Are we all ‘coloured’?Posted in Africa, Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, South Africa on 2011-05-11 21:55Z by Steven |
News 24 (South Africa)
2011-03-09
We really need to find new terminology for the different population groups in South Africa, especially now that we’re moving back into a political culture of obsession with race.
Problem One: if “coloured” means people of mixed blood, then the vast majority of people born in South Africa are coloureds, myself included.
Studies in the 1980s have found that white Afrikaners have an average of seven percent “black” blood, mostly because of early relationships and marriages between white settlers and slaves or Khoisan. Some Afrikaners, like my family, have considerably more than seven percent black blood.
This is also true of black South Africans. Three quick examples: ANC veteran Walter Sisulu’s father was a white man; Winnie Mandela’s mother had light skin, blue eyes and long hair and her mother-in-law called her a mlungu; Nelson Mandela’s mitochondrial DNA was found to be pure Khoisan. There were many runaway slaves from the East Indies and European shipwreck survivors in the 16th, 17th and 18th century who became part of the Zulu and Xhosa peoples.
Problem Two: Probably a majority of people classified “coloured” during the apartheid years were descendants of the Khoikhoi and the San or Bushmen, with, of course, some white, slave and black blood. But when the ANC and other so-called Africanists refer to “Africans”, they exclude these people.
This is sheer madness: the descendants of the first peoples of southern Africa are excluded from the term African? The Khoisan were here thousands of years before the first black farming groups arrived from further north. They are the original Africans…
Read the entire editorial here.