End of year message 2006!

It has certainly been an eventful and significant year for Bruinou.com. While this year has seen us make big strides as far as membership growth figures and public visibility are concerned, we still see lots of room for improvement in the new year and these areas will be getting lots more attention.

Bruinou.com as I have come to realise (and I’m sure you’ll agree) is a very unique organisation. It occupies a very delicate and precarious position in the business/social strata (much like the Coloured community occupies a sensitive and awkward space in society’s racial strata). Having tasked ourselves with fearlessly tackling that much eschewed and avoided topic of “Coloured identity”, Bruinou.com has been on the consciousness raising warpath in the Coloured community for some time now. We believe that it’s only after people have been made thoroughly aware of what the core issues are affecting our community, will they be able to effectively mobilise themselves in order to effect change. The “Coloured identity” issue is certainly not Bruinou.com’s alone and in the new year, we’d really like to see more people take ownership of this enduring problem as well as their collective destinies. Bruinou.com’s social ambitions of advocating change in the Coloured community has often meant that we get perceived to be some kind of political party or non-profit organisation. The truth is we’re neither.

So what is Bruinou.com then? Bruinou.com is an organisation that believes in the enormous latent potential of the Coloured community. We believe that the legitimisation of the Coloured identity is the key to relieving many of our communal woes and unleashing the vast, dormant potential that resides within us. We believe that only once the Coloured identity is afforded equal recognition, status and respect as is meted out to every other South African social group, only then will our communities be able to start healing. The fact that under apartheid the Coloured community had no media access and today the situation remains unchanged, is indicative of just how deep the problem extends. Does the SABC have a national strategy on how to remedy the Coloured community’s exclusion from mainstream media? How much land does the Coloured community of South Africa own (the issue of land ownership gets dealt with in an upcoming article called “Whose land is it anyway?”)? How much money is spent every year on the Coloured community by the department of arts and culture? Will BEE in its current form ever yield any real benefits to the Coloured community? Why is Trevor Manuel (the minister with by far the best track record) excluded from the presidential succession debate? These and other questions of monumental importance to our community are continuously skirted in the naïve hope that they will go away.

We are extremely heartened by the fact that our sustained campaign to remove the stigma and the question marks surrounding the term “Coloured” is starting to bear fruit. People on the ground are starting to talk, discuss, debate and question the status quo. We’ve seen indabas being organized in communities like Eldorado Park and the formation of an entity we hope to work more closely with in the new year, the Bruin Development Agency. A common thread that we have seen with community based initiatives is their dogged insistence to treat the ills of our society while completely ignoring the underlying root cause of the problems, the issue of Coloured identity. Bruinou.com has gone to great lengths to show people the link between the lack of identity and the appearance of social ills like drug abuse; gangsterism and the afflicted group’s general collective loss of direction.

Somebody raised a very interesting point in the Bruinou.com forums. They mentioned that in the US, after the demise of the political party the Black Panthers, African-American neighbourhoods became riddled with drugs. Whether this was deliberate or purely coincidental, a conspiracy theory was posited that the drug infestation was a deliberate ploy by the federal government to render the Black “menace” docile and ineffective. When one looks at the Coloured community in South Africa; under apartheid our communities were ravaged by Mandrax and now, our communities in the Western Cape are under siege and awash with tik-tik. Now, I’m no conspiracy theorist, neither do I advocate or promote them, but on the surface, the fact that our community based organisations are always fighting fires and treating symptoms means we never get down to the real task of building capacity and skills. The conspiracy theory certainly makes me shudder at the sinister rationale that would be required to drive something like this. The powers that be certainly have something to gain from a subdued, distracted, dysfunctional Coloured community and government’s lethargic response to the ills plaguing the Coloured community only serves to reinforce any notions which the conspiracy theorists may have. We definitely do not believe that the tik-tik epidemic has any intentional or socially engineered origins, but conspiracy theories make for such interesting discussion, you gotta admit.

With that, I’d like to thank our many loyal members who have helped Bruinou.com grow and survive for so long. We hope to attract more people who will make the Bruinou.com website their new favourite online destination and also to make the transition from being spectators, to being contributors and participators.

The struggle continues.