IF BARACK OBAMA lived in South Africa, he might be called a coloured. Under apartheid, the government decided to which of four racial categories a South African belonged—black, coloured, Indian/Asian or white—depending mostly on looks. The same categorisation still exists, but it is now left up to individuals.

Given that coloureds were formerly regarded as racial misfits, once dismissed by the wife of former president F. W. de Klerk, Marike, as “non-persons…the leftovers”, one might have expected the number of South Africans wishing to describe themselves as such to plummet. But since the end of apartheid in 1994 the coloured population has in fact grown by almost a third, to 4.5m.

Most live in Cape Town and the Western Cape region, where they originated some 350 years ago after the arrival of the first Dutch settlers. Given the dearth of European women at the time, the Dutch—soon to be followed by French, German and English settlers—often took the pale-skinned indigenous Khoisan or, later, imported Asian and African slaves as their wives and mistresses.

Ranging in skin tone from very pale to darkest brown, many coloureds were (and still are) indistinguishable from their white or black compatriots. Some crossed the racial divide and became assimilated into white communities. But after a ban on interracial sex in 1950, this became much more difficult. Borderline cases were subjected to an infamous test. The curliness of someone's hair (a supposed indicator of blackness) was judged by sticking in a pencil; if it slid out the person in question was counted as white.

This experience, coupled with a long history of being treated as inferior to whites, could easily have led the coloureds to identify with their black fellow-sufferers. But unlike in America, where a mixed-race president describes himself as an African-American, South Africa's coloureds have tended to reject their African heritage, preferring to adopt the language, culture, religion and even family names of their former white persecutors. Most coloureds speak Afrikaans (a creolised Dutch) and worship in the Dutch Reformed Church.

In South Africa's first multiracial elections 18 years ago, two-thirds of coloureds—a higher proportion than whites—voted for the party that once oppressed them, the now-defunct Nationalists, rather than the liberationist African National Congress (ANC). Today the same proportion supports the white-led Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party. Better educated and traditionally better treated than blacks, the coloureds worry about being disadvantaged under ANC rule—perhaps rightly.

Economic-empowerment and affirmative-action laws are supposed to benefit all previously disadvantaged groups, but coloureds claim that blacks often get priority. They also fret over their loss of status. Second from last in South Africa's old racial pecking order, they now find themselves right at the bottom. Trevor Manuel, the country's most senior coloured politician, recently complained that “worst-order racism” has “infiltrated the highest echelons of government”.