It is said that you are the sum of your experiences, if this be true, then we as a people are in need of some serious introspection, reflection, tears and greater understanding who we are as a people.Only armed with the above revelations will we be able to burn together, and be that flame that no one can put out.

I have to be in agreement with some of the sentiments of the above entry…but in the same breath, there must be a greater understanding, as to why we have become this fractured people, that we are, and more importantly… how we can recover from this state and reach our full potential.

>> Coloured Klong <<

Note to all Beyond Identity kin, the above is a response to Coloured Commandments/Coloured Gedagtes published and directly taken from the Kak Duidelik website with permission I hope.

In his regular online column on Friday, SA Today, Leon noted that the South African Institute of Race Relations had reported that about a fifth of white South Africans had left the country in the last 10 years and noted that “given a globalising world in which skilled individuals as well as capital investment are more mobile than ever before, and are maximizing their careers by moving elsewhere, government needs to take a hard look at its race-fuelled myopia, and create the conditions that encourage productive South Africans to stay and contribute to growth — which in the longer term is the only real answer to joblessness and poverty”.

The DA leader argued that “rather than discouraging these citizens from staying, moreover, the state should be actively and energetically soliciting the world’s very best practitioners in tackling the enormous problems that currently beset us in so many areas”.

All must be included and valued. He said: “In short: government needs to reassess its message so that all feel included and valued. Foot-dragging at best and vindictiveness at worst undermines all of our futures – most especially those South Africans for too long disadvantaged by our apartheid legacy and whose interests the ruling party professedly wants to advance.

Read the full article here…

>> Donwald Pressly <<

In time, groups of settlers moved away from the Cape settlement into the hinterland to develop farms there. The indigenous people of the Cape at that time were the Khoikhoi people, many of whom worked as laborers on the farms of the Dutch-speaking settlers. The Dutch government forbade enslaving indigenous people of southern Africa. They did allow the importation of slaves or indentured servants from the Malay peoples of Indonesia and Malaysia. The first Malay slaves arrived in 1657. Others slaves were imported from West Africa.

The isolation of the Cape from the Netherlands in Europe, meant that the form of Dutch spoken in the Cape gradually changed significantly from that spoken in Holland. The Cape dialect of Dutch came to be called Afrikaans (“the African language”). In the church, the law courts, educational institutions and official government circles, the official language was Dutch. But the common language of the people was increasingly Afrikaans.

Out of the interaction between the Dutch settlers and their slaves developed another South African people. The first and largest base of this people was Malay Cape Coloured, or the brown Afrikaners. The settlers also had mixed offspring with the Khoikhoi, the San and the Xhosa. The term Coloured came to be applied to all mixed people. The Coloureds share the same language and religion as the “white” Afrikaners, although separated from them by strong social and class distinctions.
One group of Coloureds escaped to the bush and lived as an African tribe, but became fearsome warriors on horses. These were the Griqua, who are still an Afrikaans-speaking tribe today. Today, there are about 7 million Afrikaans-speaking people in South Africa, over half of whom are “Coloured” people.

The Dutch settlers resented the British takeover, and some moved further inland. Two measures led to a permanent enmity. The government made English the official language in place of Dutch. In 1824, Britain freed all slaves in all British territories. The Great Trek resulted, so that by 1835, a steady visible steam of Boers (Dutch for “farmer”) was migrating north and east, establishing independent Afrikaner states, including Natal.

The final insult was the annexation of the independent northern Boer republics. The Transvaal, annexed in 1877, tried to negotiate independence and finally defeated British forces in the first Anglo-Boer War (1880-1881), winning autonomy but not total independence. Further British incursions into the Transvaal led to the second Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902. The British defeated the Afrikaners and finally incorporated their republics into the Union of South Africa in 1910.

Read full article here…

Zoe Wicomb, South Africa-born but living in Glasgow for the last 11 years, is a writer of rare brilliance. On the cover of her latest book, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and double Booker winner JM Coetzee compete to eulogise her work. She’s formidably intelligent: ‘A mind like a steel trap’, says the head of the Scottish Arts Council’s literature department, ‘one of the brightest people you could meet.’ She is, according to the pupils she has taught creative writing to at Strathclyde University, where Wicomb holds a professorship, a peerless and inspiring teacher.

Yet the chances are that you won’t have ever heard of her, because this is the first British newspaper interview she has ever given. For the 30 years she’s lived in Britain, that’s the way she liked it, and to be honest, it probably still is.

Zoe’s third book Living In The Light, is one of the most convincing novels I’ve read all year. If she’s going for the title of Scotland’s greatest unknown novelist, it’s hers on a plate.

