Chinese the new black?

This is in reference to your article 'Chinese are now black--official' in the August/September 2008 issue of African Business magazine. Throughout my youth in my native South Africa, I was classed, treated and identified as a coloured (the same as my entire family), being both demeaned and elevated for not being considered "black." As I travelled and worked outside of South Africa, I caused bafflement, and occasionally indignation, by not identifying myself solely as 'black'.

I believed that the renamed and reformed New National Party, the African National Congress, alongside the government Black Economic Empowerment and Broad-Based Economic Empowerment programmes, were supposed to dismantle the institutionalised racism and white domination of the private sector. Though the race lines have blurred, your feature highlighted that internal divisions still exist, and this is hindering the government's attempts at economic stability and equality.

The reaction you reported of Bhule Mthethwa, the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry's president, alerted me that the long-standing practices of segregation have not left business and political practices.

An empowerment movement should be a service to all of the country's peoples, particularly the disadvantaged - whether they be black, Italian or Portuguese (the ethnic groups Mthethwa highlighted), since they are all classed as citizens.

Moeletsi Mbeki's comments that redistribution is a creator of social conflict and poverty highlights the disunity within South Africa's government. The fact that the Chinese population has to redefine itself through racial identification proves that finance is motivated by racial factors.

All of the arguments provided for the reclassification of the Chinese as "black" (replacing "coloured") were based on economic injustices, such as the Chinese investor being refused shares on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

With research also revealing that white South Africans still earn around 450% more than black South Africans 14 years after the end of apartheid, the government recognised that this action in reclassifying themselves is no different from the South African coloureds who sought to distance themselves from the black community in preference to the white community, and this takes us back many years to the same problems.

Robert Nobanda,

Windhoek, Namibia