The problem with coloureds...

By Kim Smith

One of my favourite quotes from former president Thabo Mbeki is: “One of the things that became clear and which was actually rather disturbing, was the fact that there was a view which was being expressed by people whose scientific credentials you can’t question.” What sets the pre-Socratic thinkers apart, what causes us to remember and consider them millennia later and what essentially made them philosophers, was their ability to say “hang-on, what are you saying? What is it exactly that you want me to believe?” And for certain, when they were unsatisfied with what they heard, after thinking about it, they surely believed it no more. We must question!

Recently, a lot has been and is being said in the media about coloured people.

Why do we afford these people so much scope? Why do we allow them to affect us in the way that they do? Would we have reacted the way we did if we were comfortable and certain with who we are and what we are about, regardless of what anybody says? Is it wrong to suggest that the type of person who read the article and/or watched the interview should know better than what these people were saying and disregard it for the drivel that it is? Since the one is in public office and the other writing for a newspaper, is letting your vote and your money do the talking not perhaps a less petty way of dealing with these events? Perhaps the time has come for us to start changing the way we think …

In my view, there is a problem with coloured people. The problem perhaps with coloured people is summed up in Minister Trevor Manuel’s letter. On the one hand, he says something to the effect of the idea of “coloured” being a construct of apartheid and that he doesn’t subscribe to it, but on the other hand, and I mean let’s be honest, the reason he’s writing is because he’s coloured! That in itself is a kind of hypocrisy almost, one which translates into a contradiction protruding into the very existence of coloured ethnicity. And though most people are thinking “good on you Trevor! You told him lekker”, the reality is that his letter was a bit of an emotional outburst. How can he call the man “a racist in the mould of Verwoerd”? Coloured people don’t know who they are. Those who say “we are African” or “black” are delusional: coloured men don’t go into the bush to be circumcised. The point is, black people in South Africa have their own culture, separate to the culture of coloured people. And you know what? There is nothing wrong with that.

I’d like to suggest that the recent events must cause us to look at coloured ethnicity and culture, as opposed to coloured race as a means for discrimination. It’s because people actually associate Kuli Roberts’s article with coloured people that we get so emotional about it. The truth hurts. The real tragedy though is that it stops there. The real tragedy is that people of other ethnicities think that that is what coloured culture and ethnicity is limited to. And the problem is exacerbated by coloureds (like Minister Manuel) who champion the dead idea that coloureds are black and African. I think he would’ve done a much better job if he had exalted coloured ethnicity and culture, as opposed to continuously treating it like an ailing chick.

Can you imagine where we would be today if the freedom fighters in the streets of Bonteheuwel, Mitchells Plain, Bishop Lavis, and elsewhere in the country, had just accepted what the whites were telling them? We shouldn’t allow “today’s whites” to convince us of their nonsense either. But deeper than that, and specifically as coloureds, we need to react in a way that exalts us as a people, a culture, an ethnicity, one that we can be proud of. And when this happens, we will be able to secure our place in South Africa and Africa. And once our place is secure, we will abandon our ailing chick identity and soar above the stereotypes like eagles, not because we told them lekker but because we showed them who we really are!

Kim Smith is currently pursuing a master’s degree in development studies at the University of the Western Cape and aspires to pursue a career as a social entrepreneur.