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South Africa has spent centuries trying to decide what a coloured person is. The colonial state classified them. Apartheid institutionalised them. Democracy retained their categorisation. Political parties court them. Census forms count them. Yet the question of who they are remains remarkably unsettled.
It may take another 300 years before we undo the lingering apartheid ethnic identities that continue to undermine the building of a primary national identity.
Many have tried to elevate how we understand what it means to be coloured and South African. I remember Alex Tabisher and Jakes Gerwel, two of my educators, who made me feel dignified as I learnt the language, history and culture of being coloured without being stuck in a negative nationalism.
They showed us ways to build political narratives that were nonethnic and nonracist. They showed how histories have good and bad trajectories. I was taught to understand and value this history without turning it into an ethnic nationalist crusade. Cultural identity is not the problem. Ethnic nationalism is. I was taught by them that remembering a history and celebrating a culture is not the same as turning both into a political weapon.
Each generation either seeks to build better versions of its story or becomes part of the problem it is trying to fix. Fadiel Adams’s problem is not that he has no history. It is that he appears to have no intellectually grounded relationship with it. Nor does he have mentors to help him achieve this. The failure to make sense of a particular human existence resulted in what we saw Adams display at the Madlanga commission.
It is easy to dismiss Adams as an ethnic nationalist and an extreme and vulgar populist. He certainly displays the traits of one. His buffoonery, bravado and braggartry all help to define him as a man who, having seen and experienced the miserable problems confronting coloured people in South Africa, decided to get into the ring — but without the skills needed.
They lack the skills to address our painful history and potentially prosperous future in a way that builds a cause that a nation can collectively align with
His inability to process and order his thoughts, and to craft words with precision, is his greatest challenge. What we get from him is a torrent of words that ends up bordering on verbal diarrhoea. In this he is not alone. It is a problem for many of our political leaders. Driven by a just cause, they cannot process ideas properly nor articulate them appropriately. They lack the skills to address our painful history and potentially prosperous future in a way that builds a cause that a nation can collectively align with and feel proud of.
Since the exit from modern political life of people like Wilmot James, Franklin Sonn and Gerwel, the intellectual and political character of coloured political leadership has become frozen in seizures of evangelical fervour, void of any sense-making. Coloureds in the ANC are politically outmanoeuvred. Coloureds in the DA are regarded as sellouts. In the African Christian Democratic Party they are regarded only as congregation members at a church service.
Being outmanoeuvred and regarded as sellouts has given rise to an array of “coloured political parties” that all attempt to give coloureds “a better voice”. These ethnic identity-seeking enterprises have fractured any sense of building a national patriotism for all people in South Africa. They have separated into ethnic voting fodder that increasingly regards their black, white, Indian and immigrant brothers and sisters as the reason for their stagnation and decline.
From the competing Khoi and San communities and their many tribal sub-groups to the various provincial coloured groupings, they have become an exploited ethnicity ripe for the picking by leaders like Adams, Gayton McKenzie, Marius Fransman and the many other leaders who seek the vote of this constituency.
The political and economic exploitation they have identified is not wrong. It is historical, and it is current. What is wrong is that they have no plan to fix it — all they have is rousing ethnic nationalist rhetoric.
They are lying to the people they are promising to help. They have become the ones exploiting the pain of coloured people for their own political fortunes.
Adams owed the country a better version of himself at the Madlanga commission. Instead, he turned it into an embarrassingly shameful display.
I had hoped that the inclusion of Adams and McKenzie in mainstream debates would increase their awareness and give them a more informed political voice. The sons and daughters of coloured descent were voting fodder for white political parties who similarly did nothing to improve their lives. Coloured people rightly felt that their economic and political wellbeing was being exploited.
It was fertile ground for the “gatvol” factor to become a substantive part of our political narrative. This factor will grow. It should. However, Adams and McKenzie and the rest of those who are ethnic nationalists have ruined the moment for the country to see that there is an intelligence within their cause.
They have failed to show that they are not driven by ethnic nationalism but by a deep concern for any and all exploited communities. But more especially, they failed the poorest coloured people — the truly gatvol people — who had hoped that they would be led by those with dignity and intelligence towards a better future. Their pain, inflicted by poverty, their daily violence, and their maligned identity, remain in place.
- Davids is a director at the AfriGo Capital Group
