If diversity is the cure, however, why, instead of promoting racial harmony, has it brought racial division and conflict? The answer is not hard to discover. The The unshakable fact is that. To accept the diversity premise means to think in racial terms rather than in terms of individual character or merit. Taking jobs away from one group in order to compensate a second group to correct injustices caused by a third group who mistreated a fourth group at an earlier point in history (e.g., 1860) is absurd on the face of it and does not promote justice; rather, it does the opposite. Singling out one group for special favors (e.g., through affirmative action) breeds justified resentment and fuels the prejudices of real racists. People are individuals; they are not interchangeable ciphers in an amorphous collective.

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>> Edwin A Locke <<

In South Africa, race classification determined people’s voting rights, where they could reside, where they could buy or sell property, their social status, the jobs for which they could apply, the amount of their pension and the quality of their children’s education. When it was first passed in 1950, the Population Registration Act defined racial groups relatively loosely. A coloured person was defined as “a person who is not a white person nor generally accepted as a member of aboriginal race or tribe of Africa”.

However, the Act was revised at least six times to tighten loopholes. “Race” was no longer judged only on appearance, but also according to line of descent. Amendments to the Act sub-divided coloured South Africans into further different categories such as Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Chinese and “other coloured”. After the Population Registration Act became law, the classification of whites and coloureds in Cape Town was carried out by the Electoral Officer. Later, in January 1958, a Population Registration Office was opened.

The Population Registration Act determined people’s race classification, which in turn determined the implementation of many other racially based laws. For example, the Group Areas Act determined where people of different racial groups could live. It did not permit mixing of any groups. Thus, any woman who married or lived with a member of someone from another “racial” group would, in terms of the Group Areas Act, be deemed to belong to the racial group of the man involved, except if the man were white. In that case, the man took on the racial group of the woman and would need to be re-classified before being allowed to live in that Group Area.

In February 1958 the Cape Times reported the Minister of the Interior as saying that the Population Registration Act was assisting people by removing uncertainty and unease and the “clouds which hovered over them”. However, at the end of 1961 the newspaper reported that there were at least 20 000 people in the Cape Peninsula who were still uncertain whether they were officially “white” or “coloured”. The first Race Classification Review Board was established in 1954. In September 1959 the minister announced that the board of review was to be replaced by special appeal boards to be set up in the Transvaal, Cape Province and possibly Natal.

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>> Sue Valentine <<

Throughout the colorful history of South Africa, various concepts and ideologies has been used to label, enforce, enslave and segregate. One such label, word is ‘hot-not‘  and ‘bastar‘, being of sound birth in the days of Jan van Riebeeck and his cronies, when they were unable to resist the alluring appeal of a fine native ass under an inviting African sky. And magically, as if some African voodoo played a part, the first coloured being of European and native Khoisan (Khoi-khoi and San) decent sprung forth from the Cape shores around the fortress. Growing defiance towards the British Empire and the discovery of gold in Transvaal and the Orange Free State, some European colonialists trekked through the length and breadth of South Africa, coming into close contact with the native blacks. Once again the African voodoo sang an enchanting lullaby under an African sky, yet again, another mix-breed being of European and native Black (Xhosa, Zulu, etc) decent – sprung forth from the Highveld and Lowveld earth.

As South Africa became an important vestige and halfway house of trade between Europe and Asia, Africa also suffered the grunt of the slave trade. Firstly, the exporting of Africans as slaves to the America’s. During these days blacks were reduced to commodities and slaves. Secondly, the importing of Malayans as cheap and forced labor – as the natives was seen as lazy, untrustworthy and ignorant (to the ways of the European colonialists). The chanting of some foreign religious mantra to the drums of the African plateau lingered again spawning another masala-mix of European and Malayan decent.

This inter-pollination of genes was not only confined to fornicating, forced or with permission, to the whim of the European colonialists with the natives or the Malayans, but between all people of different ethnicity and cultures visiting South African shores, fueling the growing numbers of an ethnic hybridization. Alas the number of the bastard offspring rose steadily; as these mix-breeds procreated among themselves naturally. Through the times and forces of urbanization, declining imperialism of the British Empire, the Boer war, the First and Second World Wars and the establishment of Boer Nationalism in South Africa, the mix breed grew significantly. In time and with certainty these more unique individuals, these half-breeds were scorned, scourged, discriminated and ineptly labeled, eventually marginalized. Offset with the introduction and legitimizing of apartheid by the national party in 1948 ‘Separate but equal‘ policy and further entrenched with the group areas act, segregation, re-classification as coloreds (kleurling) and forcible grouped together.

This term, concept and construct of colored was and still is very tenuous. Tenuous in the sense that the heritage of coloureds is shrouded in a veil of different languages, beliefs, cultures, prejudices, religious and social affiliations. Roughly this relates to the (in)visible hierarchy of imposed social class distinction between coloured people based on feature discrimination, economy, misplaced sense of class, religion/beliefs and ignorance; fostered and maintained by the Apartheid Republic. A social and people bigotry illuminated in the form of demeaning slurs as ‘hot-not’, ‘bushie‘, ‘gam‘ and ‘bastar‘ imposing a humanistic heresy that people are inferior to others.

A shared culture, defined as a shared heritage, tradition, socially entrenched customs, beliefs, language, and vision, between coloureds have been forged through the Union Years, the PACT years, the Apartheid years, the Equality years in the guise of a shared rejection, oppression, discrimination, poverty and escalating social issues like gangsterism, alcoholism, abuse and affirmative action. An unique feature of a coloured culture is that it is not based in conventional and traditional (Western, if you like) precepts, definition or description of culture. A broad definition of colored culture is based on a stereotype that coloured people are untrustworthy, lazy, drunkards, thieves, gangsters, murderers, drug peddlers, abusers, con artist, you name it still ring through the corridors of society.

The presumed nature and defined characteristics, ‘the commandments‘, of life as a coloured is based on stereotypical assertions maintained by political, social and economic exclusion. Either colored people have failed to rise above their conditions or circumstances created and maintained by the Apartheid government of which their identity as an insular group have be traumatized and is in state of paralysis or in denial; or the present government has failed to make significant contributions to alleviate the plight of the so called colored people; or the present government and coloured leadership has inadvertently embarked to maintain and sustain the racial landscape immorally legitimized by the Apartheid government; or simply we as people have failed to see and meet each as people. By law we are free and equal but still, in shackles and chains mentally. Servants and subordinates to the ‘Separate but equal’ Apartheid government premise.

>> Ross Rayners