Is there a coloured identity?

Some media forms work better than others for different things. For instance, it is difficult to describe a song in writing because one can only appreciate its nuances when one is listening to it.

In the same way, it is probably impossible to try to have a debate about something as complex as “coloured identity” in five minutes on television. This debate is probably best suited to a documentary, a radio programme, a newspaper or magazine article, or a book.

Yet last Sunday, I tried to have this debate with two other studio guests on Weekend Live on SABC2. Apart from a host of mess-ups, like us not being able to link to the guest in Tshwane and my connection from Cape Town being lost when I was trying to make a crucial point about why I call myself black as opposed to coloured, it was also difficult to have this debate in the limited time available.

As it was, we were not treated to any of the views of the representative of a website called Bruin-ou.com and I would have loved to have debated his views. Maybe somebody involved in another media form will take up the challenge and get us together to debate this issue once again.

I have never considered myself to be a coloured and prefer to describe myself as black, in line with the definitions explained by Steve Biko in the 1970s. At the time, the apartheid regime called us non-whites and Biko questioned why “white” had to be the standard against which everything was judged. He asked why “black” could not be this standard. He argued that we should all call ourselves black (Africans, coloureds and Indians), and whites should be called non-blacks.

These definitions have, of course, been entrenched in our law and our Constitution, so I can legally call myself black.

The issue of whether there is a coloured identity is not new, but it surfaces every now and then. It seems to surface more every time we are heading for another election.

At first I used to reject the notion of coloured identity out of hand; recently I have become much more sensitive towards it, but I still cannot see myself adopting this identity. However, I understand completely why some people say they are coloured and proud of it, like I believe the singer Vicky Sampson said on the same programme on Sunday.

Now, Vicky is my home girl. We grew up together in Hanover Park on the Cape Flats and belonged to political youth organisations in the early 1980s, so she has a consciousness of non-racialism and how important this was to our struggle.

At some point she, like me, called herself “black”. But she would not be the only one who now suddenly seeks solace in being a “coloured”.

Like I said, I have no problem with people identifying themselves as “coloured”, but then they must afford me the right to assert my human identity, my South African identity or my black identity.

I think the resurgence in people identifying themselves as coloureds could be laid at the door of short-sighted politicians who failed to make people who could potentially identify themselves as coloureds feel welcome in the new South Africa.

But it also has to do with economics, where people who identify themselves as coloureds have to fight for a small piece of the economic pie along with Africans.

If you speak to Africans, especially in the Western Cape, they will tell you that coloureds are favoured. If you speak to coloureds in the Western Cape, they will tell you that Africans are being favoured. The truth is probably that neither of the two is being favoured.

I try to deal with the issue of coloured identity in my book and I ask how one identifies a coloured. There are certain markers to identity and, of all the markers that I could think of, it is difficult to find any great commonality among the group roughly called “coloureds”.

I still believe that the only definition of “coloureds” is people who could not be fitted into any of the other apartheid-era definitions.

And isn’t it amazing how our democratic government has just adopted all the apartheid-era terminology? But that is probably the subject of another blog.