Will BBI help coloured people ‘feel comfortable in their own skin’?

(Some interesting commentary on the BBI – Unlike some people, I’m not too fond of playing the “oppression olympics” and comparing the sufferings of my community with that of others. What I do believe in though, is equal treatment. My comments to this article can be found in the comments section further down – Read the arrticle on MG here – Ed)

How do you measure suffering? And if you were to find that you have suffered the most, how do you get compensated for that?

This is a rather crude analysis of why the newly established Bruin Belange Inisiatief (BBI) — Coloured Interests’ Initiative — was brought into existence.

The 400 coloured people who gathered at Goudini Spa, previously an exclusive holiday hangout for whites, had one thing in common: they felt they were done in by the African National Congress government and that the pot of gold put aside for the rainbow nation is shared exclusively among their black countrymen. The fact that they were all coloured was arbitrary.

Because just as you have to admit that some coloured people have not had access to the fruits of liberation, you have to admit that some did.

I certainly did. With a mixture of supportive parents, commitment to hard work, good mentors and a little bit of luck, I have been able to use opportunities and find a place for myself in post-apartheid South Africa.

The proponents of the BBI would argue that I am one of the lucky ones. I have been able to rise above my circumstances (based on the assumption that my circumstances were particularly bad — I am, after all, coloured) and now feel the need to plough back into the community.

Anyway, to give something back to your community is a notion that is a mainstay of most coloured communities: through one’s work, through churches or community projects and organisations.

Now it is felt we have to do it under the banner of being coloured. We must mobilise around the fact that we, as a group, need to find a place for ourselves in South Africa and make our voices heard. A noble task, given that thousands of coloured people live in squalor in the Western Cape and that, at tertiary level, enrolments of coloured students are not as high as they should be in the province, given that more than half the population is made up of coloured people.

Step one for the new BBI is to help coloured people “feel comfortable in their own skin”, says Dr Danny Titus, president of the Afrikaanse Taal- en Kultuurvereniging (ATKV), which sponsored a large chunk of the BBI’s first conference at Goudini Spa.