BOOK EXTRACT
Colouredness as an identity marker in South Africa must always be understood in the context of both the country’s race-based political structure and its unintended cultural consequences.
We have seen how the invention of coloured as a racial category under apartheid was a clumsy and random process based on a conception of race as a mash-up of biology, culture and geography – and that, when people presented themselves for racial classification, as was the mandate, it was not DNA or even self-identification that determined their classification but the subjective views of a few white men using limited
