LETTER: Why am I still regarded as a coloured?
When a comrade's daughter asked him whether he identified as coloured, the answer was not easy, writes Jeremy Veary.
|||When a comrade’s daughter asked him whether he identified as coloured, it required much existential introspection to answer the question honestly, writes Jeremy Veary.
“Uncle Jeremy, do you identify yourself as coloured?”
When I was asked this question by a comrade’s daughter as part of a Skype-interview for a high school project, I was calm and free from the self-inflicted existential crisis I had suffered a few days earlier in preparation for the interview.
The week before, I remined the writings of my respected authorities on the subject of race in anxious desperation that Xolela Mangu, Adebe Zegeye, Neville Alexander or Ryland Fisher would enlighten.
I even went outside South Africa to the writings of Amin Maalouf, Amartya Sen, Étienne Balibar, Immanuel Wallerstein and Kulichenko for help, but neither provided any answers.
But they could not provide answers because this was not an abstract question that could be approached with the analytical advantage of clinical distance. It was personal.
However, I recalled Alex La Guma had raised the same issue from a personal perspective in a letter to the Sechaba journal of the ANC of June 1984 that resulted in an insightful exchange between him in the August 1984 edition, and finally Arnold Selby in the September 1984 edition.
La Guma wrote: “I have noticed now in speeches, articles, interviews etc. in Sechaba, that I am called “so-called Coloured (sometimes with a small “c”). When did the Congress decide to call me this?
“... Comrade Editor, I am confused. I need clarification. It makes me feel like a so-called human, like a humanoid, those things that have all the characteristics of human beings but are really artificial.”
While this extract does not do proper justice to the full import of La Guma’s argument, the answers to the questions he raised forces personal introspection without the theoretical comfort of ideological analysis.
I was forced to address the following issues in terms of how I feel about:
* Why I am still officially regarded as a coloured by government or employers;
* Why my children born after 1994 are still regarded as coloured;
* The Constitutional Court Case 78/15 of 2016 in which the court found that Department of Correctional Service employees designated as coloured were unfairly discriminated against when they were not appointed into management posts for which they were the more qualified candidates.
In a material reality that still regards my children and I as coloured, and talks about the “coloured vote” during elections as a distinct political interest, we still have a long way to go before this question can be answered honestly at a personal level.
As for me, I believe that after much existential introspection, I answered that question honestly. Especially when asked by the daughter of a comrade who probably still has to deal with the unfair implications of being regarded as coloured, irrespective of what she chooses to self-identify as.
Jeremy Vearey
Mowbray
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus