Tyla, a South African singer, performer, and Grammy Award winner, has achieved more in the past year than many musical artists ever will. In part one of the series “Tyla, Coloureds, Color, and Culture,” I outlined her numerous professional achievements. The goal of the post, though, was to highlight that the immense global spotlight that she is enjoying is dimmed by the backlash she is receiving for self-identifying as a South African Coloured, adding the disclaimer that she is also a Black woman.
In the first part I focused on the element of situatedness in Gaile Pohlhaus’ definition of willful hermeneutical ignorance. In this second part, I consider the interdependence aspect of the definition. I demonstrate that the complainants in the Unites States (US), which is Tyla’s new professional home, have their own legitimate situation, a positionality from which they condemn the use of a racist term. Paradoxically, while they enforce their situatedness, they are encroaching upon Tyla’s own situation.
The consequences of this impasse affect both parties because of an interdependence that I will explain further. The complainants are exhibiting a form of ignorance that prevents them from understanding the lived experience of others situated differently on the spectrum of blackness and from different parts of the world. When Tyla calls herself Coloured in SA, it’s benign; but doing so in the US is provocative and offensive.
There is third dimension to this debate. Coloured identity is also unstable in SA. Whereas it overlaps with the identity categories of Black, African American, and “people of color” in the US, it is also overlaps with Black, Indian and White identities in SA. The first dimension of interdependence that I explore is between Coloured racial classification and the other races in SA.
Due to the Population Registration Act of 1950, South Africans were divided into four main races – Black, Coloured, White, and Indian. The Asian classification was later added. The rationale for continuing to use these classifications in post-apartheid SA is that they facilitate collection of statistics that are intended to redress the social, economic, and political oppression suffered by the non-white groups, through for example, implementing the Employment Equity and Black Economic Empowerment policies.
The Coloured group is composed of people of native/bantu/African Black, settler European White, and Malay (South Asian and Indian Ocean Muslim slaves and migrants) descent, as well as the indigenous Khoi and San, the Griqua of the Cape Dutch Colony, and the Nama from neighboring Namibia. Owing to varied lineage, many Coloured families exhibit a spectrum of physical attributes. Hence, this arbitrary law was the cause of many broken families, ambivalent classifications, and segregation based on phenotype, skin tone, hair texture, eye color, language, customs, and culture.
Between these genetic fissures a culture was born. The culture found expression in language, which is accented by lilting vowels and hard consonants, whether spoken in Afrikaans or English. The food has Afrikaner kombuiskos, Malay cuisine, and spicy Indian influences. The music is an amalgam of R&B, soul, jazz, and local hip hop, together with minstrelsy that celebrates a second New Year on January 2, and mixes in Cape creole culture as well.
Moreover, it was understood that the Coloured population group was not necessarily composed of mixed-race people, but was in fact multiracial, based on its being multiple generations removed from the initial cross-racial mixing, centuries ago. Tyla’s own heritage is made up of Indian, Mauritian, Zulu, and Irish ancestry. Simply put, Coloured South Africans are a hybrid community which is neither African Black nor European White.
Nowadays, the deep pain of this hybridity is echoed in the sentiment that Coloureds are “not Black enough and not White enough.” The post-apartheid Black regime is often accused of advancing the socio-economic and socio-cultural interests of the Black majority population to the disadvantage of other races. What some are willing to acknowledge is that Coloureds shied away from proximity to blackness during apartheid so that they could enjoy more white-adjacent privileges, or just to survive. This positioning maintained the buffer role they played between Black and White, which resulted in an antagonistic counter-dependence with blackness. It would be too simplistic to think that Coloureds are just antiblack-racists. They also bear the burden of being labeled as boesman (bushmen), and a people with no culture, no distinct identity, or heritage.
However, Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel, the authors of Coloured: How Classification Became Culture (2023) offer much-needed nuance in terms of the nature of interdependence between the Coloured population and other racial groups. The two women, who come from Eldorado Park (a Coloured township in the South of Johannesburg), identify as culturally Coloured and politically Black. This dual identity harks back to the days of the Black Consciousness Movement, a liberation struggle organization led by Steve Bantu Biko that sought to unite all “non-white” South Africans against the apartheid government. The potential merit of this identification is that it captures how “Coloured” is not merely a racial designation, but a cultural one as well, and also that blackness need not be one’s race for its political identity to be embraced.
The second dimension of interdependence is between Colouredness and Black or African America racial and cultural identity. The Black complainants in the US currently occupy the role of the dominantly situated in this debate, even though they have a history of marginalization that makes the classification “Colored” so unpalatable and intolerable to them. What they fail to appreciate is that the “Colored” of the slavery and Jim Crow eras was the equivalent of the “native,” “bantu,” or “Black” of the apartheid era.
In other words, the confusion here is that the African Americans or Blacks who were historically and pejoratively classified as Colored are not the same racial and cultural group as the contemporary South African Coloureds. Coloured identity is the equivalent of the term “people of color” (POC), with a major caveat—it excludes all those who are considered homogenously Black. Therefore, this Colored/Coloured debacle targets a strawman.
Even when we factor in the “one drop rule” (of so-called “black blood”) that historically classified anyone with African ancestry in the US as “Negro” or “Colored;” in SA, there was still a distinction between being homogenously Black (composed of the Zulu, Tswana, Pedi, Sotho, Ndebele, Swati, Venda, and Tsonga ethnic groups), and mixed race. To ensure apartheid segregation, rural homelands were created to further separate the Black ethnic groups from each other, and urban townships were established to house the Coloureds and Indians as buffers from the Black population.
To emphasize this fundamental difference, shortly after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the eruption of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, Nathaniel Julies, a Coloured boy with Down Syndrome from Eldorado Park, was also killed by the police. SA Coloureds who protested this injustice in huge numbers, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, decided on a hashtag that they believed captured their plight: #ColouredLivesMatter!
A lazy judgement of this variation of the hashtag would claim antiblack racism, but South African lived experience would tell you that under the circumstances and context, the latter hashtag made more epistemic, racial, and political sense. The difference between #ColouredLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter or #WhiteLivesMatter is that the former also speaks to a historically oppressed, disenfranchised, contemporarily marginalized, and racially profiled group—Coloured South Africans, among other groups.
Being Coloured in SA and historically Colored in the US is about “lived experience,” past and present. Within an existential phenomenology framework, lived experience refers to the intersection of embodiment, consciousness, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In other words, this is one’s point of view of the world, self, and others that comes from being-in-the-body. The bridge between lived experience and Pohlhaus’ definition of interdependence could be forged by Edmund Husserl’s notion that all subjectivity is intersubjectivity.
This leads us to Pohlhaus’s suggestion that “knowers are interdependent insofar as the epistemic resources or tools with which we know operate collectively, not individually.” In both the US and SA contexts the Colored/Coloured identities are problematic. However, in the US, the posture towards the term is abolitionist, and in SA, it is for the most part retentionist.
Under equitable conditions, intersubjectivity that leads to interdependence facilitates mutual recognition and reciprocity, and the opportunity to cultivate new knowledge. However, where there are asymmetrical power relations, the dominantly situated tend to impose a hegemonic interpretation of lived experience upon those that are marginally situated. I will engage this last element of the discussion in part three of the series, where I discuss the notion of bad faith in the Tyla identity debate.
Sarah Setlaelo
Dr. Sarah Setlaelo is a writer with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is currently a fellow at the Harvard University Center for African Studies, where she is doing independent research for a book on political philosophies of Africa and the Diaspora.
