Touches of Colour

"To use the old-fashioned classifications", intoned the Radio Four announcer after he had uttered the terms "Coloured" and "Indian". He was not my old university mate who works for the BBC full-time in South Africa and must therefore know better.

Coloured has a capital C, and there is nothing "so-called" or "painful" or what have you about it. Coloureds are the majority in the Western Cape, which has almost as many whites as blacks, which is the only province run by a party other than the ANC, and which 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 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.

And consider that the party running the Western Cape, the DA, is the heir to the non-violent and pro-Commonwealth tradition of non-racial and non-Marxist opposition that did in fact bring about the end of apartheid. 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 have very close ties indeed to the ones who predominate in the Western Cape.