Being Black and Coloured in South Africa

Good people! The podcast is still in South Africa and venturing across Johannesburg and the various neighboring townships. I am particularly enjoying the sites and learning the history; yet most fun and interesting are my conversations with the people!!!

Listeners who have been following the podcast for 5 seasons know that I am a sociologist that specifically researches and writes on topics related to racial and ethnic identity, not just in the US but also across the Americas.  Therefore, you must understand how intrigued I am by concepts of race, racialization and identity in other places across the diaspora.  South Africa is a unique country, in this regard. 

While people may be most familiar with their previous system of Apartheid and may draw similar parallels to US Jim Crow, the policies around miscegenation (race mixing) and the importance of Black empowerment, there are distinct differences.  One of which I will be highlighting in the March 12, 2024 podcast episode is in the nomenclature we use when racializing groups at the same time the groups themselves assert and perform identities around these same words. 

In this case, I am talking about the word: Coloured.  Spelled c-o-l-o-u-r-ed as different from c-o-l-o-r-e-d, an antiquated term used to categorize African descendants in the U.S. The word Coloured in South Africa has different and unique social-political-cultural-histories associated with it that is very distinct from its use in other places across the diaspora. 

I have had the great fortune and opportunity to be in conversation with another Black woman sociologist (woohoo!) South African political analyst and development practitioner, Tessa Dooms, who is co-author of the recent book, Coloured: How Classification Became Culture.  I seek to gain a deeper understanding as to why Coloured remains such a highly contested concept and identity in South Africa and beyond. 

My curiosity was peaked when Grammy-winning South African singer and songwriter Tyla [Tyla Laura Seethal] (best known for the 2023 summer sensation Water), was recently embroiled in a “culture war”/online debate regarding her assertion of possessing a Coloured versus a Black identity.   Singer Tyla, who is of Indian, Zulu, Mauritian and Irish descent, is considered Coloured in South Africa because of her mixed-race heritage although in places like the US her phenotype and categorization based on the “one drop rule” would define her as Black. 

This online debate has drawn more attention to the meaning of the term between cultures. The term Coloured is one that holds several meanings depending on the geopolitical context.  Coloured as an ethnicity and racial demographic is intertwined in the creation of the South Africa we have today. Yet often, Coloured communities are disdained as people with no clear heritage or culture — “not being Black enough or white enough.” In effect, they have been seen as an intermediary group and categorized in terms of their proximity to whiteness.

Indeed, the historical context about who is identified as Coloured today (which include descendants of indigenous Africans, European colonizers, Malay peoples and those of mixed-race/multiracial backgrounds) is directly correlated to the country’s colonization and slavery, which informed its racial and political hierarchy through Apartheid. Yet, the vestiges of these racialized categories manifest in two important ways:

First, in creating a complicated narrative about who can get to claim a Black identity, a Coloured identity or if possible, both a Black AND a Coloured identity—because you can hold two things to be true at the same time!  Today, there is a movement wherein some people are reclaiming a Coloured identity and asserting that such an identity is not anti-Black.

Second, these classifications remain important when it comes to who can utilize South Africa’s broad-based Black Economic Empowerment policy (BEE), and other affirmative action policies that aim to remediate the lack of access Black South Africans have had to jobs, education, business and property ownership, and other forms of economic advancement. As it stands, many Coloured communities are denied utilization of BEE even though there remains much disparity for both Blacks and Coloureds in terms in wealth accumulation and income when compared to whites.

Have I got you thinking more about Being Black and Coloured in South Africa? Listen to podcast episode #45, which debuts on March 12, 2024, as me and Tessa take a deeper dive into all things related to Black political sensibilities and being Black, Coloured, and more. 

Enjoy!