Zoe Wicomb was born in Namaqueland, a hot, arid region on the southern fringes of the Namib desert, in 1948. The good life of white South Africa was a long way from this sparsely populated scrubland, and the nearest whites lived 20 miles away, in the town which also had the nearest shop. (Not that, as coloureds, the Wicombs were allowed to enter it, only being served from a hatch round the side). Her Afrikaans-speaking parents wanted the best for their children, something more than working in the nearby gypsum mine or as a domestic servant, which were the only local jobs going. Speaking English – as no-one did for 200 miles around – wasn’t an automatic free pass to a better life, but it was a better bet than anything else.

Secondary school meant Cape Town, where she moved to live with her aunt. A school for coloureds, followed by a university for coloureds, where she learnt about such great non-coloureds as Chaucer, Johnson, Shakespeare and Hardy. And where, for the first time, Zoe caught sight of her first “play-whites”. ‘There was a family living across the road from us, and one day they just disappeared. Our neighbours said, ‘They’ve left. They’ve turned white’. This happened all the time’

‘It’s an odd phenomenon, the play-whites,’ says Zoe. ‘We don’t even know how many of them there are. There’s no discourse, nothing in the library, because officially they don’t exist. Yet the truth of the matter, because of their history, is that many Afrikaners are mixed race. Even Verwoerd [the founder of apartheid] had a wife who looked African.’

Because skin colour is so variable even within the same family, legal definitions of whiteness were absurdly tortuous. ‘A white person,’ the government decided in 1950, ‘is someone who in appearance obviously is or is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person.’ Mrs Verwoerd presumably counted as white not because she looked it but because enough people could agree that she actually was.

‘The weird thing,’ says Zoe, ‘was that there was this legislation for racial purity at the same time as the whites were tacitly boosting their own numbers by allowing some people to cross over.’

Read full article here…

Eurasian People

Throughout the former colonial world, in many instances what are referred to as ‘hybrid communities’ have evolved. In Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas, different groups were born of mixed relations between the colonists and indigenous peoples. In Asia, such groups, commonly known as Eurasians, developed in differing ways. These peoples were regarded varyingly from society to society. Often seen as a privileged class in comparison with the other native peoples, with the current trend in ethnic and post colonial studies, ethnographers, historiographers and sociologists frequently class Eurasians as living in some kind of ‘hiatus’ with allegiances to no one and to nowhere. However, it can be said that these peoples were more loyal to their countries of birth and origin than has been believed. In Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (the former French Indochina), Eurasians evolved from mixed relations between the natives and French rulers. In the Philippines, Mestizos and Amerasians were born of Spanish and Filipino, and American and Filipino miscegenation. Throughout the Indian Subcontinent, Anglo-Indians emerged from mixed relations between the British and other Europeans with Indians, whilst in Sri-Lanka, Eurasians and Burghers emerged as the descendents of Singhalese and Portuguese, Dutch and British unions. In Indonesia, Dutch-Indonesians emerged, descended from colonial Dutch and Javanese miscegenation. In Burma, the Eurasian community evolved through mixed relations between the British and other settlers of European origin with the local Burmese populace, and this community came to be known in two ways: as either the Anglo-Burmans or the Anglo-Burmese.

Today’s Burma, the Union of Myanmar, is a nation situated in Southeast Asia between India and Bangladesh on the west, and Thailand, China and Laos to the north and east. Myanmar stretches more than 2,050 kilometers from north to south, and some 935 kilometers from east to west. With a population estimated at approaching some 58 million and an area of 676,577 square kilometers¹, Myanmar is the largest nation of mainland Southeast Asia and joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1997 amidst worldwide condemnation of its military dictatorship, human rights violations and governmental policies. Formerly known as the Union of Burma, the country was renamed in 1989 shortly after the military, known as the ‘Tatmadaw’, took over control of the country. The said intention for the name change was that the term ‘Myanmar’ better reflected the indigenous name for the country, dubbing ‘Burma’ as the colonial name for the nation. Notwithstanding, it is agreed that both terms are indeed correct appellations for the country, ‘Burma’ being the informal, spoken term, and ‘Myanmar’ equating to the literary form of the name for the country. However, minority groups such as the National League for Democracy (NLD) and the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB)² all oppose the name change as an indirect and subtle means of domination by the largely Burman-controlled military government. The country is officially divided into fourteen administrative units, seven States (Pyeneh) and seven Divisions (Taieen). The States are named for the dominant racial group inhabiting each territory, thus being Shan, Karen-Kawthulé, Kayah, Chin, Mon, Arakan (Rakhine) and Kachin. The Divisions are primarily located within central Burma and populated by the Burman majority and are Rangoon (Yangon), Mandalay, Tenasserim (Tanintharyi), Magwe (Magway), Sagaing, Pegu (Bago) and Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady). In practice, the States were traditionally autonomous, whilst the Divisions were governed centrally. The current Divisions and States more or less correspond to the British methods of governance of the country whilst they ruled, the Divisions making up what was once known as ‘Ministerial Burma’ and the States corresponding to the ‘Frontier Areas’.

