Cape Coloureds () are a South African group of Coloureds who are from the Cape region in South Africa which consists of the Western Cape, Northern Cape and Eastern Cape. Their ancestry comes from the interracial mixing between the European, the indigenous Khoi and San, the Xhosa plus other Bantu people, indentured labourers imported from the British Raj, slaves imported from the Dutch East Indies, immigrants from the Levant or Yemen (or a combination of all). Eventually, all these ethnic and racial groups intermixed with each other, forming a group of mixed-race people that became known as the "Cape Coloureds".
Demographics Although Coloureds represent only 8.15% of people within South Africa, they make up 42.1% of the population in the Western Cape, representing a plurality of the population of the province. (according to the 2022 South African census)
They are generally bilingual, speaking Afrikaans and English, though some speak only one of these. Some Cape Coloureds may code switch, speaking a patois of Afrikaans and English called Afrikaaps, also known as Cape Slang (Capy) or , meaning Kitchen Afrikaans. Cape Coloureds were classified under apartheid as a subset of the larger Coloured race group.
Recent studies of Cape Coloureds using genetic testing have found ancestry to vary by region. Khoe-San ancestry is higher in inland regions and towards the north into the present-day Northern Cape. Although it is prevalent throughout the Cape, the partial Bantu-speaking ancestry (most predominantly Xhosa) increases going eastwards into present-day Eastern Cape. The European-related ancestry is highest along the coast. In Cape Town and the rest of the Western Cape province, the partial Asian ancestry is high and diverse due to the arrival of Asian and African slaves that mixed with Europeans (colonists, immigrants, tourists) and existing mixed race (Khoisan-European) which formed the modern-day Cape Coloureds and Cape Malay due to the creolisation of all those populations. At least 4 genetic studies indicate that the average Cape Coloured has an ancestry consisting of the following, with large variation between individuals: Khoisan-speaking Africans: 19.1-43.0% Bantu-speaking Africans: 17.9-33.0% Ethnic groups in Europe: 19.3-38.5% Asian peoples: 9.0-19.9%
Below are the approximate ranges for each ancestral component based on genetic studies and historical accounts:
African Ancestry: Range: ~ 30-68% European Ancestry: Range: ~ 20-70% Asian Ancestry: Range: ~ 20-40% Middle Eastern Ancestry: Range: ~ 5-15%
Please note that this is not an exhaustive list, and individual results may vary. The ancestry of Cape Coloureds can be diverse and complex.
The genetic reference cluster term "Khoisan" itself refers to a colonially admixed population cluster, hence the concatenation, and is not a straightforward reference to ancient African pastoralist and hunter ancestry, which is often demarcated by the L0 haplogroup ancestry common in the general South African native population, which is also integral part of other aboriginal genetic reference cluster terms like "South-East African Bantu".
Religion A separate Dutch Reformed Church, the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC), was formed in 1881 to serve the Cape Coloured Calvinist population separately from the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa (NGK). It was merged in 1994 with the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa (DRCA, formed 1963) to form the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa.
Success in the spread of Catholicism among Afrikaans speakers, including Coloured communities, remained minimal until the death throes of Apartheid during the mid to late 1980s. As Catholic texts began to be translated into Afrikaans, sympathetic Dutch Reformed pastors, who were defying the traditional anti-Catholicism of their Church, assisted in correcting linguistic errors. By 1996, the majority of Afrikaans-speaking Catholics came from the Coloured community, with a smaller number of Afrikaner converts, most of whom were from professional backgrounds.Afrikaans-Speaking Catholics in the Rainbow Republic, Catholic World News, 14 November 1996.
Sunni Islam remains in practice among Cape Malays, who were generally regarded as a separate ethnoreligious group under apartheid.
Origin and history
The first and the largest phase of interracial marriages/miscegenation in South Africa happened in the Dutch Cape Colony and the rest of the Cape Colony which began from the 17th century, shortly after the arrival of Dutch settlers, who were led by Jan van Riebeeck, through the Dutch East India Company (also known as the 'VOC'). When the Dutch settled in the Cape in 1652, they met the Khoi Khoi who were the natives of the area. After settling in the Cape, the Dutch established farms that required intensive labour, therefore, they enforced slavery in the Cape. Some of the Khoi Khoi became labourers for the Dutch farmers in the Cape. Despite this, there was resistance by the Khoi Khoi, which led to the Khoikhoi-Dutch Wars.
