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My Coloured Friend

Writer's picture: Shoga FilmsShoga Films

Updated: Jan 28


Some of the staff of Hage Geingob High School. Guess which one is the Coloured. 
Some of the staff of Hage Geingob High School. Guess which one is the Coloured. 

First of all, note the British spelling. Second of all, note the lighter skin color. I didn't make this sh*t up. 


In 2005, I was teaching computer literacy skills in a high school that served one of the poorest areas of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Having endured 70 years of South African rule as a League of Nations Mandate (don't ask), Namibia was forced into the same social deformation of apartheid and meticulous racial categorization, even though there were far fewer whites in that relatively distant land. Nonetheless, the hierarchy was established with whites at the top and Black Africans at the bottom. 


And then there were the Coloureds, spawn of Boer fathers and Black mothers -- at least initially. Even though such couplings violated the laws of God and nature, Coloured children arrived -- and in the millions (the Coloured population of South Africa currently clocks in at 5 million, a little over 8%). Everything in Namibia followed this tripartite racial division, which still held force even fifteen years after the Black Namibians wrested their independence from a recalcitrant South Africa. Namibia has been ruled by a majority-Black government since 1990. There's been a gradual relaxation of the barriers and snobbery between Black Africans and the Coloureds, but the Namibian whites still live in their privileged and segregated world -- no social mixing from their sector. During my year of teaching, I was given the house of the high school principal to stay in and gained some notoriety as The Only White Man in Khomasdal, the area of Windhoek that had been designated and built as the Coloured "location" (the local term for ghetto). 


The principal arranged for me to be picked up and driven to school by one of the teachers on her staff, Melvin Gallant. Over the course of the year, we became friendly, although Melvin was older than the rest of the teaching staff and not socially outgoing. Also, he was from Cape Town, the Paris of the Coloured world, and that, too, presented a barrier. The other teachers read his reticence as arrogance, and although I personally felt that Melvin was being maligned, it wasn't my place to defend him. There were socially entrenched attitudes that I couldn't have knocked down anyway.  


The Coloureds naturally considered themselves superior to the Blacks. And just as naturally, the Blacks, now that they were in power, made sure that the Coloureds didn't share in the state spoils. The poor guys couldn't win for losing. Too Black to be white and too white to be Black, the Coloureds were second-class citizens under apartheid and under Black democracy. 


Nonetheless, because they were a step closer to the white ideal under apartheid, many of the city Coloureds have several generations of economic and educational advantage under their belts. While they may be marginalized politically, they often enjoy a relative business prosperity, although there are lots of poor Coloureds as well. Khomasdal, established as a Coloured township, is better off than Katatura, the Black location. 


For reasons I was never able to fathom, Melvin was hellbent on establishing Namibian citizenship. It took years because, in addition to the glacial pace of African bureaucracy, he had to surmount the double disadvantage of South African origin (bad former colonial power) and being Coloured (wrong race), he was tough or persistent or perhaps just thick, but he eventually succeeded. The victory didn't add much joy to what I came to appreciate as his heart of gold. You couldn't ask for a sweeter guy, but his view of humanity was bleak, bleak, bleak! Every morning, Melvin regaled me with tales of bureaucratic corruption and inefficiency. “Can you believe it?” was his refrain after informing me of the latest scandal, teen pregnancy, suicide, betrayal, and sexual misconduct. Even though he proved himself (to me at least) the most generous and self-sacrificing teacher at the school, he remained socially isolated. In fact, none of the four Coloured staff members mixed much with the others. 


The Coloureds are linguistically differentiated as well. Because of its South African heritage, Afrikaans is the common language of roughly half of the Namibian population, but the other half are the numerically and politically dominant Ovambo who had been excluded from the colonial economy of the time, never learned Afrikaans, and had no interest in maintaining the language. Thus, upon independence, English was arbitrarily declared the country's official language, even though nobody spoke it as a mother tongue. Black Namibians could communicate with one another in their own tribal tongues outside of a sometimes uncertain grasp of English, but even though Afrikaans was still the informal lingua franca of the non-Ovambo population, it was on the historical chopping block -- probably destined to die out. It's not taught in school (as are some of the tribal languages), and the fact that Afrikaans is still the first language of 60% of the small but rich white minority doesn't boost its prestige. 


-Robert Philipson


Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Inescapable Blackness of Jean Toomer (And the Escapable Jewishness of Waldo Frank)


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