Colored Community
Colored Community: In South Africa, the term “colored” does not refer to black people generally but instead denotes a phenotypically diverse group primarily descended from Cape slaves, indigenous Khoisan peoples, and other Black people assimilated into Cape colonial society by the late 19th century.
This group is also partly descended from European settlers, leading to their classification as “mixed race” and placing them in an intermediate position within South Africa’s racial hierarchy, distinct from both the historically dominant white minority and the numerically larger African population.
Today, there are approximately 3.5 million colored people in South Africa, constituting less than 10% of the population. Due to their history of slavery, dispossession, and racial oppression, they lack significant political or economic power and form a marginalized group in society. Most colored people are concentrated regionally, with about two-thirds residing in the Western Cape and one-third in greater Cape Town.
The concept of colored identity crystallized in the late 19th century, though its origins trace back to the period of Dutch colonial rule when social amalgamation occurred among the colonial black population.
The abolition of slavery in 1838 accelerated integration within the heterogeneous Black laboring class, fostering an incipient shared identity based on common socioeconomic status. However, the full emergence of colored identity was driven by the sweeping social changes following the mineral revolution in the late 19th century.
As large numbers of Africans were incorporated into Cape society, acculturated colonial Blacks sought to distinguish themselves by claiming a position of relative privilege due to their closer alignment with Western culture and partial descent from European colonists.
Due to their marginal status and the state’s enforcement of white supremacist policies, the history of colored political organization is marked by compromise, retreat, and failure. A key feature of this history has been the gradual erosion of civil rights initially granted to Blacks in the Cape Colony by the British administration in the mid-19th century.
This process began with franchise restrictions in the late 19th century and continued with segregationist measures in the early 20th century. Significant losses included the exclusion of coloreds from voting rights in the former Boer republics after the Anglo-Boer War and the denial of their right to be elected to parliament following union in 1910.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Pact Government’s “civilized labor policy” and laws favoring whites over blacks further undermined the economic status of coloreds. The enfranchisement of white women in 1930 diminished the influence of the colored vote.
The apartheid era brought the most severe violations of colored civil rights. Key measures included classification under the Population Registration Act of 1950, prohibition of mixed marriages, removal from the common voter’s roll in 1956, forced relocations under the Group Areas Act of 1950, and segregation of public facilities under the Separate Amenities Act of 1953. Initially, politicized coloreds avoided forming separate organizations, preferring assimilation into the dominant society.
However, intensifying segregation in the early 20th century compelled them to mobilize politically. The first substantive organization, the African Political Organization (APO), was founded in Cape Town in 1902 and dominated colored protest politics for nearly four decades, expressing both assimilationist aspirations and fears of rising segregationism.
The failure of the APO’s moderate approach led to the rise of radical movements inspired by socialist ideology in the 1930s, including the National Liberation League (1935) and the Non-European Unity Movement (1943). Despite their efforts, these groups failed to unite Blacks against segregation due to internal divisions and racial barriers.
State repression following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 effectively stifled extraparliamentary opposition until the Soweto uprising in 1976 reignited activism. From the late 1970s, influenced by black consciousness ideology, increasing numbers of educated and politicized individuals rejected the “colored” identity imposed by the Population Registration Act, viewing it as an artificial categorization used to divide and rule.
The growth of a mass, nonracial democratic movement in the 1980s and debates over colored participation in P.W. Botha’s tricameral Parliament (established in 1984) intensified controversies surrounding colored identity. Despite these tensions, colored identity remained significant during the transition to democracy under F.W. de Klerk (1989–1994), with political parties appealing to it across the ideological spectrum.
In post-apartheid South Africa, there has been a resurgence of “coloredism,” driven by a desire to assert positive self-identity against pervasive negative stereotypes and attempts at ethnic mobilization in the new democratic environment.
This resurgence is also fueled by fears of African majority rule and concerns that coloreds are once again being marginalized, leading to sentiments such as, “First we were not white enough, and now we are not Black enough.”
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