Read original article here…

>> Dean Burnett <<

Marcia Yunmi Lise

I was born to a Japanese mother and an American-Italian mother. Like many other ‘racially’ or if you prefer ‘ethnically’ mixed individuals, I often think about my identity and how I sit in society. I was born and raised in Japan. I therefore consider myself to be predominantly Japanese. That is, culturally. The issue with my experience in Japan was that I was often regarded as ‘non-Japanese’. This had a great impact on my identity. Exploring the experiences of the half Japanese in relation to Japanese society somehow became a sort of a passion or a habit. I came to London in 2001 to study Sociology at university. My undergraduate thesis was on the marginalisation of Hafus, the Japanese word to refer to half Japanese people. I also recently completed a qualitative research project (submitted for MA), which was also about the half Japanese but this time focusing on how they are considered to be the ‘other’ in Japanese society.

In summer 2005, I agreed to be photographed by Natalie Maya Willer, a London based artist who was also a Hafu. She has a slightly different background with a Japanese mother and a German father. She was brought up in Germany and tells me how she had the same problem of not being recognised to have Japanese connection due to her very German look. Earlier this year we decided to put a project together combining her photography (visual arts) and my research work represented by the spoken words of the participants. The result was a one week exhibition at the Bodhi Gallery in east London last month. It was well received with over 450 visitors, half of whom I estimate to be Hafus.

The exhibition was accompanied by three events: a seminar with guest speakers from SOAS and LSE, a Hafu social night, and a Hafu family art workshop. I’m certain that the exhibition together with these events created an important contribution to the cultural dialogue about identity, culture, ‘race’ and nationhood.

Read original article here…

>> Marcia Yumi Lise <<

A documentary by Tana Baru Productions, and Directed by Rhomeez Petersen

How do you categorise someone who is not 100% white nor 100% black, without offending that person?

This is the debate that I walked into the other day, when a woman pointed at me and told her son: ‘That is a half caste.’

Why she did that I will never know, but it left me feeling hurt that the phrase is still being used.

Why so hurt? The answer is in the meaning of the words. If you research the definition of half caste, it says ‘a person of mixed racial descent.’

Fair enough, but read the synonyms and it tells you: amalgam, bastard, combination, composite, compound, cross, crossbreed, half-blood, half-breed, mongrel … to name just a few.

Caste was first used in India in the sixteenth century to describe the Hindu system of hierarchy. The term half-caste indicates how pure you are racially and echoes the days of colonial slavery when words such as mulatto, quadroon and octoroon were commonplace in sales ledgers and even in post-emancipation days in the old United States census.

John Agard, from Guyana makes some brilliant points in his poem ‘Half caste‘:

Read full article here…

>> Donah Sibanda <<

I would like to thank Blackman Ngoro for opening an issue which we as Khoisan rights campaigners have been discussing all along – that coloured people should shed their coloured identity and reclaim their original identities, culture and heritage.

Now is the time for an in-depth public debate across the country for the coloured community to engage in dialogue and debate about the future of this minority community in post-apartheid South Africa.

I was not aware of the Ngoro saga until I opened the newspapers and saw the media hype about remarks posted on his personal website that “coloureds are culturally inferior to black people, drink cheap alcohol . . .” . Ngoro’s remarks may be offensive, but I for one agree with him that coloured people are indeed happy-go-lucky people who are culturally inferior to black people.

As long as they go to work five days a week, show-off their new expensive car sound systems during weekends and go to church on Sundays, coloured people are the happiest bunch of people in the world.

It pains me to hear remarks from coloured people that they are comfortable with being coloured and pay no attention to the emergence of the Khoisan renaissance in areas like Kimberley, Upington, Bloemfontein or Eersterus in Tshwane.

Read full article here…

>> Opinion of Brian Vel, Secretary – General: Northern Cape Khoisan Council <<

A documentary by Tana Baru Productions, and Directed by Rhomeez Petersen