Film explores Cape Coloured’s struggle with identity, social injustice

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Elyse Kaner
Staff Writer

A filmmaker and actress visited Anoka-Ramsey Community College recently carving a trail of awareness of the suffering and inequity apartheid has brought to a group of people in South Africa: the Cape Coloured.

Minneapolis independent filmmaker Kiersten Chace held a screening April 26 of her first feature-length documentary “I’m Not Black, I’m Coloured” at the college’s Coon Rapids campus.

The 52-minute film, subtitled “Identity Crisis at the Cape of Good Hope,” gives voice to a South African people of Cape Town, who have endured centuries of discrimination. The group in a psychological beating have been ignored, belittled and besieged with oppression for a period of 350 years.

The film was followed by a question and answer session among the dozen people in the audience. Joining Chace was model-turned-actress Lesley-Ann Brandt, a breakout star from her role as Naevia in the 2010 “Spartacus: Blood and Sand.”

Brandt landed her first lead role in the television series “Diplomatic Immunity.” (She does not appear in Chace’s documentary.)

Brandt, whose family later moved to New Zealand in 1999, gave insight into her Cape Coloured South African upbringing and heritage.

The film marked the second of two ARCC presentations in a diversity lecture series.

Everyone can relate to not being heard at some point in time, said Marcellus Davis, director of diversity and multiculturalism at ARCC.

“This film gives voice to the Coloured people of South Africa for the world,” he said.

Davis said he hopes the movie teaches that “social justice for all is not a tenant of just America, but it should be a rally cry for all around the world.”

The struggles

“I’m Not Black, I’m Coloured” was four years in the making, said Chace, founder of Mondé World Films, who also produced and edited the film. (It was screened for the first time last year, but Chace has since tweaked it.)

“The only sin is the color of my skin” the movie begins with a haunting, a cappella freedom song.

The film documents the history of the Cape Coloured and their struggles for identity, equal rights and freedom in a world rocked by apartheid in South Africa. The story is told from the view point of the Cape Coloured people.

The Cape Coloured are neither black nor white. Rather, they are a people of mixed heritage – African, European, East Asian and East Indian – those who settled in Cape Town.

Many of their ancestors were shipped to the Cape and sold into slavery by Dutch settlers some 300 years ago. Slavery ensued for 180 years.

The British later came into power and abolished slavery. The slaves were freed in 1834, but received their final freedom in 1838 after serving an apprenticeship to the farmers. Even after their freedom, they underwent heinous discrimination in their struggles to coexist in a white governing society.

In the mid 1800s, they left the farms and settled in the foothills of Table Mountain, an area surrounded by mountains and blue ocean located in the heart of Cape Town’s business center in the western Cape province. The area became known as District Six.

Living harmoniously

The land and community the Coloured created was the only cohesive symbol of their identity and culture, Chace said. They set up stores, shops and nightclubs, creating their own economy, living together harmoniously with whites, blacks, Muslims, Christians and Jews, but the majority were the Coloured people.

They were proud of their community. While one might describe District Six as a slum, it was the fabric of life for the Coloured. But apartheid changed all that. (The South African system of racial segregation that existed after 1948.)

A 1949 law, for instance, prohibited mixed marriages, implying Coloured people were not valid and were illegal, according to the movie.

In the mid 1960s, the National Party, the local white government, designated District Six a white only area. Sixty thousand Cape Coloured were forcibly removed from their homes.

“It almost seemed like apartheid was going into reverse,” an interviewee says in the film.

Brandt, in a discussion after the film, recalled stories of her own great-grandmother being taken from her home to make way for the whites.

Today, District Six no longer exists. Chace said nothing has been built on the land with the exception of a few homes.

The movie features 22 interviews, filmed over nine days in 20 locations in South Africa. The end of the film captured raw emotions of some of the Cape Coloured cast, when through DNA samplings, they learned their ancestral roots on film.

Some were elated, some shed tears of relief as they had known nothing of their origins. Still, another charted a plan to visit his newly discovered relatives in Pakistan and India.

The challenge

Chace first learned about the Cape Coloured in 1995 when she produced a U.S. concert tour for the gospel choir, the Christian Explainers.

One of the choir members confided to her that she had a big secret, a secret she was told not to tell anyone in the states. “I’m not a black South African, I’m Coloured,” she told Chace.

Chace was appalled that people were fearful of claiming their own heritage. That’s when she started researching the group.

Four months later, in 1996, she was off to Cape Town, where she helped inaugurate a music school. The visit planted the seed to film her documentary with the intent to educate and effect social change.

A decade later, she revisited the area and was saddened to find little had changed. She noticed a deterioration in the people, both physically and morally.

Pulling the film together

“Many nights I was in tears,” Chace said in the Q & A following the screening.

The challenge was pulling the film together, the burden of telling the story of a community as a white American. Chace said she strived to represent the Cape Coloured in a sensitive manner not racially divisive to the blacks of South Africa and still relating their history in a positive but truthful way.

While acting in “Spartacus,” Brandt was often asked about her heritage. In response, she started an Internet discussion.

“I felt the need to educate people through the blog,” she said.

Brandt related a story about her green-eyed grandfather with light skin, who managed a liquor company for nine years. When the company nearly a decade later learned he was a Cape Coloured, he was fired. “I can’t have you selling to white people; it’s just not right,” was the reason he was given, Brandt said.

Brandt went on to say “Being Coloured is a state of mind, a state of community. It’s our language. It’s kind of engraved,” she said.

Proceeds from the film will funnel back into distribution to universities worldwide with the intent of educating, Chace said. She looks forward some day to offering the film on the Internet free of charge.

“I would hope that this film inspires,” she said.

Audience Choice awards

“I’m Not Black, I’m Coloured” has been selected Audience Choice Award winner for the 2010 African World Documentary Film Festival and the 2010 Bermuda International Film Festival.

“This is not a Coloured, black thing,” Chace said in summing up the movie. “It’s a group of people who want to be recognized,… acknowledged and have a voice.”

Chace has returned to South Africa on seven ministry trips during the past 15 years. In addition to creating the film and inaugurating a music school, she was also instrumental in connecting several Minnesota organizations with non-profits in Cape Town, including Open Arms of Minnesota and Arm-in-Arm in Africa.

After the Anoka-Ramsey showing, Chace and Brandt made their way to St. Cloud State University for a second screening. The movie was later screened as part of the annual International Film Festival in Minneapolis.

Chace and Brandt plan a return trip to Cape Town in 2012 to meet with and support local non-profit organizations devoted to servicing the needs of the Cape Flat townships.

For more information on the film “I’m Not Black, I’m Coloured,” visit www.capecoloured.com.

Elyse Kaner is at elyse.kaner@ecm-inc.com