The Goffal Speaks: Coloured Ideology and the Perpetuation of a Category in Postcolonial Zimbabwe
type: CreativeWork
description: Significant changes for the Coloured community have occurred and continue to occur as a result of an ever-changing political landscape in Zimbabwe. These changes reveal a group consciousness or ideology that often translates into daily practices of methods of inclusion and exclusion based on ethnic affiliation and racial organization. Many Coloureds have historically denied the reality of the boundaries that have separated them from whites or Europeans, and more recently, have reinforced the boundaries that have separated them from black Africans. Zimbabwe at Independence was the poster child for progress and change on the African continent. It was a place where, "the wrongs of the past [would] stand forgiven and forgotten... [and] oppression and racism were inequalities that [would] never find scope in the political and social system." Yet thirty years later, amid growing disillusionment over promises of a unified Zimbabwe, a destitute economy, and the perpetuation of racial inequality and oppression, there is an effort among Coloureds themselves to reify the Coloured category. The categorization of people tends to develop in the course of specific histories of particular places. Local nuances color this. In Southern Africa, following the victory of the South African National Party (NP) in 1948, the term "community" was used as a euphemism for racial exclusion. Official categories that were clearly racial were commonly designated "communities": the Indian community, the Coloured community, the white community, and the black community. The NP relied heavily on the idea on distinct peoples bound together by blood and culture and in this context the language of community slid easily into a rhetoric justifying separate development for separate communities (Crehan, 2002). In the anti-apartheid era, opposition to the State often assumed the form of struggles fought out in the name of a particular community. It is here yet again, in the postcolonial context that we witnes…
abstract: Significant changes for the Coloured community have occurred and continue to occur as a result of an ever-changing political landscape in Zimbabwe. These changes reveal a group consciousness or ideology that often translates into daily practices of methods of inclusion and exclusion based on ethnic affiliation and racial organization. Many Coloureds have historically denied the reality of the boundaries that have separated them from whites or Europeans, and more recently, have reinforced the boundaries that have separated them from black Africans. Zimbabwe at Independence was the poster child for progress and change on the African continent. It was a place where, "the wrongs of the past [would] stand forgiven and forgotten... [and] oppression and racism were inequalities that [would] never find scope in the political and social system." Yet thirty years later, amid growing disillusionment over promises of a unified Zimbabwe, a destitute economy, and the perpetuation of racial inequality and oppression, there is an effort among Coloureds themselves to reify the Coloured category. The categorization of people tends to develop in the course of specific histories of particular places. Local nuances color this. In Southern Africa, following the victory of the South African National Party (NP) in 1948, the term "community" was used as a euphemism for racial exclusion. Official categories that were clearly racial were commonly designated "communities": the Indian community, the Coloured community, the white community, and the black community. The NP relied heavily on the idea on distinct peoples bound together by blood and culture and in this context the language of community slid easily into a rhetoric justifying separate development for separate communities (Crehan, 2002). In the anti-apartheid era, opposition to the State often assumed the form of struggles fought out in the name of a particular community. It is here yet again, in the postcolonial context that we witnes…
author: Nims, Kelly
language: English
keywords: Colored people (South Africa), History, Ethnology, Racism, Postcolonialism, Citizenship, United Party (South Africa)
date published: 2013
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:44:31Z
provider: Columbia University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Columbia University

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7916/D8T72QNV