I gather that this is an emotionally-charged issue over ethnic groups in South Africa, but FRDE’s posts seem increasingly cryptic. Not knowing the history of the area in anywhere near the detail necessary, I’m very puzzled, and neither his links nor my quick searches seem to help much. I hadn’t heard that South africa was poised for another upheaval, but that’s what he seems to be implying.
Apparent Stream-of-Consciousness posts like this don’t help clarify it:
And this just makes me curious without helping:
“Ghurkali”? Obviously it’s metaphorical, as the Ghurkas, according to my searches, don’t have anything to do with the situation. But what does he mean by it? Do the Cape Coloureds have a similar history to the Ghurkas or something?
Does anyone have a relevant link, or can they explain this?
The old, racist, South African government devised a whole lot of racial classifications for the people living in South Africa. One of these general classifications was “Coloured”, which fit all of those people not classified by the South African government as “White” or “Black”, and people classified Coloured occupied an ambiguous place under South African law, having more rights than Blacks, but not enjoying the full amount of civil rights that Whites enjoyed.
Coloureds were themselves divided into seven subgroups under the law: “Cape Coloured”, “Malay”, “Griqua”, “Chinese”, “Indian”, “Other Asiatic”, and “Other Coloured”.
Mr. Dibble is a South African who, if I’m correct, was, in the bad old days, labled a “Cape Coloured”, by the South African government, and seems to have taken a little offense at FRDE’s statement “Funny but I’ve noticed a lot more South African whites and capes in the UK, in the last few years.”
Disclaimer: I despise racial classifications. But in discussing the old Apartheid regime of South Africa, it becomes necessary to get into the discussion of human ethnic phenotypes.
And “Coloured” (the capital C and -u- are standard usage) in South African use is not euphemistic for Black – it means something quite different. The “aboriginal” population of South Africa is neither Bantu blacks nor Afrikander whites, but peoples of the Khoi-San group, a relatively small but distinct “racial” group as different from the Bantu as the Finns would be. The Bantu tribes migrated in from the north as the white colonists spread north and west from the Cape Town area.
The Khoi-San group is so called because it is composed of two groups: the !San peoples, known as the Bushmen (a name I believe they accept with the same ironic grace which Native Americans accept “Indian”), historically hunter-gatherers for the most part; and the Khoikhoi (singular Khoi… I believe the reduplicated plural is their preferred use for “the Khoi people”), historically called “Hottentots” (a name as offensive as “nigger” or “Chink” in modern parlance), somewhat lighter-skinned and pastoralist/farmers. The !San predominantly retreated into the Kalahari and what is now Namibia, as did some of the Khoi. But many Khoi intermarried with the European colonists and formed a group accepted as part of civilized society but with some outcaste status – think of urban blacks in cities that “didn’t discriminate” (officially) in 1930s and 1940s America. This was and is the Coloured, which were the “Cape Coloured” under Apartheid classifications. As Captain Amazing notes, other groups were slipped under the Apartheid umbrella of Coloured.
It’s important to make this distinction as historically there was a clear distinction between the tribal Bantu peoples (offensive S.A. epithet was “Kaffirs,” and see above for degree of offensiveness), on the one hand, and the non-tribal, urbanized or farming whites and Coloured on the other. In point of fact, many blacks of Bantu ancestry had in fact found roles, generally fairly menial ones, in the South African culture, though the Apartheid system continued to regard them as tribal.
But the main point is that anyone who hears the term “Coloured” and thinks it equivalent to the genteel euphemism for Negro in 19th/early 20th-Century America or referencing persons of mixed black/white race (“Mulatto,” another now-offensive term) is misunderstanding the complexity of South African ethnic composition.
Gurkali = Griqua (different continents but similar effects - hard bastards)
We were talking about South Africa.
As it happens I believe that he belongs to a race that is going to be wiped out within about five years. My name for the future holocaust is Mugabeisation, but don’t worry I have not copyrighted it. Feel free to use it.
Fortunately my impression is that he has come to the same conclusion, which is a bit unpleasant.
