Heritage Day asks South Africans to wear their culture, and for many citizens that is a simple, joyful request. But for Coloured people, the question of what to put on can expose something deeper about how the country understands identity, belonging and the everyday right to define oneself. Some may reach for a sari, a church hat, a sports jersey or everyday clothes tied to another branch of their family history. Others would rather not dress up at all, and that choice is not necessarily a sign of having no heritage. It reflects a more complicated truth about what the category “Coloured” actually means, and why a single outfit cannot carry it.
The government frames Heritage Day as a celebration of cultural diversity, and in 2026 it has placed particular emphasis on “living heritage”: the traditions, memories, language, music and rituals that communities continue to practise and pass between generations. That framing matters for the public, because it suggests heritage lives in what people do together, not only in what they display. Yet the history of racial classification complicates the picture for one large group of South Africans.
Being Coloured has never been a neat description of a single culture. The apartheid state used the Population Registration Act of 1950 to sort South Africans into racial categories, defining a “coloured person” as someone who was neither white nor “native” and requiring classification in the population register. That bureaucratic label pulled together people with different ancestries, languages, religions and traditions. It cannot tell you what someone ate at home, which language their grandparents spoke, where their family lived or which traditions they handed down. If a category contains many different histories, the question follows: what does its culture look like?
Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel take up that question in their 2023 book Coloured: How Classification Became Culture. Rather than accepting the idea that Coloured people have no distinct culture, they examine how culture developed through food, music, community and shared lived experiences shaped by colonialism, slavery and apartheid. Academic research points the same way. A 2026 study of Coloured women’s identity narratives found that cultural identity was actively constructed through food, language, faith, memory and everyday practices, rather than being a fixed category.
For citizens themselves, the answers vary. Micaela Martin does not believe she needs an outfit that represents a Coloured culture. “I do not personally subscribe to ‘Coloured’ as an identity or a culture,” she says. For her, the term carries the history of colonialism and apartheid. She recognises the communities and experiences shaped by that classification, but does not believe a racial category automatically defines her culture. Heritage Day therefore does not require her to find clothing that communicates “Colouredness”.
Siona O’Connell sees it differently, and more colourfully. Her family history offers several directions: a sari connected to her grandfather, who came to South Africa from India; something referencing her Irish great-grandfather; or a nod to her Xhosa great-grandmother from the Eastern Cape. All of those histories belong to her. This year, though, she wore what she normally wears: jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt.
Meanwhile, O’Connell acknowledges that recognisable visual associations exist, pointing to the satin and sequins associated with the Klopse. But she argues that expecting one look to represent everyone risks turning a complicated identity into a costume, an awkward outcome when the category itself was shaped by racial classification. A Springbok jersey might express family, community or South African identity. A sari might carry Indian family history. A church hat might express faith and family tradition. None of these becomes less meaningful for lacking an official Coloured outfit. She sees heritage particularly clearly in music, food, dance and humour.
That view matters for the public because it widens where heritage can be found. A grandmother’s recipe can carry family history. A song can connect generations. A church, mosque or community gathering can preserve traditions that never made it into a museum. For Martin, heritage is memory, family, language, place, migration, faith, food, music and stories, and it can include the freedom to question inherited categories.
South African History Online notes that heritage and identity are not straightforward categories in a country where histories, languages and cultures have constantly overlapped and changed. Research into Coloured identity has found its meaning long contested, shifting over time and across places. Martin warns that policing authenticity could recreate the old problem in another form. One person can acknowledge the history of being classified Coloured without making it the centre of their cultural identity; another can embrace Coloured identity fully as a rich inheritance. We often want culture to be easy to recognise, but some identities were shaped by migration, slavery, colonialism, forced removals, intermarriage, religion and the deliberate disruption of communities. They do not fit neatly into a single outfit, and perhaps that is the point a single day of dressing up was never going to settle.