Cape Coloureds

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Cape coloured school children in Mitchell's Plain

Cape coloured children in Bonteheuwel township (Cape Town, South Africa)

The Christmas Bands are a popular Cape coloured cultural tradition in Cape Town

The term Cape Coloureds refers to the modern-day descendants of slaves imported into South Africa by Dutch settlers as well as to other groups of mixed ancestry. They are the predominant "population group" found in the Western Cape Province. Their population size is roughly 4 million. Most Cape Coloureds are mother tongue Afrikaans speakers. Slaves of "Malay" ancestry were brought from Indonesia, Madagascar, and Mozambique, and from these diverse origins they gradually developed into a grouping that was subsequently classified as a single major ethnical grouping under the Apartheid regime. In many cases the slaves were imported to be concubines and wives to single male Dutch settlers. Much racial mixture has thus occurred over the generations, both with Europeans and with indigenous Khoi and San.

Technically, the term "Cape Coloured" referred to a subset of "Coloured" South Africans, with subjective criteria having been used by the Apartheid bureaucracy to determine whether a person was a "Cape Coloured", or belonged to one of a number of other related "Coloured" subgroups such as the "Cape Malays", or "Other Coloureds". Currently this term is used very crudely to distinguish people of mixed ancestry from the phenotypically (and generally more genetically homogeneous) paler South Africans of European descent, and the darker "black" South Africans. There are often exceptions to this generalization, and consequently Apartheid classifications often led to tragi-comic consequences, with some paler family members being classified as "white" and others "coloured". This contentious classification has no consistent meaning among South Africans - opinion, more than anything else, dictates who is classified as "Cape Coloured".

The Cape Coloured group is far from being homogenous: these divisions were accentuated by the Apartheid classifications which defined type hierarchies with this grouping. As a consequence, there is much racial intolerance between self-defined groups of Cape Coloureds.

[edit] Cape Coloureds in the media

A group of Cape Coloured were interviewed in the series of Ross Kemp's "Ross Kemp on Gangs". One of the gang members who participated in the interview mentioned that black South Africans are on a higher social level than Cape Coloureds.

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