Coloureds, Capies, Browns, So-calleds, Malays, these are the names given to the mixed-race people in the Western Cape region of South Africa. The issue of coloured identity is one example of the general reexamination of ethnicity under way in the new South Africa. Rather than thinking about ethnicity as some immutable essence, it is more accurately conceptualized as the locus of relations among differences whose content and boundaries are incessantly shifting. Initially the designation ‘coloured’ referred to all non-Europeans and it was not until 1904 that the term was used to refer to mixed-race peoples. When Christian Nationalists seized power in 1948, the situation for coloureds changed rapidly. Afrikaner hegemony was to be maintained through a policy of enforced group identity and territorialization. In the post-1976 period of concerted challenges to white rule and the advent of black consciousness, there emerged an unwritten obligation for mixed-race people to refer to themselves as ‘so-called’ coloureds. The move to describe oneself as black – a practice prevalent amongst politicized youth – took place in the 1980s. The current appropriation of hip-hop culture by Cape coloureds provides a hint of the mentalities emerging in this process. Ref.
