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Tyla, water and the racialised history of injustice against indigenous ‘coloured’ women

22 Feb 2024

A racialised controversy emerged around the sultry ‘brown’ singer Tyla after her Grammy award-winning song ‘Water’. Tyla’s self-identification as ‘coloured’ on TikTok provoked ‘black’ Americans. Lineage can be a powerful mode of (re)integration into society, a space of recognition. But in the absence of archives, and strong and cohesive families, finding this path back to lineage is a troubled pursuit.

The idea of “making it” is a prevailing African imaginary in which cosmopolitan Africans are expected to get closer to the attainment of celebrity-style success, with the corresponding markers of successful citizenship: being the chair of a board; having your own company; living in a beautiful mansion; driving a kick-arse car.

This conspicuous consumption is how we are invited and included into (South) African citizenship. When we do not attain these markers of cosmopolitan success, we are deemed to have failed – the worst assessment being “you did not make it” and, to that extent, you are a less valued citizen.

Our young water goddess, Tyla, seems to be “making it” with her global fame and popularity in the music industry.

In Jacklyn Cock’s 2018 book, Writing the Ancestral River, she reflects as a “white” South African on her failure to understand the spiritual rituals undertaken by the Xhosa-speaking South Africans of the Eastern Cape. (Note: I use the inverted commas to indicate that these racialised categories are contested. However, I drop this punctuation for the rest of the article.)

A racialised controversy emerged around the sultry “brown” singer Tyla after her Grammy award-winning song ‘Water’. While the song evokes the sensual rather than symbolic aspect of water, the intersections with ancestral roots are interesting.

Tyla’s self-identification as “coloured” on TikTok provoked “black” Americans. Her lineage evidently has more Zulu ancestry than that of the Khoi or San Africans, who were among the indigenous people of the south of Africa.

Many indigenous African groups, some of whom settled in the Eastern Cape where Cock’s observations of the river occurred, observe various ancient water rituals. Khoi African ancestors also quarrelled with other African groups, such as the Xhosa-speaking peoples in the Eastern Cape.

Much of Tyla’s lineage controversies would wash over most observers and be unfamiliar to her youthful South African fans as they imbibe the steamy ‘Water’ music video.

The quarrels over her “mixed identity”, however, resonate with new citizenship claims in South Africa and the indigeneity of the coloured woman.

Tyla’s new global fame provides us with the opportunity to reflect on the lack of knowledge, in South Africa and abroad, about coloured lineage in our country.

The history of the indigenous people of South Africa – the Khoi and the San – has recently received more attention in the political and academic landscape of the country.

Part of the challenge of reconstructing the history of these peoples and their descendants – the “coloured” groups – is finding the archival sources of knowledge about this lesser known past.

The absence of formal, written archives for dispossessed peoples is a common phenomenon globally that limits historical records. More significantly, however, the absence of records produces another trauma for those who are dispossessed: the absence reminds the postcolonial subject that their existence historically was of little or no relevance at the time.

Whatever services their dispossessed ancestors provided in the Cape Colony, this was deemed insufficient to warrant systematic historical records of slaves, free labourers, domestic helpers, carers, water carriers, translators.

Did we come from ‘under the bed’/‘onder die kooi/Khoi’?

When researching the women of “Proudly Manenberg” (The Red Tent, 2012), I was struck by their assertion that they were not dragged from under the bed (“onder die kooi/Khoi”); that they too, had a lineage and a past.

It would seem strange to have to assert that you have a past, but this is not unusual for those designated coloured in South Africa, who have very little knowledge of their past lineage.

One instance is the narrative of extinction: your ancestors did not survive, even though you exist as one of their progenies. Another is the evisceration of your past: when your ancestors did exist, their records were irrelevant.

There are multiple sides to this trauma of evisceration, producing what some historians have called a “melancholia”, an awareness of an absence, but an incapacity to define what this absence is.

Part of this poor knowledge of past lineage is attributable to a politically conscious act of disavowal of coloured identity. As part of apartheid racial classifications, the term ‘coloured’ was resisted politically in favour of a united black collective identity, forged in the heat of the struggle against apartheid.

