How Gen Z is redefining Coloured identity in South Africa

OPINION

I recently attended a debate on Coloured identity, expecting the usual conversation: history, culture, belonging, family, maybe a few jokes about food and how everyone’s auntie makes the best pickled fish. Instead, I walked into something more complex: a room full of people trying to define an identity that has never been contained as only one thing.

The debate took place at 1 Dowling Avenue in Newclare, a predominantly coloured area. The panellists included Terry Adams, an author who frequently speaks on coloured identity. Larrie Varrie Sr., an internet personality also known for speaking in the coloured voice. Jordan Solomons, a former South African youth soccer player.

What does it mean to be Coloured?

The easiest answer is “mixed race”. But even that feels too simple. Mixed with what? According to whom? And who gets to decide when a label is culture, when it is race, and when it is a category forced onto people by history? Coloured identity is not one thing. It is family. It is food. It is language. It is humour. It is Cape history. It is Khoi and San ancestry, enslaved ancestry, Malay, Indian, African, European, and Chinese histories. It is also apartheid paperwork, forced removals, and the violence of being classified by a state that wanted people separated, ranked, and controlled.

Social scientist Michaela Martin told /explain/ there is no single Coloured identity. For some people, it is a source of pride, culture, family, and a sense of belonging. For others, it is a label created by colonial and apartheid systems, carrying painful historical baggage. “For many, the question is less about the label itself than about who has the power to determine identity,” Martin said. That was exactly what the debate revealed. People were not just asking what Coloured identity means. They were asking who had been allowed to define it.

A label, a culture, or both?

For me, Coloured identity lives in ordinary things. It’s the smells that come from my mother’s and aunt’s kitchen at Easter; the argument over whose pickled fish is best; the memories of our family coming together around our traditions. For someone else, Coloured identity may be Afrikaans, Kaaps, English, Islam, Christianity, rural life, Cape Flats life, Northern Cape life, family surnames, hair politics, humour, music, or simply the feeling of being part of a community.

Panellist Jordan Solomons told /explain/ his favourite thing about being Coloured is that “we are all so different and, despite our differences, we all can still come together”.  The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation describes Coloured identity as fluid: shaped by apartheid classification, forced removals, displacement, and the creation of new communities, particularly in the Western Cape. It notes that Coloured identities today are increasingly understood as multiple, hybrid, and open to reinterpretation. That’s probably why the identity can feel both deeply familiar and impossible to define.

The history in the room

For panellist, Larrie Varrie Sr, belonging cannot be separated from history. He told /explain/ that “Coloured” is an umbrella identity created by colonial rulers, not something people freely chose for themselves. He explained it pulled together different groups, including Khoi and San people, enslaved people brought to the Cape, and communities of Malay, Indian, and Chinese descent.

For him, this was not romantic mixing. It was forced mixing under systems of conquest, slavery, land loss, and control. The apartheid state later entrenched racial categories through laws such as the Population Registration Act of 1950, which forced South Africans into racial classifications including “native”, “Coloured” and “white”, with “Asian” added later. 

People classified as Coloured included Indigenous Khoi and San people, descendants of enslaved people, and families of mixed heritage. This is why the word carries tension. Some people embrace it because it names their culture, community, and ancestry. Others reject it because it was used to divide Black and Coloured people and to place people into a racial hierarchy designed by apartheid.

Martin put it clearly: some people celebrate the resilience, culture, and contributions associated with the identity; others want to redefine it on their own terms; and still others want to move beyond apartheid-imposed labels altogether.

Gen Z is not keeping quiet

The generational divide became one of the most interesting parts of the debate. Older generations often speak about Coloured identity as something inherited: a history, a community, a way of being passed down through family, place, and memory.

Gen Z seems less willing to simply inherit it without questioning. That does not mean young Coloured people reject their identity. Many are doing something more disruptive: asking which parts of it are culture, which parts are trauma, which parts are internalised racism, and which parts were handed down without being questioned.

Platforms like TikTok have become spaces on which young Coloured people talk openly about things families often whispered about: hair texture, skin tone, proximity to whiteness, anti-Blackness, language shame, “good hair”, “kroes” hair, respectability, and whether being Coloured means being Black, not Black, both – or something else entirely. For many Coloured women, “gladde hare”, or straight or smooth hair, was treated as the ideal. Curly, coily, or “kroes” hair was often described as untidy, difficult, or in need of “fixing”.

In one TikTok video, content creator Chloë Netto pushes back against that old message, reminding women “your hair is beautiful” and there is nothing wrong with curly hair. She speaks about older women in her family feeling pressure to straighten or chemically treat their hair because they were taught their natural texture was a problem.

Black, Coloured, or both?

Many young South Africans are now using language in more layered ways. Some identify as Coloured culturally and Black politically; others identify as Coloured and reject Blackness. Some see Colouredness as part of Blackness; others want the whole system thrown into the sea, preferably with a strong wind behind it.

Popular TikTok creator Samantha Jansen identifies as Black by race and Coloured by culture and regularly comments on Coloured history and culture. Whether or not one agrees with that framing, it shows how younger people are refusing the old either/or.

Academic research has also explored how Coloured racial identity choices in post-apartheid South Africa remain shaped by the racial state, even as people negotiate identity in more personal and flexible ways. When Gen Z debates identity online, it may look like social-media drama. But beneath the comment wars lies a serious question: How do you build a self from a category that was partly designed to control you?

Stereotypes still do damage

One of the most difficult parts of Coloured identity is that national conversations often reduce Coloured communities to stereotypes: gangsterism, drug abuse, violence, broken families, missing fathers, school dropouts, and “coloured people are funny” content.

Yes, some communities face serious social problems. But stereotypes turn structural issues into character judgments. They make poverty look like culture. And they make historical neglect look like personal failure. Martin said these stereotypes are “extremely harmful” because they reduce an entire community to a narrow fraction of its reality.

Martin said many Coloured people feel their voices are missing or overlooked in national conversations about race and inequality. Real representation, she added, is not only about being seen. It is about having diverse experiences reflected accurately, without relying on stereotypes.

Who gets to define Coloured identity?

By the end of the debate, I realised the question had not been solved. Perhaps the problem has always been the demand for one definition. The state wanted one. Apartheid wanted one. Census forms want one. Politicians often want one. Even community debates sometimes want one, as if identity can be packed neatly into a container and given a single label.

Coloured identity can be inherited and questioned. Celebrated and rejected. Cultural and political. Painful and joyful. Rooted in family and still shaped by apartheid. Gen Z is not destroying Coloured identity by asking difficult questions. It refuses to inherit silence as culture. It is asking why one community must keep explaining itself to everyone else.

The debate did not give me a clean definition of what it means to be Coloured. But it gave me proof that the identity is still alive, still argued over, still loved, still painful, still changing. Perhaps that is the point.

Questioning the label without rejecting the culture

As I listened to the discussion and joined in, I realised I had been asking many of the same questions myself. I grew up proudly identifying as Coloured because that is how my family identifies, how our traditions have been shaped and how I understand the community that raised me. I do not feel detached from that identity. 

I feel it in the food we share, the humour we understand without explanation, the languages we move between and the stories passed down around family tables. At the same time, I have begun to question where the identity comes from, who named it and which parts belong to us rather than to the systems that classified us. 

Learning more about colonialism, slavery and apartheid has shown me that Coloured identity can hold both pride and pain. I no longer see those feelings as contradictory. I can celebrate the culture that shaped me while still questioning the history behind the label. Perhaps that is what this means for many of us in Gen Z: not rejecting who we are, but refusing to accept inherited answers without examining them for ourselves.