Fine, we’ll do one more post about the magic man today.

When Wayde clocked a new world record the country went wild, but for many coloured South Africans it was a particularly sweet victory.

Whilst Odessa Swarts, Wayde’s mother, has played down her son’s race in the past, Twitter still celebrated his win with the hashtag #colouredexcellence.

The Mail & Guardian takes over:

The athlete was born in Cape Town in the Western Cape, which unlike other provinces in South Africa, has a population of coloured people higher than black people. The so-called Cape Flats in Cape Town – where drugs, gangsterism and crime are the order of most days – have become synonymous with coloured identity, fuelling prejudice against coloured people as being lazy and criminal.

Van Niekerk’s world record breaking win challenged stereotypes, with coloured communities proudly standing behind the sprinter’s victory. As people streamed on to social media, some identity-splaining popped up when coloured people were told to leave race out of it and celebrate as South Africans.

A more complex sort of explaining to coloured people then started coming through, as black South Africans began telling coloured South Africans that they should be identifying as black.

This one is steeped in much history, discussed at length in the piece, but I’ll skip forward to the end for something of a wrap:

The debate sparked by van Niekerk’s victory demonstrates that, even today, coloured people are still being told how to identify themselves, regardless of their own experiences and cultures.  While black identity can be a political umbrella of unity, it can’t erase cultural differences or roots: like a coloured family in the Cape growing up on kombuis Afrikaans (a mix of Afrikaans and English that coloured people adapted from the dictionary form Afrikaans), while some black people consider Afrikaans to be an entirely oppressive language because of the Bantu Education policy under apartheid.

While black South Africans have celebrated Luvo Manyonga’s long jump gold victory under #blackexcellence, coloured South Africans are taking the time to celebrate the victories of one of their own heroes.

I’m not really in a position to comment, because by this time of the day everyone has had their fill of whitesplaining, but I’d hope that victories like Wayde’s were a uniting, rather than divisive, force.

[source:mg]