Coloured: Encyclopedia II - Coloured - The Coloureds

Coloured - The Coloureds

The Oxford Dictionary of South African English reveals that the word "Coloured" has been used since the 1840s to refer specifically to South Africans of mixed race, while the term Cape Coloureds came into use around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. During the 19th century the people of Griqualand, who would now be known as Coloured, were known by the Afrikaans term Baastards. An offshoot of the Cape Coloureds now make up a separate ethnic group in south-central Namibia, known as the Rehoboth Basters, migrated to their current location in pre-German times. They have subsequently migrated to the urban centers.

Apartheid-era legal categories aside, there are three features that set the rural core (i.e. those outside of Cape Town) of the Coloured population aside as an ethnic group in the anthropological sense:

1. Khoikhoi family lineage and racial features
2. traditional association with the Afrikaans language and the Dutch Reformed Church
3. a historically complicated and ambivalent relationship with the related ethnic group the Afrikaners

The Coloureds form a number of racially and culturally distinct subgroups (including Cape Malays, Cape Coloureds, Basters and Griqua; some would also include the Namaqua into this group) and were legally considered a separate group under Apartheid's racial classification legislation. Most speak Afrikaans as their mother tongue, and are Protestants, belonging to a local offshoot of the Dutch Reformed Church. In the 1950s and 1960s, laws prohibiting interracial sex and marriage, the proclamation of separate residential areas, the provision of separate schooling etc attempted to make the so called "Coloureds" appear to be far more of a unified identifiable ethnic group than they were in reality. Indeed, many sub-classifications were required in the law to include all those that the government categorised Coloured.

Coloureds are spread across the country but the largest and perhaps most distinctive subgroup is that of the Griqua, numbering more than 300,000 individuals, with that of the Cape Coloureds (located in the Western Cape where there was strong influence from Malay slaves brought by Dutch colonists) being second largest, with an estimated population of 180,000. During the Dutch rule thousands of people were bought, tricked or kidnapped from various coastal regions around the Indian Ocean and brought to the Cape Colony to work as slaves, mostly originating in Java, southern India, Mozambique and Madagascar. The Asian influence had led to a slightly different language use and a strongly Muslim heritage among Cape Malays. The Apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria at the time that the Population Registration Act was implemented to determine who was Coloured. Minor officials would administer tests such as the so-called pencil test (testing the curliness of hair) to determine if someone should be categorised Coloured or Black, or Coloured or White. Different members of the same family found themselves in different race groups. Further tests determined membership of the various sub-racial groups of the Coloureds.

The most common language of South African Coloured people is Afrikaans, followed by English.

Not all Coloured people do not much like the term Coloured to describe their community, but it continues in use for lack of a satisfactory alternative. Alternative expressions like "so-called Coloureds" (Afrikaans sogenaamde Kleurlinge) and "brown people" (bruinmense) and "brown Afrikaners" (bruine Afrikaners) or "brown South Africans (bruine Suid-Afrikaners) have acquired a some popularity in recent years.

However, the term Coloured is still widely used in South Africa, including by some organisations which opposed apartheid e.g. the Congress of South African Trade Unions. In London problems have arisen when teachers have been been imported from South Africa, some of who define themselves as Coloured, and prefer this term to "mixed race", but some British people consider the term Coloured to be pejorative. Some Coloureds reject the term "mixed race" on the grounds that it implies that they do not have a race.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Coloureds", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki