Zimbabwe has the second largest Coloured (mixed-race) community in Anglophone Africa, after South Africa. Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, is historically the city with the largest concentration of Coloured people in the country, and considered by many to be its cultural heartland.
This multimedia project invites senior members of the community in Bulawayo to share their stories. Stories that are personal, yet not definitive. Stories whose origins lie somewhere behind and among us. As bearers of memory, these recollections and reflections of the elderly encourage us to confront, understand and re-imagine the forgotten (hi)story of Zimbabwean Coloureds.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
In Southern Africa, racial categories conceived during the colonial period continue to be perpetuated. In English speaking countries of the region, including Zimbabwe, the term Coloured denotes persons of mixed racial origin who possess ancestry from Europe, Asia, and various Khoisan and Bantu ethnic groups.
Originating at the intersection of worlds, Coloured identity is complex. It can be described as an exercise in cultural creativity, shaped by a history of violent dispossession and segregation, resulting in creolized formations that have appropriated, translated, and articulated elements of different cultures in nuanced ways.
In 1983, three years after Rhodesia gained independence from Britain and became Zimbabwe, Marike de Klerk, the First Lady of South Africa, had the following to say about the Coloured community: ... "You know, they are a negative group ... a non-person. They are the people that were left after the nations were sorted out. They are the rest ...".
PRESENT-DAY SITUATION
Today, Coloureds continue to be largely perceived as irrelevant remnants of an inconvenient past.
