COLOURED PREJUDICE

Hugh Russell reports that the mixed-race

tribes of Africa look down on their black cousins

Lusaka I'M ashamed of myself. When the 2 November issue of The Spectator finally burst through the unnatural barrier to communication known as the Zambian postal service and fell on to my desk yesterday, and I read Rod Litidle's painful piece about the black woman who was not sufficiently black to adopt a blacker baby, I laughed.

I laughed because to us here in Zambia, and perhaps to almost any African, the lady in question, who is half-Irish, half-Nigerian, isn't black at all. She is coloured. And therefore, to the coloured mind, infinitely different from, and indeed superior to, a black.

Here in southern Africa the coloureds are a nation, a tribe. The chasm between black and coloured is as vast and spectacular as the Grand Canyon. And just about as unbridgable. The idea that a coloured woman would voluntarily attempt to adopt a black child is so remote, so unlikely, as to be . . . well. laughable.

The coloureds are a rigidly self-controlled and cohesive community. To qualify as a coloured you must have a portion, a drop, a soupcon of white blood in your veins. It's not how much that matters; it's whether it's there at all. If it is, you're coloured. Not black. Your actual complexion matters not at all.

This can lead to confusion. Early in my years here I fell into conversation with an elderly coloured lady. I knew that she was classed as 'coloured' because I'd been told so, but in truth she had the complexion of a pickled walnut. 'Mr Russell,' she asked me gravely, 'are you British people not concerned about all the crimes committed by these awful black people?'

Coloureds may today be a symptom of racial division on this continent, but they were of course the result of wholehearted integration. Their parents and grandparents were the offspring of white men who came to colonise the place but forgot to bring their white wives with them. Coloureds are mostly half-British in extraction. There are also a few Greek and Italian coloureds. The Greek ones tend to be swarthy and short, The Italian coloureds are spectacularly good-looking. The Brits, the great majority, are all too often . . well, gingerish.

Many coloureds stilt remember and revere their original white begetters. Another ancient coloured lady told me that her grandfather had three African wives at the same time but, she added primly, the three women each had a hut of their own.

As they are a combination of white and black, you might expect the coloured lifestyle to be a blend of the two cultures. You would be right. Their accent and much of their language is African, although they often derisively imitate the way Africans speak. Sometimes it is difficult to tell if they are speaking naturally or sending up the African accent. They generally speak English as a first language, although they will easily lapse into the local Bemba and Nyanga tongues, especially when they want to say something scandalous or obscene.

They occasionally serve up an English roast on a Sunday, but most of them prefer the food that their mothers and their mothers' mothers prepared for them on the small traditional charcoal-burning mbaolas — mealie meal cooked to a stiff porridge, tonesmeat', which is brisket stewed with bits of bone attached, and 'spinach' (any greenleaf vegetable cooked with onion and tomato). All eaten, of course, with the fingers.

Coloureds are the most clannish of peoples. Much like P.G. Wodehouse's aunts, they call to each other across the vast stretches of African bush. A coloured wedding or, more frequently in these Aids-ridden days, a funeral brings them sweeping majestically across the plains. When they meet up, much of their conversation consists of tracing each other, through marriage, divorce and displacement. An outsider senses an almost fanatical desire to keep everyone in touch with everyone else. Driving through a Lusaka shantytown one day with a coloured friend, I pointed out a brown-skinned, straight-haired young girl playing with some African children. 'Surely she's coloured. isn't she?' I asked. 'Yes,' he said. 'Must be one that got away.'

The other thing they all talk about incessantly — and this is where socialising with coloureds can go against the grain for oldfashioned English liberals like me — is the Africans. Or, as they are known in petulant and abusive tones, 'These people!' Most coloureds have black servants, and the masters and mistresses of this strange society like to sit around on their verandas at night, open ice-cold bottles of beer and list the sins and the failings of their servants with savage relish.

Apparently 'these people', also sometimes referred to as `Munts' or 'Pops', are thieves, liars, morons and poisoners of babies. They are immoral, godless and stupid. Oh yes, and they are lazy. The people who have just put in a ten-hour day scrubbing floors and lavatories, raking lawns and cleaning cars for their coloured employers are always 'lazy'. As for their other sins, the most quoted is theft. Theft of what? Well, apparently female underwear is a favourite target. Other thefts sound less serious. The other week a coloured household I know virtually collapsed in a welter of accusations, insults and threats of dismissal when the night security guard was suspected of eating a ripe mango from a tree loaded with the things.

Quite why these half-blacks are so excoriating in their criticism of all-blacks is difficult to explain. Then, so is all prejudice. Fear obviously has a lot to do with it. When the coloureds, usually comparatively prosperous thanks to their education and background, look over the walls of their pleasant villas, they see an awful lot of very poor black Africans looking back, And perhaps, in order to justify paying such pitifully low wages as are the norm, it is convenient for these employers to assume that the people they are exploiting are criminal, feckless, delinquent, even less than human. That way they can sleep at night.

It all grates harshly on the ears and the nerves of this musungu, but I learnt some time back that argument or reason is useless. When I first came to Africa I tried to point out that in England we, too, have employees who are lazy and dishonest. I was told that I didn't understand. 'Wait till you've been here a bit longer.' Well, I've been here a bit longer now, and I still don't understand.

But in the few years I've been trying to understand, there has been a change. The coloureds have become fewer. More and more of them, especially young couples with families, have taken advantage of their ancestry, and have resettled in Britain. You'll find little clusters of them now, in west and south London and around other major cities.

There, among the neat new housing estates, you'll find the Zambian coloureds, still crowding into each others' kitchens, inquiring after distant relatives, making jokes in Bemba and consuming vast quantities of mealie-meal porridge. Only one thing is different. They no longer refer slightingly to black people. Perhaps this is because they have realised that, now they live in Britain, they, too, are the blacks.