What’s the main problem?

I’ve noticed the word “mentality” being thrown around on the Bruinou.com forum recently as a cursory explanation for the Coloured community’s entrenched and notorious sense of apathy. One of the Bruinou.com forum regulars said that the Coloured community needs to seriously undergo a profound change in their “mentality” and “attitude” if they are to progress in this South African society. Is it really that simple? Would our problems mysteriously disappear if we all had a session on Dr Phil’s couch and underwent a “mentality and attitude transplant”?

As much as I’d love to believe in the simplicity of this approach, there is certainly more to the issues of Coloured “mentality” than meets the eye. For me, the need for the Coloured community to change its “mentality” implies some kind of intrinsic flaw in our mental state. Now, I cannot believe for a second that the 3rd most populous social group in this country is saddled with some kind of universal character flaw which permeates all levels of our society, reducing us to some kind of mental basket cases. There are far too many Bruinous that I know, who have clawed their way out of pretty bleak situations to become successful (in all definitions of the term). Having given the Coloured success-story anomaly some considerable thought (I say “anomaly” because let’s be honest, Coloured success stories are the exception and certainly not the rule), I’ve come to the conclusion that having a poor “mentality” is simply a by-product of the more pervasive and oft neglected issue of “identity” and the understanding of one’s place in society. A common trait I’ve noticed amongst almost all successful people (particularly Coloured folk) is their strong sense of self and self-worth.

For everybody that belongs to an anthropologically defined “race” group, knowing who they are in society pretty much goes without saying. They have their group’s collective history; their chunk of terra-firma from where they can claim origins; they don’t have anybody imposing a group identity on them, they have the right/luxury of choosing their group’s own proper noun; they aren’t encumbered with a myriad of question marks surrounding the validity of their identity and they’re pretty certain of who they are in the world. Not so for South Africa’s Coloured community unfortunately, our perpetual quest for approval and acceptance in mainstream South African society continues to this day.

In South African society, we are coerced into viewing the Black and White groupings as if they are physical realities (like gravity and the speed of light are physical realities), but the Coloured grouping we are told, is “a social construct”. While the overarching, overlapping Coloured identity leaves many, like myself, awkwardly squirming in their skins trying to find a comfortable place in South African society to contribute from, it creates a strong sense of detachment and feelings of alienation for those who straddle the racial divides. In many ways, I think that Coloured intellectuals are particularly lazy in rethinking the relevance of Coloured identity in the modern world. They remain steeped in the parochial semantics of Khoisanist/Cape Town origination. They very quickly subscribe to the view that being “Coloured” is to simply be a subset of the broader Black grouping. While this line of thinking may have worked wonders during the struggle years when there was obvious strength in numbers and a united front was necessary to oppose the evils of apartheid. In this day and age, I refuse to mindlessly traverse the humanity maze, unquestioningly gobbling up nuggets of regurgitated “Black” rhetoric like a mindless Pacman. If Black Consciousness and White privilege are afforded relevance in the status quo, then goddammit, I propose a new era of Coloured Consciousness! But, I digress…

I think the best way that I find to explain my actions (and those of the broader Coloured community) would be to invoke the awesome explanatory power of that recent heavyweight in modern psychology, Abraham Maslow and his "Hierarchy of Man’s Needs".

Briefly, Abraham Maslow’s theory goes that man has a set of hierarchical needs in the formation of a pyramid, starting at the base (the biggest/most important needs) and going upwards 5 layers. The most basic need is man’s need for food, water and oxygen; the physiological needs, without which you will die. The second set of needs are the safety needs which cover the need to be sheltered, secure, safe, warm, dry, etc… You can have yourself all the oxygen in the world, a dik chow and even purified water on tap, but if bullets are flying all around you and your person is under constant threat, you’re not gonna be able to do much else but fret over your personal safety and the preservation of your life. You’d be stuck on layer 2, your safety needs. But if your physiological needs are taken care of sufficiently, you’re relatively safe from harm and danger, then your love needs come in to play. The thing with Maslow’s hierarchy is that as a lower set of needs are adequately and properly sated, a higher set of needs automatically come into play, which serve to propel us to our purpose in life, self-actualisation, the highest need in Maslow’s hierarchy. The 3rd layer of Maslow’s hierarchy is concerned with a person’s love needs. This is your need to feel a sense of belonging within a family, a community, to love yourself and to receive love from others. Unfortunately, this is the layer on Maslow’s hierarchy in which the wheels come off for the large majority of people who embrace the Coloured identity as their own.

The Coloured community’s lack of a collective past and our current social limbo means we have a tough time truly knowing who we are. Add to this, the enduring stigma of embracing an identity that many see as no longer relevant in an allegedly non-racial society and you have the recipe for self-loathing. Our community is fractured along language, class and religious lines which means we cannot seek solace in the broader group. We occupy the unenviable position in the social strata where many see us as the bodyguards of white capital and the bastard sons and daughters of Black Africa. There’s really no doubt that Coloured people have a hard time loving themselves. Do other groups within South Africa have the same problems? No! Black identity and all its constituent tribal subsets do not grapple with the same issues of belonging, origin and social worth like the Coloured community does.

Is it then any surprise that we are the most incarcerated group in South Africa? That our society is characterised by gangsterism (which is merely a manifestation of the youth’s desire for group acceptance); drug addiction and familial dysfunction within our ranks should not be greeted with any shock. Are we surprised that tik-tik found such a fertile breeding ground in the Western Cape? One can even draw parallels between the plight of Coloureds in South Africa and the African-Americans in the United States. Both groups share a familiar case of stolen, tainted identities. The difference between the 2 groups however, is that the Coloured community in South Africa feels reluctant (and with just cause), to fully embrace the Black identity, whereas the African-Americans of the United States fully embraced the institutionalised and accepted Black identity. I commend the attempts by community activists to deal with the symptoms of a lacking social identity, I feel that more needs to be done to address the problem at its root though, and to make the Coloured people of South Africa feel as if this land is actually also truly theirs.

Until we can, as a group, learn to love ourselves and find peace within our own skins, our community’s success ratio will remain low. The many Coloured folk that I’ve seen soar to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy have to some extent substituted their innate Coloured identity with a more socially acceptable Black identity. For the longest time I saw Coloured people who called themselves “Black” as being some kind of sell-out, sycophantic bootlickers. I’ve since changed my attitudes to these people as the merits of embracing Black identity gives one’s psyche the social relevance necessary to climb above the slovenly morass of mixed-race identity and on to bigger, better things.

The thing is, now that we have an idea of what the main problem afflicting our community might be, what exactly are WE going to do about it?

By Charles Ash
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