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Drawing on her family’s Cape Town history, the writer examines how Apartheid classifications such as ‘Cape Malay’ and ‘coloured’ continue to shape identity and belonging. She argues that recognising shared humanity can help South Africans move beyond inherited racial labels.
By DR NADIA KAMIES
Like many people in Cape Town, I grew up in a family diverse in religion, language and traditions. My birth certificate said, ‘Father Cape Malay, Mother Cape Coloured’.
In one of the very few photographs of my parents as a young couple, they confidently stroll through the centre of a segregated city in the days when you still dressed up to go into town. Many families have a photograph like this, taken in the late 1950s by the Movie Snaps Studio in Darling Street. In a time when many people did not own cameras, this became a way to capture themselves as they wished to be seen – well-dressed and respectable – a challenge to the negative stereotypes the Apartheid regime had assigned to them.
As much as I tried, I could not see any reason for their different racial classifications. What did that make me, I wondered, growing up? Then, at age 16, the identity document I was issued with by the Apartheid regime labelled me as a ‘coloured female’. That classification governed my life: where I could live, play and study, who I could marry and what I could be.
Population Registration and institutionalised discrimination
The first step towards institutionalising discrimination was the introduction of the Population Registration Act 30 of 1950, which required every citizen to be registered according to his or her race group. The Act divided the population into white, native and coloured. The latter was a residual category in which smaller groups that did not fit into either white or native were placed. The Act was amended in 1959 to divide the coloured group into seven subgroups: Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Chinese, Indian, Other Asian, and Other Coloured.
A person’s race could be determined by a special Race Classification Board; testimony could be taken from family and friends, and a person’s hair, eyeballs and cuticles could be examined if there was any doubt. While the implementation of the Act seemed innocuous (since registration of citizens was accepted practice in many countries), the register was used as a basis for further legislation, namely the Group Areas, Separate Amenities, Immorality, and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Acts.
The elusiveness of fixing coloured identity is reflected in the different definitions offered up by the government over the years, even before the 1950 Act. According to these definitions, the descendants of enslaved people were positioned to occupy an in-between identity that at once made them superior to blacks and inferior to the same because of their supposed lack of culture.
Coloured people occupied ambiguous spaces, were diverse in language and religion, and were of different hues, which facilitated moving through spaces and led to people being able to pass from one classification to another. This fluidity led to people seeking to reclassify themselves from one racial category to another. Passing and reclassification offered different privileges such as living in a better area, going to a better school, or being able to play sport or dance in a competition that would have been forbidden to you.
The South African population in general is ignorant of the extent of ethnic and genetic mixing and the mixing of cultures, languages and religions that occurred between enslaved people, indigenous groups and white immigrants. The Afrikaners tried to banish all evidence of their past indiscretions by stripping coloured people of a shared history, treating them with contempt and implementing strictly policed legislation to distance themselves from the proof of their sexual liaisons. Articles about race and colour mixing were dismissed as political propaganda or banned, while many researchers tried to prove that there had been no significant mixing and that the Afrikaners were ‘pure’ Europeans with a slave component of less than one per cent.
The fallacy of the Cape Malay label
The term Cape Malay as a category of people is also embedded in colonial and Apartheid history. Under Dutch rule, the term Malay was linked variously to being Muslim or to a linguistic group, but under Apartheid it became a racial category. This construction of Malay as an ethnicity characterised by practices such as choral singing was influenced by the Afrikaans writer ID du Plessis, who served as Commissioner of Coloured Affairs and later secretary in the 1950s and 1960s. He helped to secure the Bo-Kaap as the Malay Quarter, and it was on his appointment in 1952 that Cape Malay entered the Apartheid dictionary as a sub-category of coloured.
Divisions of Malay, coloured and African identities were reinforced and ‘coloured’ Muslims were encouraged to think of themselves as distinct. These official Apartheid discourses rejected creolisation, ethnic interaction and cultural exchange between descendants of the enslaved. Malay became synonymous with Muslim while coloured became associated with being Christian.
