To be Coloured in South Africa means being all of the above

About six months ago I had a post up on the Cape Coloureds of South Africa. As a reminder, the Cape Coloureds are a mixed-race population who are the plural majority in the southwestern Cape region of South Africa. Like the white Boers they are a mostly Afrikaans speaking population who are adherents of Reformed Christianity. After the collapse of white racial supremacy many white Afrikaners have argued that it is natural and logical to form a cultural alliance with the Cape Coloureds because of the affinity of language and faith (Afrikaans speaking Coloureds outnumber Afrikaans speaking whites). For their own part, though a people of color who suffered under Apartheid, the Coloureds have an ambivalent relationship with the black majority and have supported several white dominated political movements since the end of Apartheid. One of the reasons that the Afrikaners and Coloureds have a relationship is a genetic one: the white ancestry of the Coloureds is the same melange of Dutch, French Huguenot and German which gave rise to the Afrikaners. Though I am unaware of modern genetic studies, older genealogical research has concluded that on the order of 5% of Afrikaner ancestry is non-white, and almost certainly it is through the "passing" of Coloureds into the Afrikaner population. As the Coloureds share language and religion with the Afrikaners this would naturally not be particularly difficult if they could pass themselves off as unmixed European. Or, at least if on the frontier farms of the 18th and 19th century if the neighbors did not inquire too closely as to the provenance of an individual whose ancestry was probably mixed. It is because of the non-white genetic load, small, but not trivial, that individuals such as Sandra Laing emerged from Afrikaner pairings during the era of Apartheid. But though the Cape Coloured derivation from Europeans and local Africans, a mixture of Bushmen, Khokhoi and Xhosa, is well known and attested, there are other groups who are in the mix, quite literally. The Cape Colony was a way station between the far flung holdings of the Dutch East Indies Company, the VOC, one of the first major joint-stock corporations in the world, and the mother country. Just as Europeans arrived from the north, so Asians were brought from the east, though in this case they were generally slaves or bonded laborers. Large numbers of Southeast and South Asians arrived to serve the Dutch and provide labor which the locals would (because they were free and outside of colonial control) or could not (they died of disease and maltreatment). The Cape Malay community, which is in some ways affinal to that of Cape Coloureds, serves as a cultural testament to the Muslims amongst those brought to Africa. But the Cape Coloureds themselves no doubt have Asian ancestry which has left fewer salient cultural marks than that of their European ancestors. But recent genetic data is clarifying that ancestry. It seems plausible to assume now that Asian ancestry surpasses European ancestry among the Cape Coloureds, with African ancestry still retaining a plural majority. A new paper in Human Molecular Genetics confirms earlier findings, Genetic structure of a unique admixed population: implications for medical research: