justice. 

The coloured people, as a group, have nowhere to go. They are diverse in most senses. While the majority may speak Afrikaans, they share only a tenuous relationship with the Afrikaner mainstream. If we believe Adams, through a combination of wilful exclusion marginalisation, the coloured people are being led to believe they’re unimportant, “unfit” for work or higher education, and remain mired in increasing poverty, unemployment, violence, hunger and need.

The NCC believes it can make a difference and, at least, raise the levels of prosperity of the coloured people. A hard task for a political organisation that is so narrowly based on an amorphous group like “the coloureds” — who should, if one were allowed to say it, take pride in being “impure” and made up of racial and ethnic influences. The problem, of course, is that it is not up to the coloureds to determine where they “belong”. It is up to the African nationalists and the ethnonationalists. DM

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