Rejection of a ‘Coloured’ identity
During Apartheid, many of us rejected the label ‘coloured’ for being socially engineered by a racist regime, choosing instead to identify as black in line with the definitions offered by Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader murdered in detention by the Apartheid government in 1977. The term has persisted post-1994, continuing to shape identity and belonging in a still deeply segregated country.
The intermingling of diverse backgrounds and cultures of slaves, Europeans, KhoiSan and Nguni people means that their history is intimately linked to Africa and South Africa. The creole language, culture, identity and traditions evolved along with South Africa, making a mockery of segregation and alienation from the struggles of others. This diversity was palpable in places like District Six, which is not only symbolic of the forced removals that occurred across the country but is also a site of integration. These grey spaces existed throughout the city, where people could be together even if only briefly.
I see the heterogeneity of my own family as a privilege. Traversing spaces between grandparents who spoke English, Afrikaans and Kaaps, who practised Christianity and Islam, has made me who I am and has given me a deep respect for different religions and cultures. Growing up, there was the Christian aunty who only bought meat from a halaal butchery, and there were the young Muslims who belonged to St Bartholomew’s Youth Group. My Muslim father praying at the bedside of my mother’s dying uncle is one of my most endearing memories of him. My father’s mother crocheted an onner-kuffiyatjie for one of my mother’s cousins who regularly attended functions with my father. When my grandmother died, five of the six pallbearers who carried her into the church and from the hearse to the graveside were Muslim.
The way we lived in community with each other defies the legacy of Apartheid and testifies to a will to freedom and humanity. Somehow, ordinary people found ways to survive and hold on to that which made them human.
Academic and author Dr Gabeba Baderoon reminds us that to remember slavery is also to remember the vibrant and diverse cultures, new language, food, music and beliefs that arose, and to honour the spirit of survival and resistance that was engendered. I find it difficult to comprehend why, if we could forge communities like these during Apartheid, we still grapple with Apartheid labels.
I was reluctant to write an article about contestations of ‘colouredness’ when blatant acts of racism and isolationism are an everyday occurrence, and the world seems to be poised on the brink of a nuclear war as a direct result of colonialism, racism and Apartheid. The systematic, institutionalised policy of discrimination, which includes land expropriation, forced evictions, demolitions and restriction of movement in Palestine, has stark parallels with the system of Apartheid in South Africa.
The Interfaith Vigil at St George’s Cathedral
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Since October 2023, I have been participating in a weekly vigil for the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people on the steps of St George’s Cathedral (dubbed the Freedom Steps for the role it played as a space of resistance during Apartheid). The gathering is attended by Muslims, Christians, Jews, and people of no faith, by young and old activists, by ordinary human beings still hoping for a more just world. The strong sense of community that has developed among the regulars is what keeps me coming back week after week. The interfaith nature of our gathering is a reminder of the way I grew up and what is possible when we start to see each other as human beings.
In the communities we grew up in, we lived side by side with people – neighbours who were there for each other, whether it was to celebrate a wedding, mourn a loved one or borrow a cup of sugar. It was only when we ventured out of that community that we were confronted with being ‘coloured’ or ‘other’, like I was when I had to apply for a permit to attend the white University of Cape Town.
That designation limited the areas of the hospital I had access to as a student and the patients I could treat in state hospitals once I had qualified. Both my children have had the privilege of studying overseas and of living abroad, and I am envious of the ease with which they move through the world in a way that would have been incomprehensible to their grandparents and great-grandparents.
Recognising our common humanity
The idea of different races persists globally, even in a post-Apartheid democratic South Africa, where non-racialism is enshrined in the constitution. Clearly, more than simply the dismantling of Apartheid legislation is needed before we can consider how we may live together in a post-Apartheid society. Only through recognising our common humanity will we be able to live in a way that honours the sacrifices of those who fought and died for our freedom. This resonates for me especially now, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising amidst rampant poverty and youth unemployment.
Nadia Kamies was born and raised in Cape Town. She graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BSc in Occupational Therapy in 1984 and worked extensively with children in hospital, school and private practice settings. She holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town and a PhD in History from the University of Pretoria. Her writing focuses on the afterlives of slavery and Apartheid.
- This article was first published in the June 19, 2026 print edition of Muslim Views.
