download — A “Gam” is a form of speech, not a person.

EXACTLY dow do the authors intend to update their badly thought out and obscene journey into apartheid-era paternalism? The object may as well be renamed ‘Getting the Rainbow Nation All Wrong: A Recidivist’s Guide to racialising South African culture’

That the book in question clearly has no insight into its purported subject matter and appears to immediately launch into an illogical binary, an ‘Us vs Them’ proposition along with its absurd claim to normativity, and thus directing an editorial voice at an audience who are clearly ‘not coloured’ is highly problematic.

The otherisation of people is what hurts and what needs to be tackled here. The problem is not incidental and I have found the exact same condescending, patronising tone expressed within the transcripts of a 2010 court proceeding, only accessed this year and involving apartheid publisher Media24 and its own insane claim to demographic normativity.

In 2008 the same company won the right to use the term “bushmen/boesman” in reference to “coloured” persons. The latest offering from Logogog fairs no better in fictionalising and failing its subject matter.

Exactly who are “they” and what is “them”? Why the race stereotyping, profiling and patriarchy, and why is there something wrong with tackling racism by identifying with the oppressed?

Equally unacceptable is the continued use of apartheid race criteria to label people. The term ‘coloured’ itself is an anachronism, same way that the ‘National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Persons’ is anachronistic and harking back to a previous period before the ascendency of civil rights.

As a person who was disenrolled from the ‘white race” back in the 80s, sectioned under apartheid laws and assimilated into the self-same ‘coloured culture’ portrayed inaccurately and with contempt by the publishers, due to the Group Areas Act and other legislation, I find such chocolate box portraiture (in essence race stigma) highly problematic — as too my ongoing legal problems (mostly contrary to received science) surrounding my presumed race identity and thus the publisher’s supreme right to act accordingly.

Apartheid never worked, and its many sequels in the new South Africa of today are equally doomed to failure. This is not what the authors of the freedom struggle intended.

For starters, at South Press, (a struggle newspaper) we all decided we were black. Under a black government, the ‘coloured” label saw renewed contestation. The term is not so much an identity as an imposition.

Under apartheid persons could be classified ‘coloured’ or “other coloured” merely for looking coloured, or by associating with persons of mixed race. Such was the problem inherent to ‘coloured identity’ and the criteria enumerated by C Vogel and A Abdurahman. Yet, a 2010 decision, applauded by the press, and handed down by one H Cheadle, labeled me an “absurdity” for being just who I am.

The problem appears endemic, at a recent peacebuilders conference, a young spokesperson for the Fallist movement, who happens to be ‘black and transexed’, when questioned as to what a ‘transracial or postracial identity might entail’, claimed that “white people cannot experience racism … since they don’t have the same baggage…” to which I replied, aside from the fact that you choose to label me, do you mean to tell me a straight person cannot experience homophobia, similarly a non-Jew, anti-Semitism, and ergo, a non-Muslim, Islamophobia?

Lest we forget, I had a school mate named Marcus who attended my prep school and migrated to the village primary institution along with the rest of the class. Then one day an investigator from the Cape Provincial Administration (CPA) pitched up, yanked Marcus by the scruff of the neck and removed the dear from the school because his hair wasn’t straight.

The tragic case of Happy Sindane, the boy who thought he was ‘white’, despite having ‘black parents’, also springs to mind. Pseudo-scientific racial criteria and the ersatz and equally obscene ‘cultural wash’, now laid on thick by the publishers, and even the press, should not be a defining factor of life in South Africa. To reiterate, the Rainbow Nation is not about the colour of one’s skin, but rather, the colour of one’s rights. Equally, the Rainbow Nation is not about maintenance of racial privileges but rather the restitution of the innate rights we all hold from birth.

— David Robert Lewis

Tag: Coloured Identity