Laugh, the beloved country

Dear Boet(a) & Almal Tuis, 

I suspect your cup of tea is astir with acid right now. I get it. You must be feeling like, “I just want to sommer strangle someone, anyone, right now.”

But there is a lot to celebrate about being “coloured”, whatever that actually means. Upon watching a looped video-clip featuring a bunch of “ignant” young bucks, clearly trafficking in satirical stereotyping of “coloureds”, my mind leapt back in time to the early 1990s. An era of exuberant possibilities. A permissive era in which we were able to be rude to each other as an expression of love, political affection and solidarity.

I was reminded of the play The Colored Museum by George C Wolfe. Its genius lies in its exuberant, almost kitschy jest about US racial stereotypes. Early in the play, Topsy Washington, one of the liveliest and most troubled (by her identity) character of the lot, exclaims: “I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain, and yet, I can’t live without it.”

Boeta, those podcaster kids were obviously out of order. But something needs to be said here: South Africans make silly jokes just about everyone. The African folks mislabelled as “coloureds”, out of settler colonialism’s lack of imagination, have been the butt of insensitive humour as much as any ethnic group.

Boeta, too much cacophonous noise is drowning other voices.   I also feel like this moment offers us an opportunity to reset and think deeply about how and why we conceive of ourselves the way we do as a nation

I and the people in my orbit, including my extended “coloured” family, friends, ex-colleagues and creative collaborators, have long come to the consensus that each black “nation” (Zulu, Thembu, Xhosa, Pondo, Venda, and so on) has its singular sociocultural lore, which is remixed to meet the demands of contemporaneity. And what the apartheid regime categorised as“coloured” is nothing other than another branch of black Africanness. “Coloureds” are an exciting, beautiful and complex quilt of ethnic sampling; history’s assemblage.                                         

Therefore, colouredness is potentially a powerful branch of political blackness. “Coloureds” are black African, imbued with own dynamic cultures.

But unlike a lot of fixed ethnicities, colouredness has within it creative tides of creolisation. It is out of that dynamism, I’ve always imagined, possibly presumptuously, that the spiritual state, pleasure and pain of being “coloured” must be derived.

To be “coloured”, it feels to me, is to live with the shock, pleasure, wonder, curiosity, burden and beauty of everyday remaking, re-evaluation and restating; to be told what you are, and what you are not, often falsely, by both outsiders and family mythmaking.

Steve Biko, Peter Jones and even Neville Alexander at one stage agreed “coloured” people are black. It might have been political expediency, a strategy to bring all the oppressed under the same tent, but it is clear that even though some “coloured” families and communities include strands of ancestry ranging from Southeast Asia to the coasts of Africa and Europe, as a group “coloureds” cannot escape their quilted blackness and centuries of Africanness.

No-one whom fate has submitted to this continent, as a ritual offering, a sacrifice or magical gift, escapes its overwhelming pull or crushing force. “Coloureds” are as African as Afrikaners inevitably are.                              

By casting racist epithets at “damn hotnots”, haters — and I do not include those podcaster kids among these — possibly implicate their own ancestral forebears in such insults. For the “coloured” genealogy also issues out of the San, Khoi, Nama, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho, Griqua, and so on. Politically, they also mean we blacks are like ______ (fill in your worst stereotypes of “coloureds”).

Because South Africa is a “coloured” nation. Almost all of us qualify. I’m aware that by “coloured” those young podcasters are referring to a specific demographic. Their conception of colouredness is postal-coded around Cape Town, the Free State, Gauteng, Kimberley and Gqeberha, not that they thought about that. They don’t seem to be burdened by the demands of a life of the mind. But there is no monolithic “coloured” culture in South Africa. There just isn’t. 

I do not know of any cultural sub−group that escapes South Africans’ raw, ignorant or knowing humour — none. Otherwise we would not have produced Trevor Noah

So when someone says “coloured” people nywe, nywe, nywe I blow up in mirth. I ask myself: wag ’n bietjie, which “coloured” people are they talking about?

Boeta, too much cacophonous noise is drowning other voices. I also feel like this moment offers us an opportunity to reset and think deeply about how and why we conceive of ourselves the way we do as a nation. I feel like what sounds, on the surface, like a huge racial profiling skandaal, is nothing but a satirical line gone overboard. We cannot leave it to the courts or politicians to rule on it.

We have to defend satire’s right to offend. But also, talking of the politics of “care”, what South Africa needs more than anything is a major electroshock purge of the mentality of the slave trade, colonialism, apartheid and Bantu education. The fact that we are still saying the obvious is one of the major failures of the ANC project since 1994.

This beautiful country, perhaps inevitably, still looks at itself through the burdensome mirror of history. But we also have a history of self-deprecating jokes; we excel at “the true niggers of this world” gallows humour.

We should be careful not to kill that spark. Educate ourselves, yes, but never kill that unique tradition of court-jesterliness, jeering, booing and jou ma se humour. You could say the podcast kids were not exchanging banter but trafficking in stereotypes, and you would be half correct. But the context of the clip is the wish to joust and poke fun, not to hurt, even if the cumulative effects are damaging. We also need to see the whole segment, and not just the edited version.

Boeta, it is really shocking that the minister of arts, culture & sports, Gayton McKenzie, refers to himself as “coloured” as distinct from black. Whether he likes it or not, he is just another tribal iteration of black Africanness. What is he smoking? No, it can’t be tik. 

I do not know of any cultural sub-group that escapes South Africans’ raw, ignorant or knowing humour — none. Otherwise we would not have produced that golden black boy, Trevor Noah. Colouredness as defined by apartheid did not give birth to him or raise him.

A black woman gave birth to a boy fathered by a Swiss man. His Soweto granny, he never stops of reminding us, raised him. Blackness raised him. And even all that means nothing. South Africa, in all its dynamism and remixed cultures, raised Trevor Noah, and many more.   

I have observed a troubling phenomenon: the resurgence of “coloured” nationalism. This is tied to the Cape’s slavery history and is also a product of perceptions about the treatment of “coloured” people since 1994.

But the economic conditions of “coloureds” in the Cape are the result, mainly, of the European settler-colonial project, the National Party’s patriarchal fantasies and the DA’s decades of provincial, and municipal, abuses.

It is not the result of any form of black supremacy.

Another, much deeper reason for the re-emergence of the ugly strain of “coloured” nationalism I’m talking about is the view within a specific “coloureds” consciousness that black Africans are inferior. This view holds that the white-adjacent nature of colouredness makes it special.

And yet I dare anyone to tell me: what are the intractable, irreversible, profound differences between black Africans and “coloureds”?

Your brother, always, B.