Confronting the Coloured Class Divide This Youth Month
written by Denver Toroga
At the age of 19 is when I first realised that not all Coloured South Africans knew what it meant to buy food “op ‘n boekie” (on credit) from the local tuckshop. Not all knew the feeling of arriving at your train station, checking your money in your pocket, and needing to deciding whether to take a taxi home or instead buy a loaf of bread. Because you couldn’t afford both.
At 19, I also discovered something else: that there were middle-class Coloured people. Coloured people with office jobs. Coloureds with cars, degrees, and double-storey dreams. And some of them had learned how to move in white spaces so well that they forgot how to see their own. They’d pretend not to hear you because of your broken English, the smell of Metrorail still clinging to your clothes.
Some would later explain, “We’re not political, we’re bridge-builders.” But how do you build bridges when the people you leave behind aka your own people are living under those bridges?
This is the contradiction we don’t talk about enough in South Africa’s ‘rainbow nation’ Coloured working-class aka as Khoi and former enslaved communities who face a unique kind of kakapusa or erasure, both externally and internally.
Our community who conveniently forgot that every job formerly reserved only for white South Africans, every graduation gown we celebrate, was paved by generations of working-class struggle. By people like Ashley Kriel, the young freedom fighter from Bonteheuwel who was tortured and killed by the apartheid state at just 20 years old. He, too, could have said, “I’m not political.” He could have chased the soft life, the safety of the colony, the dream of personal success. But he didn’t.
That’s why his memory matters—especially for Coloured youth today attending Model C schools or predominantly white universities, where they’re taught that political awareness is a burden, not a right. Where they learn to disconnect from the trauma of a mother in Hanover Park facing gang violence, or a farmworker in Citrusdal fighting eviction.
In these institutions, to be “apolitical” is often seen as the price of acceptance. But silence is political, it protects power, not people.
That’s why films like Action Kommandant, directed by Nadine Cloete, are vital. They don’t just honour Ashley Kriel’s life—they challenge the myth that we must choose between survival and solidarity. That to be successful means to disconnect.
Coloured working-class youth in Elsiesriver, Manenberg, Lavender Hill, Macassar, Paarl, Eldorado Park, Port Nolloth, Saldana Bay, Graaff-Reinet etc are still navigating systems stacked against them. But worse, they’re often expected to do so quietly—to assimilate, to smile, to succeed, to be grateful without making others even their own uncomfortable
This Youth month, Nadine’s documentary should be screened in every school, every church youth group, every college or university lecture hall. Not as a history lesson—but as a mirror. A reminder that the legacy of struggle didn’t end in 1994. That political awareness is not about slogans or party loyalty—it’s about showing up for your people, especially when it’s inconvenient.
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