Embracing colouredness in Cape Town: Racial formation of first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa

Abstract

Sociologists of ‘race’ studying ‘coloured’ racial identity in South Africa have exclusively focused on its socio-historical invention throughout the colonial and apartheid eras and its continuity in post-apartheid South Africa as it relates to South African nationals. What has been missing in the literature, however, is how coloured identity is being navigated by foreign-born non-South African nationals in post-apartheid South Africa, such as refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants more generally. Furthermore, migration scholarship in South Africa has paid little attention to this phenomenon to date. This article addresses this lacuna by interviewing first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers residing in Cape Town to explore the extent of their attachment to coloured racial identity in their everyday lived experiences. An interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to examine the lived racial self-identification patterns of the participants. Convenience and snowball sampling were utilised to select study participants. This article forms part of the results from a larger project. Sixteen participants were recruited and three major themes identified: (1) awareness of one’s phenotype; (2) adopting spouse and offspring’s racial identity; and (3) embracing colouredness as a positive racial identity. The article argues that, in everyday life, coloured racial identity, which was historically created to categorise South African citizens, is being adopted by refugee and asylum-seeker communities for whom coloured identity was never socio-politically constructed. It is also argued that extra-somatic social and perceptual factors informed the racial self-identification choices of the participants rather than their racial phenotype, which has traditionally informed the racial self-identification practices of South African citizens. Furthermore, the participants redefined coloured as a positive racial identity, effectively displacing negative discourses associated with coloured racial identity.