JAMIL F. KHAN | From colonial tropes to podcast slurs - How history still shapes racial wounds in SA

The current historical moment we find ourselves in conforms, in a very literal way, to the adage that warns how history repeats itself.

We have witnessed how with flagrant disregard, Western powers and their proxies have normalised the dehumanisation of people from Palestine to Congo and Sudan.

The sheer power of that impunity has not repulsed as many people as it has inspired to dream about a world where abuse has no consequences. In a world where hate speech is everyday banter and opinions have no responsibility to be factual, the fragile social relations of South Africa is liable to be swept up into another cycle of regression showing how despite our racially defined social contract, we remain, largely, a race illiterate society. 

The latest iteration of a very old South African dance of dehumanisation surfaced last week when the hosts of the Open Chats podcast made derogatory comments about Coloured people habitually engaging in incest as a consequence of a particular racialised kind of mental illness unique to Coloured people.

It is important to note that the hosts of this platform are young people, indicating just how successfully colonial and apartheid divisions have maintained their grip on our imaginations.

Though these comments seem absurd and baseless, unbeknownst even to the hosts, they emerge from a well-established colonial trope regarding race-mixing as a source of illness and impurity that “pure” races are saved from.

The rhetoric that constructs Coloured people as deviant as a result of racial impurity is a colonial language that has been happily regurgitated by even Black people who are indoctrinated by those same ideas. 

In response to this, Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie expressed his outrage through threatening legal action over the comments.

However, instead of using the power of his assigned office to summon institutional might that could address this unfortunate event as part of a larger problem for which our leaders are responsible, he chose to engage at the level of petty, reactionary tit-for-tat discourses claiming double standards that benefit Black people.

As is the nature of such engagements, his social media posts using racist language towards Black people have been excavated to invalidate his protests, reinvigorating the zero-sum game that is Coloured/Black rivalry underpinned by anti-Black racism.

Two things can be true at the same time: dehumanising stereotypes about Coloured people when espoused by Black people are violent and unacceptable, and Coloured people spewing anti-Black racism towards Black people is violent and unacceptable, as well.

Neither one of these occurrences justify some kind of revenge game that exempts one party from their responsibility to upholding human rights. At the heart of both these shameful, yet widely practiced behaviours is a desire to assert superiority.

Though many would deny it, an outcome of our collective oppression under white supremacy has been the desire to reclaim humanity through finding ways to feel superior to someone else. In one instance, superiority is derived from the false, supremacist idea of racial purity, while in another, it is derived from proximity to whiteness.

It is important to acknowledge that despite those who would like to stick their heads in the sand about our fraught racial relations and focus on an exaggerated sense of social cohesion that relies on denial, South Africans, by and large, do not know each other. 

This is our colonial inheritance with which we continue to wound each other over and over. With that said, the existing ideas about Coloured people in our society emanate from a specific kind of ignorance rooted in a dismissal of complexity in relation to Coloured life in South Africa.

This ignorance, and its harmful outcomes, as seen on the Open Chats podcast, is one of colonialism’s major victories. For those who care to take on the responsibility of thinking differently, I offer a wider view to history and its resultant present.

Coloured people suffer from a particular kind of wounding that coheres around a set of historical traumas which include slavery, genocide, dispossession, displacement, political disenfranchisement, segregation, and dehumanisation, which they share in large part with other Black South Africans.

What makes this wounding specific and different to others is the way these losses constructed them as devoid of history and culture, and how this history is not simply ascribed to primitivism, but that it never existed.

The loss of access to an originary, albeit “inferior” history of culture and struggle, victory or defeat, cast Coloured people as pitiful characters even in the eyes of those who share aspects of their histories.

In the absence of the ability to display and perform ceremonial cultures recognisable for their supposed untaintedness by Western influence, Coloured people are denied an interiority that many others enjoy.  

For Coloured people, there remains an open wound that is exposed to scrutiny, never being able to receive the protection of the interiority of cultures that are also looked down upon, but nevertheless recognised.

When linked to a national project that brings people and memory into focus through the pageantry of “heritage”, without practices and artifacts that Coloured people can uniquely claim as their own, their relevance, presence, and usefulness to the optics of the nation state that defines itself as diverse are obscured or completely disappeared by a genericism they are ascribed.

Under such conditions, Coloured people have felt disqualified from participation in nationhood. 

Coloured people have also had agency to choose and can be held responsible for how they participate in systems of power, but they are not the custodians of that power. Coloured people are also acted upon by this power.

Although it is the responsibility of Coloured people today to interrogate and eliminate the harmful outcomes of the indoctrination of anti-African and by implication, anti-Black sentiments, these conversations must always be had in the context of history – a history of white supremacist social engineering which alienated people from themselves and each other.

The work that must be done to heal these wounds is a collective task relying on diffused culpability, compassion, and solidarity. Coloured people do not live one-dimensional lives, and without a willingness to see them in all their iterations, we risk the fault of not seeing them as lives at all.

Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.