A short video clip about a chapter in the book, Coloured: How Classification Became Culture, slipped into my TikTok feed yesterday. In the chapter, the writers, Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel stated that “Trevor Noah is not coloured”.
I don’t intend to review the book, here. I turned down a formal request to review the book when it was first published for two reasons:
- I am not an expert on, nor do I have an active interest in coloured identity or politics. My first book was published in 2022, and dealt with mostly existentialist matters, with reflections on the crude identity politics and essentialism of our time. The request to review Coloured, made specific reference to my having written the book.
- We live in times that are quite terrifying; people are perfectly happy with stating their views, but take offence, and are often conspiratorial about criticism. If I reviewed the book, and I found, say, a factual error (as I did), I may have been accused of “hating” the writers, or claiming some kind of superior knowledge (nuance is completely lost) which I do not profess to have.
I don’t particularly care that “Trevor Noah is not coloured,” I did wonder when I first read the book and looked at some of the accompanying social media, whether the same statement could not apply to Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, whom I suspect is a friend of the authors. They used his studio and infrastructure to promote the book. See here.
I am not a fan of Trevor Noah (I don’t think he is funny), and actually don’t care. I am also not a fan of Mpofu-Walsh, who is, of course, quite smart and eloquent. Without any sense of his own privileges and elite status, Mpofu-Walsh has bathed in the golden glow of accolades, more the vacuous encomia of the bourgeoisie. So, Mpofu-Walsh achieved almost everything from being “an inheritor” (I’m not sure that phrase is used appropriately), he is the son of a wealthy lawyer and politician, someone who became wealthy in questionable ways, and the cynosure of a parvenu prince who tapped into elite privileges; from education to his profession.
Frantz Fanon, it was, who wrote:
The national bourgeoisie steps into the shoes of the former European settlement: doctors, barristers, traders, commercial travellers, general agents and transport agents. It considers that the dignity of the country and its own welfare require that it should occupy all these posts.
Mpofu-Walsh’s association with a violent paramilitary, fascistic group, that dabbles in forms of ethno-nationalism and exceptionalism, is also a problem.
As for the book, I remain unable to write a critical review.