As a result, the Dutch imported slaves from other parts of the world, especially the Malay people from present-day Indonesia and the Bantu people from various parts of Southern Africa. Slaves were also imported from Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh (also known as 'Bengal'), Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Madagascar, Mauritius and the rest of Africa. Because of this, the Cape had the most diverse slave population in the world. The slaves were almost invariably given Christian names but their places of origin were indicated in the records of sales and other documents, so that it is possible to estimate the ratio of slaves from different regions. Usually, slaves were given their masters' surnames, surnames that referred to the characters in the bible (e.g. Adams, Jephta, Thomas, Esau, Solomons, Jacobs, Matthews, Peters, Daniels), surnames that reflected the month when they arrived in the Cape (e.g. September, March/Maart, January/Januarie, April), surnames that referred to Greek and Roman mythology (e.g. Cupido, Adonis, Titus, Hannibal) or surnames that referred to the geographical location where they came from (e.g. 'Afrika' from different parts of mainland Africa, 'Balie' from Bali in Indonesia and 'Malgas' which referred to the Malagasy people from Madagascar). These slaves were, however, dispersed and lost their cultural identity over the course of time.
Even in the early years of colonialism, the area that became known as 'Cape Town', received international interest because it was the perfect halfway point for the trade route between Europe and Asia, which made Cape Town a vital trading station. This is the main reason why the Cape was colonised by the Dutch so that the VOC could control and benefit from the Cape-Sea Route. This is also the main reason why the Dutch Cape Colony (especially in Cape Town) became a melting pot of people who came from different parts of the world and this melting pot still exists. The majority of the early Europeans who settled in the Cape were men because they were mostly traders, sailors, soldiers, explorers, farmers and politicians who hardly brought their families with them; therefore, they created new families in the Cape.
Because most of the Dutch settlers in the Cape were men, many of them married and fathered the first group of mixed-race children with the local Khoi Khoi women. Soon after the arrival of slaves, the Dutch men also married and fathered mixed-race children with the Malay from Indonesia, the Southern African Bantu, Indians and other enslaved ethnic groups in the Cape. To a certain extent, the slaves in the Cape also had interracial unions with each other and mixed-race children were also conceived from these unions as well because the slaves were of different races (African and Asian). Some of these slaves also intermixed with the local Khoi Khoi workers and another breed of children were born with diverse heritage. Unlike the One-drop rule in the US, the Dutch settlers in the Cape did not view mixed-race children as "white enough to be white", "black enough to be black" nor "Asian enough to be Asian", therefore, mixed race children from all these interracial unions in the Cape grew up, came together and married amongst themselves, forming their own creole community that would later be known as the "Cape Coloured" (a term that was given by the Apartheid regime during the 20th century).
The first interracial marriage in the Cape was between Krotoa (a Khoi Khoi woman who was a servant, a translator and a crucial negotiator between the Dutch and the Khoi Khoi. Her Dutch name was "Eva Van Meerhof") and Peter Havgard (a Danish surgeon whom the Dutch renamed as "Pieter Van Meerhof"). Having conceived 3 mixed-race children, Krotoa was also known as the mother that gave birth to the Coloured community in South Africa.
Eventually, more Dutch people settled in the Cape until the Cape fell under British rule in the early 19th century. Amongst them were the Van Wijk family (whose descendants became 'Van Wyk') who arrived in the Cape in 1686 and the Erasmus family that arrived in 1689. The arrival of more Dutch people in the Cape led to the recruitment of more Khoi Khoi labourers and the importation of more slaves from different parts of Asia and Africa. From the mid-17th century until the 19th century and the 20th century, all the Dutch surnames in the Cape region and the rest of South Africa evolved into Afrikaans surnames which are the most common surnames amongst White South Africans and Coloured South Africans e.g. Van Niekerk, Strydom (from 'Strijdom'), De Waal, Pietersen, Van Rooyen, Van Tonder, Hanekom, Steenhuisen, De Jongh (from De Jong), Van Wyk, Van Der Walt, Van Der Merwe, Koekemoer, Meintjies, Beukes, Van Der Bijl, Uys, Oosthuizen, Theunissen, Pieterse, Willemse, Nieuwoudt.
The Huguenots (also known as 'French Huguenots') were French Protestants who escaped banishment and persecution of Protestants in France. Many of them emigrated to the Dutch Cape Colony to seek refuge among the existing Dutch community during the late 1600s and early 1700s. Despite being refugees, they played a huge role on the history of the current Afrikaans-speaking community, the Cape region as a whole and the rest of South Africa. Coming from a country that has a rich history of wine production, these French refugees pioneered the vineyards of the Cape Winelands, turning it into one of the biggest wine producers in the world. The town of Franschhoek (which means "French corner" in Dutch and Afrikaans) in the current Western Cape, was named as a refuge where many Huguenots were allocated by the VOC. Many Huguenots were also allocated to Stellenbosch, Paarl and the rest of the Cape Winelands because this was the perfect environment (in terms of climate and fertile land) for them to plant their vineyards and produce wine.