Racial discrimination in post-Apartheid South Africa? The stories of Coloured people in Johannesburg, South Africa

Published date01 June 2024
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/13582291241246964
AuthorAmanuel Isak Tewolde
Date01 June 2024
Article
International Journal of
Discrimination and the Law
2024, Vol. 24(1-2) 6792
© The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/13582291241246964
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Racial discrimination in
post-Apartheid South Africa?
The stories of Coloured people
in Johannesburg, South Africa
Amanuel Isak Tewolde
Abstract
Dominant theoretical conversations on experiences of racial discrimination are focused
on how Black and other non-White people perceive and experience racial discrimination
in White majority racial systems; however, research is scant on experiences of racial
discrimination of racial minorities in Black majority social systems. This paper addresses
this lacuna by exploring perceived experiences of racial discrimination of Coloured
people in Johannesburg, South Africa, a racial minority in a Black majority country.
Fourteen in-depth individual interviews were conducted with participants. Analysis of the
interviews resulted in many interviewees claiming race-based discrimination in housing,
employment, service delivery, political representation and education. A few participants,
however, claimed that Black South Africans are also experiencing socioeconomic
problems like Coloured South Africans. Racial discrimination theory and social exclusion
theory are used as perspectives for the study. Based on the f‌indings, I argue that the
perceived experiences of racial discrimination of most of the participants of the study can
be explained by three interrelated structural forces, namely legacies of historical racial
exclusions, the neoliberal macro-economic order and government neglect.
Keywords
Black African, Coloured, government neglect, Johannesburg, neo-liberalism, post-
Apartheid South Africa, racial discrimination, Westbury
Centre for Social Development in Africa, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
Corresponding author:
Amanuel Isak Tewolde, Centre for Social Development in Africa, University of Johannesburg, Cnr Kingsway &
University Roads, Auckland Park, PO Box 524, Johannesburg 2092, South Africa.
Email: amanisak@gmail.com
Introduction
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present
inaccessible Maya Angelou
The South African society is racially organized along four categories, namely
1
Black
African, White, Coloured and Indian. These categories were created in Apartheid era
through Population Registration Act No. 30 of 1950 (Maylam, 2001). It is this Act which
functioned as the foundation for Apartheids institutional racial discrimination and
segregation (Maylam, 2001). Even after Apartheid laws had ended in the 1990s, these
categories have still been in use in post-Apartheid
2
South Africa and still structure racial
group relations and socioeconomic experiences (Pirtle, 2021).
This article examines how Coloured people in Westbury
3
, Johannesburg, a working-
class suburb with high unemployment, talk about their lived experiences in regards to
their socioeconomic condition and experiences of racial exclusion in a post-Apartheid
context; their stories are situated within the context of a Black African-majority gov-
ernment and in a country with high inequality and poverty particularly among non-White
groups.
Based on the narrated experiences of the participants, this paper argues that the stories
of racial marginalization of the majority of the participants can be explained by three
interrelated structural forces, namely legacies of historical racial exclusions, the neoliberal
macro-economic order and government neglect. The three explanatory models also apply
to participants of this study who claimed that not only Coloured South Africans but also
Black African South Africans are also experiencing marginalization in the post-Apartheid
context.
In October 2018, residents of Westbury, Johannesburg, held protests for many days
claiming that they were racially marginalized by the Black African-majority government
in post-Apartheid South Africa (Jordaan, 2018). The protests were initially sparked by the
killing of a Coloured woman in Westbury caught in gang-related shootings (Bheki, 2018;
Jordaan, 2018;Pijoos, 2018). Members of the community claimed that service delivery
and policing in the area were neglected due to the racial identity of the residents and called
for the government to intervene (Bheki, 2018;Jordaan, 2018;Pijoos, 2018,2023). The
South African, in its 04 October 2018 issue featured a community representative of the
Coloured community in Westbury as saying In the previous dispensation, we were not
White enough, now we are not Black enough(Daniel, 2018). The present study was
inspired by such protests and I conducted interviews with some of the residents to learn
more about their stories and perceptions of racial marginalization.
Race-based discrimination and marginalization has characterized the history of South
Africa for centuries. Race has always been a primary organizing factor to access economic
resources and political power (Chen, 2021;Frederickson, 1981;Maylam, 2001;Petrus
and Uwah, 2022). Racial discrimination in South Africa emerged when European settlers
appeared in the Cape in the 17
th
century (Christopher, 2001;Guelke, 2005;Maylam,
2001). Particularly after the onset of Apartheid in 1948, the government instituted many
68 International Journal of Discrimination and the Law 24(1-2)

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