But with this disavowal of coloured identity came a loss of knowledge of personal and collective past histories, and the particular history of those designated coloured.

Michael Morris, head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations, says the history of the coloured community is complex, but “quintessentially South African”:

“However, many of those designated ‘coloured’ under apartheid feel excluded from the nation-building project. This racialised group, found in different provinces of South Africa but mainly Cape Town, is often heard saying that ‘we were too black under apartheid but we are too white under the ANC’.”

We are estimated at 8.2% of the population, around 4.2 million of the 59-60 million South Africans, a numerical (and social) minority group.

There is much stereotyping of coloured people: I was called “Kaapse-dans” when I was the national education leader of one of the largest trade unions in Cosatu at the tender age of 28. A natural gaiety, a joy of life, an enjoyment of people – these were the traits that were betraying my roots.

I had not learnt the art of demure femininity that goes down so well with the patriarchy. I was given to flailing arms, legs, wild hair and a freedom in my movements that were a constant reminder of my ancestry, and which signalled the Khoi-bred “coloured girl”, or meid (maid) as they liked to call us in the past.

Stereotypes are powerful governance mechanisms. They enter the minds of citizens and shape narratives for government and society. One such example is the poem that was used in the 1800s to mock and stereotype coloured-black girls, and often recited by the Dutch in the Eastern Cape:

My name is Kaatje Kekkelbek
I kom van Kat Rivier
Dere is van water geen gebrek
Maar scarce van wyn en beer.
Myn a.b.c. st Philip’s school
I learnt ein Kleene bietjie
And left, with wisdom just as full
As gekke tante Meitjie.

(Boonzaaier, et al, oft-recited poem, 1838)

These narratives have powerful impacts on policy choices and approaches to the way a country is governed – who are considered privileged insiders and who are marginalised outsiders; less important, less valued.

But the most debilitating aspect of a stereotype is the way it enters the body of the stereotyped. It becomes a way of knowing the self – as flirty, frivolous, not serious, for instance, when in fact a layered experience of “coloured-black” interiority is being invested with prejudice and normative disapproval.

This latest injustice – the epistemic omissions of our lineage as coloured peoples – has added another layer of indignity to a lifetime of humiliations that life under apartheid bestowed to our communities.

The theoretical consequence of the “narratives of extinction” is to produce an “epistemic silencing” where little is known about our sociocultural practices and histories, and our evolution into contemporary society.

At the practical level, these narratives have the effect of actual or perceived exclusion and marginalisation from active citizenship. Such actual or perceived exclusion can promote fragmented citizenships, and negate our national policy goals of social cohesion and integration.

Where “epistemic silences” persist, epistemic injustice and discriminatory epistemic injustice are produced by these absences in our national memory and psyche, with the consequent contested policy outcomes (the recent Employment Equity Act amendment being one example of this fragmented and fractured citizenship dialogue).

Substance abuse (alcohol, drugs), swearing, rebelliousness and the difficulties of finding a space of belonging haunt any indigenous peoples who are severed from their lineages.

Lineage can be a powerful mode of (re)integration into society, a space of recognition. But in the absence of archives, and strong and cohesive families, finding this path back to lineage is a troubled pursuit.

The incomplete nation-building project in South Africa has excluded the Khoi, San and their coloured descendants from the reconstruction and development of the South African nation. Narratives of extinction have fed the myth that the Khoi were obliterated, yet their descendants remain.

Excavating the intimate “herstories” of invisibilised indigenous women - and easing and healing the torture that resides in these troubled and complex excluded women in South Africa’s national polity - remains an imperative for a decolonised Academy and for a country that aims to include all its citizens.

Tyla is not the only one who is “making it”; there are many other African girls and women who are “making it” in different ways – making food to feed families; making clothes as seamstresses; making money through trading informally on the roadsides and pavements of African cities and towns; nurturing our children into social civility and making governable citizens.

These are the invisible women – some of whom are delighting in Tyla’s raunchy moves – but who our academic texts and nation-building choices have marginalised behind various gendered stereotypes and ignorance of our past.

We need to retrieve our lineages and our past, and sometimes memory in the water is the seamless way into such reconnection. DM

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Did we come from ‘under the bed’/‘onder die kooi/Khoi’?