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2 The cape coloured community this book is about women who face stigma, discrimination, poverty, and violence . it is about women who do care work for children and men, and whose responsibilities sometimes force them to make choices between their own needs and those for whom they are caring. And it is about women who must contend with all of these challenges at the same time they fear for the deterioration of their own physical selves and their lost beauty as a result of hiv. Women all over the world face similar challenges, and in that sense the women in our study represent the experience of women across many borders. The women in this case, however, also represent one particular community on the globe with its own unique history and its own particular expectations about women. This case study is about coloured women in cape town, South Africa. Who are these women? in the united States the word “colored” is an offensive holdover from the period in American history when apartheid was legal under Jim crow laws. in South Africa, however, while there is controversy surrounding the language used to describe various groups of people in the country, the term “coloured” is generally not perceived as a derogatory term. in fact, it is widely used by people who identify themselves as coloured. The identity of coloured and the character and experience of the coloured community is an important feature of South Africa to be explored. And as our research unfolded it became an essential issue for discussion in order to understand the lives of women in the Western cape who identify themselves as coloured. This chapter describes a little of the history of coloured people through slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and the struggle that finally toppled a racially defined government in the 1990s. it also provides some context for understanding contemporary issues in the coloured community as South Africans continue the fight to depose the deeply entrenched social, economic, and political remnants of that history and as coloured women face all of these issues in addition to gender injustice. oldest humans, newest constitution South Africans like to point out that their history is long. The cradle of humankind , near Johannesburg in the middle of the country, is perhaps the earliest site of humans using fire. in 1997 the oldest footprints of a modern human ancestor, believed to have been made 117,000 years ago, were discovered fossilized in the sand north of cape town (Beck, 2000). Scientists in 2010 announced that a lo11 12 | South African Women Living with hiv cality on the southern coast of South Africa, mossel Bay, “may have been the original location for the lineage that leads to all modern humans” (Brown et al., 2009, p. 861). much of this nearly 200,000-year history has been lost, and our summary here reflects the dominance of the european point of view, which makes vast areas of the globe and huge populations of people invisible. We try in this chapter to bring in as much information as we could find about the different populations groups who have lived in South Africa, but the sources and information that have been documented and saved are largely from a european point of view and focus on the activities and experiences of the colonial people who began coming to South Africa 500 years ago. nevertheless, some information can be gleaned from the history of the encounters of colonial populations with the people they found in South Africa, including those who were there first. South Africa’s indigenous population, now called Khoisan, have been living in South Africa as hunter-gatherers and fisherfolk for tens of thousands of years. The San people were primarily hunter-gatherers, and the Khoikhoi were herders and fisherfolk. estimates of the precolonial population of San range between 150,000 and 300,000 in the whole region of southern Africa, and between 15,000 and 50,000 in the southwestern cape. About 200,000 Khoikhoi lived in the area. Their numbers, however, were decimated by genocidal colonial policies and the practice of colonial farmers who took over land and water, leaving the San no place to forage and the Khoikhoi no place to tend their animals and farms. today the two names have been collapsed into the term “Khoisan” to describe all of the original people in southern Africa (Adhikari, 2011). Before the arrival of the colonial powers a few thousand years ago, various other groups of people traveled...

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