‘Coloured culture’ sets tongues wagging

SOCIAL media platform Twitter erupted on Thursday continuing well into Friday over a tweet questioning whether coloured people have a culture, sparking much angst and debate.

Instead of explaining what coloured culture is, social media users opted to celebrate coloured culture by flooding time lines in a matter of minutes with anecdotal tweets beginning with the phrase, “If coloured culture didn’t exist…” and colourfully shared what coloured culture is all about – adding some humour, of course.

Coloured people do have an identity, and coloured culture is unique.

The term “coloured” was given to non-white persons by the apartheid regime. For decades, many scholars and coloured people have debated whether “coloured” should be classified as a racial group or is it just a name given to a group of people of mixed heritage. In the US, the term “coloured” is deemed an ethnic slur.

According to Twitter user @nicolejacobssnj, one of the first users to tweet about “if there was no coloured culture”, coloured people have been silenced for a long time.

“We’ve been hurt, and told to suck it up because it’s probably our circumstances or our nature or we’ve probably inflicted the pain on ourselves, and not being recognised as a real culture in SA stung because people mock us when we talk?

“Y’all expect all of us to be gangsters, have passion gaps, etc?”

Nicole added: “So, when I posted, I didn’t expect it to blow up, I just hoped that I’d leave a seed, but when I saw almost every coloured person water that seed and it growing into what it is now I couldn’t be more proud, and for us to make light of the situation is literally the only way a coloured person knows how. We always want others to laugh and we kind of reclaimed the stereotypes that caused division, only to find that we basically lived the same lives.”

Nicole continued: “This fight and togetherness couldn’t have come at a better time, especially after the death of Nathaniel Julies, which was a senseless act of hate, and right now, not only seeing coloured people, but our black brothers and sisters fight along with us, proves that we’re fighting a common enemy.”

There were a number of tweets referring to “what coloured culture?” with one user saying, “Please point out one thing that originated from coloured culture seen in mainstream media? We know about images of gangsterism …”

Another social media user named @LingDeeYor said: “Coloured people, or rather the Creole people of South Africa, have long been accused of having no culture. This debate is not new. In the 1980s Marike de Klerk called us non-persons, an unfortunate group, borne out of her ignorance and racism.

“We are culturally the most diverse group of people in South Africa with an erased history. But we are experiencing a revival in wanting to embrace our identity, and that poses a threat to anyone who wilfully does not want to understand that coloured people possess a culture like no other that is uniquely South African.”

In recent months, social media in South Africa responded to the death of African-American George Floyd at the hands of police in the US. The South African public condemned Floyd’s death by uploading a black square on their social media and sharing the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

Now, the death of Nathaniel Julies at the hands of the South African police has raised the question of whether coloured lives matter.

The disabled coloured 16-year-old boy from a coloured area in Johannesburg was killed at the hands of the police, but it seems there hasn’t been the same outrage from South Africans at his death as to that of Floyd.

This is a time for coloured, black, white and Indian people to stand together as one South Africa against brutality. By celebrating and respecting our unique cultures and embracing each other in all our differences, South Africa will be a force to be reckoned with. |