Durban - Coloured people should reclaim their identity and right to self identity, say Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel, who have written a seminal book ‒ Coloured: How Classification became Culture.
In 2020, the US police killed George Floyd, a black man, leading to a global resistance campaign, #BlackLivesMatter.
Locally, the police’s murder of 16-year-old Nathaniel Julies, a coloured teen with Down syndrome in Eldorado Park, sparked unrest which spread to other townships and social media. Soon, the #ColouredLivesMatter was trending and became the rallying cry of an outraged community seeking justice.
Dooms, a sociologist and political analyst who describes herself as politically black but culturally coloured, was interviewed by the media on the reasons behind the #ColouredLivesMatter campaign, while Chutel, a New York Times journalist, covered the growing unrest.
Both women grew up in Eldorado Park.
“As coloured people with a public voice, we were asked to explain our community, not only to the nation but to the world,” Dooms told the Independent on Saturday.
In the book’s introduction they write: “...the protests took on a greater significance to become a demonstration against the hopelessness and nihilism of young coloured people who felt left behind by a system that was meant to take them into a non-racial future.”
They took up the “burden of responsibility” to tell the stories of the different peoples that make up the coloured community, Dooms said, and “the common thread was pain”.
Her father, Letsole Elliot Dooms, grew up in Dithakwaneng, a rural Northern Park village, and never thought of himself as anything but a Motswana boy until at the age of 16, when he and other children from his high school were sent to the Office for Race Categorisation.
Dooms was officially categorised as “native” and given a “dompas” (compulsory documents blacks had to carry with them). Unknowingly, the rest of his family had been classified as coloured, and just by going home from school that day, he was breaking the law. Then came the forced removals. The only way he could remain with his family was to change his name and his classification. That’s how Lesole, the Motswana boy, became Elliot, a coloured teenager. “My father’s family had not told him about the collective narrative they had agreed upon to be identified as coloured.
“Like many families, mine had predetermined strategies for ensuring that everyone ended up with the same classification status to improve the family’s life chances.
“Families would alter their surnames ‒ Ndlovu became Oliphant, Nkosi became King. They would deliberately forget their mother tongue and whole parts of their history,” wrote Dooms.
She told the Independent on Saturday that colouredness was an ethnicity not a race, which means people are coloured not because of their biology but because of their experiences. “So in the same way that someone who is Xhosa can say that I’m Xhosa and I’m black, a coloured person can say they are black and coloured.”
She said apartheid attempted to forge colouredness into a racial category and looked for racial markers, but failed. This week, Dooms said it was the right of those identified as coloured to have “self-agency” and to accept or reject coloured as an identity.
Dooms said for her, like many others, coloured is the only identity she knows, unlike her dad with his Tswana heritage and her mom Irene Marwa with her Zulu cultural background.
“...It shows up in the way I talk, the way I do my hair, how I eat, what I enjoy, in my music preferences. It is a real part of my identity. And so, I’m choosing to own it and reclaim it and recreate it. Other people can choose to do different things with it. That’s part of the agency we are calling for. That’s part of the reclamation journey.”
Chutel also identifies as coloured and black.
“You can be both because, again, it comes back to that shared experience of oppression that all black people around the world have experienced. We all have a very similar story.”
Born in a family of “all hues”, she told the Independent on Saturday her story of being a dark-skinned girl growing up in a coloured community where colourism (as in all black communities) is rife and being fair had a “very real economic effect”.
She said your skin tone informed your marriage prospects, your job opportunities, and your parents were far more impressed if you were dating someone with light skin.
Growing up with “kroes” or “kinky” hair meant long hours of trying to make it straight. This has changed, and girls like her niece celebrate their hair and have a plethora of natural hair products to choose from.
Chutel said coloured was not a racial classification like it was during apartheid, an ethnicity with its own culture, food, music, history, language, and a way of doing things. “And that’s what we want people to see; we don't want them to fixate on this as a separate race because that’s just not what it is.”
She said in the US, people were horrified when she used the word coloured, and she had to explain that, for now, it was the only word to explain a very complicated history that involved people enslaved in Indonesia, Angola, Madagascar and Mozambique who were all taken to the Cape.
“And there were people who were kidnapped as the Great Trek happened, and they were then made to no longer be their own race; their names were changed, their religion was changed, so those people have also become what we now call coloured,” said Chutel.
The book addresses the common question faced by many coloured people, “what are you?”
Chutel said while there wasn't one way of being coloured, people, especially primary school teachers, often burdened bi-racial children to accept this identity even if they lacked the cultural or sociological experience of being coloured. Being biracial did not make you coloured, unless one of your parents was.
Chutel has a message for coloureds who feel that, in the past, they were not white enough, and now they are not black enough.
“We are enough just as we are. We have a place here. South Africa is as much ours as it is everybody else’s, and our story is the story of South Africa,” she said.
- Coloured: How Classification became Culture is available at bookstores and as an e-book and retails at R270 and R210, respectively.
The Independent on Saturday