A friend of mine from the US dropped me an email wanting me to explain the so called controversy of the "coloured" issue that got the government spokesperson, Jimmy Manyi, into trouble. Of course I had to first explain to him what I meant by coloured, since it ‘sounds like an offensive term' to him. In the end he asked why we don't just called them ‘mixed-race' people like everyone else in the world. I had to look at the recesses of both our history and my personal life to provide him with a satisfactory answer.
I often caution people to be very careful reading into South African parlance. Most of the universally accepted terms mean different things in this country. When, for instance, a South Africans speaks of liberalism, they don't necessary mean small statism, franchise reform, free markets, the usual stuff that is largely defended on Benthamite consequentialist grounds. Instead they mean a reconstructed white attitude that has undertones of racial superiority complex.
As far as I am concerned the word coloured in South Africa does not only mean someone of a mixed race, but one whose culture and language goes back to the arrival of occidental and Asian people in the Cape, as far back as Jan Van Riebeeck - perhaps even going back to the era the Arabs came to the southern Africa for gold but let's limit our argument to Van Riebeeck's era.
In most African traditions a child gets their lineage from the paternal parent, but when the occidental race started producing children of mixed race they mostly felt embarrassed by it and didn't own up to their parental obligation. Like in the American slave era, these children were products of their father's rapine nature. I think, the attended stigma of being coloured stems from this. This stigma further feeds to the complexity of a coloured identity in those who have no yet managed to emancipate their thinking from the mix of the so called ‘superior and inferior race'. To others it even give rise to the conflict/crisis of identifying with the superior race that denies them that right.
I doubt if my own children would see themselves as inferior or superior, or will be regarded as coloureds for that matter, even though they are of mixed race lineage. (In fact I consider them to be Xhosa.) My children are products of normal love relationship that mature to formal marriage, or permanent partnerships, through ennobling qualities of love. I am sure this is also the case with coloured people of the era following the colonialist encounter. Like my children they grow up in their respective cultures with dignity and pride that does not regard their identity as a burden. Why I do not consider my children coloured in particular is because, though they are of mixed race, they are growing up with Xhosa as their prime culture, and would slightly be at loss in the coloured culture even if they eventually mange to speak Afrikaans well.
The fundamental problem about some coloured people in our country is what I would term an identity crisis. What unsettles them is not the fact that they are mixed race, but the fact that their family history has been denied them, thus lost, or rather misplaced. This is why I think my children, though of mixed race, will not have the coloured identity crisis issue. They can trace their family history on my Xhosa side, and on the Scottish side of their mother.