My IDENTITY is not in a CRISIS

My IDENTITY is not in a CRISIS

It’s just Decidedly Not Narrowly Defined…

This is not just my story.

This in all probability could be Yours.

Ja nê! The colonisers after the end of officially endorsed slavery knew exactly what they were doing when they no longer bothered recording much of my and so many other Coloureds’ lineage.

During slavery, for business & legal reasons, it was logical that they kept meticulous records.

Once we were no longer slaves they knew they had to keep us from having illusions of sharing a common identity, purpose or destiny.

Nor we or our descendants were to know who we really are.

Having been (mis?)educated with the notion that we all should know exactly where we came from and then thereby claim a (sometimes fabricated) cultural identity that excludes simply accepting that you are of mixed origins, a few years ago I went on a mission to find out about my own ancestry.

Dead ends; mostly just dead ends!

Oral history and a few public records there are some yes, but all that I could accurately trace goes back till the late 1800s starting with mixed-race descendants of freed slave immigrants on both my paternal and maternal sides, who married into the local mixed-race population, and there was a whole lot of a bit of everything including Khoisan in that mix but of whom there are no official records dating back any further.

Knowing and accepting with pride that somewhere along those lines I have Khoisan blood flowing through my veins, makes me want to celebrate that part of me …but this always leaves me with some uneasiness.

Now before I get disowned and there are calls for my head to roll by my “so-called” Coloured friends who Know Exactly from which Khoi-San tribes they are… Ja djy bra met jou perd-stert styl hare…

Let me try to explain my uneasiness.

You see, there are quite a few Khoisan tribes who all have chiefs, who all want me to actively be a part of their cultural traditions.

These chiefs have not really been fighting amongst themselves over my allegiance or for territorial authority over me, but they are all in some way or another vying for my attention and thus indirectly targeting my loyalty. Consequently they have been causing me to have a fair bit of resentment towards them for they cannot see that I can in no possible way pay any allegiance to any specific one of them.

I do not question their legitimacy as they could with much better luck – and with a whole lot more skill than I have – trace back their royal lineage for many, many generations.

I however do question the legitimacy of some of their subjects, after all… a chief has to have a tribe. How does one who is without records or even a reliable oral history decide which chief to pay allegiance to?

How would one go about finding proof that your great, great, great, great grandfather was indeed a subject of the great, great, great, great, grandfather of today’s chief?

OK, I have no clue but maybe I could join a tribe just because I like the headgear of the one chief more than that of the other?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not mocking our revered and honoured chiefs, but am just trying to share with you my thoughts …my way of dealing with this quandary.

Not being willing to pay allegiance to any specific one of them, I have decided to at the very least hold them all in high esteem. After all, if it weren’t for lost or deliberately not kept records, there could even be a whole lot of chief in me.

There is no getting away from the fact that they are all a part of me and that they are the only connection I have to a culture and traditions that, if it were not for them and many others, would be relegated to museums and deceitful history books.

This part of me however is only a very small part and I am resolute in celebrating every other aspect of what makes me the Coloured that I am. So besides having some Khoisan ancestry that I cannot begin to accurately identify, there are a whole many other influences that make up who I am.

Those influences today dictate the way I celebrate the joys of life, how I worship the God I pray to, formed the games I played as a kid and those that Coloured kids in my area still play to this day because we actively teach it to them.

Those many influences that you can see when we mourn friends and relatives that have left this life and the ways we celebrate when a new Coloured enters into this world.

I come not only from our own aboriginal Khoisan tribes but also from, East & West African slaves, Nguni and other Southern African peoples, indentured Indian labourers, Malay slaves as well as their royal princes exiled here as political prisoners, Chinese immigrants who became assimilated into the Coloured communities they were forced to live in, and obviously Europeans in the mix as well.

I can assure you I am quite comfortable being a Coloured who does not pretend to know what tribe I am from just like Coloureds from KZN do not ride on a Groot Trek ossewa with Indian turbans on their heads and Zulu shields in their hands while singing God save the queen proclaiming to be a tribe.

In Fact most Cape Coloureds will be shocked to find that KZN Coloureds have mostly no Khoisan or Malay in them but yet they can still easily identify with and relate to them.

No matter how many times the question is raised, the answer eludes many including me, since Coloured Identity is always, albeit sometimes erratically, evolving.

We had this nametag thrust upon us, then our creolised language, Afrikaans, was claimed and “purified” by our enslavers, and now we fight amongst each other as to whether we even exist or not and whether the nametag should exist at all.

Well we can continue arguing all we want, but when all those people with different cultural histories and influences were forced to live together in Coloured Group Areas and legally required to only procreate amongst each other, a distinct culture evolved and is still evolving.

I cannot leap-frog back in time and skip some of what formed me in order to claim only one aspect of what makes me.

For me there is no personal Coloured Identity Crisis.

I Am All Of It.

Ek’s mos ’n Kullid!