Initially he was up for a scrap with me about using a potentially ‘racial’ slurr word, but one of my posts went missing and it became obvious to him that I knew what I was talking about and that I do not like the situation.
If I thought it would do any good I would flip my IP and come back as ‘Cassandra’
she was right - but nobody listened.
I was on the verge of having a verbal scrap with a very nice guy who is about to become a victim of a Rwanda type uprising - and you lot are concerned with oral sex in the middle ages and/or global CO[sub]2[/sub] surfeit.
Sometimes I worry about the human race, mostly I put it down to lead in petrol, but I still wonder.
Mkay, but why do you have the impression that Mr. Dibble has come to the same conclusion?
Once we straighten this out this last semantic ambiguity, the mission of this “meta-thread” will have been fulfilled and we can get back to talking about comparative quality of life in Africa.
Polycarp, many thanks for the discourse. I knew much of that already, but it still didn’t explain the interchanges, especially FRDE’s refrain about some sort of coming racial holocaust. He seems utterly convincede of this (and complains about our obsession with trivia instead), but when pressed as to why he thinks this will happen, he puts it to “intuition”.
I’m not from anywhere near there, and don’t follow South African news, but I haven’t heard anything to suggest this. If there is anything, I’d be very curious to know. Talking about groups getting wiped out within five years is serious stuff, and worthy of further investigation. But surely, if FRDE thinks that Mr. Dibble came to the same conclusion, it must be more than his own intuition at work here.
The Dope is an internet entity dedicated to fighting ignorance. The personal desires of the users posting here-in are a different story and, of course, are up to everyone’s personal discretion. I’m guessing that by saying “you lot,” you meant everyone posting here? That’s a highly disingenous argument, and IMHO offensive to the community.
Personally, just because I may be curious about oral sex in the middle ages does nothing to detract from my sympathy for the plight of the people in South Africa, or anywhere for that matter. So, please save your vitriol for people that deserve it, instead of lashing out at one community that will, on the most part, try to help you.
To be fair, FRDE has not said that he believes in a coming racial cleansing because of “intuition.” He says he concludes that he and Mr. Dibble agree on this because of “intuition.” I’m not quite certain what intuition it is that leads him to draw the opposite conclusion of the plain statement from Mr. Dibble, but that’s really neither here nor there.
Calling anyone from anywhere by a term which involves racial stereotyping, or which carries with it certain negative connotations resulting from past usage, is, in my opinion, per se offensive. The original statement by FRDE got the attention of Mr. Dibble for precisely that reason; the fact that FRDE appears oblivious to this fact is not a good thing, regardless of what feelings that worthy may have about the situation he is describing.
For more background, here are the relevant Wikipedia articles: Griqua, Coloureds, and Cape Coloureds; that last is a suprisingly stub entry, under the circumstances…
He means that he’s making accurate predictions which are doomed to be disbelieved, like those of the princess Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy, who made several spot-on forecasts about the consequences of the siege of Troy by the Greeks but was disregarded because Apollo had destroyed her credibility.
(Shouldn’t somebody named “Autolycus” know this already? Autolycus was the grandfather of the Trojans’ arch-enemy Odysseus, wasn’t he? ;))
My sister-in-law is a white South African, and she is in close contact with family members that still live there. Certainly they have no such idea about the near future of South Africa, or else they would be making moves to leave.
However, if you are familiar with FRDE’s opinions on some other subjects, they are not necessarily related to the general perception of most other people.
I have come to no such conclusion. I disagree with your interpretation** completely**.
I’m still not convinced you know what you’re talking about, actually. At any rate, you’ve failed to provide any backing for your views.
CAptain Amazing, nice summary, except for a couple nits:
Indians were a separate classification that didn’t fall under Coloured
There were a lot more than 7 subgroups (one could end up, as one of my grandfathers, being classified as an “Other Other Coloured”), but in actual effect, the only real classification that mattered was the Coloured umbrella one.
The basic classification scheme by the 80s had been refined to White, Indian, Coloured and African. “African” meaning Black as most people understand it.
What gave you that impression? The currently-final exchange in that thread runs like this:
