She called me Colored!!!!!!

Yes!  That's what I said!  She took one look and assumed me to be a coloured!  I was taken aback, because I’m sorry but in the US you don’t refer to anyone as coloured because of the era that the word was tied too!!!!  A time where because of the color of your skin, you were treated very differently.  But many don’t agree, saying it’s a much more descriptive word and sounds better than referring to one as black.  Well to South Africans the word coloured means something totally different.....

Coloured,  Well actually in South Africa it is spelled Coloured.  Coloured represents one of the four racial categories in which one could classify themselves in South Africa.  Coloured, Black African, White or Indian.  According to the 2010 census, Coloureds only make up 9% of the population while Bantu make up 79%.  Confused??????   During the apartheid era, in order to keep divisions and maintain a race-focused society, the government used the term Coloured to describe one of the four main racial groups identified by law: (All four terms were capitalised in apartheid-era law.) Well Coloureds here in South Africa refers to fair-skinned heterogeneous ethnic group who possess ancestry from Europe, various Khoisan and Bantu tribes of Southern Africa, West Africa, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malaya, India, Mozambique, Mauritius, and Saint Helena. 

Bantu, also known as Black African, is used as a general label for 300-600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages, distributed from Cameroon east across Central Africa and Eastern Africa to Southern Africa. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages.

The Bantu family is fragmented into hundreds of individual groups, none of them larger than a few million people (the largest being the Zulu with some 10 million). The Bantu language Swahili with its 5-10 million native speakers is of super-regional importance as tens of millions fluently command it as a second language.

And just like the US, South Africa is pretty segregated.  One area full of coloureds, another area full of blacks and this area holds majority of the whites.  Times have changed, but what about the people?