Coloured

The death of Nelson Mandela has revived the tiresome British media expression, "so-called coloureds". You can pretty much hear the small c as they say it.

I am related to the people thus described. Let me assure you that there is absolutely nothing either small-c or "so-called" about the Coloureds, "of mixed European and non-European descent and speaking English or Afrikaans as the mother-tongue". Please note that they include half of all native speakers of Afrikaans, although my lot have English as their first language.

That mixed means really mixed, and mixed a very long time ago: a distinct people with a distinct culture. As they themselves would tell the BBC or anyone else, they are Coloured with a capital C. Coloureds are the majority in the Western Cape, which has almost as many whites as blacks.

The Western Cape is the only province run by a party other than the ANC, albeit one with problems of its own, but nevertheless an heir to the non-violent and pro-Commonwealth tradition of non-racial and non-Marxist opposition to apartheid.

The ANC itself is now very likely to collapse, due to having adopted the neoliberalism that has failed to deliver for its people, and for none less than for the Coloureds, very many of whom in the ANC plan to tear up their party cards after Mandela's funeral.

But then, it was colonial liberation movement. It is served its purpose a generation ago, and was kept alive by the fact that Madiba was still alive. He had to die at some point, and therefore so did it. That point has arrived.

The Western Cape looks out across the harbour at Cape Town to the world beyond, just as KwaZula-Natal looks out across the harbour at Durban, a city full of Indians, as they also very definitely call themselves.

In many ways, South Africa's great hope is that she contains those two. Jacob Zuma will never be The Big Man in either of those places, a Greater Mugabe or a Greater Amin.

Not least, consider that there used to be Indians in all the former British possessions down the east of Africa. But the ones in and around Durban are still there, with ties to a rising superpower and to its vast global Diaspora.

Such is the entirely voluntary constitutional status of each of the places in question, that to be British is now to be not just any, but at some level all, of English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Manx, Channel Islander, Mediterranean, North American, Caribbean, South American, Southern African Creole, Indian Ocean Creole, and Polynesian.

The Southern African Creoles in question - British at once by birth and by choice as surely as, for example, the English are - have very close ties indeed to the ones who predominate in the Western Cape. The ones who predominate in the Western Cape have very close ties indeed to those Britons, and thus to all Britons.