[imagesource:colouredpoetry]

Sunday was Heritage Day.

The annual holiday on which South Africans are encouraged to celebrate their heritage, many of your relations probably chose to have a braai. Others may have donned traditional outfits, and gathered with family and friends to celebrate in their own way.

Personally, I chose to stick it out in bed and do some macrame. St. Paddy’s is my time to reflect on the past.

Intrigued, two reporters from News24 took the streets of Johannesburg to find out what it means to be coloured, asking “Do you think you have a heritage?”

It is sometimes said that the identity of the coloured person is lost in South Africa. Former first lady of South Africa, Marike de Klerk, in 1983 said of coloured people:

“They are the people that were left after the nation was sorted out. They are the rest.”

Not sure she is talking any sense there, but let’s take a look at what some of those interviewed had to say:

For Taz Golden, 29, being coloured is a lifestyle. “I have no idea what makes me coloured,” he says.

Golden, a DJ and community radio presenter from Klipspruit, feels that nothing solely belongs to coloured people. No culture, no music, no food and no clothing. For him it is just a ‘lifestyle’.

“My ways makes me coloured, what I eat, what I drink and where I chill,” he says. He believes coloured people have a little of both black and white culture.

Have coloured people never really had the opportunity to explore their identity and heritage? Or is proof of ‘colouredness’ found in “dropping the suspension of your Volkswagen Golf and putting a “moerse” (loud) sound system in?”

The News24 piece went on:

Shaldon Ferris, a filmmaker from Eldorado Park, south of Johannesburg, believes the term coloured is just a ‘label’.

“It is not who we are,” he states. “We all sort of had the same or similar shades of brown, and there was a need for classification.” Ferris believes coloured people have owned the title, becoming a community over the years.

“I would say we are homogeneous because there are a lot of things that you and I can relate to even if we have not met each other – certain ways that we greet, certain ways that we talk.”

While some believe that many coloured people can be linked back to either the Khoi or the San – “the best heritage ever”, others disagree, saying “they” even “robbed us of our own language, the Griqua language”.

You can read and watch more comments and answers here.

I would be intrigued to know what those living in the Cape would have to say – or is that in itself problematic, to suggest location makes a difference? Coloured Mentality might hold some answers to those questions.

[source:news24]