The prof keeps his politest Zoom face on as I read to him this excerpt from an article on the BBC’s website about South Africa’s Grammy-winning superstar, Tyla: “Before her rise to fame, the 21-year-old made a video proudly talking about her mixed-raced heritage on TikTok.
“In it she slicks her coily hair into Bantu knots, while donning a traditional beaded necklace, with the words, ‘I am a coloured South African’ splashed across the clip like a badge of honour.
“The star says this means that she ‘comes from a lot of different cultures’.”
He grimaces at the following from the article, which was published in December when the Tyla video threatened to spark a culture war: “It is a simple video intended to share a part of herself with her audience. But instead, her racial identity has stoked flames across the internet, most notably, in the US.
“Americans see the word as a slur, unlike Tyla’s South African community, who see it as a part of their culture. In South Africa, it is a distinct identity that is officially recognised.
“One US user on X, formerly known as Twitter, said: ‘We are not gonna call her coloured here and if she personally demands it, her career will end before it begins.
“She’s trying to cross over into an American market, she won’t be able to use that word here; she can use it somewhere else though.’”
I’m done and Adam Haupt, globally respected hip-hop scholar and director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, lets out a deep sigh.
We are discussing the race politics around Tyla who had a few days earlier become the youngest South African — she turned 22 on 30 January — to win a Grammy award in the new Best African Music Performance category for her amapiano/RnB floor-filler, Water.
Thankfully the American internet “backlash” did not spill over to the Grammy Awards, spoiling Tyla’s big night.
“I think it’s interesting how they read her racially, because there is a lack of nuance,” Haupt says.
He spends a lot of time engaging racial identity politics, which includes explaining the difference between the South African “coloured” and American “colored”.
The former laid a foundation for apartheid when the Population Registration Act of 1950 required South Africans to be registered into one of four racial categories: white, black, Indian or coloured.
As the BBC explains: “In the US, the word harks back to the Jim Crow era, when segregationist laws were instituted in the southern states to oppress black Americans after slavery was banned. Water fountains, toilets and bus seats were marked ‘whites only’ or ‘colored only’.”
The misunderstanding over Tyla’s Tik-Tok video was in the spelling.
“I mean, it’s the same problem that I have when I work with editors and publishers in the States,” Haupt says.
He noticed too late that all the “U”s in coloured were edited out in a recent article of his in a respected American anthropology journal.
“In South Africa, we spend a lot of time talking about or framing what the term ‘coloured’ means. I always have to explain how that spelling matters.”
Now, whenever possible, Haupt inserts a footnote early on in his text, so to say, “This is what this term means.”
“It’s not the pedantic point about British spelling versus American spelling. This is the historical and political significance of the term.
“It has a very different meaning here to what it would mean in, say, in the States, particularly the South.”
He apologises with a smile: “Sorry, that’s just my annoyance.”
The debate needs nuance, because “race lands differently in different places. Black isn’t just one thing. Blackness is broad and I’m always reminding people to see varieties of black experiences, as not essentially [just] one thing …”
Similarly, being coloured also means “different things in different spaces because not everyone’s lived experience is the same”, says Haupt, who grew up under apartheid in the poor working-class suburb of Bonteheuwel north of Cape Town.
Young Tyla, who grew up in post-apartheid Johannesburg, has a completely different experience of “colouredness” to someone from the Cape Flats, Eldorado Park, Langa or Gqeberha, for example.
He adds: “I mean, if you go to the Northern Cape, that’s a very different take on what coloured is.”
We are talking about a YouTube video where Tyla goes to a typical African hair salon. “The ritual of having your hair done is exactly like any other person on this continent. You go to a salon, and you have your hair braided.
“So, whether you want to claim her as exclusively coloured, I’m like, yeah, okay …”
It is about how she styles and represents herself.
“That is not just about claiming colour, but also that this is broader black and African-centric allegiance in a styling,” says Haupt.
Her form of blackness travels well, which is why Tyla is massively popular on the rest of the African continent and the diaspora.
“The way in which she aligns herself culturally … is why her music has taken off here,” Haupt explains.
American cultural imperialism and its accompanying myopia is, as Tyla’s generation would say, “a thing”.
Journalist Lynsey Chutel is one of the co-authors of Coloured: How Classification Became Culture.
She grew up in Eldorado Park in Johannesburg. She tells the story of how when she went to Columbia University in New York she had her own “Tyla experience” after she introduced herself as a coloured woman from South Africa on the first day.
“It did not go down well with her classmates; her roommate pulled her aside and said she had made the American students feel uncomfortable,” from the aforementioned BBC article. “She was forced to defend her own identity, background and culture while trying to assuage the discomfort of others.”
Chutel agrees with Haupt that Tyla has brought a different expression of blackness, by embracing being a coloured person. She has forced the diaspora, especially Americans, “to recognise a different history of blackness and a different history of oppression, because that’s where the word [coloured] comes from”.
“The reason we still use this word is because it represents a very particular South African and Southern African history of enslavement, colonialism and apartheid,” Chutel tells me. “But I think what’s also been really cool about her is the way in which she uses it, as someone who’s born free.”
Hers is a generation for whom being coloured is a term that has been passed on to them by their families and their communities, says Chutel. For them this as a culture rather than an apartheid classification.
“I have not spoken to her, but I’ve watched her interviews, and she seems to be an energetic, carefree 22-year-old, who uses the word without the baggage. And she uses it with a real sense of pride.”
But that does not translate into a narrow nativism, like one saw under apartheid, where collaborators bought into a “coloured nationalism” — some of which still lingers on today in right-wing offshoots.
Also for Chutel, Tyla’s hair, styling and music are important cultural signifiers. “I find that her willingness to wear her hair in cornrows clearly says something about identity as an African and as a South African.
“It is about being able to be coloured and still be South African and still be African.”
And, of course, there is the genre Tyla is part of — amapiano, with its truly African sound. It is unencumbered by borders — and you can turn it into what you need it to be.
“It’s also a style that is particularly inclusive. You don’t have to be from a particular neighbourhood, you don’t even have to be from a particular country to love it,” says Chutel.
“What that says reflects the creators who live in an online world … a far more fluid, globalised world, who may be sitting somewhere in Mamelodi, or somewhere, like in Tyla’s case in Joburg, but that producer also lives in the global world, that producer lives online.”
After Nigeria eliminated South Africa in the Afcon semi-finals earlier this month, a video clip went viral. It was of students at Ahmadu Bello University in the Nigerian city of Zaria, ribbing Saffas by pouring water over themselves while singing Tyla’s hit Water.
It was good-natured and most South Africans took it that way.
As William Shoki, the editor of Africa is a Country, wrote: “To my surprise, we were gracious in defeat. In victory, Nigerians were boastful and playfully smug. The memes were prolific and immaculate. Tyla’s Grammy win was immaterial, and Nigerians confidently declared that it was ‘Ourpiano’.
“South Africans wryly took it on the chin and mourned all our losses to the Nigerians, including but not limited to women and cities.”
Let’s hope we don’t have to explain this banter to Americans too. It was tough enough helping them make sense of the missing “U”.
The singer has caused a stir with her loud-and-proud approach to being coloured
