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 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…

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

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

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

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

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

From then until late eighteenth century when the import of slaves from Asia was prohibited, many hundreds, if not thousands, of persons from India – mainly Bengal, Coromandel Coast and Kerala – were taken to the Cape and sold into slavery.  Officers of ships and officials of the Dutch India Company returning to Holland usually took slaves or servants with them and sold them at high profit in the Cape. (Slaves could not be taken to Holland where slavery was prohibited). Many others were carried by Danish and British ships. While most of the Indians were taken from Dutch trading posts in India, a considerable number were also taken from Batavia as thousands of Indians had been taken by the Dutch as slaves to Batavia. South African, American, British and other scholars have conducted painstaking research into the archives in the Cape – records of the deeds office, courts, churches etc. – and have brought out several studies on slavery in the Cape. They contain extensive, though far from complete, information on transactions in human beings, the conditions of slavery and resistance of the slaves.

The archives indicate that Mary, the first known Indian slave, was found in bed with a constable, Willem Cornelis, in 1660. He was fined and dismissed from his post but she was apparently not punished. Van Riebeeck and his family probably took her with them when they moved to Batavia in 1662.  Jan Wouters was transferred to Batavia soon after his marriage to Catherine. There is no information on Anton Muller. Van Riebeeck sold Angela, who had taken care of his children, to Abraham Gabbema, his deputy and law officer. Gabbema granted freedom to Angela and her three children before he departed for Batavia in 1666, except that she was required to work for six months in the home of Thomas Christoffel Muller.

She integrated easily into the white community even while continuing relations with her friends who were still in slavery. She asked for and obtained a plot of land in the Table Valley in February 1667. Next year she obtained a slave from Malabar on hire.  In 1669 she married Arnoldus Willemsz Basson, with whom she had three children. Her daughter from the first marriage also married a Dutchman. When her husband died in 1689, Angela took charge of the estate which had a considerable value when she died in 1720. Some of these early slaves – especially women from Bengal who were acquired by senior officials of the Dutch India Company for domestic work – were relatively fortunate. The great majority of those enslaved in the Cape, however, lived under miserable conditions.

The researches in the past three decades – by Anna Boeseken, Margaret Cairns, Achmat Davids, Richard Elphick, H. F. Heese, J. Hoge, Robert Ross, Robert Shell, Nigel Worden and others – destroy several myths that had been prevalent – for instance, that slavery had little economic importance in the Cape, that the treatment of slaves, especially Asian slaves, was benign, that Asian slaves were mostly from Indonesia etc. The number of slaves exceeded the number of white settlers by early 18th century and they did the hard work of developing the land. Most of the Asian slaves worked on the farms and were treated as cruelly as the Africans. There were almost as many, if not more, slaves from India as from Indonesia.

Read full article here…

In 1963 the Cahns moved to Washington, D.C., where they raised two sons, Reuben and Jonathan. By 1971, as co-deans of the Antioch School of Law, the high profile couple had received so many death threats that they needed bodyguards. The boys’ mixed ancestry caused near riots at their public school. One principal said they “brought a dark force to the school” and called for their expulsion.

Now the generational wheel has turned. In 1990 young Reuben married Marna, a white Lutheran from rural Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. Although both a rabbi and a minister officiated, none of Marna’s relatives, except her mother, attended the wedding. Her father fumed, “I can’t believe you expect me to accept a black person, and a Jewish one at that!” But with the birth last year of towheaded Aaron, Marna’s family softened considerably.

Intermarriage, of course, is as old as the Bible. But during the past two decades, America has produced the greatest variety of hybrid households in the history of the world. As ever increasing numbers of couples crash through racial, ethnic and religious barriers to invent a life together, Americans are being forced to rethink and redefine themselves. For all the divisive talk of cultural separatism and resurgent ethnic pride, never before has a society struggled so hard to fuse such a jumble of traditions, beliefs and values.

The huddled masses have already given way to the muddled masses. “Marriage is the main assimilator,” says Karen Stephenson, an anthropologist at UCLA. “If you really want to affect change, it’s through marriage and child rearing.” This is not assimilation in the Eurocentric sense of the word: one nation, under white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant rule, divided, with liberty and justice for some. Rather it is an extended hyphenation. If, say, the daughter of Japanese and Filipino parents marries the son of German and Irish immigrants, together they may beget a Japanese-Filipino-German-Irish-Budd hist-Catholic-American child. “Assimilation never really happens,” says Stephenson. “Over time you get a bunch of little assimilations.”

Read full article here…

>> Jill Smolowe <<