Goffal
Goffals or Coloured Zimbabweans are persons of mixed race, predominately those claiming both European and African descent, in Malawi, Zambia, and, particularly Zimbabwe.
[3] The earliest Coloured communities in central Africa were formed in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), mainly by those who had emigrated as servants of Afrikaners and other white South African settlers from the Cape of Good Hope.
In 1966, the Ministry of Defence gave notice that it would henceforth extend conscription to all foreigners with residency status, making Coloureds of South African or other nationalities in Rhodesia also liable for military service.
[7] Mugabe won the country's first general elections held under a universal franchise, despite facing militant opposition from Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and a number of minority parties.
[8] As a conciliatory gesture Mugabe later nominated a leading member of the Coloured community, Joseph Culverwell, to the Senate, the upper house of the Parliament of Zimbabwe.
During the bush war, black nationalists frequently decried Coloureds as having benefited unjustly from the colonial racial hierarchy, and those who attempted to join ZANU and ZAPU's guerrilla armies were often detained or executed as spies.
[9] Less educated, blue collar Coloured workers were also concerned they would face job displacement from an advancing black workforce once they lost the advantage of preferential employment by white supervisors.
[9] For their part, community activists were disappointed they weren't invited to participate at the Lancaster House talks on behalf of their people, and felt this demonstrated both white and black Zimbabweans were uninterested in Coloureds' future political and social welfare.
[10] The NAAC has issued a statement claiming that "Coloured people are visibly and verbally treated with disdain contemptuously dismissed with xenophobic comments" urging them to "go back to Britain".
[11] This resulted in considerable ambivalence towards local Coloureds born in Northern Rhodesia, whom colonial officials described with a menagerie of labels as varied as "half-castes", "Anglo-Africans", "Indo-Africans", and "Eurafricans".
[11] Nevertheless, beginning in the 1920s such individuals posed a particular classification problem for the Colonial Office, which remained frustrated by the fact it could classify Coloureds neither as European nor African.
[11] In 1927, the missions criticised Northern Rhodesia's practice of building schools specifically for white and black pupils while failing to provide similar facilities for Coloureds.
[13] Maxwell's habit of arguing that Coloureds should identify either as Europeans or Africans, rather than a distinct mixed race population, became policy in Northern Rhodesia for the next three decades.
[13] In this regard Northern Rhodesia represented a marked departure from South Africa, where racial legislation strictly defined the rights and status of individuals from birth.
[11] In 1952, the Coloured community petitioned Henry Hopkinson, the United Kingdom's newly appointed Minister of State for the Colonies, for recognition as British subjects.
[13] Their grievances were discussed in the Colonial Office, which responded that if a marriage between a male British subject and an African woman was properly documented, any children should be allowed to take up their father's nationality.
[13] From its inception the British protectorate of Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) included a burgeoning mixed race population of Asian, rather than European, and African descent.
They were regarded with disdain by the comparatively few individuals of mixed European and African ancestry, who came to reject use of the general label "Coloured" to avoid association with the descendants of Asians.
A Nyasaland judge determined that "half-castes" did not meet the legal definition of "native", although he refrained from ruling on whether their newly altered status made them British subjects.
[14] In 1931, a Coloured man provoked a storm of controversy when he attempted to lease 200 acres in a Native Trust Area, the communal lands reserved for African farming and use.
[15] Coloured societies in Zambia, Zimbabwe and the African diaspora abroad are rather close-knit, linked by intermarriage and a large web of familial connections dating back to their earliest European and Asian ancestors.
[3] Marriages between Coloureds and black Africans were generally stigmatised, before independence in 1980, as the former preferred to select partners with visible white characteristics, though this is no longer the case today.
When India's independence movement began gaining momentum in the late 1940s, Coloured schools in central Africa rejected Indian instructors, emphasising that "love and patriotism to the British nation" were an integral part of their curricula.
